What I decided on was oilfield work around the Permian Basin. The oil business was big, and they paid welders almost five dollars an hour. Adrianne didn’t care much for the idea because Benny was in the second grade and it was during the school year and all. I decided to try it anyway because I thought we might finally be able to get ahead. I didn’t call down there for a job. I just got in the pickup and drove to Midland and left Adrianne the car. I was a good welder and confident I could get a job.
The first thing I had to do, I found out, was join the union. I had never belonged to one before, but I joined because I wanted to work. I also figured the wages would never have been that high if the welders hadn’t organized, and that had something to do with me starting a union for farmworkers some time later. You can’t be an oilfield welder unless you pass a test and get certified. I tested for several different outfits. They had you make different welds, and an inspector would look them over and X-ray the welds. We had to make vertical welds and weld around a stationary pipe on a stand without rolling it. They wanted to know if you could really weld, and I found out I could. I was as good as there was.
I did make money and sent two-thirds of it home. I lived in Midland, where a lot of people have money and think the Yankees don’t have a thing on them, in a little white house with two other welders. We kept odd hours and worked at different times for different outfits. We were on twenty-four hour call, and brother, they weren’t kidding when they said they wanted to call you any time of the day or night. Sometimes I was out sixteen or twenty hours and back for five or six hours when they called me again.
An oilfield welder is used mainly to weld the casing or heavy pipe that lines the hole. For a hole over a thousand feet deep, that’s a lot of welding. They drop the casing in a joint at a time and hold a new one from the top of the rig to weld onto the one in the hole. The edges are beveled or cut at an angle so you can make a tight weld. You make one pass or lay a bead, chip it off with a chipping hammer, clean it with a steel brush and make two passes around either side of the first bead and so on till you have it stuck good. You don’t worry about the drilling, just weld and keep on welding, setting the right polarity and reverse polarity to keep the rod from sticking and making a good bead by rotating your wrist with a slight painter’s motion and keeping the end of the rod down in the weld.
I stayed in Midland about six months. That was all I wanted. I worked through Christmas. I wanted to go home but was on call and couldn’t. After that, my enthusiasm for making extra money was gone. I went home in January with several hundred dollars in the bank but little prospect for getting that much more ahead in Victory. I opened the shop again and started work. The farmers had had a bad year. They still needed work done, but a lot were slow pay or no pay. The money I got ahead on was gone in a few months. We got behind on our grocery bill. Finally, we owed four hundred dollars, which was a lot of money back then. It was summer, the cotton got hailed on, and money was tighter than ever.
Adrianne had gone to business college in Abilene and was a secretary on military installations during the war. She had been bored with staying home anyway, so in July she took a job at a bank in Terkel and started working there. Mama kept Belle during the day and Belle and Benny after school. I later got ahead again, but Adrianne enjoyed working and kept her job. It was all right with me. I never told her to start and never told her to quit. She finally quit three years ago, which was also fine.
I know a fellow who says his wife and he never had a fight in twenty-five years of marriage. That sounds impossible. Any couple that stays together very long is going to fight. Adrianne and I never fought like we hated each other because we didn’t. I think you fight or disagree out of love. If you never fight, you are indifferent.
That bank she worked for had an interesting history. It was opened by an old man named McCorkle, who I guess was a Scotsman, and an Irishman named Longford. I understand he took his name from the part of Ireland he grew up in. They were playing poker in the bank vault one night during the late Twenties with a couple of other codgers when a fight started. Old Man Longford was feisty, and he got the other guy down and bit his ear off. He was about that salty when it came to keeping his bank up, too. McCorkle died after five or six years. Longford—his given name was George—must have been too much for him. But when the government closed all the banks during the Depression to check their books, Longford’s was one of the first they let re-open.
