by S. Smith
Mayor Riggins was always one for getting things done. Most in the city knew it. He ran the Cotton Palace, one of the biggest festivals in the state. It celebrated cotton, which was the leading crop of the state at that time. Waco had a huge festival area with an ornate palace-looking building, a race track, and manicured lawns and shrubs. At night they would light the entire place up with as many light bulbs as they could round up in the city. It was the place to see and to be seen, when the carnival was going on. At times, it even beat the State fair in attendance. Mayor Riggins ran the whole thing. On opening day Waco would have a parade. At the head would be the mayor himself, dressed completely in white, a cotton tuxedo with long tails, and a white cotton top hat. He sat atop an elevated buggy, typically next to a dignitary such as the governor, senator, and once even a president. He was a sight to be seen.
Mayor Riggins was running for Mayor at the time that Mr. Brann was attacked and whipped by the mobs. Riggins campaigned like crazy, and he had one Mr. Tom E. Davis running his campaign. This would be the same Tom Davis that later played a critical part in this story. Mr. Brann had of late chastised Mayor Riggins in the Iconoclast for being an incompetent buffoon running around the state (specifically Ft. Worth) and acting like he knew something about business at the recent Texas Immigration and Industrial Association meeting. Mayor Riggins was pretty sore about the whole Iconoclast episode. I heard he’d threatened Mr. Brann. But during those days, threatening Mr. Brann was quite a common occurrence.
Mr. Brann had plenty of friends around town, but he also had his enemies. It goes with the territory of writing a newspaper that sought out people’s faults and put them in writing. If Mr. Brann hadn’t had the Iconoclast, he would have been a really popular guy. He could dialog with anyone about anything. The thing that rubbed people the wrong way about Mr. Brann, besides his publishing embarrassing information, was that he tended to be very opinionated. In his mind he was always right and everyone else was always wrong. If you agreed with Mr. Brann, then the two of you would get along swimmingly. If you didn’t agree with him, however, he would verbally beat you over the head until you either did agree with him or retreated.
Inez said that he was this way at home as well. He was a loving father, but quite strict, particularly when it came to boys. She could not date or have a boyfriend until she was sixteen. Per Inez, the only reason that he let me come around was because he knew and liked me. I was about the only friend she had and Mr. Brann didn’t want to disrupt the friendship.
Chapter 8
THE AGGREGATION
OF PUSILLANIMOUS
ASSASSINS (APA)
Over the course of my life I’ve seen a lot of things come and go in Waco. There was AddRan Christian University that came to Waco for about fifteen years, burned to the ground, and then reopened in Fort Worth as Texas Christian University or TCU. I never understood why they chose the horned frog as their mascot. I used to love to play with those things when I was a young boy, but they can sure spit blood into your eye from their eye if you’re not careful.
Then there were the military bases and airfields that came and went, starting with Camp MacArthur and Richfield during World War I, and then James Connally Airforce Base in World War II. These military bases quickly opened during one of the wars and then quickly closed afterwards. They were necessary at the time, but it always seemed like a lot of money was spent for a temporary solution.
Over time, even the Brazos River changed its direction. Once they were building a dam just south of town. Well Lady Brazos wasn’t going to have nothing to do with having herself dammed up and decided to change course during the middle of construction. I hear the ruins of the site are still there, just south of town. They dam nothing but a seasonal creek these days. I guess that’s the prerogative of a lady, to change her mind.
Then there were the hater groups that came and went. These groups hated everyone and everything that didn’t support their cause. They were good-for-nothing groups that tried to stir up trouble. These groups visited a lot of towns when they were stirring up trouble. One of these groups was the APA. Thank God that Mr. Brann was right about the APA, or the American Protection Association, as they called themselves back then. This was a group of Protestant radicals who were going around the country stirring up trouble and violence against Catholics and Jews. In essence, the APA was trying to start a religious war to annihilate any opposing religions from the soil of the United States. Mr. Brann called it right when he said this APA group was destined for failure. He said not only that, but added that they wouldn’t last beyond a few years. People would easily see through their ignorance and understand that their goal was one of darkness and not light.
Mr. Brann’s battle with the APA started when a Mr. Slattery, an ex-Catholic priest who had recently been ordained as a Baptist Preacher, came to town spewing his hatred around the city. In the meeting at the Garland Opera House in Waco, the sign said, “Men Only,” as the subject at hand was much too daring for the ladies of the town. The main thrust of the despicable group was the ridiculous claim that the Vatican was out to turn the United States into a Jesuit nation. Slattery dreamed up all kinds of crazy conspiracies about the Catholic Church. He claimed they were bullying journalists to write only articles that favored the Catholic Church. He maintained the Pope was heavily influencing decisions made in Washington. He also said he’d seen an article from the Catholic church conspiring about a Protestant massacre. This was to occur soon and the Pope would then replace the President.
Mr. Brann saw through this whole thing and noted what a fraud Slattery and the APA were. He challenged the APA in the Iconoclast. When he came to Waco, Slattery replied directly to Mr. Brann’s articles. At the gathering, Slattery said that there was one among the Waconians at the meeting who was a Pope lover, meaning of course Mr. Brann.
