COLUMNIST’S CHOICE

Magazine writers, whose deadlines come but once a month, stand in awe at the prowess of their newspaper colleagues, the daily columnists who day in, day out, month after indistinguishable month, continue to produce fresh and lively copy. How, we wonder, do they keep their wits so keen, their styles so clean?

The newspaper columnist is the lifeblood of the daily paper. For every one who reads that hard-hitting editorial on the commissioners court, hundreds are reading the Art Buchwald or Russell Baker column on the facing page. They’re the cream in our morning coffee, the welcome alternative to “Bowling for Dollars” in the evening.

Whatever else one may say about the Dallas newspapers, they seem to have been blessed with an astonishing number of talented columnists. So it seemed only fitting to us to celebrate our colleagues on the dailies, by reprinting the pick of their letters.

It also seemed only fair to allow them to choose their favorites, the columns they take most pleasure in re-reading, for display in our gallery. The problem was, all exhibited a certain becoming modesty. One said he didn’t keep copies, but he thought his mother might have some. But one by one, they came around, saying “Well, there was the one I wrote about . . .”

So here are the choicest works of Dick Hitt and Blackie Sherrod of the Herald, John Anders, Bob St. John and Frank X. Tolbert of the News. And to round out our gallery, we decided to include one column of the late Paul Crume of the News, whose “Big D” column was as familiar a fixture of the front page as the weather report and the holiday exhortation to “Fly Your Flag.” Mrs. Crume graciously provided us with her selection from her husband’s many columns.

Dick Hitt

The smashing success of the eight-night production of Roots on television is still the talk of the country. All kinds of people, no matter their ranking in the nation’s ethnic and cultural strata, were impressed by this story. Perhaps Barbara Walters’ comment was typical: “Woots was a pwofound experwience for all of us, bwack and white awike.”

A direct side-effect of Roots was a heightened awareness of our own ancestry. Many people already have begun their visits to the genealogy sections of libraries in an effort to trace their own roots.

As it happens 1 am in pretty good shape on this account. Some time ago I filled out one of those little coupons in a magazine and sent it in to a company in Ohio that will trace your genealogy, determine from it your family coat of arms, and emblazon it on a beer mug. They charge $8.95 for this and for an extra $12.50 will do your family tree. I had sent this away so long ago that I had forgotten about it. But through a really lucky quirk of timing, only a few days ago my roots arrived in the mail, just in time for the national furor over familial history.

I was only able to get one side of the family tree, actually. My maternal grandfather was a Smith, and those are really hard to untangle when you go about three generations back. My maternal grandfather was William W. Smith, an accountant for the railroad. He was from a Georgia farming family and struck out on his own for East Texas after a dispute with his brothers and cousins over whether to sell their hard-scrabble peanut farm to a man named Carter.

As to the Hitt side of the family, I had to explain to the coat-of-arms company that I only had direct knowledge of two generations of my paternal family. There was my father, Raymond Cavosco Hitt, a West Texas druggist who spent his life paying bills and never having enough sleep and always having to work on Christmas and New Year’s and Thanksgiving. His hobby was breaking up at Harry Wismer’s fatuous remarks on college football broadcasts.

My father was the son of Lawrence G. Hitt, a farmer who settled in Wilbarger County around 1903, an extremely tall man who wore overalls and whose pipe tobacco smelled so good that I’m sure they must not make it anymore. He once told me that his forebears had come from Virginia.

On the basis of this sketchy information, the coat-of-arms company sent back a genealogical outline. They said they cannot guarantee its authenticity but that it might be close.

It seems that my great-grandfather may have been one Culwell Hitt, a self-educated man who had the distinction of being the first licensed notary public in Spot-sylvania County, Va. As a young cavalry lieutenant in the tail-end troop of one of Longstreet’s regiments, he is said to have become so fond of riding through clouds of dust that he vowed to move to northwest Texas after the war to live in the land of perpetual sandstorms. He was one of the few early settlers of the region who never met Quanah Parker.

Culwell Hitt was the son of Cyrus Hitt, who married Morgana Cavosco in Charles-ton in 1843. At that time, of course, Charles-ton, S. C, was the South’s hub of com-merce and culture, a city of stylish rogues and lovely ladies. Unfortunately, Morgana and Cyrus lived in what is now Charles-ton, West Virginia. Morgana’s father, Sti-letto, is credited with being the creator of the first crude version of pizza when he picked some tomatoes from his garden and accidentally placed them atop a pan of cornbread that was cooling on the window ledge. In 1844, Cyrus Hitt applied for a patent for a product called Cotton Gin, which was never a success because consumers complained that the cotton made the gin too linty and that being immersed in a bottle of gin made the cotton soggily useless.

