Tomlinson Hill
Page 26
Mary gave birth to a daughter in May 1942. They named her Sarah Lee and called her “Sally.” Mary and Tommy moved into a new house on Fairfax Avenue in Lakewood, a wealthy Dallas neighborhood.20 But Dallas experienced wartime deprivations like any other American city, and key materials like iron, fuel, and nylon were rationed. In 1943, the city experienced a polio epidemic and officials closed public swimming pools and movie theaters. Dallas’s racial makeup also changed. World War II nearly doubled the number of black Texans working in cities. There were nearly 300,000, yet African-American unemployment remained at 11 percent, 4 percent more than that of whites.21
Mary’s father died unexpectedly of a heart attack at his home on July 3, 1944.22 Mary’s mother sold the barber-supply company to its employees, and Mary and her brother inherited a substantial amount of money, including stock in the National Bank of Commerce. Mary’s new wealth, in addition to Tommy’s small inheritance, guaranteed an upper-middle-class lifestyle for the family.23
Mary hired an African-American woman named Gladys to clean the house and run errands. Mary cared for the children and cooked meals, preparing meat loaf, spaghetti and meat sauce, steaks, fried chicken, and chicken and dumplings. Her only work outside the house was volunteering at Saint Matthew’s Episcopal Cathedral, but religion divided Tommy and Mary. She had loved the Episcopal Church since her school days, but Tommy was a lifelong Baptist. To appease him, the family attended Wilshire Baptist Church when it opened in North Dallas. Eventually, though, Mary took Bob and Sally back to the local Episcopal church.24
Mary’s parents had employed an African-American named Wash Harvey to maintain their yard, and he would also help Tommy and Mary. Wash took care of the peach and fig trees in the backyard, planted asparagus and other vegetables, and grew strawberries.25 Sally remembers Gladys and Wash well:
I loved Gladys and, well, we called him Wash, Washy. The people that worked for the family—I mean, they were just family—I just adored them. And as a kid, it was never pointed out to me this person’s black and you’re white. It just … it wasn’t. And we knew that the white people went to school here. There was certainly a dividing line. I mean it was a difference, black and white. But it was before integration.26
Mary and Tommy differed when it came to their treatment of minorities. Mary had grown up in a Swiss-German family and spent much of her childhood around progressive Europeans who found Anglo bigotry distasteful. She also remembered firsthand how Anglos had treated the German-speaking community and people with Germanic last names during World War I, when the city council changed the name of the street where the Fretzs lived from Germania to Liberty. Mary discouraged her children from using coarse language, particularly Tommy’s hate-filled racist slurs. She often used a phrase that I remember used to describe both of my grandfathers: “He doesn’t know any better.” I remember thinking, But you do? Bob described their approaches:
I’ve heard him cuss blacks, Mexicans, Jews, Catholics, take your pick. He was an equal-opportunity hater.
My mother, on the other hand, was—I guess she would be described as kind of a benign racist, in that she separated black and white, but it was more a matter of “Be nice to those people; they are less fortunate than we are.”
I think that had a mellowing effect on my father, as well.27
Unlike her brother, Sally did not see her parents as racists, but she admitted that Bob spent more time with Tommy:
I guess if either one of them would have been more inclined to be—and I don’t want to say racist, but more aware of it—it would have been Daddy probably.
I guess because of his age, the way he was brought up, and it was just separate. Blacks and whites were just separate. And I think it would have been hard for him to see the integration, because that’s not how he was brought up. It’s not how he was raised. Not to be racist, but just it’s like here’s white and here’s black. If that makes any sense.
Mother loved everybody. I mean, she was a real people person. And it didn’t matter to her if somebody was green, or blue, or purple.28
The family often went to Marlin to have Thanksgiving with Tommy’s mother. Many gray-haired couples sat at the dinner table, but Bob was too young and saw them too infrequently to know how they fit into the family. But he said Tommy didn’t like Marlin. As a kid, Bob loved the town:
My strongest memory—figures, for a little kid—was visiting the firehouse down there, the old firehouse, not because of anything dramatic like a call or anything like that, but they had an old horse-drawn fire engine in the back end and I just thought that was a wonderful thing.
