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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The next evening, Wednesday night, Barbara Allen returned to Memphis by train. She stepped out onto the platform on her crutches. Nearly everyone in town had turned out to greet her at the depot. They cried and hugged her as she passed through the crowd with her parents. That night, while paying their respects at the Combest household, Barbara saw something she had never seen before: She saw her father cry.
Cynthia’s funeral was on Thursday. After a full day of holding her emotions in check, Miss Phillips began to crumble. Her hands and feet were tingling; her sobs came out in tortured little whimpers. Doc Goodall, a local physician, could see that the band director was terrified of going to the funeral. He gave her a shot of something that would put her under for a full day.
But nearly everyone else in town crammed the pews and otherwise formed a ring around First Methodist Church. The organist played one of Cynthia’s favorite songs, “Autumn Leaves.” Barbara, Ouida, and Tooter sat in front with the Combest family. It’s just a bad dream, Tooter thought numbly. We’re gonna wake up.
WE’RE NOT BULLETPROOF. This would occur to Ouida Massey, and surely to others in Memphis. But what to do with that fact? How does a plucky town surrender to its mortality?
It didn’t—not at first. Kay Leslie came home two months after the accident, just before Christmas. For weeks she had been in a coma, and the Leslies were warned to expect the worst. So fixated were the doctors on her head injury that they all but overlooked her hip, which had been badly disfigured. In fact, Kay suffered no lasting infirmity from the neck up, other than hearing loss from a lacerated eardrum. She arrived in Memphis on crutches. Students volunteered to carry her books from class to class throughout the spring semester. In the summer she returned to Baylor Hospital for hip surgery. By the fall of 1956, Kay was walking under her own power again, though with a heavy limp. Classmates wrote obliquely in her yearbook about how much they admired her. Barbara invited her over for a slumber party. But no one spoke to her about the accident. No one spoke to anyone about the accident.
The most visible reminder of the tragedy was, of course, the Combest family, reeling from two deaths. Young Larry Ed returned immediately to school but in the middle of class would have to excuse himself to go vomit in the restroom. His father relocated the boy to Corpus Christi for a short while. The family terrier, Butch, quit eating after Cynthia’s death and soon died. Eventually, Mr. Combest remarried and, in 1959, moved his family west to the Panhandle.
Barbara, Tooter, and Ouida went on without their queen bee. Another girl from the neighborhood, Addie Lou—a year older and with a driver’s license—filled Cynthia’s slot. They formed a singing group, performing Buddy Holly tunes at school dances. And they continued to torment the Memphis boys with their out-of-town preferences.
One day, about a year after the accident, Barbara and Ouida traveled to Gunnison, Colorado, and visited the local fair. Someone dared Barbara to ride the Ferris wheel. “You’ll never get over it otherwise,” she was told. Ouida climbed into the seat next to Barbara. They had not reached the top before Barbara started to panic. She grabbed at the bars, began to cry out. The operator stopped the ride.
Miss Phillips missed several days of school. But she was back on the football field with her marching band the week after that. On October 11, 1956, a year to the day after the accident, the band director went to the cemetery with a bunch of flowers. As she stood over Cynthia’s grave, she became aware of another presence. It was Kay’s father, the florist, who had said nothing to her at the hospital a year earlier.
He said nothing this day either. He simply walked over to Kathy Phillips and wrapped his arms around her shaking body and held her for a long time.
In 1958, after four years in Memphis, she said good-bye and set sail for Okinawa, Japan. It seemed that the kids on the military base needed some of Miss Phillips’s discipline.
WHEN DID MEMPHIS SUCCUMB ALTOGETHER? Everyone from the town has a different answer. No doubt the decline of the local cotton industry, along with increased mechanization, dried up much of the labor base. Others point to the systematic shutdown of the town’s three hospitals. (Memphis couldn’t keep its doctors for long, and those who were willing to stay hailed from foreign countries and were not thoroughly trusted by the older folks.) Or maybe Memphis went silent, says one local, with the advent of modern communication: “Before TV, everyone went to the square. Now they stay home. TV ruined visiting. People don’t even know how to carry on a conversation anymore.”
No one can pinpoint a precise moment in time. Was it in the late sixties, when the Zephyr train made its last stop in Memphis? Was it in the seventies, when General Telephone and Electric closed its district office and the town’s picture show operator died, causing all three downtown theaters to close? Was it during the Carter years, when the skyrocketing interest rate took down half the businesses on the square? Or did the final shoe drop during the optimistic flush of the Reagan years, when Wal-Mart came to Childress and worked its dubious wonders on the area economy?
On one point there is universal agreement: The spark, the promise, and the innocence of Memphis have all gone away. Where once the procession on the square was bumper-to-bumper, now there’s deathly quiet. Where once the townsfolk were all too eager to build and spruce up, new construction and renovation are scarce since, as one lifelong resident puts it, “Everyone’s statement is, ‘It won’t be long before someone tears it up.’” A meth lab was discovered operating in the county. Drug-dealing squatters took over one of the town’s abandoned older houses. Meanwhile, the two prisons in Childress provide Memphis’s most reliable employment base. If it weren’t for crime, the town would have little work. And if it weren’t for the town’s Mexicans, who once arrived during the summers by truck and returned south when the last bales were loaded, there would be almost no place to eat on the square and few students at Memphis High.
Though his mother and his sister are buried in the local cemetery, Larry Combest doesn’t visit Memphis anymore. Until two years ago, he represented the U.S. congressional district for which George W. Bush unsuccessfully ran in 1978 and presided as chairman of the House agricultural committee. Ouida Massey Bradshaw lives in Fort Worth, Barbara Allen Thomas near Tyler, Linda “Tooter” Sturdevant McCreary in Mead, Oklahoma. Sometimes the three of them get together. When they do, they talk about what wasn’t talked about before—about grief and harsh dreams and lost youth. And sometimes they, unlike former congressman Combest and many others, return to Memphis for high school reunions.
It’s not easy to face the sparseness that now defines a once-abundant birthplace. Equanimity has no easy recipe. People walk with limps. They wake up in the dark aswim in monstrous images. And the woman who was once a girl dubbed Tooter, who twirled a baton through the bustle that is no more, has seen a divorce from her husband, the death of her daughter, and a career in banking that has improbably delivered her to an office in Dallas that sits a short drive down Interstate 30 from the fairgrounds where Cynthia fell. She avoids the Texas State Fair, avoids Ferris wheels, like every single soul from Memphis.
But she does not avoid the little cotton town that fell under the wheel. When Linda McCreary goes home to Memphis, she’s not afraid to open her eyes:
Yes, in a sense I would like to see it go on forever, knowing that it will never be as it was. But don’t you think everything’s changed that way? I guess I never wanted it to grow away from the way it was. But the memories I have are so wonderful, and no one can take those from me. And when I go back, sure, it saddens me. It makes me sad we’re all growing old and someday we’ll all go away. And what happened with Cynthia probably rocked that little community more than anything. You think about that: I’m gonna retire in about a year, and I end up about a mile from where she died. But I can look around and always feel at home. Walking back into my past. That’s how I see it, and I pray at night that God won’t let me lose my memory.
Because, you see, I can go back in time . . .
For the story behind this story, read our interview with Robert Draper.
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