Cyrus Hitt’s father was DeWitt Hitt, a Marylander who was known as something of an eccentric along the west shore of Chesapeake Bay for his persistent efforts in trying to cross a blue crab with a turkey, so as to produce a Thanksgiving bird with six drumsticks and its own condiment bowl. DeWitt Hitt’s father was Quin-tius Hitt, a remarkable character who was the only Hitt in show business. Quintius was a wandering minstrel who had a trained dancing donkey and who traveled the circuit from Massachusetts to Maryland, until 1778, when his ass froze at Valley Forge. Quintius himself went on to become a carpenter and is said to have carved George Washington’s first set of false teeth.

The black sheep of the family apparently was Quintius Hitt’s father, Wolfgang Amadeus Hitt, who emigrated to Sweden from his native Germany in 1724 and was subsequently exiled from Sweden by the regent, Olaf the Testy, after saying publicly that he would see a donkey dance before he would fork over 10 percent of his lingonberry crop. Wolfgang Amadeus Hitt later fell in with a fast crowd of North Carolina rakes, lived beyond his means and was reportedly the first man south of Norfolk to have a slave repossessed.

The dramatic intricacy of such an od-yssey of people and pageantry is underscored with the knowledge that 253 years after Wolfgang was banished from Germany, his descendant stopped payment on a check to an Ohio coat-of-arms company.

John Anders

I should have stayed in sports. The worst gaffe you can make in that department is to miss a deadline (my record was 17 days) or show up at the wrong pressbox (once I covered a night game in College Station only to learn that I was supposed to be in Fort Worth for an afternoon game).

Saturday night I made a faux pas of such magnitude it is almost cosmic. If I could have died at that moment I would have lived happily ever after.

It all started so innocently.

Our nightclubs writer, Connie Hershorn, and I were to join Carol Channing and her husband Charles Lowe for dinner at the Fairmont Hotel’s opulent Pyramid Room. Connie and I had looked forward to this evening for almost a month. Indeed, it proved to be a night to remember.

What can I say? Miss Channing, who opened at the Venetian Room Monday, was charming, lovely, funny, sexy and utterly fascinating. And yes, she does actually talk that way. I loved her more in person than on stage if that is possible.

So, after a fabulous meal it seemed only natural that we should ask her and Charles to join us on an insider’s pilgrimage through Texas. Connie had been raving about C&W star Waylon Jennings and Carol suddenly announced, “Let’s go see him, tonight!”

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Jennings was playing Fort Worth’s Panther Hall, and I could just imagine the stir it would make for Carol Channing, the glittering superstar, to glide through this huge beerhall where young people in jeans and T-shirts stomped, clapped and took long pulls on Lone Star longnecks. Miss Channing, a true adventuress, was anxious to see Waylon Jennings in his element.

I called Panther Hall, made the arrangements, then left the Pyramid Room to retrieve my car. The Fairmont doorman eyed it suspiciously when I drove up to the front entrance and said I was picking up a few friends. My car, it should be noted, is neither a Cadillac, a Mark IV, nor even a Mercedes. It’s a battered five-year-old Chevy, bereft of air conditioning, and replete with a beer can or two in the back seat.

Connie knew this was typical. Carol and Charles seemed amused but nonplussed. I was mortified.

But the worst was yet to come.

As we buzzed along toward the Fort Worth Turnpike, Miss Channing was the first to smell smoke. My life flashed before my eyes.

We pulled off the road, I threw up the hood and was immediately engulfed in black smoke.

While Connie was laughing hysterically, Charles was looking for a policeman, and I was contemplating throwing myself on my turn indicator, Carol Channing was rejoicing in the night breezes. “Isn’t this Texas air fantastic,” she chimed in that impossibly wonderful voice. “I never get out in the clean air. It’s wonderful!” Then, stepping through the bull nettles and dirt clods in a glittering sequined pants suit, she was ready to flag down a semi (pronounced sem-eye) truck tooling down the pike.

I could have kissed her. I kept thinking, “What if this had been Marlene Dietrich?”

Charles showed his class under duress by coming up with the only intelligent solution. He suggested that I leave the three of them, search for a service station, and return in a taxi should my car prove inoperative. At this point I was tumbling mindlessly through the dirt.

I jumped in my Chevy and pulled away at a very slow speed. If my car hadn’t been smoking, I swear I would have kept on driving to California and gone gratefully off the Malibu cliffs.

At this point, the whole significance of the affair dawned on me. I had just left Carol Channing, her husband, and a valued staffer stranded somewhere between Dallas and Grand Prairie on the Fort Worth Turnpike. Luckily, I found a service station, was told I could make it back to the Fairmont if I drove slowly, then returned to pick up my passengers. Carol was stalking about, picking bluebonnets in the moonlight and taking in the fresh Texas air. She actually seemed to be enjoying herself.

Somehow we made it, still smoking, back to the hotel.

Miss Channing was even gracious enough to call the evening “great fun” and an “adventure,” proving that in addition to her obvious comedic talents, she is a consummate actress, or at the very least, a deeply compassionate woman.

My Chevy has been a decent car for five years. It has taken me through some hard times, but never before has it done me dirty. Yet once was enough. It was as though I had lived 29 years for this one moment, and my own car conspired with the fates to humiliate me.

So.

