Down Memory 'Layne' With Dad

It was one of those days, rain was coming down so hard our windows looked like sheets of ice. Thunder was crashing and lightening was flashing making it dangerous to feed horses, tend to chickens, get on the tractor or start painting the screen porch as I had intended. Most of those chores would have had to wait for a while and perhaps even another day. As the storm continued to roll in lightening knocked out electrical service to our place, a problem we sometimes experience during a relentless rainstorm in our rural location. I glanced at the TV and thought about spending some time on my computer, only to remember both needed electricity to operate.

Although I was happy to see a much-needed rain, I was a little perturbed as what to do with myself that morning. I asked myself; surely, the founders of this area in the country led their lives at one point in time without TVs and computers … well, in their spare time they must have done something inventive, like read. I took my cup of coffee and headed to my “cave”, a converted bedroom the wife and I have laughingly named because it is where I retreat to for naps, solace and among other things ‘deep-thoughts’.

My cave is where we located my easy chair, my leather sofa, my TV, my gun rack, most of my keepsakes, and a small personal library. The cave is really a guy’s room with wood floors, masculine colors and an environment few women would be very comfortable in, which on occasions is a blessing. I took from my library a hardback I received this past Christmas and sat down in my easy chair, put my feet up on the ottoman and began to study the very colorful book. The title of the book was “The History of Texas Football”. As I flipped through the pages, looking at photography dating back almost 100 years I came across a memorable picture of one of the football players featured in the book.

Almost immediately, I lowered the book to my lap without closing it and started to stare out the tall window beside my chair. The photograph had sent my thoughts reeling back to around 1944 when I was then a young boy about ten years old living with my family on Milton Street, in one of the Park Cities near Dallas, Texas. Milton was in University Park, one of the two small bedroom cities developed around the venerable Southern Methodist University just north of Dallas early in the 20th century.

The population of University Park in 1944, as I recall was about 20,000 residents living in homes built on about 2000 acres, a statistic that is probably still true today. Although that small community had become an exceptionally good place to raise a family, world war with Germany and Japan was raging across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Even today, I still get rather melancholy when I remember the principal of our school coming to our classroom, motioning to our teacher and whispering bad news in her ear concerning someone’s family member. We all had learned what those whispers were probably about and waited to see which boy or girl was asked to come out into the hall. Several of my classmates and friends lost a father, brother, uncle or cousin that year.

I do not recall any serious neighborhood or family arguments or misunderstandings in 1944. Everyone seemed to like or love everyone else and banded together in a common cause – to win the war! Gas and food were rationed, if a family ran out of food stamps, or had the wrong sticker on the window shield of their family car, families would substitute syrups for sugar, be literally out of gas and very few could remember even what beef tasted like.

It was such a wonderful time for young boys in the neighborhood, they were free to walk, roam, ride their bicycles just about as far as they wanted to as long as they were back home by dark. Crime was something that happened in New York, Chicago, on the radio or in the movies. I remember Hamilton Shaw and me riding the streetcar alone all the way to Dallas and the fairgrounds of Fair Park to ice skate and play broom-hockey.

My young friends and I pitched in as much as we could with the war effort. We sold and collected government savings stamps, newspapers and tin cans. A schoolboy with a small bundle of old newspapers or a stack of flattened tin cans could occasionally exchange either for a ticket to the movie theater in Snyder Plaza or Highland Park Village.

We were pretty much like young boys today, aside from there were no TV’s, no Internet, cell phones or I-pods, and really not much of anything electric to occupy our time. We played baseball sometimes without real bats and occasionally without a real baseball, or a football with so many patches, it started to look more like a basketball. Most of us were enthusiastic sports fans in a time when professional baseball and football were hundreds of miles away in places like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis and other big cities.

The radio, newspapers and magazines kept us current with which teams were winning and which were not. Without a Texas home team, each of us were free to become a follower of the professional baseball and football teams of our choice, which made neighborhood get-togethers occasionally very competitive for both adults and children.

Most of the boys I knew around my age liked, or looked up to one or more professional baseball players, often changing their mind during the season, or from one year to the next. Nearly all of us collected and traded baseball cards, which came with the purchase of Fleer’s Bubble Gum. My favorite baseball team in 1944 was the Brooklyn Dodgers and my favorite players were Eddie Stanky and Mickey Owen.

However, in 1944 my hero was a neighborhood football player who played quarterback for the Highland Park Scotties. At this late date, I cannot remember whether my friends and I were let in free for the football games played on the High School Campus, sneaked in, or they just did not sell tickets, however for a few years, I did not miss many of their home games.

My hero was the most popular boy in the Park Cities. He was tall for his age, muscular and according to all the girls in our neighborhood, looked something like a movie star. Some of us became such huge fans of our High School team that we often would even go watch the team practice after school. One day after practice, my hero was practicing kicking field goals. A few of us were lined up near the goal posts just gawking at him, when he looked up, smiled and asked if we wanted to hold the footballs while he kicked and then retrieve them for him.

We thought we had died and gone to heaven. A little later, we were still outside running around on the practice field when he came out dressed to go home. He yelled at us and asked if we wanted to walk several blocks with him up to the ‘Village’ and he would treat us to ice cream. The ice cream did not send my heart pounding. However, seen walking down the street with him and sitting next to the quarterback of the Highland Park Scotties in the drug store was one of the proudest days of my youth!

At that time, there was not any organized football in our area for boys my age. Nevertheless, every time I watched the Scotties play football and saw my hero run, kick the football or throw a pass, emotionally I was also playing in that game. Late that year my family moved to Lubbock, Texas, a move I still regret to this day.

My hero and I were now miles and miles apart. He went on to the University of Texas and ultimately into professional football. Although I grew to adulthood without any further contact with my hero of 1944, I kept up with his exploits on the football field, first still as a youngster in Lubbock on the radio and in newsreels, and years later as an adult on TV and in the newspapers.

Forty-two years later during a business trip in 1986, I found myself again in Lubbock. I had not been back to that part of Texas, except for the brief funerals of my mother and father, for almost 20 years. In 1965, I left Lubbock and moved my wife and four children to Phoenix, Arizona. A lot had changed by 1986, the town was much more cosmopolitan and the population had more than doubled. Farms and ranches, which years ago dominated the landscape just outside Lubbock, were now sprawling subdivisions. Old landmarks were either gone or quite some distance from the fashionable places to live in 1986.

My business meeting that day was going to be very short, so I thought I would take the opportunity to contact some of my former classmates and friends in Lubbock for a drink. After a few phone calls, I agreed to meet some old friends at a bar they suggested in the far southwest part of the new Lubbock. My business concluded around 3:30 and my rendezvous with my friends was not until 5:00. I did not want to go back to my hotel and stare at the walls in my room and had nothing better to do, so I headed to the bar where I had agreed to meet my friends.

It was a real nice bar tucked away in one of Lubbock’s many new shopping centers. On the way, I could not help but notice all of the beautiful homes, homes that twenty years ago were occupied by only the affluent, now seemed to be block after block with no end. Once inside the bar I found it to be rather new-fangled, but with the decor of an old tavern from Scotland. The ceilings were very high featuring huge carved wooden crossbeams and the whole place very dimly lit.

As I sat down at the bar, I noticed a man sitting near me slightly slumped over. Coming inside from broad daylight of the afternoon it took a few moments for my eyes to dilate. I asked the bartender for a beer and I could not help but notice the same man was sort of scowling and his face somewhat wrinkled. The empty glasses in front of him made it clear he had been there for some time and his demeanor led me to believe he was to some extent a little inebriated. As he ordered yet another drink, my eyes began to focus and I said to myself -- damn this person looks familiar.

As I moved nearer to the man I asked … Are you? … Are you? … Yes, I am what’s it to you?

It was my hero from 1944 and University Park, now almost 60 years old. I knew from accounts in the newspapers that he had married the daughter of a very wealthy family in Lubbock. A beautiful girl he first met while playing football at the University of Texas and a few years before he retired from professional football, they had purchased a ranch a few miles from guess where – Lubbock, Texas.

It was evident that my old hero was not in a talking mood. However, when I told him I knew him as a young boy from his days in Highland Park, used to hold footballs for him while he practiced kicking field goals and he once took me and my friends to the ‘Village” for ice cream, a smile finally graced his lips.

Between his many drinks, he muttered that he had no memory of me, but seemed to enjoy talking every now and then about his high school days at Highland Park. At one point in our almost one-sided conversation, he half-heartedly whispered that he had contracted cancer and that his doctors told him if he did not stop drinking liquor, it would kill him and said that must mean he was sitting there drinking … waiting to die!

We chatted every few minutes, about his days in Austin and Highland Park. After a couple of beers, I heard someone yell … STONE! It was my friends at a table waving me over. After long overdue hugs and handshakes, I sat down and asked them if they knew who had been sitting next to me at the bar. They said yes, he is in here every time we are here, it is very sad, he going to drink himself to death. I never mentioned anything about my youth in University Park, we laughed as we recalled our times together in Lubbock.

The next morning in the coffee shop at the hotel as I was preparing to go to the airport for my flight home I picked up the Lubbock Avalanche Journal and on the front page of the newspaper was horrible news from the night before.

For my hero, the clock stopped one last time, his game of life was over and his waiting had finally ended! God must have needed a great quarterback on his team! For me, although he was gone from this world, my memories of my hero of 1944 will never leave my heart!

On the front-page of the Lubbock Avalanche Journal December 1, 1986 …

Happy Birthday David!