Tomlinson Hill

by Chris Tomlinson

  Bob made only $650 and didn’t join the PBA. The popularity of bowling was also flagging, and Bob had to expand his sales route to keep enough orders coming in to stay in business, which kept him out of town most of the week. He gave up his dream of becoming a professional bowler and concentrated on selling supplies and raising a family, though he continued to bowl as a serious amateur at the American Bowling Congress’s national tournament for the next forty years.

  The Vietnam War and the turmoil in the Democratic party in 1968 motivated Bob to get involved in the hottest thing in Texas politics, the Republican party. I can vaguely remember a Richard Nixon lawn sign in front of our house. Bob told me about attending the party’s 1968 state convention. Rather than finding the party of Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller, he discovered Texas favored Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. “I’m not going to fit in here at all,” he concluded.2

  The Vietnam War played a bigger role in shaping Bob’s political views than did the civil rights movement. The ability of wealthy white men to avoid going to war bothered Bob, even though he was exempt from the draft because he was married and had young children. He also believed the war itself was immoral and unnecessary.3

  Bob and Beth moved into the Lake Highlands neighborhood in northeast Dallas and found themselves in a liberal enclave. Beth convinced Bob to join her in liberal Democratic party politics. After the 1970 election, Beth started hosting neighborhood meetings of the League of Women Voters at our house on Aldwick Drive.4 The couple joined the Amigos, an organization that met once a month and brought together white, black, and Hispanic Dallasites to promote racial understanding. There Bob met Peter Johnson, who represented the Southern Christian Leadership Council in Dallas, and Dr. Charles Hunter, an assistant minister at St. Luke’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, located downtown.5

  In 1972, Bob became the Democratic party precinct chair and volunteered to promote the George McGovern campaign for president. He told me he enjoyed politics:

  I think it’s the second-best indoor sport and bowling is my first.… It’s a pretty wild swing going from a Republican state convention one year and being an organizer for McGovern four years later. But I was much more at home with McGovern. I thought he was a very good man, but a lousy candidate.

  [Beth always] considered herself to be a Democrat and she couldn’t be just a Democrat. She had to be the leading rabble-rouser Democrat. She didn’t have a pragmatic bone in her body; she was all or nothing.

  When I was working for McGovern, some of our strongest opposition was within the Democratic party—George Wallace people [who supported segregation].6

  When Bob and Beth attended their district’s convention, conservative Democrats outnumbered them two to one, and the conservatives rejected everything the liberals said, often without listening first. Bob described one such incident: “We were at the district convention and from the chair there was a mathematical error. Joe and I stood up to try and correct that, and we started getting all these yells: ‘Sit down, you dirty Commies!’”7

  Texas voters chose conservative Dolph Briscoe for governor by a huge margin, while voting for Nixon over McGovern. But Houston’s Barbara Jordan became the first African-American woman from a southern state to win election to the U.S. House of Representatives. Bob served as precinct captain again in 1974, but he failed to be reelected and was replaced by an oil-and-gas attorney.8

  Bob also volunteered with Big Brothers, an organization where adult men act as mentors for boys at risk of dropping out of school or getting involved in crime. Bob’s little brother was Jimmy Miller, an African-American who came from a family of four brothers, all boxers.

  We were going to work with a young guy who had some legal problems and try and show him a better life than stealing. He visited with us every couple of weeks, I guess, for a year and after that I think he was tired of it. And we would run out of things to do with him, so we kind of drifted away. Unfortunately, I know he wound up in some legal problems later on, because he was a champion in the Golden Gloves in the Dallas division, but his probation officer wouldn’t let him go to the next step, to the state tournament.9

  Bob had troubles of his own as Bowling Supplies, Inc., began to collapse. The rapid construction of bowling alleys in the early 1960s had created a bubble that burst by 1970. Most of the operators leased their buildings from landlords, so when hard times hit, they cleaned out the buildings and left without paying their debts, including those to Bowling Supplies, Inc. One bowling center accepted a delivery of pins, only to declare bankruptcy the next day. Bob said he and an employee went down to Waxahachie and took the pins back. A series of suspicious fires destroyed several bowling centers, including one where the fire burned only the back of the alley and the storerooms, not the snack bar or the arcade at the front. Within months, the owner used the insurance money to reopen as a skating rink. Bob said his company had made a profit only once in ten years, and it burned through Tommy’s savings as his debts racked up.10 Tommy and Mary still held a large investment in Lakewood Bank and Trust, where Tommy was a director, but that money was for their old age.