If anyone is interested in a beat-up, unreliable, five-year-old Chevy which once took Carol Channing to Grand Prairie, it is for sale . . .cheap.

The morning after, incidentally, my four-year-old son found a few sequins from Miss Channing’s pants suit in the front seat of my treacherous vehicle.

“What’s this, daddy?” he asked in the tremulous innocence of childhood.

“Son,” I said to him, “Someday, when you’re older, I’ll tell you about it.”

Bob St. John

When I was very young we lived on a small, narrow street in one of the leaner sections of Paris, Texas. I usually think about that street and that particular time when I run across things from the past or in early summer when I see and smell honeysuckle, which grew wild and helped tone down smells from a nearby vinegar factory.

The other day when I was giving my library its annual 10-year cleaning (I have never been accused of being hygienic) I climbed a ladder and looked back at the farthest corner of books, near the ceiling, and came across some old Dell paperbacks, which I know now were not hiding, but only resting there in dust of nostalgia. There was Bill Stern’s Favorite Baseball Stories, Bill Stern’s Favorite Football Stories and baseball and football books with cover pictures of Ted Williams, Joe Page, Charley (Choo-choo) Justice, Leon Heath and a 1949 Complete Baseball showing Lou Boudreau on one knee, leaning on a bat he used to help the Cleveland Indians win the 1948 American League pennant.

I guess I was about in the fifth or sixth grade when I bought the book showing the great Lou Boudreau for 25 cents. Seeing it again reminded me how cluttered and complex my life has become because all I ever really wanted to do was play shortstop for the Cleveland Indians. In those days if you did not want to be a baseball player there was something terribly wrong with you, the most serious thing being you were a girl.

I went to J. G. Wooten Elementary School, since torn down, and organized my own baseball team. The school had a Softball team but I was a purist. I tried to run my team as the great Lou Boudreau might. Though we would often have only eight guys, I’d post the batting order each Saturday morning and spend many of my weekday nights calling around town trying to get games.

My best hitter came from the very poorest part of town, though we never judged degrees of social status. His name was Cha-Cha Charley Moore. He’d failed a couple of grades, so while he was in the fifth grade with us, he should have been in the seventh. Cha-Cha Charley came to play in overalls and without shoes. The thing that bothered me was that he batted cross-handed.

“Hey, Cha-Cha Charley, you battin’ cross-handed again!” I’d yell.

“Shut you mouth or I whup ya!” said Cha-Cha Charley.

Cha-Cha Charley caused a lot of trouble in school during that fifth grade year. There was a coat room with doors opening into our classroom. Cha-Cha Charley would hide in the coat room and wait for girls to come in and hang up their coats. Then he’d rush up and kiss them. Often we were all seated in class and the teacher was about to go into our lesson when some little girl would scream from the coat room and come running out, blushing. A moment later here’d come ol’ Cha-Cha Charley, with a silly grin on his face. The teacher would then grab his arm and take him to the principal’s office. Soon you’d hear a great, fearful noise echoing down the halls as Cha-Cha Charley got a swat.

We’d all expect him to come in bleeding but he never did. Ol’ Cha-Cha Charley would just walk back into the classroom, grinning. He kissed about 15 girls in the coat room that year, many of them twice. Me, I never thought about doing anything like that because I wanted to stay in shape for baseball.

One of the great burdens I had to carry then was that I couldn’t whistle. Everybody on the team would whistle, yelling encouragement to the pitcher. I couldn’t. I tried and tried but I’d just blow out air. I think I was 30 before I learned to whistle, putting my tongue and teeth just right and letting the shrill sound come out of my mouth. It didn’t help my authority with the team when I couldn’t whistle.

I saw a picture of the great Lou Boud-reau’s Ted Williams shift in the book and started using it against this 4’3″, 67-pound, left-handed batter. In retrospect, I know now that he wasn’t even strong enough to hit the ball to the right side, where I’d placed all my men, but theory was important.

J. G. Wooten had a football team, which played other elementary schools around town. I honestly can’t remember us winning more than one or two games but we seldom lost a gang fight because we had some pretty tough kids. Toughest kids I ever knew were the Glenn brothers, James and Clarence. James was our tailback, our best runner, and Clarence, whom we called Bubba, played on the defense, despite having a crippled hand and sometimes dragging a deficient foot. Bubba was crippled but he stood a good head and a half taller than anybody else.

I didn’t like to block Bubba, not only because he was crippled but also because he was bigger than I was – not necessarily in that order. But one afternoon the coach kept yelling at me to knock that man down. So I closed my eyes and threw myself under him on a sweep, sending both of us to the ground and clearing James for a touchdown. Bubba yelled and went berserk, jumping up and then kicking at me with his good foot. I curled up in a ball and let him kick away not only because he was a cripple but also because he was bigger than I was.

