The Gentle One 
Vanishing Texas
Though faded and forlorn, these places are graced with the memories of another time. Photography by Harry De Zitter
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I never comprehended, in Odessa in the fifties, why the courthouse gang swore by the Club Cafe’s grumpy cadre of aging waitresses, fierce black coffee, or leather-fried cheeseburgers. Close proximity to the courthouse? But how, then, to account for city detectives who drove two miles each morning to the Rig Caf, where the sausage was just as greasy, the toast just as butter-logged, the sunny-side eggs just as runny as those to be found elsewhere? These were opinions one learned to keep to oneself.
Funny thing: Regulars who defended their “special” greasy spoon to outsiders with the partisanship of hardball politics often affected dissatisfactions in bantering with the owner or waitresses. I heard a tall-haired waitress say to a Club Cafe regular who had ordered a midmorning beer, “You want some pie with that?” The customer made a great show of inspecting pies on display before drawling, “Naw, them pies been in that case so long, it’d be like eatin’ a old friend.” I stored that exchange and, 25 years later, took it to Broadway in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas; it became one of the surefire laugh lines.
I came to the belief that slavish loyalties to given cafes in small-town Texas were based less on superior food or service than on avoiding unwelcome surprises. Patrons found the same comforts associated with private clubs. Cares of the workplace or domestic strife could be forgotten in the camaraderie of a place where everyone from auto mechanics to bankers could be as one for the time it took to devour the blue plate special. There was familiar comfort, too, in knowing you could set your watch by the appearance of regulars for the midmorning and midafternoon coffee breaks.
Twinkle Toes and Two-Steps
I never saw a dance hall that wasn’t painted white. They had side-prop windows—hinged at the top and braced open with poles—to let in summer breezes or shut out winter’s cold. Picnic tables normally were grouped outside or ranged inside along the walls. Whole generations—grandmas to toddlers—might pile out of crowded cars and pickup trucks to tap toes to polkas, square dances, waltzes, the two-step cowboy stomp.
I confess a little personal experience in such wholesome dance halls. Mine was Danceland, located in Odessa among a sprawled string of oilfield supply houses, scabby beer joints, and easy-access motels during the fifties oil boom. The closest Danceland came to family matters was when policemen were called to adjudicate domestic disputes after an erring spouse was discovered in the wrong company. Country and western bands played on as the blood was mopped up.
Beer was the sanctified house drink before Texans were permitted to purchase “mixed drinks” outside of private clubs, though setups—ice and chasing soft drinks—accommodated liquor lovers so long as their bottles were decently clothed in brown paper bags. The law did not insist that hard liquor be so dressed, but local mores and protocol surely did. The drinker ill-mannered enough to flaunt a naked booze bottle was subject to eviction.
The Hot-Pillow Trade
Before the national chains made it difficult to tell one room—or town—from another, motels were wonderfully varied, if often down-at-heel. A few took exotic shapes—Dutch windmills, Indian tepees, Alamo replicas. In the thirties and forties many motels—or tourist courts, as we called them—were made of native Texas rock. Thick, massive, almost fortlike, they offered surprising relief from the Texas heat before air conditioning prevailed. Though long abandoned, those old rock structures stand sturdily along little-used highways to this day.
It was not easy to tell which motels catered to vacationing families or other legitimate transients and which welcomed the hot-pillow trade. The latter sometimes advertised their in-residence ladies by stationing a “bellhop,” usually a black man, in a cane-bottomed chair out front once darkness fell. If the unwary traveler did not know this code, however, he and his family might be treated to the sounds of all-night comings and goings.
Whether the trade was legitimate or illicit, the traveler might encounter lumpy or sagging beds, cold-water baths, suspect towels, no food facilities, or food better left untouched. Decent folks were expected to be early-to-bed, so travelers began hunting accommodations before sundown. Past nine o’clock, motel operators often turned out their lights and remained stubbornly impervious to frantic ringings by desperate parents seeking room at the inn.
