Tomlinson Hill

by Chris Tomlinson

  On Tomlinson Hill, Vincent’s youngest son, O.T., quit high school to work odd jobs, while O.T.’s older brother Charles moved to Corpus Christi with his wife, Zelma.11 J.K. preferred to hang out on Wood Street and shoot dice.12

  LIVE OAK STREET

  Every Saturday, when county residents flooded into Marlin to shop, the town’s racial divide was clear for anyone to see. Live Oak was the dividing line between black and white, and whites walked on the north sidewalk, while blacks walked on the south.13 When blacks and whites shared the same sidewalk, whites expected blacks to step into the street to make way.14 The Wyman family lived a block away from the white neighborhood and Frank said he learned as a six-year-old in the early 1950s how their home’s location put him in danger:

  A friend of mine and I were sitting on the curb and this man, this white man, and these two little boys came running down the street and he was shouting to them to “shoot them niggers.” I had no idea what they were doing. I had heard of BB guns, but I had never held one. I didn’t know anything about it, so they were directly across the street from us, just pumping the BB gun and just shooting as fast as they could. [The white man] would get behind and say, “No, to the left, to the left, shoot him.” The little boy would shoot and he missed.

  So finally, one of them hit my friend on the shoulder and he said, “They’re shooting at us.” When I look back at it, I say, “How stupid could we have been?” We could have been blinded. But we just sat there looking at them until he hit Junior Bonner on the shoulder. So we just peeled off and ran away and they walked on down the street.

  The next day I told Junior Bonner to bring a hammer and I’d find the steam to kill both of them little boys. I took these bullets out of my mother’s sewing machine drawer. My father had a .32 revolver; it was an officer’s revolver during World War I.

  My plan was that I would steal those bullets and a pair of pliers and he would bring the hammer and I would hold the bullet with the pliers and he would hit the bullet from the back, and when it went off, we would be shooting back at them. We were going to sit on the curb as bait to trick them into coming to shoot at us again. Just before we left I was taking the last inventory of the bullets, when my mother saw me with them and asked me why did I have them. I just nonchalantly told her the entire story and the plot to commit first-degree murder. It was the first time I saw her do almost what people do in church when they’re shouting, where they just become possessed.15

  Wyman remembered that African-American parents spent a great deal of time training their children, particularly boys, to avoid getting into situations where they might be falsely accused of doing something wrong. Blacks did not speak to a white stranger unless spoken to first, and they avoided looking a white person directly in the eye. Frank said he was taught never to speak to a white woman without a witness present, preferably a white man. The most important rule for a black man was never to be alone with a white woman. Daily life offered routine humiliations, as well. Frank remembered walking down Live Oak one evening with two friends when he was twelve years old. Two slightly older white boys drove by.

  They started screaming out “Niggers!” This was a favorite sport for them, this type of harassment.

  My friend’s friend shouted an insult back to them. Okay, they went down a block and pulled into the parking lot on the corner of Gretchen and Live Oak. They made a U-turn and came back, and when we saw the car coming back, our hearts fell. They came back shouting, “You niggers want to fight, you niggers want to fight!”

  We ran across the parking lot, through the partial construction of the funeral home, and we were just trying to figure out which way to go, because we didn’t want to go to either one of our homes. This would tell them where we lived and they would surely come back with men in sheets on horseback or something.

  I have spent time punishing myself for having run and swearing that if the same thing happened again, I would run as far as I could and pick up a two-by-four. If they want[ed] to kill me, they would have to do it right then and there. I was ashamed and angry at myself for having run. They would never make me afraid enough to run from them again.16

  Segregation in the 1950s provided both whites and blacks a chance to hide. Whites didn’t want to share their power and privilege, and blacks found protection within their own communities. But segregation denied African-Americans equal opportunities and guaranteed a lesser quality of life. Many Marlin businesses refused to serve African-Americans, but those that did set up elaborate ways to keep their white customers separate. When Vincent took his children for ice cream, the parlor downtown had a special entrance in the back and uncomfortable seating. At the movie theater, blacks sat in the balcony and public water fountains came in pairs, one for each race.17 At Houston’s Restaurant, next to the Marlin bus station, cooks served blacks from a window in the back.18 No matter how much pride, self-esteem, or education African-Americans enjoyed, segregation ate away at them, and it often ate away at the whites who came to recognize the unearned benefits it granted them.