He was kicking away at me and then James screamed, ’’Leave Bubba alone! You pickin’ on a cripple lil’ boy!” With this battle cry James threw the ball at me and then ran over and jumped on top of me and started pounding away. When Bub-ba heard the words, “Cripple!” he started crying. So there I was on the ground with James pounding me on the helmet with all his might and Bubba crying and screaming and kicking. After about 10 minutes the coach broke it up and said, “A lil’ fightin’ is good for the spirit. But we don’t pick on no cripples here.”

Paris had a baseball team in the East Texas League, later going to the Big State League, and we’d go out faithfully to watch it play because it was the closest we could get to the great Lou Boudreau. There was a custom then of passing hats around the stands and taking up collections for players who hit big home runs. One night the almost-great George Sprys hit a home run. After the game we were walking the 10-odd miles back home when who but the almost-great George Sprys walked up behind us. We were ecstatic. We talked and he bought us ice cream with one of the 100 coins they’d collected for him. I told him all about our baseball team and he promised to come out the next day and help us practice.

The next day was Saturday and we were out bright and early. We had a lookout and every time he’d see somebody walking toward the school grounds he’d yell and we’d start hustling. By mid-aftemoon some of my guys, including Cha-Cha Charley Moore and Bubba Clarence Glenn, wanted to go home.

“The great George Sprys said he’d be here and he’ll be here,” I told them. “So he’s a little late. You think all he’s got to do is come play baseball with a bunch of snot noses like us.”

We waited until dark and the almost-great George Sprys never showed.

In fact I think I waited until almost nine o’clock. When I found that old book the other day and dusted it off I got to thinking that the great Lou Boudreau would have certainly showed up that day.

Blackie Sherrod

Six months after they took the left leg of Freddie Steinmark, he returned to the Houston tumor clinic for another of his nervewracking checkups. The little Texas safety had to do this every three months, as do all victims of osteogenic sarcoma. He underwent blood tests and x-rays to determine if the dread malignancy might appear in other parts of his strong young body.

For several nights preceding his trips to M. D. Anderson Hospital, Freddie would stare at the ceiling. He knew the odds. He prayed for a miracle.

“They told me not to worry, but that’s easy for them to say,” Freddie said. “They’re the ones taking the x-rays, not the one getting them.”

When Freddie would get a clean report, he would return joyously to the Texas campus and throw himself into another project with fierce energy. He took up golf, balancing himself on one leg while he swung. He learned to water ski. He went religiously to the Longhorn weight room to build up the rest of his body, as if muscle could hold off any return invasion of cancer cells. He worked his grades back to a B average. He made speeches and appearances. He wanted feverish activity to keep his mind occupied, so it wouldn’t wander back to the calendar and the date of his next trip to Houston.

Last July a couple blurs showed up on x-rays of Freddie’s lungs. It could be one of several things, the doctors told Freddie, we’ll watch it close. A bit later, they told Freddie he would have to start a series of chemo-therapy treatments. He didn’t change expression. But he guarded the news as if it were the atomic secret. He wanted no one to know. It was almost as if Freddie thought the treatments were a sign of personal weakness. The news might bring pity from his teammates and friends and above all, he didn’t want that.

The chemo-theraphy consisted of six days of shots that, hopefully, would kill or arrest any fast-growing cancer cells. They make the patient frightfully nauseous. But he masked the trips and treatments from all save a precious few. Scott Henderson, the linebacker and Freddie’s apart-ment mate, knew but he respected the confidence.

One side effect of chemo-therapy shots is the loss of hair. Freddie had a long thick black mane and he was proud of it. His teammates teasingly accused him of being a hippie. Okay, you guys, he said. I’m gonna coach the freshman defensive backs and just to show you how seriously I’m taking this job, I’ll get rid of the hippie image. I’ll get rid of all this hair. As a matter of fact, I’ll just shave it all off, just to show you I’m not kidding.

So the Texas squad had a little ceremony in the locker room and they all laughed and cheered as Bobby Wuensch shaved off the Steinmark hair. His teammates didn’t realize he dreamed up this little act to hide the fact he was taking treatments that made his hair fall out. He kept his head shaved. Rick Troberman took note of the bald head and the missing leg and applied the nickname “Pirate.” Freddie went along with the gag. He had his ear pierced and wore a gold ring in it for a while.



He shared his worry and concern with no one. But sometimes when you were in a conversation with Freddie, he would be staring at you vacantly with those enormous black eyes and there would be a silence, and he would say, “Excuse me, I guess I wasn’t listening. What did you say?”

To the last, Freddie refused to accept the idea that the cancer had caught up with him and finally dragged him down. When he was hospitalized this last time in M. D. Anderson, he believed – at least outwardly – that he was there to have some fluid removed from his body. When his priest from Austin, Father Fred Bo-mar, walked quietly into Room 514W and sat down, Freddie looked at him narrowly.

’’Have you got some business in Houston, Father?” he said. The priest said no, he just came down for a visit.

“Do you know something I don’t know?” asked Freddie. The priest said no.