His boy Junior and I had a run-in one time. Junior Longford had a horse. He was about the only kid around who did. He rode the horse the seven miles to Victory one Saturday and caught me walking home after a baseball game, and he rode the horse up and down at me with me cussing and throwing clods. He laughed and rode away. I sort of stalked him to the little store across from the school. While he was inside, I sneaked up and loosened the saddle cinch but not enough that he couldn’t get back on. I gathered up a pile of rocks and hid around the corner. When he came out, I threw one right in the horse’s flank, and it jerked four or five steps and reared up. The saddle slipped a little to the side, and I threw another rock and hit Junior in the cheek to make him let go of the saddle and fall. I could have jumped him with my fists while he was off the horse, but I wanted it to be a horse riding thing because he had ridden the horse at me. Junior was an Army officer in the European theatre, and we grew up to be good friends, which show how inconsequential kid stuff can be.
Somebody could go to work out on the Bull Wagon Ranch, and the next time he came to town the sidewalk wasn’t wide enough. Wearing those leather gloves and boots, they thought they were the toughest guys around. But they weren’t very tough when it came to facing Papa. I wonder how tough they would be if some Guamanians were waiting outside the bunkhouse for them with machetes or a Japanese officer waving a bloody samurai sword when he had already been shot a dozen times but wrapped up like a mummy to keep fighting, high on dope and ancestors, jumped out at them around a corner.
There was a guy from Rackley, a little place east of Victory, who became a cowboy. He made foreman at the Bull Wagon, forty or fifty sections, and used to ride around the lookout for trespassers. He came up on a man shooting rabbits and told him he was trespassing.
“Why, I ought to get down and whip you with this lariat rope,” he said.
The man said, “You’d look silly as hell getting down with a rope and me standing here with a twelve-gauge shotgun.” He considered that for a minute and rode on over the hill.
Chapter Two - Hard Labor
When my mind is blank, I usually see someone’s face in there. I think about him or her and other people we both know and come back to myself. The face I see now is big and black. It’s a fellow I have known for twenty years named Luther Moore. If Luther liked you, he would do anything for you. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t do a damn thing for you. Luther believed in enjoying life.
He told me, “I can’t understand why white folks commit suicide. Colored folks almost never do that. Did you ever hear of one of us committing suicide? I bet if you did, it was only one.”
Another time, he said, “You might think I wished I was white, but I wouldn’t be white for nothing. If you came with me just one Saturday night and really let your hair down, you wouldn’t ever want to be a white man again.”
Luther worked for a farmer, bootlegged and ran a place on the side, a little house with high steps in town that he called “The Country Club.” I suspect there were more good times there than there ever were at the other country club the rich guys went to near Terkel. Luther did all right. He had a big family, and they had a better television set than we did and decent clothes and plenty to eat. I told him there was no way to beat the income tax because they could check your bank account, and he said, “Don’t put your money in a bank.”
The most trouble he was ever in was over a baseball game three or four years ago. The blacks and Mexican-Americans were playing baseball by the school and got in an argument. One of the Mexicans had one of L
uther’s friends up against the backstop with a knife, and Luther stepped up behind him with a bat, planted both feet and hit him in the head. One of the witnesses told me he heard it thirty yards away and thought somebody shot a gun. The Mexican man laid in the hospital for a couple of weeks and died. The sheriff and county attorney were talking about charging Luther with manslaughter, but his boss hired a lawyer and got him off for saving the other guy, the same as a claim of self-defense. He was in another scrape over cutting a guy with a broken beer bottle, and I went to Terkel and testified as a character witness. Luther took care of his family and was nice to everybody who was nice to him. That shows good character to me. He didn’t live the same as a lot of people, but you can’t say a man has bad character if he lives the only way he knows and works and tries to be congenial. He may not know the best way, but he isn’t necessarily bad.