  In the summer of 1972, Tommy was at Lakewood Bank when he suffered a stroke. He returned home weeks later from the hospital, but was bedridden. I remember him lying in his bedroom with the curtains drawn because the light gave him headaches. I could tell he was suffering, and his condition worsened until Mary readmitted him to the hospital later that year. He held on for Christmas but died on New Year’s Eve.11

  I was seven years old and asked to attend the funeral. I surprised my parents and grandmother because I wasn’t distraught by Tommy’s death. I agreed with what many of the adults had told me, that he was in a better place and no longer suffering. After an elaborate Episcopal service, we rode in a black limousine, and Mary asked the motorcade to pass through Tommy’s beloved Lakewood Country Club on the way to the cemetery. I remember the golfers on the links as we drove by.

  Mary no longer needed the huge house on Twin Tree Lane and looked for a smaller one nearby. She began sorting through old boxes. I found the Fretz family scrapbooks on a bookshelf in Bob’s old room. The first was filled with clipping from the Dallas German-language newspaper published by Swiss settlers during the early 1900s. The other scrapbook was where I first read the obituaries for Gus, Eldridge, and R. E. L. Tomlinson. I was thrilled to learn they were cowboys, Texas Rangers, and southern gentry. Tommy had only ever said, “Our family used to own slaves and we treated them so well that they took our last name.” To me, these were precious documents. My grandmother even told me that a Tomlinson had died in the Alamo and that my middle name was the result of the Tomlinsons’ marrying into Robert E. Lee’s family. Armed with this information, I told my friends at all-white Lake Highlands Elementary that I was descended from aristocracy and I was the offspring of the greatest general ever. Only years later would I learn that the family had no connection to the Alamo or to the Lees of Virginia.

  I never considered that nonwhites might look at my family history with anything less than awe. I felt proud of my family’s slaveholding and Confederate past, not because I believed in slavery or racism, but because white Texans honored and celebrated that heritage. I learned in elementary school that the South’s cause was lawful and noble, and that the northerners who came to Texas were evil carpetbaggers set on looting my family’s belongings. I learned the words to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but at school we sang “Dixie” more often. My parents forbade me from using racist language, but they didn’t explain the injustices all around me. The only black people I encountered before I met Jimmy, the young boxer, were servants.

  A popular cartoon character on Saturday-morning television commercials when I was in elementary school was Frito Bandito, created by the Dallas-based company Frito-Lay. A kid at school told me that if I wrote to the company, they would send me free Frito Bandito erasers, a hot commodity at my elementary school. But Frito Bandito was a caricature of a swarthy Mexican with a som
brero and bandoliers across his chest. He waved pistols in the air, yelled, “¡Arriba!” and twirled his mustache while trying to steal Frito snacks from children. He even fired his pistols to the tune of “Cielito Lindo,” an iconic ballad from the Mexican Revolution. Civil rights groups protested this depiction of Mexican-Americans as early as 1969, but I remember collecting the rubber figures well into the early 1970s without objection from any adult in my life.

  The mythology of a great family legacy took on greater psychological importance as I watched my family fall apart. Bob and Beth first experimented with marijuana in 1972, and he smoked it on a regular basis for years to come. They also started having sex with other couples. One night, I witnessed some heavy petting between them and the parents of a friend. A few weeks later, my parents and the other couple thought it was cute when I wrapped my arm around the other couple’s daughter. We were nine years old.12

  Bob and Beth frequently argued, and they never enjoyed spending time with their own parents. Holiday gatherings ended in wine-fueled arguments, but by the mid-1970s, the fights began as soon as we got in the car. The fighting grew worse after Tommy’s death, when money became tight. I spent more and more time imagining ever more grand fantasies about my ancestors.

  Bob carried on with Bowling Supplies, Inc., for a few months after Tommy died, but he could see the business had no future. He sold as much inventory as he could, put the money in the bank, and declared bankruptcy. The bank seized the cash, which paid off most of the debts, and the suppliers fought over what remained. The move protected Mary’s nest egg, but Bob’s credit was destroyed.13 Beth applied for a job for the first time since she had married Bob and worked as a teller at a bank near our house.

  A NEW DALLAS

  Eddie Bernice Johnson became the first African-American woman to win a public office in Dallas County when she won an election to the Texas legislature in 1972.14 The Dallas Cowboys won their first Super Bowl that year, and the Washington Senators baseball team moved to Arlington and became the Texas Rangers. Between 1960 and 1973, more than 100,000 Anglos moved out of Dallas to avoid desegregation and took with them much-needed revenues for the schools.15

  Racial tensions reached a fever pitch in July 1973, when Dallas police arrested twelve-year-old Santos Rodriguez and his thirteen-year-old brother as robbery suspects. The officers placed Santos in the front passenger seat of their patrol car and Officer Darrell L. Cain tried to convince him to confess by placing a .357-caliber revolver against his head during a game of Russian roulette. Cain pulled the trigger and killed Santos in what the officer later claimed was a mistake because he thought he’d removed all of the bullets first. Minority leaders pointed out that Cain had shot a black suspect three years earlier, and police arrested him for murder. A judge then released Cain on five thousand dollars’ bail, setting off anger in the Mexican-American community. The case united blacks and Mexican-Americans, who often disagreed on civil rights.16

  More than a thousand demonstrators protested outside of City Hall a week later, damaging a police motorcycle, smashing windows, and looting luxury department stores. Police arrested twenty-three Mexican-Americans and thirteen blacks. A court found Cain guilty of murder, but he served only three years of a five-year sentence.17

  After Bob closed down Bowling Supplies, Inc., he took a job selling fire alarms, then left that for the Guardian Life Insurance Company. My parents did not have a lot of money, but we lived in a nice house in a safe neighborhood. At first, I attended a suburban school because it was closest to our house, even though it was not part of the Dallas school district.18

  In the third grade, my teachers started observing February as Black History Month and taught us about the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. My teacher read King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” and I felt an instant connection when she read, “‘I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.’” I was the son of a slaveholder and out there, somewhere, were the sons of slaves my family had held. But rather than feel a sense of shame, I wondered where those slave descendants lived and if I’d ever meet them. My teacher taught that slavery was wrong, but I don’t remember her saying anything bad about those responsible for it. She talked about how prejudice was wrong, but she never said anything bad about prejudiced people. She walked a careful line in teaching about race, holding no one responsible for the sins of the past. That allowed me to hold on to the love of my ancestry while embracing equality for all. She was letting me and all of the other white children have our cake and eat it, too.

  The first African-American children attended Lake Highlands when I was in the fourth grade. The teacher invited one black student to come to the front of the class and asked him if he’d ever touched a white person’s hair. The terrified child shook his head no, and she invited him to touch her hair and feel her white skin. Then she invited a white girl to come touch the boy’s hair and skin. The teacher explained how the skin color and hair texture of a black person were no more significant than the hair and skin color of a white person. By this time, I’d met Jimmy and Faye and several other black people whom my father knew, and I thought the whole exercise was a little strange, but then at recess I spoke to my white friends. They explained that they’d never spoken to a black person before. Even my slight experience with African-Americans was more than what my classmates had. While a handful of African-Americans attended Lake Highlands that year, my classroom was still all white.

  The situation at home, meanwhile, grew more tense. Bob couldn’t get the hang of selling insurance and was becoming increasingly unhappy. He wasn’t very good at selling what he considered a concept, not an actual product, and it gave him nightmares.19 These dreams were part of a larger emotional breakdown, and he started seeing a psychotherapist. Bob learned to follow what made him happy, and that meant returning to bowling alleys.

  Bob became the night deskman at Expressway Lanes in 1975. Expressway had all of the qualities that had made him love Lakewood Lanes almost twenty years earlier. It was just north of downtown, on Central Expressway. Suburban bowlers in big corporate leagues came in on their way home. The place was also cheap and central enough to attract blue-collar bowlers and the gambling crowd that showed up after the businessmen were gone. Bob worked nights and Beth worked during the day, so my sister, Dana, and I became latchkey kids. We let ourselves inside the house after school and waited for Mom, knowing Dad wouldn’t come home until after we had gone to bed. But he was back in his element and didn’t want to leave bowling again.20

  CONFRONTING RACE

  One afternoon, when I was about nine years old, a neighbor named Roger offered to introduce me to a star football player with the Dallas Cowboys, Harvey Martin. Roger had gone to college with the Dallas native at East Texas State, and it was my first chance to meet a celebrity. Roger didn’t want to take any chances on my behaving badly, so he told me not to use the word nigger around Martin. I was shocked to hear Roger use the n word and I didn’t understand at first why he had brought it up. I wondered if there was something about me that made Roger worry that I would say such a thing. Using the n word was taboo, and I felt like he was telling me not to set his cat on fire.

  I explained to Roger that I had never used that word, not to mention that “Too Mean” Martin was three times my size and capable of throwing me like a football across Texas Stadium. Roger’s attempt to educate me about race made me realize how naïve I was and that my grandfathers weren’t the only ones who didn’t know any better.

  While Bob was strict about racism, he was flexible in other areas. When a cook’s son showed up with a semitrailer full of electronics, no one questioned his story about a shop that was going out of business, rather than thinking it was a hijacking. The Expressway regulars, including Bob, bought microwave ovens and portable radios for pennies on the dollar. One of Bob’s favorite criminals was a shopl
ifter named Pat Parks, who once gave me a stolen portable typewriter when he learned that I liked to write. Bob also liked to gamble, though not for big money. He made bets on his skills at bowling and pinball, or played the spread in college football. He enjoyed the company of petty criminals and smoking dope when he got home from work, but he liked to say, “I was still a good boy. I was being good with my weed and only smoked it at home.”

  Dallas schools finally got serious about desegregation in 1975, and past courtesies, such as allowing white children like me to cross district lines, came to an end. Administrators required my parents to enroll me in the Dallas Independent School District21 and I left Lake Highlands and started fifth grade at Hexter Elementary. The biggest change came in my grades. I went from earning mostly C’s at the rich school to straight A’s at the poor one, because the standards were so much lower.

  Toward the end of my first year at Hexter, federal judge William Taylor still didn’t think Dallas officials were moving fast enough, and in March 1976, he ordered them to begin busing. The school board approved a plan to bus 18,223 students in fourth through eighth grades and create “magnet” schools, which would offer special classes to attract white students to minority parts of town. That year, students in the fourth through eighth grades were 47.1 percent black, 38.65 percent white, and 14.4 percent Mexican-American.22 The district decided that when I entered the sixth grade, I should take a bus to Reilly Elementary, formerly an all-white school.

  School officials scheduled a meeting to explain to parents how the plan would work. Our school actually got the good end of the deal, since we would attend a nearby elementary and middle school. The big difference would be the black students bused from South Dallas. My father took me to the meeting, and I remember that the father of one of my classmates became irate, insisting that the teachers couldn’t protect his daughter Kelly from the black students. He proclaimed that blacks behaved no better than animals and would rape his little girl. The man’s rant set off my father’s hair-trigger temper, and he responded with a stream of expletives. Within minutes, the two stared each other down, the racist, with his crew cut, dress shirt, and cowboy boots, facing off against my father, who wore his hair over his ears, sported a disco mustache, and had on a paisley shirt. Desperate school officials begged them to calm down, and the other man left. My friends began talking about Kelly’s initials, KKK.