I remember the baths, the bathhouses. My father always went for the waters down there when we were in town visiting, and I just thought that was strange. I remember when we were driving there we would go to Waco and turn off on Highway 6 and we’d be desperately looking for the Falls Hotel sign, a big FALLS on top of the hotel, because that’s when we knew we were just right there. In spring, it was bluebonnet wildflower country, gorgeous.29
THE GOOD LIFE
In Dallas, the Fretz and Tomlinson families regularly went to the country club, and the children often saw Mary’s parents there. Mary’s mother, Minnie, enjoyed punching nickels into the club’s slot machines while holding Bob on her lap. She’d puff on a cigarette and let the ash grow until it fell to the floor. Sally relayed some of the memories Minnie shared with her:
She could be absolutely the epitome of grace and the total lady, and then in the next breath she could just rip you to shreds. So you just didn’t want to get on her bad side. But she was wonderful. I loved her.
I can remember her talking about when she was a young girl growing up in Dallas, and the dirt streets downtown. And when you’re talking about the racial issue, I can remember her describing when she was just a young, young child, and one of her earliest memories in downtown Dallas was just a dirt road. And the black people being tarred and feathered. I remember her describing that once, that she had seen that as a child.30
From Bob and Sally’s bedrooms in their two-story brick home, they could see across the city. Bob often wore western-style clothing and a cowboy hat, while Sally wore stylish dresses. Bob described Dallas’s public schools:
It was a concrete block house, Robert E. Lee Elementary School. Stonewall Jackson was right up the street. The dividing line between Stonewall and Lee was the alley that ran behind our house. My cousin went to Jackson. At that time it was basically all Anglo, all white, obviously no blacks, but Mexican-Americans.
Mexican kids were able to attend school with the rest of us and we had at least one set of brothers in my class and, yeah, they were just as accepted as they could be. I didn’t realize that there was any discrimination against Hispanics until years after I was out of school. It just … they were always part of our classes. I went from there to J. L. Long Junior High, Woodrow Wilson High School. Same story.
There were probably twenty-five to thirty-five kids in each class. There were a lot of amenities that I don’t think the elementary schools have now, like music programs. You could start studying piano in the second grade and instruments in the third, and I thought that was great. I did it. I carried my violin for the next ten years, sawing away on it.31
Tommy bought a television in the early 1950s, a large round-screen Zenith, and the family watched Dallas’s two stations. The family’s Lakewood neighborhood had its own shopping center with a movie theater, ice-cream parlor, and everything a young family could want.
The Tomlinsons made their last trip to Marlin in August 1951, when Tommy’s mother, Bettie, died. Her obituary made the front page of the Marlin Democrat. Bettie had been ill for some time and was in the hospital when she passed away at eighty-two. The Reverend Lloyd Chapman led the funeral rites inside the chapel that she and R. E. L. had helped build. She was buried next to him at Marlin’s Calvary Cemetery, just a few blocks down Fortune Street from their house.32 Tommy never felt the need to visit Marlin again.33
I
n 1952, Tommy constructed a one-story office and warehouse in the Trinity industrial district to the specifications of the Ford Metal Moulding Company, a New York firm that agreed to lease the property to manufacture aluminum rods and bars. Thanks to that deal, and to the sizable Fretz inheritance, Tommy achieved his ambition of retiring at fifty. His only obligation was his duty as a board member of the National Bank of Commerce. In 1955, that board made history by appointing the first woman to lead a bank in Dallas. Tommy was one of six directors when the board elected Maurine Jacobs, who had worked at the bank for twenty-three years. The appointment was big news for Dallas’s fifth-largest bank.34
Tommy spent much of his time at the Lakewood Country Club, drinking Four Roses bourbon. When his drinking became a problem is unclear, but Bob remembers tense evenings as a child when Tommy came home from the club drunk, expecting a formal dinner. He’d sit glumly next to his quiet children at the head of the table while Mary waited on him. Sometimes, though, he’d return home in a darker mood, screaming and scaring Bob and Sally. On one occasion, Mary took the children into the garage, climbed into the car, and locked the doors until Tommy passed out. Bob said Tommy never physically abused his family, but they often feared him.35
Tommy built his dream home in 1956 on a half-acre lot just a few blocks east of White Rock Lake. The ranch-style four-bedroom house with all the amenities was in one of Dallas’s newest neighborhoods, Lakewood Heights. Tommy had always liked to walk along White Rock Lake, and now he was a short distance away.
The civil rights movement was gaining momentum in the mid-1950s, and the Democratic party’s support for it did not sit well with Tommy. He switched to the Republican party, becoming one of a tiny number of Republicans in Texas at the time.36
Bob was an adolescent and beginning to explore the world around him. In the 1950s, high school students observed an annual Ditch Day, when they did something fun instead of going to school. One year, Bob’s friends suggested going bowling at Lakewood Lanes:
That was the first day I ever bowled, but I had been watching it on television. And from watching Buddy Bomar, I knew I should take four steps, hold the ball like this, swing it, and roll at the second arrow. The second frame I ever bowled, I got a strike. I probably got thirty for the game, but the second frame I bowled, I got a strike. I thought it was great fun, and they had a junior league there on Saturday mornings, and I wound up joining that. Basically, I was a nonathlete, but I found out that bowling was something that the jocks couldn’t do a whole lot better than I could, if at all.… The summer after my senior year of high school was the last junior league that I bowled, and I tied for high average in the house for the summer, 180. I tied with a woman that threw a ten-pound ball like a rocket.37
Bob joined teams and had a natural talent. During his high school years, he spent as much time at Lakewood Lanes as he spent at Tommy’s new house.38 He also loved music but wasn’t satisfied with the show tunes and light classical pieces he played in the high school orchestra. In his junior year, he discovered another kind of music, one that would become a lifelong passion, while visiting Hi-Fi Incorporated, a record store at Mockingbird and Abrams:
The man handed me an album and said, “Why don’t you listen to this? Maybe this will be something you like.”
I took it back into the room and put the needle on, and I had found my home. The first track I played on the album was “Round Midnight” and it was Miles Davis playing it. From that time on, I have been a jazz fan. I was before then, I guess, in a way, but not the same. It’s such black music. Nobody can play music that beautifully and not be a good person, and Miles could. The music really opened up a world for me that I hadn’t realized I was missing.39
MR. SMITH GOES TO THE FAIR
The end of the Klan did little to improve conditions for minorities in Texas; it only made open discussion of white supremacy impolite and racial violence less acceptable. Whites relied instead on Jim Crow laws and all-white juries to maintain social control, not vigilantism.40
Racists despised the mixing of the races and insisted a biracial child took on the worst qualities of both parents. Texas law said one drop of African-American blood made a person black and no amount of money or number of college degrees could change that. By treating all blacks the same and discouraging those who tried to pass for white, Anglos kept the black community together and laid the foundation for vibrant, economically diverse communities.41
With Jim Crow laws in place, African-Americans for the most part followed the teachings of Booker T. Washington and established businesses and tried to prove wrong all of the stereotypes that whites held about them. Antonio Maceo Smith, though, wanted to bring real change. Smith may have been born in Texarkana, but he’d earned a master’s degree in business administration from New York University and was a successful businessman back east. He came home to attend his father’s funeral in 1933, and the indignities he witnessed inspired him to move to Dallas and join the civil rights movement. Smith helped resuscitate the Dallas Negro Chamber of Commerce in 1936, establishing himself as a major black leader. He later created the Texas Negro Chamber of Commerce and became head of the Texas NAACP.42
When Dallas officials organized a world’s fair in 1936 called the Texas Centennial Central Exposition, Smith saw an opportunity to highlight the contributions of African-Americans. He wanted to build a Hall of Negro Life, the first exhibit dedicated to blacks at a world’s fair.43 The Centennial Committee, however, refused to provide any funds, since they had decided the overarching theme of Texas’s centennial celebration would be how white Europeans had brought civilization to Texas.44 They planned to portray people of color as either impediments to civilization or the tools of their white masters.45 When President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited the exposition, city leaders asked him to unveil a monumental statue of Robert E. Lee riding his famous horse, Traveller.
Smith, though, convinced a white oilman, Walter D. Cline, to lobby for federal funds in return for selling fifty thousand dollars’ worth of bonds for the centennial. Cline convinced Congress to appropriate $100,000, and Smith built the ten-thousand-square-foot hall in Dallas’s Fair Park, just past a monument to the Confederacy at the park’s main gate. The hall opened on Juneteenth.46 Jazz musician Cab Calloway performed at the ceremony.47 The exhibit ultimately attracted more than seventy thousand blacks.48
The Dallas Morning News’ coverage of the Hall of Negro Life dripped with ridicule and sarcasm. The writer led off his story with fictional minstrel characters and called all blacks the sons and daughters of Ham, people in Genesis cursed by Noah to be “servants of servants”:
Mammy wasn’t there when Dallas sat down to cold supper Friday night for with Rastus, and thousands of care-free members of her race, she was busy putting in a glorious Juneteenth at the magic Texas Centennial Exposition. Attendance totaled 46,116. Joining in with the city negroes were other thousands of dusty county merrymakers who had deserted catfish streams and left fiddle-faced mules to munch contentedly in idleness, farm work forgotten, to celebrate Emancipation Day amid the wonders of Dallas’ $25,000,000 world fair.
Rolling eyes and flashing white teeth dominated exhibit halls, the Midway and various places where special negro programs, ranging from the dedication of the $50,000 Negro Hall to the highly entertaining hi-di-hoing as performed by Cab Calloway and his Cotton Club Orchestra which was hotter than the blazing afternoon sun.
Laughter and carefree happiness comes easy to the sons and daughters of Ham and with the many wonders and attractions of the magic city at their disposal they made this Juneteenth a Christmas, July Fourth and Thanksgiving all rolled into one.
Another high spot of the day’s more serious side was an address to thousands of negroes in the Amphitheater Friday evening by Dr. L. K. Williams, Chicago, pastor of the largest Negro church in the world. Dr. Williams who is vice president of the World Baptist Alliance, was introduced by Dr. George Truett, who heads the organization. A massed chorus sang.
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br /> While these more dignified observances of the occasion attracted many thousands, hordes of merrymakers stormed the purified Midway, its strip shows deleted for the day. There they saw the wonders of the freak world, screamed when Snakeoid swallowed a reptile and then regained normalcy by pushing black faces deep into slices of watermelon and welcome ice cream cones.
Friskier members of the race whooped it up while dancing to the ho-di-ho rhythm of Calloway’s band at intervals through the afternoon and night in the Amphitheater and had a great time of it, entirely oblivious to the stares of hundreds of white onlookers.
There was plenty of entertainment for both whites and colored in the arena during the afternoon when dusky belles disporting neat curves set off by tight silk suits which obviously were not intended to go too near the water, pranced before an audience of rolling eyes. Contestants in the high brown bathing beauty review were vying for audience applause and the lure of a trip to Hollywood for possible selection for a part in Cab’s next picture.
The dusty beauties got plenty of optical attention but they had to share the entertainment angle of the proceedings with a crew of male and female truckers [dancers] whose twinkling feet and widely swayed bodies blended almost to perfection with the sizzling, jungle tomtom rhythm of Calloway’s hotcha artists. The truckers, proving once again that shaking the dogs comes as natural to a Negro as swimming does to a fish, brought down the house.49
Reporting on the Hall of Negro Life continued with the same tone throughout the duration of the fair, but those who visited the hall saw a presentation of black progress that filled African-Americans with pride. The first statue they encountered depicted a black man breaking chains from his wrists. A mural depicted African-Americans building the United States and contributing to the nation’s music, art, and religion. The hall drew 400,000 visitors, the majority of them white, and many of them aghast at the challenge to their narrative of American history.50