He was a little under six feet tall and weighed two hundred pounds or so. He had a tough side, but his face was big and wide and friendly. He had a big mouth and big white teeth and friendly smile. His eyes hardly ever smiled, though, unless he knew you and really thought something was funny. The whites in them were usually a light yellow. As a matter of fact, he had the same look in his eyes as most of the Marines overseas. He did about as well as me and probably better sometimes, and I felt more in common with him than most rich white people. My point is that people are divided more by how much money they make than what race they are. Take a smart young Mexican who becomes a lawyer, sets up a practice and starts making a lot of money. He is real good, so whites and Mexican-Americans go to him. Pretty soon, he is not a Mexican anymore. He has passed that and become a rich man. Take the Longfords for example. They were Irish Catholics, and if there is any part of the country that hates Catholics, it’s this one. But do you think the Baptist and Church of Christ farmers acted like they hated the Longfords? No, the Longfords owned a bank, and that was more important. The farmers didn’t mind the presence of Catholics like that. Every small town has a few rich families. Pick them up and set them down in Lubbock or Amarillo and they would be no better off than three or four hundred others.
Don Bills made money in real estate around Lubbock and retired in Victory, where he was raised. He belonged to the Baptist Church. A guy I went into partnership with in the early Sixties decided he wanted to buy me out and thought he could get the money from Bills because they went to the same church. “Do you think he’ll give you seventy-five hundred dollars because of that?” I asked him.
“He’d get it back,” he said.
“Old Man Bills didn’t get his money by taking chances,” I said. “He’ll want more than that.”
“No, he won’t,” he told me. His name was Havis Callahan. “I’ve made friends with him. We’ve been going to the same church for two and a half years.”
Havis didn’t tell me what Bills said, but somebody who talked to him about it did. I heard he went to Bills’ house and hit him up, and Bills gave him the fish eye and said, “Have you got any collateral?”
I never aspired to be rich myself, so I can’t complain because I’m not. I think a lot more people could get rich than do. Look at it this way: how many people are trying to get rich? Almost nobody. They either think they can’t or think it isn’t worth the trouble. They have a point when they say it’s not worth it. You work day and night to make it, and then you work to keep other people from getting it.
After I got back from the war, I continued to be involved in sports. I coached a Pony League team one year, and we won the regional championship. It wasn’t because I was an especially good coach. I had some boys who were the best athletes Victory ever had except for maybe my class. One of them, a tall farm boy named Joe Ed Dix, played semi-professional and was in the minor leagues till he broke an ankle sliding. They should have won district or better in football and would have with a better coach. The coach they had was a real smart ass and stupid to boot. If he didn’t get out-coached in every game, it was only because a few coaches were as dumb as he was. A bunch of boys can only go so far on sheer ability. They have to have a coach. I’ll give Coach Rudd one thing. He knew how to win. The players could have all the attention as far as he was concerned. He was like a good officer in the service. If you have ever been in the service, you know there aren’t many good officers.
I think partly it was my feelings about that coach that inadvertently led me to get Victory kicked out of the inter-scholastic league for a year. It was the last game of the season, and we’d win district if we won that game. It was against Ivanhoe, which has always been a big rival. We had a good fullback named Selkirk who could run over anybody and was between the twenty-yard lines. But the coach would start calling passes every time we got close to scoring and lose the ball. That was bad enough, but there was a referee from Ivanhoe calling it for them. The score was twelve to twelve near the end of the game, and we stopped them on fourth down on the five-yard line. They didn’t have a field goal kicker. So the ref called a defensive holding penalty and gave the Ivanhoe boys four more downs to run it in. Of course they did, and we lost. I had no intention of hitting him. I just went to the corner of the field where he was coming off and said, “The way you called that game, you didn’t need those glasses.”
He made the mistake of saying, “I can take ‘em off,” and started to, so I reacted by reflex and hit him. They took him in the ambulance, and the cops hauled me to jail. Adrianne came to Terkel and bailed me out. That was bad enough, but the inter-scholastic league told the school board the next week that Victory was out for a year. I offered to pay a fine or do anything they wanted, but they wouldn’t have anything but punishing the school. I really felt bad. We had football the next year but had to play academies and teams from New Mexico and Oklahoma and a couple of private schools in Texas. It shows what can happen when you get in the habit of fighting.