His friends thought it was rather a miracle, Freddie having played regularly on anational championship team with the tumoralready gnawing at his leg, and had survived the amputation and returned to active life, had been able to move back intosociety, to tell people how he felt, tosqueeze another 17 months out of preciouslife. Freddie didn’t think it was a miracle;it was what an athlete was supposed to doand now that same fierce competition kepthim hanging on for days, weeks, after theaverage person would have let go. Doctors walked out of his room with tears intheir eyes.

Two weeks ago, I visited the room. The shades were drawn. A television set suspended from the ceiling, with the volume off, flickered lifelessly with a soap opera. There was a skinny couch with bedpiilows along one wall, where Freddie’s mother, Gloria, and his girl friend, Linda Wheeler, spent each day and his father spent each night. A vigil candle on a table burned 24 hours a day. Freddie was a gaunt shadow and his voice was about gone and I had to bend close to hear him whisper, “I’m getting better.”

Freddie has written a book about hisexperiences. It will be published this fall.The editor noticed after Freddie was hospitalized, that he had not made a dedication of the book and he asked to whomFreddie wanted to dedicate his story. Freddie said to the Lord, who had been sogood to him.

Paul Crume

The office critic came by the other day and said, “Wher are you going to get another pair of shoes?” Ordinarily nobody pays any attention to him because he is a fop given to wearing knitted shawls over his head when the ail conditioning is turned high.

In this instance, however, he had a point. Although barely more than five years old, the shoes I have been wearing lately have a slightly worn look. The threads show where one seam has pulled loose from the sole. They have white marks over them where I have waded in mud, and the lace of one is broken. I have replaced it with some beeswaxed small stuff from the boat which is darn sure not going to break.

The thing that most people don’t realize about this pair of shoes is that they are perfect for rainy weather because each has a hole in the bottom. All you have to do is lift your foot, and the water will drain out.

It is odd that in these thousands of years, shoemakers have never solved the drainage problem they created.

In fact, most shoemakers do not know how to make a man’s shoe. The drainage problem is that typical. Most men’s waterproof shoes are so lowcut that a man is likely to step too deep into a puddle while wondering how in the world to play Sir Walter Raleigh to one of those pretty girls in plastic rain boots.

When this happens, all that a man can do usually is pretend that he is really energetic and jump high in the air and make hydraulic pressure squirt some of the water from under his feet when he lands. Hydraulic pressure has never been as good as this at drainage.

A man’s shoe ought to be made with vents in the sole equipped with one-way valves which will let trapped water escape but prevent any from entering. Common sense says, also, that men’s shoes ought to come equipped with strings tapered from the middle so they will break at the ends and can be used by adding a new tip.

Men’s shoes also ought to be reduced in size, so that a man who wears a size 14 can find a size 10 that fits him and quit looking sheepish.

So far, I have got small support for my advanced ideas about men’s shoes, mainly because men are getting as vain as women. The town is full of businessmen in thick-soled, highly polished shoes so tight that one single atomic bomb jar would bust every stitch in them. It is this kind of false economy that has put the country in the shape it is in today.

These men think they are fooling somebody about their personal hygiene, but those of us in the know smile behind our hands. “Bet his feet haven’t been drained in four days,” we tell each other.

I used to walk around in rainy weather hearing squirting sounds inside my shoes, but no more.

The average 30-foot boat is drained betterthan a man’s shoe.



Frank X. Tolbert

Stewart Ferguson, Ph.D., was a friendly psychology professor who had been a Little All-America football end. In 1939 Professor Ferguson agreed to coach football at Arkansas A&M College if it were spelled out in his three-year contract that it didn’t matter if the Boll Weevils, as the team was called, lost every game.

In fact, Stewart Ferguson told the Arkansas A&M authorities he would use only students (no athletic scholarships) and he hoped to coach a football team that lost all its games.

Arkansas A&M had been losing money and games subsidizing football. So the school was ready for anything.

It was also in Ferguson’s contract that the Boll Weevils would play nine games on the road and only two at home (Mon-ticello. Ark.) each season during his 1939-40-41 coaching tenure. He scheduled road games from coast to coast. The coach liked to travel.

By the end of the 1941 campaign his record was 31 games lost, three won, and no ties. What he called his most successful season was in 1941. Then the Weevils were defeated in all of the 11 games.

Even without athletic scholarships Ferguson somehow attracted gifted players, including two heavyweight intercollegiate wrestling champions, and men such as John Stritchfield of Austin, who were later stars on service football teams with Ail-Americans in the lineups.

“We could have won most of our games. We really had to work hard to lose some games,” said John Stritchfield, who was a natural at quarterback but sometimes lined up at end or guard. Ferguson’s boys would choose their positions and substitutions were by whim of the players.

“Above all, ” Stewart Ferguson told me, “football must be fun. We’ll trade laughs for touchdowns any time.”

What private vision drove Ferguson to become a losing football coach may never be known. (He died in 1955.) But he once told me before a game between Arkansas A&M and North Texas State University that the Boll Weevils were the instrumerits “of my aim to ridicule and satirize high pressure collegiate football.” He said he wanted “to give the game back to the boys.”

