Dad vs. the Dress Code
When I was in the sixth grade in San Marcos, my rabble- rousing father fought the rules that dictated what I could wear to school. My hip-huggers survived, but I almost didn't.
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My father was furious when I told him what had happened. After a discussion with the principal, he fired off a letter to a member of the school board, a former friend of his, citing Harmon's recent claim to the press that there were no "specific" mandated lengths for skirts. "How 'specific' can one get? And how stupid?" The timing of the incident—the day before the school board election—was political, he wrote. "Why that day? Why our child?"
Conservative candidates won the school board election. I was questioned again about my attire, this time by a male teacher in an empty classroom. He remarked on the fitting and the seams of my pants, concluding that they were hip-huggers and in violation of the dress code. Again, my father wrote to the school board. He protested "the embarrassment and humiliation suffered by our little girl" and described the interrogation as indecent and evidence of "the system's sick and sordid preoccupation with something other than education. . . . Nothing in the dress code prohibits such apparel and her being called to account can only be attributed, at best, to the over-extension of State power to the sacred person of my daughter."
The "sacred person" and her siblings were now being driven by their mother to church in Austin every Sunday because the preacher at the First Baptist Church in San Marcos was a leader of the Harmon camp. The end of the school year was chaotic. Honor students were being suspended for refusing to cut their hair; teachers opposed to the dress code were secretly smuggling homework assignments to them.
BY THE TIME CLASSES STARTED again in the fall, people were calling for Harmon's resignation. The school board, facing increasing hostility, finally announced that it would create a committee of 54 members—students, parents, and teachers—to review the dress code. My father was quoted in the papers saying that this proposal was the "first flicker of leadership that the board has shown since Harmon began his long ego trip." He did not oppose rules prohibiting immodest dressing and wrote the board saying he believed that if a credible committee studied the issue, a reconciliation could be reached in the community and he would be among the first to support it.
I was in the seventh grade now at Lamar and suddenly under pressure from students who opposed the dress code to run for a place on the committee. Although reticent by nature, I was still my father's daughter, and some of his ambition, if not his fearlessness, had seeped into my personality. So I signed up as a candidate and had a poster party. Many of my friends were not allowed to come, as their parents supported the dress code. I fretted through the campaign but in the end won by a good margin. The candidates' slots at Lamar were divided by sex and ethnic group, and I was elected to the slot for an "Anglo girl."
"I'm proud of you, baby," my father said. But when the school board announced a blatantly pro-Harmon slate of teachers and parents to serve on the committee, it became clear that the elected students would have no real influence. Dad wrote a letter to the school board and paid to have it published in the San Marcos Daily Record. The students had been "trusting, patient, mature and indulgent," it said, and had even "managed a sense of humor at the inflexible follies so fanatically embraced by so many." But they had been "cynically deceived." The children, he wrote, "have suffered from this continuing lunacy, and now they are faced with a hanging jury under a hanging judge. God bless them."
The first meeting of the dress-code committee was held in the Lamar auditorium, and I badly wanted to make some showing that my father and the students who had elected me would be happy with. The public was kept out, so my parents were not there. As I remember it, the board members were on the stage and the rest of us sat in the auditorium seats. I was apprehensive, staring into the faces of a row of people who disliked my parents. It is a personal curse of mine that I am the exact opposite of my father in one particular: I have always cared too much what people think of me, even when I don't think much of them. I remember trying to be friendly and appealing to Harmon and the members of the board. I remember smiling at them, though some of them did not smile back. I knew it would be hard to keep this up if I was only going to say things that my father would be proud of. Wanting to get it over with, I was the first to speak.
Afterward, my parents were waiting outside the school to take me home, and when I told them how it had gone, Dad praised my courage for speaking out. If he thought my comments were lukewarm, he didn't let on. The next day, one of the newspapers reported on the meeting: "Mary Beth Crook said the code 'should be abolished, but if it can't be, it should be modified.'" Dad congratulated me on being quoted in the paper. "In the face of all this bigotry," he said, "you've taken a stand." But I knew the quotation was tepid.
Hispanics continued to press grievances that went beyond the dress code, and a second boycott ended only when the U.S. Department of Justice sent in a mediator to negotiate and get the children back in school. By the following year, 1973, enough of the town had turned against Harmon to win control of the school board. The night those election returns came in, my father piled the three of us kids into his car and drove us past Harmon's house honking the distinctive, high-pitched horn. I was in the back, on the floorboard, nervous about being seen, a hostage to my father's elation.
Later that night he attended a victory party in the offices of an underground newspaper in the warehouse district, near the railroad tracks. The liberals were all there. Minorities turned out in force. I've been told that my father arrived in one of the Lamborghinis with several bottles of scotch and entered the building holding the bottles over his head. The crowd surrounded him and cheered as he made his way to the center of the room. "He gave our cause legitimacy," Juan R. Palomo told me recently. Back then, Palomo was a young high school art teacher, one of 34 individuals who were being sued by the school board for their part in the second boycott. "We always knew that if anyone was going to take things further, attract the national press, or go to court or whatever, it was going to be Bill Crook," he said.
The newly elected board threw out the dress code and fired Harmon. He demanded a public hearing, which dragged on for days in the sweltering heat of the high school auditorium, the crowds dwindling when Chilympiad, the local chili cookoff, got under way. In the end, Harmon got his job back but promptly quit and moved away.
AFTER THE DRESS CODE WAS abolished, my father moved on to other interests. He lived another quarter of a century, standing up for causes and taking up for people. He was my touchstone. He was my standard for courage. When I was timid or muddled, he shamed me into action. I came to understand him better as I grew older. I had always known that the way to secure his love was to earn his respect, and at some indefinable point along the way, I realized I had succeeded. The effort to hold on to it has been the animating force in my life. I would not have preferred a father who signed the piece of paper.
In 1985 he and my brother went to Ethiopia under the auspices of the Episcopal Church to help establish an orphanage during a famine. While they were there, he contracted hepatitis B, which, after a great deal of suffering, led to his death twelve years later. Few besides close family and friends even knew that he was sick; he was never caught complaining. As he told me on several occasions, more instruction than observation: "Our people"—meaning us, meaning me in the future—"Our people die well."
My family has all but forgotten the controversy over the dress code. But when I am in San Marcos and encounter someone from those days, I always remember which side of the fight they were on. I don't know if they would be on the same side now. I know there is a dress code in the San Marcos public schools, and few, if any, seem to have a problem with it. I know of other school districts where dress codes are creating controversy. It seems we didn't settle anything back in the early seventies. I recently talked to my mother about the dress code and what it had meant in our lives. Strangely enough, neither of us had much to say about it. But then neither of us had had much to say about it thirty years ago. It was Dad's fight, not ours.
"What do you think about all that now?" I asked her. Her answer summed it up for both of us. She got a dreamy look in her eyes and shook her head. "I miss him," she said.
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