Wheel in the Sky
Fifty years ago this month members of the Memphis High School marching band traveled to Dallas to perform at the State Fair. One of them never came home. And the town hasn’t been the same since.
Donna says: This is one of the most moving stories I have ever read. It is strange how such a tragedy has forever linked so many people. Equally sad is the impact this tragedy had on the lives of each throughout their lifetimes. (January 24th, 2009 at 4:06pm)
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In the summer of 1954, four teenage girls were speeding along the Friendship Highway on the outskirts of town, playing a game of “ditch ’em” as a carload of Lakeview boys gave chase, when the girls’ car lost control in a divot of sand and flipped off the road. One of the four girls, Barbara Allen, flew out of the green-and-white Chevrolet and landed in a cotton field. She was unscathed. So were Barbara’s three friends. These were the four princesses of the town: Barbara, daughter of the Memphis Compress owner; Linda, or “Tooter,” Sturdevant, who’d been baton twirling in town parades since toddlerhood; Ouida Massey, the town’s dishwater-blond beauty queen; and Cynthia Combest, whose granddad owned ranchland and service stations and whose mother was the young lady who had committed suicide in the city park.
Cynthia had been driving the Chevy. Of this boy-crazy quartet—“wild by Memphis standards,” “too high and mighty for the rest of us”—she was the undisputed queen bee. When Cynthia said, “Let’s all wear our plaid dresses today” or “Let’s form a square-dancing club” or “Let’s not talk to her anymore” or “Let’s all go to the drive-in theater so I can make out with Don,” the other girls gamely fell in line. Cynthia had gotten her driver’s license earlier than her friends; she had nicer clothes, a more lenient curfew. Though the five-foot-one brunette wasn’t nearly as pretty as Ouida or her family as wealthy as Barbara’s, leadership came naturally to her. She could be bossy but also terribly needy, even before her mother’s death. “Give me a hug.” “Hold my hand.” “I can’t wait for Don to marry me!” She was not yet fifteen.
Cynthia, Barbara, Tooter, and Ouida performed in the Memphis High marching band. This being Texas, the townsfolk lived for its Cyclones football team, and the school’s basketball squad had won the state championship in 1949. But by 1955, the band was the hottest thing going on campus.
Kathy Phillips was the reason. She had shown up in town the previous year, 22 and single and poor but determined to prove that a young lady could be a band director. The school’s bombastic football coach had chased off the last directors, who had been male. Though petite and fresh out of college, Miss Phillips wasn’t easily intimidated. She possessed a drill sergeant’s strictness. Everyone in place. Uniforms tidy. Utmost attention paid. Consequences paid as well. She threw out three cornet players for acting up. The parents backed the young teacher. Some of them tried to fix her up on dates. Miss Phillips told them not to bother. Her work was her life, and she spent almost every waking moment encamped in the band hall and ignoring the town gossips—convinced, she would one day say, that her kids, like all kids, “can accomplish things they never dreamed they could do, once they develop pride and an esprit de corps that makes a band much better than its individual parts.”
In the summer of 1955, Miss Phillips’s efforts paid off: The school’s 51-member marching band was among the 22 bands selected from the entire state to play for that year’s Cotton Bowl Music Festival at the Texas State Fair. They were going to Dallas! Most of the Memphis kids hadn’t ever seen the big city before. For them and their farming families, a day trip to the department stores on Polk Street in Amarillo, eighty miles away, was a monumental event. But Dallas! A few parents were fretful. Miss Phillips assured them she was leaving nothing to chance. Plenty of chaperones would accompany the band, and the bus driver, Tooter’s father, was a skilled auto mechanic. The complete regimen would be outlined in the “poop sheet” Miss Phillips handed out to her charges: 5 a.m. load bus. 5:30 leave. (If you don’t think so, just you hide and watch.) Lunch stop on ride. Immediately upon arrival, we will check in at the Baker Hotel. Go to rooms to change and rest awhile. No one will leave the hotel at this time without permission…
Fifty years later, Kathy Phillips—still petite but now gray-haired and rickety—would sit on her apartment sofa in Fort Smith and consider with wistful hazel eyes that banner moment in the life of Memphis, Texas. “I’ve always been an inveterate what-iffer,” she says. “Still am. Especially in the position I was in. I couldn’t make any mistakes. I’d given the kids permission sheets to make sure the parents would allow them to go on rides at the fair. But the night before we left and I was packing, I remember thinking: ‘If anything ever happened to one of these kids, I don’t think I could teach anymore.’”
Silence overtakes her. The past engulfs the present.
She measures her words. “There was never, of course, any hint that I was to blame.”
THE TEEMING SQUARE OF MEMPHIS in 1955 was a virtual ghost town compared with downtown Dallas in the throes of the 1955 Texas State Fair.
Men in fedoras and women in high heels packed the sidewalks. Streams of pennants flapped overhead. And this was Monday! The hayseeds of Memphis filed out of the Baker Hotel and regarded the elaborate window displays and sleek pedestrians with amazement and more than a little nervousness. Several of them retreated to their hotel rooms, where they contented themselves with leaning out the windows and chunking ice and water balloons at the passersby below. Cynthia, though miffed that Tooter hadn’t made the trip to Dallas and that beautiful Ouida had seen fit to go shoe shopping with the baton twirlers, took to the streets with Barbara in tow. They wandered through the gift shops and bought matching stuffed poodles. But they didn’t stray far from the hotel. They were Memphis girls, this was the big city, and as Miss Phillips had admonished them, tomorrow would be a long day.
At eight-thirty in the morning on Tuesday, October 11, the school bus containing the Memphis High marching band and its instruments pulled away from the hotel and headed for the fair. Cynthia was in a sulky mood. She’d asked a Dallas girlfriend who went to school at Hockaday to meet her at the fairgrounds. When the friend said she had other things to do that day, Cynthia snapped, “Well, you probably won’t see me again. I’m going to meet my mother.” She casually recited this story on the bus to another band member, who scarcely knew what to make of it.
Tooter’s father parked the bus on Pennsylvania Avenue. The band members lugged their instruments across the parking lot and into the warm-up room located in the bowels of the Cotton Bowl. Miss Phillips began her litany of instructions. After performing a morning concert, they would rehearse on the football field and then have lunch at the fairgrounds, followed by free time to enjoy the park rides. They would meet back at the bus at three-fifteen. Rehearse one more time at four. Return their instruments to the bus and then have supper. Meet back at the bus at seven-fifteen. Line up at the end zone at seven-thirty. Say, as was customary for all of Miss Phillips’s bands, the Lord’s Prayer in unison. Then the performance in the Cotton Bowl, followed by fireworks. She noticed one of her students was heedlessly staring off into space. “Cynthia!” she hollered.
The band director led them out onto the Cotton Bowl field. It was their time to rehearse, but another band had only just begun its drill. The Memphis kids gaped. This band, obviously from a big-city school, stretched its formation all the way across the football field. While her charges admired the band and kicked their shoes through the lush green turf, Miss Phillips consulted with the other school’s director, then with her watch, which read roughly eleven o’clock. Then she wheeled back in her distinctive bowlegged gait.
“Leave your instruments here on the field,” she told them. The band members could spend the next hour entertaining themselves on the fairgrounds while Miss Phillips went back to the hotel to check on a sick student they had left behind. A few of the Memphis kids stayed to watch the other band. Most, however, bolted out of the stadium, out into the thickening carnival crowd and the aroma of fresh popcorn and the tangle of roller coasters, the merry-go-rounds, the Twister, the Scrambler, and the myriad ring toss booths.
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