Michener, James A. (156 page)

The Corpus Christi man fulminated against secular humanism and what he called the Four Ds: dancing, deviation, drugs and Democrats: 'And when I say deviation, I mean it in its broadest sense. There is a wonderful central tendency in Texas history, and when we deviate from it in any respect, we run into danger.' When I asked for an example, he snapped: 'Labor unions. All Texas will be deeply offended if you discuss labor unions. We've striven to keep such un-American operations out of our state and have campaigned to preserve our right-to-work laws. I have four textbooks here which speak of communists like Samuel Gompers and John L. Lewis as if they were respectable citizens, and this will not be tolerated. Organized labor played no part in Texas history and must not be presented as if it did.' Like the Abilene woman, he wanted the roles of the sexes clearly differentiated: 'Boys should play football and there should be no concession to movements blurring the lines between the sexes.' When he preached against dancing, I think all of us listened with condescending respect, but when he came to drugs, we supported him enthusiastically: 'I simply cannot imagine how this great nation has allowed this curse to threaten its young people. What has gone wrong? What dreadful mistakes have we made?' We nodded when he said in thundering, prophetic tones: 'This plague must be wiped out in Texas.'

At this point Rusk interrupted: 'What positive values are you

advocating?" and the man replied: 'Those which made Texas great Loyalty, religion, patriotism, justice, opportunity, daring

As he recited these virtues, most of which I endorsed, 1 saw these three earnest visitors in a different light. They were striving to hold back the tides of change which threatened to engulf them They really did long to recover the simpler life of 1844 and find refuge in its rural patterns, its heroic willingness to defend its principles, its dedication to a more disciplined society. I understood their feelings, for all men in all ages have such yearnings.

When we broke for a belated lunch, Miss Cobb, a descendant of Democratic senators, asked the speakers: 'By what route did you become Republicans? Surely, your parents were Democrats.'

The Abilene woman laughed uneasily: 'My father knew only one Republican family. A renegade who joined that party so that the Republican administration in Washington could nominate him postmaster. Father would cross the street to avoid speaking to the scoundrel.' The Corpus Christi man said: 'You mustn't get into that with children. Our families were all Democrats. Nobody thought of being anything else before the 1928 election, when they had to vote Republican to fight Al Smith and his boozing ways.'

Smiling amiably, the San Angelo man said: 'If you do have to explain it, why not use the old joke? Man asked a rancher in the Fort Stockton area: "Caleb, your six boys are all good Democrats, I hope?" and Caleb said: "Yep, all but Elmer. He learned to read." But I agree with the others. Best to omit the whole question.'

I said: 'You seem to be recommending that we omit a good deal of Texas history,' and the dour Corpus Christi man said: 'A good history is characterized by what's left out.'

I said I'd appreciate an example, and he was more than equal to the occasion: 'In the decades after the great storm of 1900 that destroyed Galveston, loyal citizens rebuilt the city, pretty much as you see it here today. But with their enormous losses and few businesses to take up the slack, how could they earn money? They turned the city into a vast amusement area—houses of ill repute, gambling, gaudy saloons. Men from my city . . .'

'And mine, too,' the San Angelo man chimed in. 'They came here to raise hell in Galveston. Wildest city in America, they boasted.'

'Do we need to include that in a book for children 7 ' the Corpus Christi man asked, and I had to reply 'No,' and he smiled icily: 'There is much that can be profitably omitted.'

At our lunch I wanted to make peace with our vigorous critics and said: 'I'm sure I speak for our entire Task Force when I say that while we must disagree with certain of your positions, we

support many of them. Like you, we feel that modern children are pressured to grow up too fast. We deplore drugs. We champion private property. We agree that too often the negative aspects of our society are stressed. And we subscribe to Texas patriotism.'

'What don't you agree with?' the Corpus Christi man challenged, and I answered him as forthrightly as I could: 'We think women have played an important role in all aspects of Texas life. We think Mexicans are here to stay. We think Texas should be proud of its multinational origins. And we are not monolithic. Rusk and Quimper are strong Republicans; Miss Cobb and Garza, equally strong Democrats.'

'What about you?' the San Angelo man asked amiably, and I said: 'I'm like the old judge in Texarkana during a heated local election who was asked which candidate he supported: "They're both fine men. Eminently eligible for the big post, they think. Haven't made up my mind yet, but when I do I'm gonna be damned bitter about it." '

Dr. Clay started his presentation on Texas weather with three astonishing slides: 'Here you see the Clay residence in Wichita Falls at seven-oh-nine in the evening of the tenth of April 1979. That's me looking up in the sky. This second slide, taken by a neighbor across the street, shows what we were staring at.'

It was an awesome photograph, widely reproduced later, for it showed in perfect detail the structure of a great tornado just about to strike: 'Note three things. The enormous black cloud aloft, big enough to cover a county. The clearly defined circular tunnel dropping toward the ground. And the snout of the destroying cloud, trailing along behind like the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner.'

When Clay started to move to the next slide, Rusk stopped him: 'Why does the snout trail?'

'Aerodynamics. It lingers upon the ground it's destroying.'

He then showed us the most remarkable slide of the three: 'This is the Clay residence one minute after the tornado struck.' No upright part of the former house was visible; it was a total destruction, with even the heavy bathtub ripped away and gone.

'How could the man with the camera take such a picture?' Rusk asked, and Miss Cobb wanted to know: 'What happened to you?'

'That's the mystery of a tornado. Its path of destruction is as neatly defined as a line drawn with a pencil. On our side of the street, total wipe-out. Where the photographer was standing . . . merely a big wind.'

'Yes, but where were you?' Miss Cobb persisted.

'just before it struck, the man with the camera shouted: "Lewis! Over here!" He could sec where the pencil line was heading.'

