Gone to New York
In 1964 the already legendary Texas novelist and sportswriter Edwin "Bud" Shrake, who died earlier this year, moved from Dallas to New York and took his place in a literary scene as boozy as it was a distinguished. Over the next three years, the letters he sent to his friends—excerpted on the following pages—showed him at work, at play, and always angling for a way to get back home.
Charlie says: I sat behind Anne and Bud at a movie once. Now they are both gone, but I am glad to have that memory of a different time. (November 5th, 2009 at 1:01pm)
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June 6, 1965
Uncle Midford [Jay Milner, a writer in Dallas]:
went to a costume party the other night with plimpton and candy bergen. before the party clint murchison called up, and so i invited him and he came with his waf and with robert cummings and waf and we had a big time. i put on my white jeans, straw hat, moccasins, and pinned a rodeo number on my back. “just like i dress at home,” i explained. candy bergen went as a spanish girl. plimpton went as a cave man. plimpton’s date went as george washington. murchison went as clint murchison jr.
G.J.N.
Feb. 12, 1966
Mr. Pete Rozelle
Commissioner
The National Football League
Dear Sir:
Please accept this as my formal application for a National Football League franchise to be placed in the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico. I have been hearing much talk about Houston, Seattle or Cincinnati getting the 16th NFL team. I wish to express to you my opinion of those cities, which is that not a one of them has to offer what we can offer in Santa Fe. Besides our excellent transportation facilities (there is an important rail hub up in Lamy, DC-3 service to Albuquerque and more horses and donkeys in the area than you would ever need to look at), we have a tremendous output of Navajo blankets, beads, silverwork, green chili omelettes and other readily marketable items that can be tied in with our team in a merchandising package.
I propose to call our team the Santa Fe Nuclear Holycosts. Our colors will be ash-gray and yellow, and we will have mushroom clouds as our helmet decals. Through marketing, we plan to have mushroom cloud decals on every auto windshield in the country, inspiring terrible fear in our opponents that may even match that felt by our players. I pledge to you that we will build an underground stadium, camouflaged on top to look like a buffalo wallow. Thus we will be the only team in the league that can play a regularly scheduled NFL game right through the middle of an all-out atomic attack. Could Cincinnati do that, Mr. Rozelle?
Shortly you will receive a visitor bearing an antelope kidney stuffed full of cash in the sum of at least eight million dollars. Do not insult him by counting it. His name is Nachise, which means Willow Stick, and his grandfather was named Hickory Stick, or Cochise, and he is a very nasty customer when insulted and often when not. His Spanish name, when translated, is Mean Rascal. He is also our Director of Player Personnel and Chief Scout and has been known to track a potential player for a month of rocky ground before finally denting the fellow’s skull with the store-bought hatchet you will notice in his belt.
In regards to our stadium, I have arranged with friends at nearby Los Alamos to do the excavating. They assure me they can cause a sizeable crater with a single afternoon’s work. I am considering hiring John Ford as coach if Tex Maule is unavailable or too expensive. But I must have confirmation from you at once, since I have told my Los Alamos friends to proceed with the excavation next week and the people out there are liable to get very aroused if we do not have a team to put in that hole.
Yours Sincerely,
Edwin Shrake
March 31, 1966
Deardickiedickie [Dick Hitt, a Dallas Times Herald columnist]:
If I do move back, I intend to buy a huge color TV, a kingsize bed, a white convertible, and live in the way charming fellows like us ought to live. With the view, the color TV, the big bed and a stocked refrigerator, I doubt that I will go out much, but then we have already done that. Looking back at Dallas I see a blurry drunken daze of years and years of going out to the same places over and over, to the same adventures, to the same great ball of nothing.
We might, though, start off with an intimate little party for six hundred.
And wind up in Mexico.
I’m not that tired.
And when it all blows up I will give you the rights on disposal of my white convertible.
Please don’t say anything more about this moving-back than necessary because it might not ever happen, although the thought that it might not makes me reel off my chair.
[no signature remains]
May 2, 1966
Dear Uncle Jake [Jay Milner]:
My Blessed McGill book, incidentally, does have meeny meeny Indins and is pretty fine in that respect, as it includes tortures and horse stealings and plenty of dancing and is the product of some strenuous—for me—
research. I think you will like that part of it and also the part I just wrote yesterday about a stompede on a cattle drive on the Red River. There are several scenes I think are funny, including one when some cowboys hang a guy in the hill country and have to try three different times before they can manage to hang him all the way to death and then it happens accidentally after they have about given up. There are also scenes of McGill hunting a lost gold mine in the Sierra Madre Occidental, getting into a fight at the Vaudeville Saloon in San Antonio on the same side as noted old gunfighter Ben Thompson, McGill living with the Lipans in the Chisos Mountains, McGill scouting for the 4th Cavalry, McGill in the German Free School in Austin as a kid, McGill eating raw liver with the Tanima Comanches, McGill hunting buffalo, McGill rescuing a white girl from the Quahidi Comanches, and so forth and so forth—a grand way for me to live out boyhood daydreams. The harder parts deal with his mother becoming a nun and with him being rescued by the Taos Indins and then healing at a mission and being preached at by two Franciscan priests named Higgins and Mulligan, but I haven’t started writing those parts yet.
Yr pal, Bob
Oct. 6, 1966
Dear Ladybarg [Nancy Growald, the younger sister of Dick Growald, an old Fort Worth friend]:
Herewith is a handy little diet by which I lost 25-30 pounds in a couple of months without torture. I go back on it occasionally because it is easy. It’s a variation of that Drinking Man’s Thang of recent years but simpler to remember.
THANGS TO EAT AND DRINK ALL YOU WANT OF—Fish, fowl (including hot goddamn fried chicken), beef, pork (dozens of pork chops), green salads, green beans, eggs, cheese, butter, pre-sweetened Kool Aid, tea or coffee with artificial sweeteners, scotch and bourbon, some wine.
NOT TO TOUCH UNDER NO ACCOUNT WHATSOEVER INCLUDING THREATS—Corn, citrus fruits or fruit juices, lima beans, pinto beans, Meskin food (I cheat there some), English peas (which I hate), potatoes (toughie), gravy (sometimes too hard to bear), bread, desserts, beer. Also no chicken pot pies, which I used to live on. Also no milk. No cokes. No apples.
I found it easy enough because I would simply eat a steak, a huge salad, some green beans with mushroom sauce, then a jar of olives and pickles, a slab of cheese, a few pieces of bacon, sliced tomatoes and before and after down a dozen scotch and waters.
Great thing is you really can eat all you want and drink all you can hold before falling on your face on the carpet and get svelte. Or somewhat.
[no signature remains]
Oct. 28, 1966
Dear Lady [Nancy Growald]:
Today I lost the last of my Texas visitors—at least of the latest crop—and damned near bounded all the way to work. Singing, whistling, doing nifty little dances. People in the office thought I was crazy. And I, much poorer, no wiser, much tireder, am going to celebrate by shouting FREEDOM NOW at the horse show tonight (I will pick up some research material for that novel, HORSES HORSES HORSES, and we will all become rich, etc.). Then I may have a cocktail or two and an elegant dinner and sooner or later wind up peering closely at my color TV without yammering voices in the background wanting to watch a different show. By God, madam, it is a joy.
Your new outfit sounds nifty. I should know within the week whether I’ll be going to Houston and will notify you faster than immediately if such is the case. I notice I have overused the word nifty, but that is how I feel today.
Niftily, and with love,
[no signature remains]
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