  In the summer of 1955, Albert’s heart began to fail and he checked into the Buie Clinic in Marlin. There he bumped into a woman he vaguely recognized, Julia Ann Taylor. She was the schoolteacher from the Tomlinson Negro School and the daughter of Hezekiah Taylor, the man whom Albert had blackballed in the 1930s. Frank is Julia Ann’s son, and he told the story of what happened that day:

  She saw this black orderly pushing this elderly white man in a wheelchair and he passed her and she didn’t pay any attention. Then she heard him say, “Whoa, Bully,” one of the nicknames they would give to the orderlies. Or a black male, they called him “bully.” He said, “Back up, back up,” until he got right in front of her and he asked her, “Are you Hezekiah Taylor’s daughter?”

  She said, “Yes.”

  And then she remembered it was one of the Tomlinsons, Albert Tomlinson. She said that he just started talking as though it was pent-up and he wanted to release that he remembered something, and that it was how happy he was to see her and that he had great respect for her father.

  When [my mother] was telling the story to me, she said Albert had been the one who had blacklisted my grandfather. She told me that with all those mouths to feed at that time, no one would hire Hezekiah.… He was at a point of desperation until they started working on what they called the Roosevelt roads.

  She thought it was bitter irony. She would say, “These people get holy when death starts knocking on their door.”

  And then she would clarify and say, “Heaven belongs to God, and I’m certainly not standing at the door with a clipboard in my hand as to who’s going to make it. I’m not the maître d’ to the Pearly Gate, so who He lets in is His business. But I am not going to open the side door to heaven to one of these racist hypocrites that come up to me talking about how we loved you all, when I know better.”19

  Albert died from heart disease on November 1, 1955, at the age of eighty-two.20

  TEXAS VERSUS THE NAACP

  Texas Democrats, long hostile to the NAACP, launched a legal attack against the organization in 1956. Texas attorney general John Ben Shepperd sued the organization, claiming that it had “exceeded the bounds of propriety and law” and was no longer operating as a nonprofit. He wanted the NAACP to pay taxes as a corporation and publish its membership list, knowing it would be used to harass civil rights supporters.21

  Rather than sue in Travis County, where his office was located, or Dallas County, where the state NAACP was headquartered, Shepperd took his case to Smith County, one of the most conservative districts in Texas. Not surprisingly, Shepperd found a sympathetic ear in Judge Otis T. Dunagan, who ordered the NAACP to cease operations. The national NAACP sent their top lawyer, future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, to answer what he said was the most important case in the nation at the time because it was designed to force the NAACP to abandon several school integration lawsuits.22 The Dallas Morning News’ editorial board also took a dim view
of the NAACP, calling it “the National Association for the Agitation of Colored People.” “In a free country, every citizen is as entitled to his personal prejudices as to his so-called civil rights,” one editorial read.23 Shepperd and the NAACP eventually settled out of court, with the state agreeing to stop challenging the group’s nonprofit status, and the NAACP agreeing to pay state franchise taxes.24

  African-American parents filed a new lawsuit against the Dallas school board in 1957 after it failed to make any effort to integrate. Elsewhere in Texas, school districts that were integrating allowed wealthy white students to transfer out of schools that included blacks and refused to provide transportation for blacks who wanted to attend white schools. Integrated schools allowed white students to turn extracurricular clubs into private after-school functions so they could legally exclude blacks. Superintendents retaliated against activist black teachers by dismissing them, rather than transferring them to integrated schools. The net affect was continued segregation.25

