God's Country [November 1975]
Coming of age in Abilene, the buckle on the Bible belt.
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Abilene has always been a quiet place, so far as making news is concerned. I'd rate it the most overlooked town for its size in Texas, with the possible exception of Beaumont. Abilene, however, has a style, or patina of dignity, denied so may red-dirt towns of West Texas—most of which sprang up with some oil or cattle boom and look it. Spiritually, it might be a one-industry town, but Abilene, even as Clabe and John Merchant were rooting for its becoming a cow town, would not let itself become economically dependent on a single crop, a single mineral, or one or two forms of animal life. It diversified early. It passed a law double quick that trail herds on the nearby Western Trail couldn't come through town—even if it meant losing the good-time dollars of the cowboys. Then it took the county seat away from Buffalo Gap (stole it, the Gappers still claim) and made more money shipping buffalo bones its first few years than it did shipping beef. It resisted the ranchers—even its founders—and started cropping cotton while they fumed over barbed wire fences.
But first and last, Abilene distributed and made goods. From its initial day as a tent city back in '81, it had wholesale pretensions, and before long the town was even finding a way to make its old red dirt pay off by manufacturing bricks—and it still makes and cells red dirt as "Abilene commons." The miles between Abilene and bigger places like Fort Worth and Dallas preserved it from being sucked dry—as Abilene would suck dry such nineteenth century neighbors as Hodges, Iberis, and Hamby. Abilene was (and is) all to itself—there's got to be a city right where it is. Dallas or Fort Worth to Abilene is a 200-mile drive, then to Midland-Odessa is 200 more, and from there out to El Paso is about the same interval. It's a natural sequence, and the only modern inconvenience the city feels is a kind of short-haul jet lag: Abilene's a little too close to Dallas to get on the schedule of the long-distance carriers. So, although Abilene has a modern, multi-million-dollar airport, it's served by only one airline, Texas International, and if you want to fly direct anywhere but Dallas and San Angelo, you're out of luck. You want to fly from Abilene those 200 miles west to Midland? You fly 200 miles east to Dallas-Fort Worth Airport and catch a plane which goes right back 400 miles west passing over Abilene as it flies.
Part of Abilene's diversity comes from its colleges. Simmons College (now Hardin-Simmons University) was the first, in 1891. In 1906, having killed off poor old Buffalo Gap's Presbyterian College, Abilene got Childers Classical Institute, which became ACC. After Abilene lost out in the contest to be the location for Texas Tech, the Methodists decided it would be safe enough, with no state school around, to erect McMurry College—which opened in 1923 and took over Stamford College from that Jones County town.
Abilene's colleges and the armed forces (the army shut down Camp Barkeley in 1945 but the Strategic Air Command's Dyess Air Base replaced it a decade later) have helped Abilene grow steadily—from 26,000 in 1940 to 46,000 in 1950 to more than 98,000 today. Growth has brought economic stability—employment is high and cost of living is low, one of the four lowest in the country—but it has also been accompanied by a casual indifference to the past that has permitted the destruction of much of the town's history and local color. Gone are the nineteenth-century buildings with their cast-iron fronts, gone is the South Side's red light district; and in their place are parking lots and sloping black sidewalks—that's right, black—which absorb ungodly amounts of West Texas heat and glisten so badly your eyes hurt. The history is gone, leaving the center of town snaggletoothed and drab.
From its creation, Abilene has been divided in twain by the T&P railroad tracks, creating the North Side and the South Side—and both area designations have persisted as de facto political and social definitions. "Were you raised on the North or South side?" is a perfectly valid question. It tells what schools you attended and who your friends were and hints at the social remoteness of the two parts. I was reared on the South Side and never for a minute dreamed the North Siders considered themselves our equals. It was a shock, once we all got to high school (there was only one then), to find that the North Side kids and their parents felt very much the same way about us. The business district was not quite so fixed, although it was similarly bisected. By 1930 the South Side commercial establishments had become less urbane and all the swank lay up Pine and Cypress streets north of the tracks, so the more affluent South Siders had to trade up north. Even today, native South Siders find it unthinkable to move to the North Side. I guess North Siders feel the same way, but I'm prejudiced.
Abilene has never been a honky-tonk, brawling and boozing town—at least not since it threw out the saloons in 1902. For years the only thing approaching a sin-haven was Charley Blank's nightclub—and Charley's was more famous for its sign (a two-headed concrete horse and a faceless concrete rider) than for knife fights and hair pullings. Charley used to advertise on the radio, in an Italianate accent, "No stag, no tag, no slacks . . . y'hear me?" Even now, Dallas Perkins won't put in a fancy restaurant and bar in Impact, much less a honky-tonk. Despite the bitterness with which Abilene fought his little liquor locality, Perkins doesn't want to justify the old predictions he would open a roaring Sin City. After all, Dallas is an ol' Abilene boy.
But for years there was this larger anomaly: Abilene was famous for its whorehouses, which in God's town were most unbiblical in their profusion. Nearly half the prostitution decisions given in Texas lawbooks came in cases which originated in Abilene. The tenderloin section was along Chestnut and South Second and Third streets on the South Side, with a few "hotels" on North First all mixed in the business district. There were rows and rows of these second-story places, each with its dingy "Rooms" or "Hotel" sign and a Negro porter sitting in a cane-bottom chair on the sidewalk in front of the stairway going up to the girls. It was a rite of passage for Abilene boys at a certain age to go down at night and joke with those sidewalk porters and, if the girls weren't busy with paying customers, gain access to bargain with them.
When I walked out of Penn Station the first time, I looked around and asked where the Empire Sate Building was. On having it pointed out, I expressed disappointment to my New Jersey guide, "Why, it's not as tall as the Wooten Hotel." Stuck in there shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the Manhattan skyline it lacked the lonely grandeur of Abilene's fifteen-story tower. Fifteen stories was more than enough height to impress us when the Wooten was built in 1929. One day a friend named Joe Rutledge and I hung his brother Keith out of a fourteenth floor window by his ankles—with Keith's acquiescence—and after three seconds Keith was quick to call it tall enough. It's still the tallest building in Abilene. "The Wooten Corner" was, of all things, a landmark of lust. For one thing, the big sign atop Hotel Wooten would burn out about once very five years and read HOT WOO. But mostly it was the wind current around its base. Abilene males congregated on the corners of North Third and Cypress for hours of girl watching, making bets whether a girl, coming around that corner and hitting that sensational updraft, would grab her hair or her skirt first. During Camp Barkeley days, when thousands of GIs were downtown, the Wooten Corner traffic got so disgraceful an ancient city ordinance was dusted off, calling it a misdemeanor "to make goo-goo eyes" at an unescorted female. I don't think more than two or three unfortunates were every prosecuted, but it got so much nationwide press coverage that for a month or so the corner was relatively tame. The unescorted females themselves were supposed to have been the moving force behind repeal of the goo-goo eyes ordinance. At any rate, there were few old maids in Abilene by the time the Army moved out in 1945.
My dad claimed I learned to read by studying another reminder of Abilene's sour puritanism—a big sign that glared down on swimmers at the Johnson Natatorium. I love it still. It read:
IF SHE'S YOUR WIFE
HUG HER AT HOME
IF NOT LEAVE HER ALONE
Abilene has its share of distinguished citizens and has spread a respectable collection of native sons and daughters around the globe. Those with artistic ambition pretty much have to leave—or maybe, it's just that Abilene puts a premium on being content and casts a cold eye on ambition of any sort. Ambition is often equated with excessive self-esteem: "Thinks he's better'n the rest of us." Fundamentalism not only pays scant attention to beauty and cultural growth, it suspects imagination. With fundamentalism there can be no speculative philosophy, no broad inquiry of life. There can only be doctrine.
For certain, there are a host of things one can't do or hope to succeed at in towns of Abilene's size, no matter how enlightened or advanced they may be—so you go. But it is hard to leave—harder, I expect, than from most hometowns. Even if you succeed elsewhere, the impressions of the past make you feel the tiniest bit as though you have failed. You haven't just left, you have run away from home. Abilene still insists her children develop and use internal constraints. It gets to be a kind of pride. And organized religion, even if you don't subscribe to it, is an institution teaching not just self-restraint but accountability. You don't always blame external forces for your hard times. That gets to be a proud thing, too. Or is it just the hometown syndrome? Is every town its own Abilene? But where else, you ask yourself with a chuckle, will I find a funeral home named Laughter and a florist named Philpott?
Marilyn Armstrong, a young executive trainee with Neiman-Marcus in Dallas, laughed about growing up in Abilene, reciting all the annoyances and peculiarities of living in the fusty, pokey place. And though there was an enormous gap in our ages, we agreed the Abilene experience hadn't seemed to change much for its offspring. And we agreed we could never go back, or want to go back. But a day later she called me, worried about how I might quote her. She might have sounded mean, hateful. "You know," she said, "I love the old town. I wouldn't want to do anything to hurt it."
Spoken like a true Abilenian. Of which there are no exes.
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