Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir

by Tony Hillerman

  We didn’t return to the café for days and when we did the cashier spotted us, signaled us, frowning, and returned our note, still wrapped around our money. Cousin had refused it. He told the cashier to ask us why we had insulted him, why had we refused his friendship? Dick and I were beginning to learn.

  We learned that the tourists who lived in the expensive hotels around the plaza tended to have left for Mexico City or other points south long before Wharton and I could rouse ourselves and get downtown to bum rides. Besides we were becoming fond of Monterrey.

  At the social evenings when the mariachis played and the girls (with chaperonas) and boys promenaded in circles around the Plaza Central we had met two Mexican students (a musician who wanted to sing operas and a would-be bullfighter). They had day jobs, knew the city, and didn’t object to associating with two grungy-looking American freeloaders or helping us improve our Spanish. Before we ran out of money, tired of living off bananas, bolillos, refried beans and tamales bought in the open markets, we had learned to love Mexicans and the Mexican culture. Why? Try to imagine the following happening in a major U.S. industrial city.

  We board the wrong city bus. Made aware of this, our driver does a U-turn, chases down the correct bus, stops it, and sends one of his regular passengers with us to assure these gringos won’t lose themselves again. It’s all very educational but without academic credit hours. We hitchhike back to OU for our terminal semesters.

  And for the turning point in my life.

  I spent thirty months—from January 1946 to June 1948—at the University of Oklahoma in which nothing much happened except a life-changing miracle. One pleasant October 1947 evening, I put on that sports coat I had bought from Sam in my prewar existence, met Bob Huckins, also still single and at loose ends. Providence guided us to a dance at the Newman Center. Good-bye Loneliness. Hello Joy.

  Those who have read my mystery novels know I’m not adept at dealing with romance when my plots require such. I’m still not but I will try. I noticed a girl dancing. She was slender, graceful, laughing, enjoying herself. She had enchanting eyes. I pushed myself away from the wallpaper, tapped her dancing partner on the shoulder, and asked if I could cut in. (Does this “cutting in” social convention survive?) I could. We danced, we exchanged introductions. I had met Marie Elizabeth Unzner.

  All else that happened to me in Soonerland (or anywhere else) is trivial in comparison, and it scares me to remember that this meeting didn’t happen until my senior year. (Hers, too, for that matter. I got off to a poor start by asking her if she was a freshman.) When the music is suitably slow for the only dance step I’ve mastered, I danced with her again. Then I stood back against the wallpaper watching her dance with other fellows. The next day I find I have her on my mind. Wharton is the projectionist at the downtown theater. He provides tickets. I invite Marie to a movie. She invites me to a basketball game. I’m unable to think of anyone else. I offer to help her with the papers she has to turn in for an English Lit correspondence course. She drops in at the Covered Wagon office, and we work on them. (Now, as I write this fifty-six years later, she enlightens me. It wasn’t my knowledge of the course that attracted her. I had a typewriter.) Two dates later I tell her my goal is to marry her. She doesn’t seem impressed, but by winter she invites me down to Shawnee to have dinner at her home. Spring comes. Wharton, who has connections, finds a ring I can afford. I propose. Marie accepts. We set the date a year in the future. I start job hunting.

  The surplus commodity in the summer of 1945 was unfilled jobs. By the summer of ’48 in America the surplus was unemployed young men home from the war, graduating from college, and eager to get on with it. I wanted a job as a reporter on a daily newspaper, ideally one where I could eventually become a political reporter. All my applications drew blanks. As graduation loomed in May, the best I could find was a trial opening for a copywriter at an Oklahoma City advertising agency.

  The assignment was handling advertising copy for Cain’s Age-Dated Coffee and Purina Pig Chow, including commercials for radio programs they sponsored. Thirty-second spots, but short was no problem for a student of Gracie Ray. The problem was Purina. The commercials were woven through an early-morning news and weather broadcast aimed at early-rising farmers. Technically, each of these programs carried three separate exhortations for listeners to feed their pigs Purina Chow, and the account executive wanted them to link, with the first one leading into the second and coming to a logical climax in the third. That was awfully hard to do. I had worried my way through a week of them when the telephone rang.