  Yet more than 300 white ministers and 115 black clergy in Dallas issued a joint statement in 1958, calling for “simple justice” for all citizens. Small school districts in North and West Texas with negligible African-American populations embraced school integration because it saved them money by consolidating facilities and staff. Not surprisingly, the districts with the largest number of black students took the longest to integrate.26

  THE BOWLING LIFE

  Bob Tomlinson graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1958, and Tommy ordered him to attend Texas A&M, just as he had and his father had before that. Tommy didn’t seem to care that Bob had no interest in engineering, farming, or the military, the three things at which A&M excelled. But Bob followed his father’s wishes and underwent the Corps of Cadets’ military-style training and hazing.27

  Bob spent as much time as possible bowling, joining two leagues and competing with the official A&M team. The Memorial Student Center had lanes, and the Knights of Columbus hosted a league that bowled in an eight-lane alley built with cinder blocks and steel beams, probably the loudest alley Bob ever experienced. “Every chance I got I went to the bowling alley, which is one reason why my grades sucked,” he told me.28

  In October 1959, Bob scored 297 in one game and a week later rolled his first perfect 300 game at the Memorial Student Center, a rare accomplishment for any bowler, let alone a seventeen-year-old college freshman.29 By December, the A&M team took a wide lead with a 32–4 record in the conference. Their next closest competitor, Arlington State, had a 25–11 record.30

  Howard Rogers was Bob’s roommate that semester, and he set Bob up on a blind date with a cousin for the Texas A&M vs. Texas Christian University football game in Fort Worth. Beth Ward was a junior in high school and lived in Arlington, a suburb between Dallas and Fort Worth. Bob and Beth hit it off and started dating.

  After that first semester, Bob didn’t go back to College Station. He had stopped attending some classes completely and wanted to enroll at Arlington State, a community college near where Beth lived. But Tommy insisted Bob go to the more prestigious Southern Methodist University, an expensive private school, long known for its wealthy student body and active fraternities and sororities. But Bob didn’t like parties, and he liked SMU even less than A&M. Bob again spent most of his time in bowling alleys, much to the chagrin of his conservative father.31

  By the mid-1950s, more and more Texas conservatives were joining Tommy in the Republican party. Tommy and other Dallas County white voters in 1954 elected their first-ever Republican to Congress, Bruce Alger, who took increasingly white supremacist positions over the next decade to defeat conservative Democrat challengers. In the late 1950s, the Dallas Morning News reported on the transformation of the Texas Republican party into a conservative states’ rights group and how the Democrats were moving toward liberalism and civil rights. By 1960, the Dallas Morning News was endorsing Alger’s positions.32

  Dallas’s conservatism extended to many African-American leaders as well, who politely cooperated with the all-white Dallas Citizens Council. Together, they formed the Committee of 14, with seven members from each race, and they convinced middle-class stores to desegregate their lunch counters to avoid protests like those seen in other states. But younger African-Americans, inspired by those sit-ins and marches, organized dramatic protests across the city in 1960 and attracted condemnation from both black and white leaders. At conservative SMU, fifty-eight white students and two black students staged a protest at the University Drug Store lunch counter. The owner hired an exterminator to pump the restaurant full of insecticidal gas to drive the students out, but they held their ground.33

  Bob wasn’t a part of the protest; in fact, he was barely on campus. In April 1960, he traveled to Toledo, Ohio, with the five-member Dallas Bowling Association team to compete for a spot in the American Bowling Congress’s open division. He led the team and helped it earn a spot in the amateur tournament with a 618 three-game series.34 Bob stopped attending classes in his favorite subject, English, because the lecturer appeared to be gay. While he didn’t mind the lesbians he’d met at Lakewood Lanes, he couldn’t accept an effeminate man. Bob spent only one semester at SMU.35