I went to a couple of games the next year. I didn’t expect to be welcomed, but I learned that some people were on my side. They thought the referee deserved it. I went to most games in the years after the suspension. Almost everybody in town did. It was good entertainment and something to do. I changed my attitude and never got mad again. We never made the playoffs, but we had pretty good teams most years and won more than we lost.
There is a cheer Victory has used ever since I can remember. You hear it everywhere, but the words fit us better than other schools. It goes, “V-I-C-T-O-R-Y! Victory, Victory is our high!” Most places use “cry” instead of “high.” I thought it was silly, but I heard it enough to get used to it. Something else they did that I always liked was cheer a boy when he was coming off the field hurt. Victory is the Broncos, and the pep squad yells, “He’s a real Bronco!”
About the only other thing to do in Victory was work, and a blacksmith shop is not the most pleasant place. Adrianne said I should enjoy my work, but I never saw anything to enjoy in running a triphammer or operating a cutting torch. There are worse things to do, but I don’t see anything to enjoy. Not that I mind working. But sixty hours a week in a place so black and smoky that you cough black stuff out of your lungs gets old.
I stayed with the shop till 1964. We were doing every type of work you can imagine and had Benny helping us. We fixed everything from cars to tractors and combines. The year I sold out was the same year Victory won district in football again. Benny played in different positions on the line. They won district and bi-district, played in Lubbock and lost the regional game to Dodson, which is thirty miles south of Lubbock. They did the same as us but had nowhere near the defense.
I played in an old timers’ game in the 1950s that was kind of crazy. We had to use the high school equipment, and there wasn’t a jersey big enough to fit over my shoulder pads or pants big enough for my hip pads. I was up to almost two hundred and fifty pounds. But I had been looking forward to it and put the pads on over the uniform. There was quite an uproar in the stands when I came running out. I played in a couple more exes’ games after that. It was a funny expe
rience. You still know how to play, but you have lost that spring. You can see where to go but can’t get there fast enough. It’s not the same. The thrill you get from playing football as a kid is not something you can re-create.
I did keep the strength I inherited from Papa. The night I played that game with the pads over the uniform, I was at Lawler’s cafe afterward with a couple of boys in their twenties, Ham Wilson and Noona’s boy Herb, who were riding me about being a fat man.
“I may be fat,” I said, “but neither one of you can put my arm down.” They were good-sized, but I slapped Ham down easily and put Herb down with some effort. They didn’t know anything about Indian wrestling. “I tell you what,” I said. “I bet both of you together can’t put it down.” Standing up, they each got a hold and pulled as hard as they could and still couldn’t.
The only Indian wrestling match I ever lost in my life was in San Diego when I was in the Marines. I came across a beer joint with a sign that said the owner was the arm wrestling champion of the world. He was easy to spot, bald, thirty-five or forty years old and at least four hundred pounds. He was at a table with some people and said, “Hey, you looking for me?”
I said, “Are you the world champion Indian wrestler?”
“You think nobody can put you down?”
“I’d like to see you.”
“Well, come on,” he said, grinning. He put his arm on the table and cleared me a seat. There was no trick to it. His hand was too big to get a good hold on, but he let me give it all I had and held my arm straight up with a little smile on his face. Then he put it down like I was a little baby, slapped me on the shoulder and said, “Don’t feel bad, son. You’re pretty stout.”
Before I left, he put beer bottle caps in the crook of each finger and bent them flat. That impressed me more than getting beat. It would take inhuman strength to bend a beer bottle cap with your little finger and ring finger, and he did it with no strain. A man that strong doesn’t need to know how to fight. All he has to do is get ahold of you somewhere and squeeze.
The Byrds of Victory Page 6