One of “the boys” was J. P. Everitt, who could walk on his hands rather swiftly. Coach Ferguson perfected a play in which Halfback Everitt was given good blocking and he would walk in for a touchdown with the football held between his legs – sometimes from as far out as 15 yards.

It certainly upset the opposition to give up six points to a ball carrier walking on his hands. It suggested that the Boll Weevils held the other team in contempt.

After this display of arrogance the Weevils would revert to their “losing style.”

Oh, they would perhaps drive back down to the enemies’ goal line the next time they got the ball. Then they would punt back up field or go through some other weird maneuver.

Once against an inept Pennsylvania college team Halfback Everitt walked in for his usual first quarter touchdown.

“We went down to the Pennsylvania goal line again,” said Stritchfield, “but we were tired of punting backwards. So we made up a play in the huddle involving 19 successive lateral passes which carried us back to our 10-yard line.”

“I enjoy games because I can sit on the sidelines and wonder what my players are going to do next,” Dr. Ferguson told me before the Weevils played North Texas State.

Still, he could be a tough disciplinarian. The Weevils were drilled long hours on fundamentals and they spent a lot of time running and in gymnastics. There was not one serious injury during the three seasons Ferguson coached at Arkansas A & M (now University of Arkansas at Mon-ticello). Also, at hotels and motels where the Weevils stayed, managers praised their good behavior, in contrast with that of some other visiting football teams..

Dr. Ferguson, a Rhodes Scholar nomi-nee, taught courses in psychology, biology and medieval history to his athletes while they were on long road trips. He had Arkansas A & M professors block out courses of study for the footballers. And on the road Ferguson would hold classes daily and supervise study periods.

While preparing the road schedules he got permission for the Weevils to attend classes at colleges along the way. Southern Cal, Notre Dame, Yale, North Texas State, Hofstra and Stanford were a few of the schools where his players “audited.”

His music majors managed to attend operas and concerts in large cities. His agriculture majors took soil samples all over the country. Art and history majors hit the big-time galleries and historical sites.

The Boll Weevils of 1939-40-41 were a kind of road company lyceum. And the footballers made better grades on the average than their stay-at-home classmates.

Ferguson let his lads do about as they wished during a game. Subs rode a bicycle from bench to field and the replaced players rode it back. One of the better ball carriers, Bix Stillwell, was a spectacular drummer. He would take himself out of games and sit in with the opposing team’s band, sometimes getting ovations for his drum solos.

Some coaches and sports writers, who didn’t understand Dr. Ferguson’s motives, pictured him as a crazy man. Meanwhile, though, the Weevils were endearing themselves to fans all over the nation. Many people, bored with the reverence paid to winning teams and winning coaches, found the troupe of eccentrics from Arkansas a refreshing relief. The New York Times had this opinion: “If other coaches would follow Professor Ferguson’s philosophy, football might be returned to the sanity of its early days.”

After the Weevils scored, usually early in a game, the attempt for the point after could be equally bizarre. There were several acrobats on the squad, and one of these was usually the ball holder on the conversion attempts.

The place kicker would often ignore the ball and kick the acrobat in the rear end. The ball holder would then go through a series of forward and back flips.

Dr. Ferguson went into the service early in World War II and never returned to Arkansas A&M or to college coaching.

Once late in the all-losing 1941 season, after his Weevils had lost to Bradley University in Illinois, Stewart Ferguson told some sports writers:

“You fellows laugh at my boys on Saturdays when they are losing footballmatches. Yet for the rest of the weekthey’re learning more, absorbing moreculture and social graces than any otherfootball team in the nation.”

with a sketch of freaks and an old-fashioned bum eyeing their new digs at Thanks-Giving Square.

While Alex Bickley and Peter Stewart were locking horns, demolition finally began, eleven years after the idea was first conceived, for the Square. Peter Stewart loves ritual and panoply and symbolic gestures. So on a May morning in 1972, Judge Lew Sterrett, Don Wright of the Park Board, Frances Lopez, and George Allen III assembled and tooted toy trumpets – backed up by a brass ensemble from Mountain View College – to bring the walls tumbling down. The advertising tower on the old Pulley Bone restaurant had been loosened to lift off and fall symbolically. It nearly landed in the street. Some would see that as an omen.



Peter Stewart had to have the perfect architect, too. The search was like Selz-nick’s hunt for Scarlett O’Hara. “We went and saw people,” Stewart says, “and felt their vibrations.” He wanted technical mastery coupled with a sensitivity to the concept of thanksgiving. Only the “best that could be done in this generation” would do. After a world-wide search, Stewart settled on what a local architect calls, with the kind of edge local architects’ voices take on when they see big projects like City Hall, the Museum, and Thanks-Giving Square going to out-of-towners, “an Eastern star.” In 1971, Stewart hired a 65-year-old New Yorker, Philip Johnson, who had designed the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center, a roofless church in New Harmony, Indiana, and the Kennedy Memorial Cenotaph in Dallas.