'Remarkable,'Quimper said, but Clay corrected him:'No, the miracle was that the tornado lifted not only the bathtub from our wreckage but also my mother. Carried her right along with the tub and deposited them both as gently as you please a quarter of a mile away.'

Then, with a series of beautifully drawn meteorological slides, he instructed us on the genesis of the tornadoes which each year struck Texas so violently: 'Four conditions are required before a tornado is spawned. A cold front sweeps in from the Rockies in the west. It hits low-level moist air from the Gulf. Now, this happens maybe ninety times a year and accounts for normal storms of no significance. But sometimes a third factor intrudes. Very dry air rushing north from Mexico. When it hits the front, which is already agitated, severe thunderstorms result, but rarely anything worse. However, if the fourth air mass moves in, a majestic jet stream at thirty thousand feet, it's as if a cap were clamped down over the entire system. Then tornadoes breed and tear loose and do the damage you saw at Wichita Falls.'

'How bad was that damage?' Quimper asked, and Clay said: 'It smashed a path eight miles long, a mile and a half wide. Four hundred million dollars in destruction, forty-two dead, several hundred with major injuries.'

In rapid fire he sped through a series of stunning photographs, throwing statistics at us as he went: 'Most Texas tornadoes strike in May. We get a steady average of a hundred and thirty-two per year, and they produce a yearly average of thirteen deaths. Most tornadoes we ever had in one day, a hundred and fifteen shockers on a September afternoon in 1967. The funnel rotates counterclockwise and can travel over the ground at thirty-five miles an hour, almost always in a southwest-to-northeast direction, and with a funnel wind velocity of up to three hundred miles an hour.'

Numbed by the violent force of the pictures and words, we had no questions, but he added two interesting facts: 'Yes, what you've heard is true. A Texas tornado can have winds powerful enough to drive a straw flying through the air right through a one-inch plank. And there really is such a thing as Tornado Alley. It runs from Abilene northeast through Larkin and Wichita Falls.' Looking directly at Ransom Rusk, who lived in that middle town, he said: 'Statistics are overwhelming. Most dangerous place to be during a tornado is an automobile. The wind picks it up, finds it too heavy, dashes it to the ground. Best place?' He flashed his third slide, the one showing the destruction of his own house: 'Pick your spot. But if you have a tornado cellar, use it.'

The next two hours were compelling, for he gave a similar analysis of the great hurricanes that spawned off the coast of Africa and came whipping across the Atlantic into the Gulf of Mexico, and we sat appalled as he showed us what had happened to Galveston on 8 September 1900: 'Worst natural disaster ever to strike America. Entire city smitten. Whole areas erased by a fearful storm surge that threw twelve feet of water inland. Up to eight thousand lives lost in one night.'

One remarkable series of shots taken by four different photographers on a single March day in 1983 showed Amarillo in a snow-and-sleet storm at 29° Fahrenheit, Abilene in the middle of a huge dust storm at 48°, Austin at the beginning of a blue norther at 91° and Brownsville in the midst of an intolerable heat wave at 103°. 'From northwest to southeast, a range of seventy-four degrees. 1 wonder how many mainland states can match that kind of wild variation?'

He spoke also of the famous blue norther, which had amazed Texans since the days of Cabeza de Vaca: 'These phenomenal drops in temperature can occur during any month of the year, but of course they're most spectacular during the summer months, when the sudden drop is conspicuous, but the daddy of all blue northers hit the third of February in 1899. Temperature at noon in many parts of the state, a hundred and one. Temperature not long thereafter, minus three, a preposterous drop of a hundred and four degrees.'

But what interested me even more were his statistics on 1 exas droughts: 'Every decade we get a major jolt, worst ever in those bad years 1953 to 1957. Much worse than the so-called Dust Bowl years. We really suffered, and the law of probability assures us that one of these days we'll suffer again.'

Clay was a man of great common sense. After decades of studying Texas weather, he had come to see the state as a mammoth battleground over which and on which the elements waged incessant war, with powerful effect upon the people who occupied that ground: 'No human being would settle here, with our incredibly hot summers and our violent storms from the heavens and the sea, if he did not relish the struggle and feel that with courage he could survive. What other state has tornadoes and hurricanes that kill more than sixty people year after year? And blue northers^ and drought and hundred-degree days for two whole months?' He looked at me, and knowing one of my preoccupations, added: And a constant drop in its aquifers? This is heroic land and it demands heroic people.'

HE CENSUS OF 1900 ILLUSTRATED A BASIC FACT ABOUT

Texas: It was still a rural state, for out of its population of 3,-048,710, only 17.1 percent was classified as urban, and even this was misleading because the scrawniest settlement was rated urban if it had more than 2,500.

The biggest city was still San Antonio, with a population of 53,321, much of it German, for the Hispanics who would later give the city its character accounted at this time for not more than 10 percent of the total. Houston was the next largest city, with a population of 44,633, and Dallas was third, with 42,638. Future cities like Amarillo and Lubbock, which would later figure prominently in Texas history, were not cities at all, the former with only 1,442 inhabitants, the latter with a mere 112.

But it was essentially in such small towns that the character of the state was developing, and three were of special interest. The first, of course, was the frontier town of Larkin in the west, with a population of 388. The second was that charming agricultural town with the elfin name, Waxahachie, in the north-central area, just south of Dallas; it had a population of 4,215. And the third was the fascinating little Hispanic town of Bravo, about as far south as one could go in Texas. It stood on the north bank of the Rio Grande in an area where irrigation would turn what had once been unwieldy brushland into one of the most concentrated farming areas in America. Bravo, with a population of 389, guarded the American end of a small bridge over the river; Escandon, a somewhat larger town, marked the Mexican end.