  The caller was Tommy Steph, who identified himself (erroneously) as editor of the Borger News-Herald. He said he needed a reporter and Professor Herbert had recommended me. It paid $55 for a six-day week. Did I want it? Yes, I said. When did I start? As soon as I could get there.

  Borger is about sixty miles north of Amarillo on rolling, almost treeless tundra of the high end of the Texas Panhandle. When I arrived a bit before noon on an end of May Monday in 1948, the town was about twenty years old—born when wildcatters hit a vast natural gas deposit under an empire of grass owned by the Wittenberg family. The Wittenbergs sold (more likely, leased) a strip of land along the highway as the site of the inevitable boomtown, and later two other adjoining tracts for suburban boom-towns. Phillips Petroleum built the town of Phillips on one as the site of its petrochemical refinery complex and its hired hands. The other became the home of a bunch of carbon black and rubber plants, plus related housing. All around this little cluster of occupied spots the ranch spread from horizon to horizon.

  Borger, 1948. Imagine a small town in Virginia, or Vermont, or Minnesota, then take away the shady streets, the handsome old houses, the grassy, dignified town square, and the monuments to distinguished nineteenth-century heroes. Replace all this with a long row of concrete block one-story business buildings lining miles of two-lane highway, and behind them rows of the kinds of residences that members of industrial unions occupy. Cover all this with a haze of gray-black smoke produced by a multitude of jerrybuilt plants where natural gas was burned in low-oxygen drums to form the tons of soot from which the town claimed its title of “Carbon Black Capital of the World.” Add the town’s only historical monument, the bullet hole preserved in the wall of the Post Office marking the spot where Ace Borger was shot to death, leaving the town devoid of its founding mayor but enriched with its name and its claim to historic fame—the only town put under martial law by the State of Texas. (According to local legend, policemen parked their patrol car at the home of the district attorney, knocked on his door, and shot him down when he opened it, Texas Rangers were sent in to restore decorum.) The other differences worth noting include its shape, running miles down the main street highway but being only about four blocks wide, its lack of a cemetery (no one was born there), its lack of “old families” (and resultant lack of social snobbery), and a population overwhelmingly not only of my own blue-collar working-class level but of the strange “oil patch” segment of that class—folks who followed the ever-moving oil worker jobs just as whalers followed the whales.

  Borger’s spectacular lack of charm was more than offset by overwhelming friendliness. Everyone there was a wayfarer, moving through, headed someplace else. The News-Herald ran a standing Help-Wanted advertisement in the classified section of Editor and Publisher. For the purposes of a totally green journalist with a yen to make it in the news business, it could hardly have been better. The newsroom offered a total lack of direction or supervision, which meant you could try anything you wanted, and the town presented a wonderful harvest for a police reporter, which was my assignment. Borger had, as Fred, the newspaper’s photographer told me later, “every sort of crime and violence mentioned in both the Bible and the Glossary of Psychopathy.”

  My tenure there extended from June through December, a mere six months, but in Borger one lost no time getting experience. I had risen early in Norman, driven some three hundred miles, and walked into the o
ffice about 11 A.M. I identified myself to the receptionist and was directed into the little glassed-in cubicle where the editor-publisher was working on some business papers. I introduced myself.

  “Hillerman?” he said. “Well, what can we do for you?”

  “I’m your new reporter.”

  “Oh?” he said. “Who hired you?”

  “I thought it was you,” I said.

  He pointed through the glass out into the newsroom. “Better go talk to Brad on the news desk,” he said.

  Brad seemed to be about my age. He hadn’t hired me, but he thought Tommy had. He explained that the editor-publisher was actually the bookkeeper who worked for the rancher who owned the newspaper but never came around and he and Tommy had neglected to tell him their police reporter had quit. Whereupon Brad told Fred to show me where to find the police station, sheriff’s office, jail, courthouse, and so forth. Find him a place to spend the night later.