Dallas architect Dave Braden says he has never understood why a giant like Philip Johnson would agree to design a Thanks-Giving Square. “There’s nothing worse than an out-of-town architect,” Braden says, “unless it’s an out-of-town architect who doesn’t want the job.” But Braden apparently hasn’t read the recent New Yorker profile of Johnson, in which the architect is quoted as saying, “Whoever commissions buildings buys me. I’m a whore. I’m an artist.” First Johnson designed a diamond-shaped chapel for the triangular park. “You go back and think of something better,” Johnson says Peter Stewart ordered. Johnson went back to the drawing board and came up with the white concrete spiral chapel; he insists that Stewart’s order to change the design was absolutely right.

Fort Worth’s Ruth Carter Johnson (no relation), who worked with Philip Johnson on the Water Gardens, says that the architect is “a very proper man.” But one Dallas city official claims that Philip Johnson cussed more than usual around Peter Stewart. “We had our battles,” Johnson said, “of course, any architect does . . . and there were money problems.” But he adds, “We got along unbelievably well.” Stewart, he says, spent more time on the design for Thanks-Giving Square than he did, and believes his client’s “meticulousness” shows in the end product. Stewart admits Johnson could have said he was “a pain,” but Johnson calls him “an utter joy to work with.” He does note that Stewart was “very persistent.”

The city was noting more than persistence in Peter Stewart. As contruction was beginning, a Park Board engineer, Irwin Harris, now assistant director of parks and recreation for the city, went over the agreements allowing the Foundation control over visiting schedules, visibility from the street, and pedestrian entry, and scrawled a prophetic note in the margin: “This is not satisfactory. Visual access should be provided at all times. There should be guaranteed pedestrian access at some time, or no one will ever get in.”

Finally, after revisions arrived showing that the pedestrian entryway on Pacific had disappeared and that passersby could no longer see the waterfall on the Ervay Street side, Harris protested. On the city’s side of the square, there was a four-foot-high wall, a 50-foot-high bell tower, and a flower garden. The design also irrevocably included a chapel, making the city nervous about further involvement with a project that had begun as a shrine to an abstraction but was obviously taking a turn toward the theistic. The Park Board simply decided it wanted out.

So early in 1973, Jim Schroeder, the city planning director, became the latest horsetrader for the city. It was the kind of job that earned Schroeder, a bear of a man, his new post as troubleshooter for development. After three hours, Schroeder emerged with the city’s fourth agreement with the Thanks-Giving Square Foundation since 1968. “It was an experience,” the planner says dead-pan, “that everybody in city government ought to go through.”

“Hell of a coup!” whooped Dr. Bill Dean, the only self-styled “bulldog” on the Park Board, referring to Schroeder’s negotiated swap-out with the Public Works Department. The $475,000 the city had paid to the Foundation out of Park Board funds was switched over to Public Works for development of the underground at Thanks-Giving Square. In return, the Park Board received remnants of city property along Woodall Rodgers Freeway for development of three portal parks.

“We have Thanks-Giving Square and we don’t have to worry with it,” Dean says. “I’ll make a deal like that for the people all day long.”

But the city council was still worried about the people, primarily the ones who might be locked out of the park. Garry Weber looked at the plans for the four-foot wall and quipped, “You may have to buy a ticket to get in there.” “Is there an avenue of retreat?” Jerry Gilmore wanted to know. And in the Times Herald, Bob Taylor drew a snooty doorman straight-arming a bird in flight over Thanks-Giving Square. “Let me see your membership card,” the doorman orders.



Stewart could no longer dodge the issue of access by reassuring the mayor, so he hastened to defuse the issue and told the council, “Thanks-Giving Square belongs to everybody. The gateways are presently designed as open gateways. It is certainly not the purpose to exclude. I don’t know where that came from.” Leaving Stewart’s office persuaded that the public would not be barred from Thanks-Giving Square, councilman Gilmore said, “Everything seems to be working out.” But one city official says that though he could always tell when he and Stewart differed, he was less sure when they agreed. Less than a week later, the troubles resumed.

This time Stewart insisted that leases in the walkway under the Square go only to businesses in harmony with the park’s religious theme. Jim Schroeder agrees that building a chapel above and showing x-rated movies below didn’t make sense. But Stewart’s taboos were extremely severe: no alcohol, no noise, no odors, no smoke, no flashing lights. The only acceptable clothing store was a furrier.

Time for another horsetrader, and Jerry Gilmore wanted to enlist Henry Kissinger to help bargain with Peter Stewart. City Manager George Schrader got the job instead. “We ran into great problems in completion of design at the beginning of construction,” Schrader says. “We had to salvage the thing. People had given a lot of money. The whole program kept deteriorating.” Schrader got Stewart to qualify some of his prohibitions. The ban on emissions now read, no “unreasonable” noise, smoke, etc. The “no alcohol” ban now includes the phrase “without prior written consent.” When a fast food outlet signed the first underground lease this year, it wanted to sell magazines. Stewart frowned on the possibilities, so there will be no magazine rack in The Pickle Barrel when it opens under Thanks-Giving Square.