  Bob became the deskman at Zangs Bowl in Dallas’s Oak Cliff neighborhood, collecting the fees, handing out shoes, and switching on the alleys. Tommy knew Bob couldn’t make a decent living working the counter of a bowling alley, but he recognized bowling was growing in popularity. Tommy floated the idea of building a bowling alley for his son, but Bob thought that was a bad idea. Tommy came out of retirement in 1961 to open a bowling-supply distributorship and retail shop for his son, Bowling Supplies, Inc., at 2012 Greenville Avenue in Dallas. Tommy became the North Texas sales and service representative for Ace Bowling Balls and the Vulcan Corp.’s bowling-pin division.36 Tommy managed the business while Bob hit the road for three weeks out of the month, selling supplies to bowling alleys across Texas and western Louisiana. The company offered everything from pin-setting equipment to the chemicals needed to treat the lanes.37 Bob proposed to Beth, then a high school senior, and they wed in June 1961:

  She wore a gown of silk organza with scoop neckline and voluminous skirt with formal train. Her veil was a Chantilly lace mantilla, and she carried roses and valley lilies.

  Miss Joan Clare of Arlington was maid-of-honor and the bridegroom’s sister, Miss Sally Tomlinson, was bridesmaid.

  Howard Rogers of San Antonio served as best man, and groomsman was Ken McKenzie. Guests were seated by Robert D. Ward of Ardmore, Okla. and Emil Fretz Jr.

  A reception was held at the Midway Savings Community Room.38

  Bob traveled the state but still bowled in local and national amateur tournaments, with varying success. He was very skilled for someone in his early twenties, and many thought he had the potential to turn pro. On March 9, 1963, Bob bowled his first perfect 300 game in a sanctioned tournament, leading his Bowling Supplies, Inc., team in the Dallas Open Class league. He carried a 199 average, a professional-level score at the time.39

  Bob found it difficult working for his father, though. The two engaged in screaming arguments at least once a week and Bob felt unappreciated.

  I wanted a little bit of stroking, right. Everyone likes to hear they did well. I’m the only one he could never tell that. He’d tell everyone else I’d done well, but he wouldn’t let me know it. One time I came back from a trip to East Texas; I had, for those days, a ridiculous amount of orders, three or four thousand dollars.

  I came back with all of these orders. But he was so full of himself, he was so proud of himself, he had orders for six dozen bags. That was more important than the three thousand–dollars plus in orders I’d brought in.

  When Lakewood Lanes was still open, I’d go over sometimes and someone would say, “Man, your dad sure was bragging on what a good job you’re doing on things.” I never heard it.40

  Bowling was a distinctly blue-collar sport, and Bob enjoyed how it put him in contact with
a wide variety of Texans. But in the early 1960s, it was hard to make friends with people from other races. Dallas was geographically segregated, with thirty-six out of more than two hundred census tracts reporting no blacks, while six tracts were more than 90 percent African-American.41 Bowling alleys were equally segregated for customers, but African-Americans provided most of the labor, working as porters, lane men, and mechanics. Bob came to respect and like the blacks he encountered, but he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t allowed to befriend them.42 Genuine, if unequal, friendships could develop between blacks and whites, particularly with domestic workers who knew their employers most intimate secrets, but the inequality was always there. When an African-American team won a citywide bowling award, whites refused to recognize them:

  The bowling industry was slow to change in a lot of ways and a good example is there used to be an awards banquet at the end of each bowling season. There would be the banquet and a dance, and they would give out [to] all the winners of the city tournament their awards. If somebody had won a 300 award, or something like that, within a couple of months of the banquet they would wait and give it to them then.

  A couple of guys, named Julius Lamar and Ray Williams, won the doubles one year. They canceled the banquet because they were black and didn’t want to have the mixing.

  When Denver Ray and Julius were kind of shuffled off to the side—[organizers] didn’t want to take a chance on having them win anything else in the city tournament—I thought, That’s not right. They won it. They deserve their honors. That’s an injustice. It’s just minor, but it’s there.43

  When asked, Bob couldn’t recall a single moment when he recognized the injustice of racial segregation and consciously decided to support civil rights: