The Straight Bull About Cowtown

The first time I realized that intelligent life existed outside the city limits of Fort Worth came at the tender age of 12. I was a budding photographer and had exhausted downtown Fort Worth’s meagre street life, the beauties of Botanic Gardens, and silhouetted – against – the – sky pictures of Will Rogers’ statue. A classmate in the photo class at Children’s Museum, sophisticated and urbane (he lived in Arlington Heights and I dwelled in Riverside), told me of the wonders of Big D. Previously, I had thought of Dallas as only a hazy but malignant giant somewhere to the East. Amon Carter’s occasional pronouncements told me that Cowtown was indeed where the West began and that’s all a little towhead like me was supposed to need to know. I had never heard the word “boosterism.” Still, I chuckled heartily at the story that Amon took a sack lunch every time he had to visit Dallas. Amon knew what was the best of all possible cities..

I was, however, shaken by my classmate’s assertion that there were bigger buildings in Dallas. My sense of adventure was stirred and, buoyed by reading a Hardy Boys, I decided to make a foray and one day boarded the 8 a.m. Trailways commuter special and was soon smokin’ out of Cow-town. All I can now report to you is that Dallas laid one hell of a bummer on a poor, excited, 12-year-old kid who wore his P.F. Flyers down to nothing, till the soles had the thinness of bicycle inner tube patches, trudging up and down. Tall buildings meant surely that a superior race lived there, but I could find no trace of it. If anything, downtown Dallas could not match Fort Worth’s scattered winos and hookers, chicken hawks (homosexuals cruising for young boys, usually around the Westbrook Hotel), and other assorted flotsam and jetsam cast aside by boosterism.

Dallas had buildings going up to the sky, sure, but that was all. All the men looked like Gus Mutscher and the women like Pat Nixon and that was enough to send me scuttling back to the Trailways after eight hours of drifting. Still, the glimpse of another culture planted an unsettling seed in my mind: the possibility that Fort Worth might not be, after all, the center of the universe. And if Dallas was only an overblown version of the Lions Club vision of a city that was Fort Worth, then what might lie outside the Twin Cities (Author’s note: this was prior to the common usage “Metroplex,” which is Chamber of Commercese for “urban sprawl.”) but marvelous wonders unknown even to the imagination of a hyperactive 12-year-old whose most mundane daydreams involved Loretta Young in a variety of compromising positions?

My next few years only served to reinforce my precocious notions that Dalworth was perhaps not all it was cracked up to be. Summer school at TCU quickly destroyed the idea that a genteel Christian education could do more than develop one’s appreciation of Southwest Conference football at its worst. Cheerleader school at SMU taught me only that it could be a true delight to be in the midst of nubile young women, even though (or perhaps because) their minds were concerned only with getting into Sweetbriar or, as a last resort, UT. My other preoccupations dealt with trying to make a buck as a sometime photographer/writer. There were no takers. I’ll be eternally grateful to, in this order, the Fort Worth Press, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the San Angelo Standard-Times, the Houston Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Times Herald, the Dallas Morning News, and the Fort Worth All-Church Press for refusing to hire me as a reporter, photographer, writer, or even office boy or copy boy. They knew what they were doing; I didn’t.

Talk about a liberal education (and that, dear reader, is all this little exercise is all about). Nothing could be more edifying than a grueling job interview with the city editors of Texas’ major dailies. My inch-wide black tie was always neatly tied and my best white socks were gleaming and my J.C. Penney sport coat was only moderately wrinkled and I always had fresh Butch Wax on my crew-cut. I was easily the sartorial equal of these autocratic bastards who would sit there and edit thousand-word pieces on the openings of shopping centers while they gave a cursory glance at my resume and clips and then sent me on my way with a curt admonition to “get some experience.” I could never figure that one out – how do you get experience if you can’t get a job to get experience on? – and it’s too late now to worry about it. I still think I could cover a shopping center as well as the best of them. Eventually, through the most mundane of coincidences, I went down the road a little ways to Palestine and landed a dodge on the Herald-Press there as the $55-a-week star reporter and labored in the very shadow of the ever-developing Metro-plex. Did okay there too, until I invoked the ire of the local Chevy dealer who was the chief booster thereabouts. He got a little disturbed that I would consider traveling to Dallas to buy a second-hand Triumph instead of (a) buying locally, and (b) buying American. He sent word to my publisher to give me a little lecture on being a good citizen. The publisher patted me on the back, called me “my boy” and told me in a roundabout way that there was more to journalism than the five W’s and the H and the inverted pyramid. What I was lacking, it seemed, was civic pride and community involvement. To get along in this world, he concluded, one had to get along. For some reason, that made me think of Amon Carter and the Star-Telegram. In a flash, I understood why the S-T turned me down immediately.

Now, that’s the whole beauty of growing up in Fort Worth. The conditioning makes it impossible to grow up without being cynical and irreverent and once you become so, you are terminally unemployable. Because you don’t get along. Joining the Ki-wanis or the Jaycees becomes as impossible as taking a moon shuttle from Greater Southwest Airport. I wondered for years why Fort Worth seemed to produce an unceasing string of good writers and musicians and artists who didn’t do anything at all worthwhile until they left Fort Worth. After I left, after I felt that I had to leave, I finally began to realize that it was not a matter of the Sensitive Artist Escaping the Philistines or even The Bohemian Fleeing Mindless Conformity. All it came down to is that Fort Worth just bores the hell out of you. It’s not boring enough even to be considered banal. It is the largest city in the world where absolutely nothing happens. Everything is orderly and spotless and All-Amer-ican and eminently logical and sane and business-like and it’s all enough to make you either give up or leave. Or, as I did one Halloween with a friend, assemble home-made hand-grenades and drive around town tossing them out on deserted streets. The streets were all deserted anyway after 10 at night. The first time I was arrested, it was (where else?) in Fort Worth and I was merely trying to alleviate a summer’s boredom (no summer jobs available for the terminally unemployable) by climbing the outside of the Continental Bank building. I made it too, all the way to the top and, instead of receiving a citation from the city council for my marvelous feat and the wholesome publicity it might engender for Our Town, I was clapped into the pokey.



Now what does that do to a tender psyche? To the spirit of adventure that at times exists in all of us? Grinds it right into the pavement. I half expected Amon Carter to assemble the town at Will Rogers Coliseum and administer me a public spanking. At least that would have broken the boredom.



Perhaps I’m unfair to Fort Worth. The Stock Show and Rodeo were okay sometimes. The zoo seemed to be all right. I once went to a posh nightclub and saw Snooky Lanson there. When I started the collegiate trend in the Sixties of wearing cut-off Levis and penny loafers with no socks I was almost killed by several bored construction workers who accused me of being a “fairy.” That was exciting. When I came back from the Navy with hair a little longer than was the custom on Houston Street I received many mild and not-so-mild complaints from citizens who felt that I perhaps did not belong in downtown Cowtown. That was the same day I decided to give the Star-Telegram a third chance to hire me but the paper still knew I was no good, that I wasn’t prepared to, by golly, get behind the Metroplex and shove for all I was worth. Like I said, they knew what they were doing.