Stewart had said, “Thanks-Giving Square is a little place that will represent something almost inexpressible.” At City Hall, they were beginning to find the words.

One day in 1974, when Thanks-Giving Square was still a gigantic hole, Times Herald reporter Ron Calhoun ran into former-Mayor Erik Jonsson as they were passing the excavation. “What hath God wrought?” Calhoun said, gesturing toward the cavity.

“It isn’t what God hath wrought,” Jons-son replied. “It’s what Peter Stewart hath wrought. If it was God, it would have been finished five years ago.”

But finally, after 16 years and $6 million, it was finished. For a month before its installation, the 4,000 pound C bell toured schools and churches. It was then suspended in the white marble bell tower, and the tower, the Court of All Nations, and the chapel were consecrated with much private pageantry. On May 8, 1977, the gates swung open. And swung closed again, and were locked, promptly at 5 p.m.

City councilman Don Hicks, a Church of Christ minister, says he understands Stewart limits access to the park to keep out “undesirables.” The founder of his faith, Hicks points out, reached out to undesirables. Hicks admits that when he’s serving as official city host he never tells out-of-towners about Thanks-Giving Square: “I’m afraid it won’t be open.” When Jim Patterson, chairman of Thomas S. Byrne, Inc., builder of the Fort Worth Water Gardens, drove a French exchange student over from Fort Worth to see the Dallas park, he found the gates shut tight. Jim Schroeder bluntly says, “I will never agree it’s right to lock that place up, even for ten minutes.”

After the opening, Mayor Bob Folsom fired off a letter to Stewart and fumed in protest: “To have a downtown facility closed up at 5:30 p.m., well, that’s a tragedy . . . It just seems criminal to me that this place could be closed on the days they’ve decided to close it.” In a classic Peter Stewart counterpunch, the announcement was made that a decision to extend the hours to include weekends and holidays had been made before the mayor’s fusillade. The new hours: 10 to 5 on weekdays, 1 to 5 on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays.

Monroe McCorkle, head of the city’s Public Works department, has had to take so many calls about the municipal investment in the Square, that he keeps a little slip of paper with the figures beside his telephone. Besides the $389,000 recently awarded to enhance the area with new sidewalks, lighting and trees, the city involvement includes the following: $475,000, originally to buy surface tend, later transferred to Public Works for the underground; $1,800,000 for utility adjustment; $575,792 for engineering costs; $7,131,500 for construction – a grand total of $ 10,371,292. The money came from three capital improvement bond programs and federal revenue-sharing funds. The figures don’t show the incalculable but significant amount of public time devoted to the project.



Architect Howard Meyer, who designed Temple Emanu-El and has a reputation as one of the most distinguished Dallas architects, says he “resents dreadfully” the Square’s restricted hours. Before the expanded weekend openings, Meyer, who was born in New York and grew up in Central Park, showed up on a Saturday and couldn’t get in. On the next attempt he got there too early and had to hang around until admitting time. Meyer is generally complimentary of the Square’s aesthetics, but he hopes the park will become “a public park like any other sensible park in other cities. The whole point,” Meyer contends, “is to encourage people to use it and use it and use it.”

People do use it, according to Dr. Ralph Stone, an ordained minister and director of the Square, who says he may have “the most stimulating job in America.” Between 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. recently, Stone counted 2,000 people in and out. Of those who come, Stone, who reportedly makes $25,000 a year, says 37 percent climb the 100-foot ramp up to the chapel. Stone also says that the brown-baggers who bring their lunches there respect the setting. There’s hardly any litter after lunch hour.

“All that religious graffiti” offends architect Nick Glazbrook. “It leaves out a lot of people,” he says. He calls the Square “stiff and cold,” but applauds the concrete chapel as a tour de force. The chapel, however, doesn’t fit with the bell tower, he says. It’s as if Stewart had said to Philip Johnson, “Let’s have some bells.” According to Johnson, that’s what happened. On the other hand, the architect likes bell towers and welcomed the challenge.

Still others in the city think Dallas has learned a valuable lesson about cooperation between public and private sectors in its first major downtown revitalization project. Dave Braden calls the park a seed for a city whose master plan has been neglect. Bill Dean, a confessed “open space” man, nevertheless thinks Thanks-Giving Square is “like a new shoe, which will eventually become a comfortable part of the city’s wardrobe.”

Philip Johnson, who once said architects “never can seem to grow ivy fast enough,” would let time heal the wounds caused by politics and personalities. Of the Fort Worth Water Gardens he wrote, “We must not forget the contribution of time; like all gardens, trees must shade, vines must drape. The architect is finished; let nature now finish the work.”

But until nature gets through, a lot of people will continue to react like publicist Judy Bonner’s four-year-old son. When he dabbled his hand in the water at Thanks-Giving Square, he was admonished by an Associate (the name given to volunteers at the Square). On his way out, the boy muttered, “Where’s the park?”