  Off we go, Fred and I, driving down Borger’s main street to be almost immediately passed by a fire truck with sirens wailing. Fred gives chase, gets on his radio, and learns there has been an explosion at the Phillips chemical plant. We join the caravan of fire department vehicles, ambulances, and police cars. Security people at the gate wave them through but stop Fred’s car.

  “They know me and I can’t get past them,” Fred tells me, “but they don’t know you. Just walk right in like you have business inside.” Standard reportorial thinking. I walk past the guards, join the crowd of curious workers milling around inside. I start listening and asking questions. Too many questions. Two security types grab my elbows, hustle me to the gate, and toss me out. I brush off the gravel and we rush back to the paper with a yarn about one dead and two badly burned while sandblasting a water tank. (“Workers reported that the hose to the air compressor had accidentally been connected to a natural gas line. Company officials refused to comment.”) My career as professional journalist thus was launched.

  At the Borger News-Herald those days upward mobility was fast, easy, and automatic. Brad and Tommy had graduated from Oklahoma State University in January, arrived as reporters, and were now splitting the editor’s job. One would hold the post until the other one screwed up (forgot to bring home the beer, for example, or let the pancakes burn), whereupon they would switch jobs—the miscreant taking the editor’s slot and the other one replacing him as general assignment reporter. They shared a bachelor apartment, shared the news editor’s job because the holder of same had quit, and enjoyed a “forged in fire” friendship. When their B-24 was shot up in a daylight raid over north Germany, they limped it over the Baltic and finished the war in joyful hard-drinking Swedish internment.

  As the foregoing suggests, working on the News-Herald was casual. We showed up at the newsroom after eight, wandered down to a lunch counter at the dime store for breakfast, and put in a couple of hours getting the paper out for afternoon delivery. Since the coeditors had fallen into the golfing habit in Sweden this situation left me to prowl the cop shops and courts as my instincts suggested. I’d read the police blotter every morning, check the desk clerk’s notes on complaints, assignments, and arrests, learn who was in jail and why (as Professor Herbert taught us was our duty), then trot over to the sheriff’s office, repeat the process, make a call to the Texas Highway Patrol Office dispatcher, and then conclude the tour collecting gossip at the district attorney’s subsidiary office (the “seat” of Hutchinson County was not booming upstart Borger but down the road a long piece to little Stinnett). If time allowed I’d stop at the tiny office of Borger’s magistrate/justice of the peace to collect historical stuff, anecdotes, and his advice to greenhorn young journalists.

  A couple of decades in the future I’d find myself scavenging among my memories of this fellow to add a bit of realistic life to minor characters needed in fiction. The JP was elderly and full of lessons he’d learned in a long career as an infielder in the minor leagues. He’d started in Class D league, worked his way up to the Triple A’s, failed to be noticed by the majors, and worked his way back down to the D’s. Most of his customers, ushered over from the jail across the street, weren’t represented by counsel and the mild medicine he administered was doled out with minimum formality. When the violation was serious enough to warrant hiring a defender, this lawyer would bring along an appropriate law book and read the pertinent passages to the JP. Whoever was representing “The People of Texas” would do the same. The judge would then solicit suggestions, ponder these a moment, and rule.

  Over a posttrial cup of coffee with a couple of these barristers, I suggested that they treated the JP as if he was illiterate. They said he was. Not much to read on those minor league bus trips, but lots of opportunities to become wise.

  I was also exposed to wise enforcement of our laws by the Hutchinson County sheriff, whose behavior I used, in modified form, years later when constructing Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn as a minor character in The Blessing Way. For example:

  Two young women, probably late teens, storm into his office as I am sitting at a table sorting my notes. They demand that he go out to their place and arrest their father. Why? The older girl, who is serving as spokeswoman, tells the sheriff her little sister got their pickup truck stuck in the draw, walked back to the house, and got Daddy to come down and help her get it out. “She should have known better,” she adds. Daddy had helped her dig out the truck and then had raped her. The sheriff gets a complaint form, younger sister signs it, and the sheriff says he would go on out and arrest the offender. Wow, I’m thinking. An incest rape. How do I handle this one without identifying the victim? The sheriff has been watching me jotting my notes.

  Am I going to report this? I say sure. He says, “About an hour after I get their daddy locked up they’ll be back telling me they won’t press charges.”

  I say, “How do you know?”

  He says, “Because that’s the way it happened the last three times.”

  That’s the way it happened this time, too. I had met a cop who tempered justice with a sort of humane wisdom. In another case involving a bank robbery at neighboring Pampa, my sheriff bagged the culprits after a chase through the network of rural back roads. When I asked him about it, he credited the bloodless success with knowing every inch of the country and getting the job done fast before the FBI moved their urbane agents out from the city to take over and complicate things. Those acquainted with my Navajo Tribal Police books may have noticed that both Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee have similar traits and attitudes.

  Hutchinson County jurors operated in similar fashion—and I will use the first murder trial I covered to illustrate. The defendant was a night club bartender charged with first-degree (premeditated) murder. The suspect a mailman who had arrived at the bar a bit after its 2 A.M. closing to pick up a waitress. The prosecuting attorney told the jury that when the mailman knocked at the door the bartender had denied him admission on grounds the place was closed. The mailman, indignant, had kept knocking. Whereupon the defendant retrieved his shotgun from under the bar, went out the back door, walked around to the front, and fatally whacked the mailman on the head with the gun.

  The defense attorney contested not a word of this and called a single witness (the arresting officer). Did he examine the shotgun? Yes. Was the shotgun loaded? Yes. The defense rests.

  In his summation, the prosecutor established that it took lots of time to get the shotgun out from under the bar, walk to the back of the bar, out the back door, around to the front to slay the still-knocking mailman. No question of who killed the mailman. No question the bartender had ample time to meditate. That made it premeditated murder.

  The defense attorney showed the jury of High Plains male citizens the shotgun. “If you carry a loaded shotgun out to a man who is bothering you intending to kill him, you intend to shoot him with it. Right? You’re not going to hit him with it.”

  The jury saw logic in that. The verdict was “Not Guilty” and the bartender was free
to resume serving his customers.

  The folks of Hutchinson County were also free-spirited in the world of sports—as I witnessed one Saturday when the Borger High football game engaged our sports editor and I was sent away to Stinnett to cover its game against White Deer. The point of this anecdote is that the pulling guard in the Stinnett Rattlers single-wing offense was a girl. Actually the point is that nobody except me seemed to think that worthy of notice. When I asked one of the fans about it he said: “Well, she’s little, but she’s fast.”

  I played the same position (but as a substitute) for the Konawa High Tigers, and that remark reminded me of a comment I’d overheard in the gym at Konawa. Our coach was analyzing our line for someone and when he came to my name, he said: “Hillerman? Well, he’s little but he’s slow.”

  I guess the double negative was provoked by the way my slowness had embarrassed Coach a few games earlier. We were playing Bowlegs High—an oil patch settlement without bleachers where the onlookers lined the football field on the fenders of their pickup trucks. On the fateful play my role was to pull out and lead interference on an inside-the-right-tackle charge. Alas, I arrived at the hole behind the ball carrier instead of in front of him. The Bowlegs linebacker hit the Konawa halfback, the ball squirted out and was lost to us. Coach, standing by the bench surrounded by mothers and fathers, screamed:

  “Hillerman, you run like a broke-dick dog!!” It’s a simile I have never forgotten, it caused the ladies to complain to the school board about obscene language, and Coach was reprimanded.

  Borger was a lonely place that summer. Long distance telephone calls in the forties were expensive, employed by the working class mostly to announce family deaths, but I managed to use letters to persuade Marie that we should move up our wedding date. The original plan was for her to accept a graduate school offer for a year while I got established. We agreed to cut that to six months, getting married the following winter. By July, with much playing on her sympathy, I got that cut down to a month. We set the date for August 16.