Avoid the Bathroom
Fillin’ stations fixed flats, patched inner tubes, provided free compressed air for a kid’s bicycle tires. You didn’t have to beg attendants to check your oil, battery water, tire pressure or to clean your windshield; such automatic services came with the franchise. Most in-house mechanics were of the shadetree variety, however: nearer to paramedics, say, than to brain surgeons. Should you need major repairs, an expert might be required from a distant city; replacement parts, shipped by Greyhound, could take longer than the pony express.
You could buy do-it-yourself tire repair kits, retreads, hand pumps, fiery dried-beef snacks requiring strong jaws, nickel packs of salted peanuts, stale cheese crackers, headache powders, digestive aids, bottled sodas of many brands and hues. You could risk your pocket change against any number of punchboards. Anyone with the slightest tendency to fastidiousness did well to avoid the bathrooms except in dire emergencies.
Teenagers and good ol’ boys like to hang out at the fillin’ station. They closely inspected travelers and sometimes cut antics at their expense. One never wanted to depend on such layabouts for directions: Simply asking them tempted their mischievous qualities beyond control.
The Hardscrabble Life
Ranch houses were homes and workplaces of people who had little time for frivolities. Bogus “cowboy lore” too often paints the false picture of hard-drinking, fistfighting, bronc-busting, womanizing Huds who, when not involved in grand adventures, perhaps spent their days listening to the Sons of the Pioneers sing under a growth of cottonwood trees.
In truth, much cowboy work was—and is—bone hard, deadly boring, and discouragingly repetitious. Mending fences, kicking salt blocks out of truck beds, shoeing horses, working the cranks, handles, pulleys, chains, and gates of squeeze chutes against panicky critters who wish to be neither branded, castrated, vaccinated, nor dehorned—well, pardners, these and a hundred other exertions cause the lights to go out early in the bunkhouse and the libido to hunker down, whimpering, in the old corral. When I see a ranch house, I think of hard work and loneliness.
In truly isolated cattle country, some ranchers during holidays hosted the occasional barbecues or dances attracting distant neighbors. These celebrations might feature groaning tables, string bands, laughter and stories, the whoops of excited kiddies. Out back the menfolk passed around a bottle of two, and young hotbloods might infrequently square off for fisticuffs. But ranch life has always been more hardscrabble—and less nonsensical—than that depicted in Giant or the incomparably foolish Dallas.
Saints and Sinners
In my youth there seemed to be as many varieties of country churches as ice cream flavors; sometimes it seemed that my family insisted on sampling them all. The more hard-core fundamentalists talked in tongues, writhed at the Mourner’s Bench, cried or shouted or trembled. It may have been good theater, but I did not enjoy such shows as a child. They brought hell too close and made the devil too personal.
I much preferred the more sedate Methodist approach—even though sermons of sweet reason, combined with summer’s lassitude and Sunday’s torpor, might tempt a young back-row saint to nod off for a forbidden nap. What I truly enjoyed was the social element: frolicking with other boys, so long as our decibel level did not disturb God on His day of rest or cause a rip in our pants; semiflirting with little girls in their starched Sunday best; families exchanging visits for Sunday dinners and staying together until evening services. Country wives brought covered dishes to communal feasts, and old hymns stirred the air in making “a joyful noise until the Lord.” Good fellowship prevailed and the devil couldn’t prevent it. And the God who watched over us was the paternal New Testament God, not the angry God of the Old Book, who left tiny sinners sleepless in their dark and terrible beds.
“Tell ‘Er I Ain’t Here”
Some places called themselves taverns, affecting to be high class, perhaps bespeaking darts instead of shuffleboard or conversation instead of jukeboxes crying of cheatin’ hearts and whiskey widows. Personally, I preferred plain old “beer joins.” The kind where you bonded with friends who were also regular customers, although the possibility of a good fight skated on the fringe. The kind where, when the phone rang, a half-dozen revelers sang out, “Tell ‘er I ain’t here,” and there was always the prospect of going home with a stranger who wore blood-red nail polish and a swollen blouse. Of all the old country institutions, the beer joint remains the most prevalent and the most likely to last.
I’ll drink to that.
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