Mr. Brann then stood up in the crowd and said the Iconoclast was not against or for any religion, but was there to root out the fakes and hypocrites of any organization. Slattery replied that Mr. Brann had been run out of San Antonio by a one-armed man with a whip. At that Mr. Brann pointed a finger at him and said, “You lie, sir and I refuse to say anything further to you.”
As Mr. Brann walked out of the Opera House, a crowd of pro-APA folks, gathered around him and started threatening him and pushing him, trying to provoke him into striking out against them. Mr. Brann was much too intelligent to take their bait, but he did something much more effective.
What he did was rent the same venue, the Garland Opera House, the very next evening to a completely packed house and gave a point-by-point response to Slattery, exposing the lies and falsehoods that he was stating as truth. Needless to say, Slattery did not think well of Mr. Brann. After Mr. Brann’s response, some of the more logical people within Waco saw through Slattery’s lies. They started a rant against him and his scurvy crew to get out of Waco and take their lies with them. The group promptly did.
The battle did not stop there, however. The APA and Mr. Brann continued their skirmish in their separate newspapers. The APA sent threatening letters to Mr. Brann telling him to watch his back because someone was likely to strike at any time. A direct threat of assassination. One such threatening letter contained the line “Sic sempter trannus.” This is a misspelling of a famous line. The APA ridiculously failed to quote John Wilkes Booth when he jumped onto the stage after assassinating Abraham Lincoln. It means “thus always to tyrants.” The correct quote is “Sic semper tyrannis.”
Of course Mr. Brann had a field day with it, saying it was likely that what John Wilkes Booth was trying to say was, “I’m sick, send for McGinnis.” Mr. Brann went on to say, “if I live until an A.P.Ape musters up sufficient “sand” to shoot me in the back, old Methuselah won’t be a marker. But if die I must, at the hands of these desperate men, I trust that my remorseless executioners will at least tell me what “Sic sempter trannus” means.”
There is little doubt that the APA was a wretched group of bigoted peop
le. Other similar hate groups started up around the same time. They all spouted supposedly moral intentions which were only a cover for killing, hurting, and disparaging people who didn’t agree with their specific dogma.
I really didn’t like groups such as the APA. Neither did Mr. Brann as he called them Aggregation of Pusillanimous Assassins in the Iconoclast after they directly threatened his life. These hater groups would usually come and go quickly, but for me and Inez, it never was quick enough. We found it hard to believe that these people could be so cruel, and intentionally spread lies and hurt innocent people for political reasons. But what we were really puzzled about was the following that they had and the people who earnestly believed their lies and supported them. It was a bit disheartening to know that people were so gullible that they would follow these false leaders. It didn’t make any sense to us.
One of the favorite spots Inez and I liked to go and talk when things seemed really crazy and nothing made any sense was the original Hueco Indian camp site by 6th street and Jefferson. We loved to climb the old gnarled trees and sit together and talk. We always treasured the peculiar and odd beauty of the old trees. We would often say, “If these trees could talk, they would have a lot to say.” We called them millennial sisters, since we thought that they were at least a thousand years old. In reality, we had no idea how old they were, but you could bet that they were ancient when the Hueco Indians, from whence Waco got its name, took shelter within their wide knobby branches. This area represented to us a period when time was slower, and the world was more predictable and saner. We could be certain that with what the trees had seen over the years, nothing would surprise them. I would often lay on one limb and Inez would lay on another nearby, and we would discuss in detail the events of the day. The ambiance of laying in the everlasting arms of the ancient trees was therapeutic to us. We frequently hoped that the trees would outlive us and certainly outlive the current turmoil that was going on.
It’s odd how much immobile objects such as trees can mean to a person. The sisters became like old friends to me. How Inez and I cherished their friendship, as a common bond between us. It’s something that I don’t often admit, but even today when I go to see them, I openly talk to the trees and almost half expect them to answer me. I hear their voice in the wind, blowing through their branches, the dropping of their acorns, and the creaking of their limbs. It’s a voice of the ages and the ancients. A voice that has been heard since well before man, but it’s a voice that today tends to get drowned out by other sounds, unless you really listen for it. The sisters wave their branches in the wind to let me know that they’re doing well and getting along just fine. These old sisters always make me smile and bring me a sense of stability in an otherwise chaotic world.
Chapter 9
THE ROTTEN APPLE
Captain Tom E. Davis was from good stock. His father was one of the early settlers of Waco and was well respected in the community, a kind man of charity. The early settlers of Waco came to the area because of the rich farmland and the river. Eventually the town became a hub for the railroads. The bridge, my bridge, was the first way that people could walk across the river without getting their knickers wet.
Lady Brazos is a wonderful and beautiful old lady. I say she’s old because I read that her flows started roughly 10 million years ago. Long before man, guns, or hate were invented. Moisture-laden clouds carry their loads from the Gulf of Mexico and gently deposit them in the middle of the Brazos basin in the form of rain. The river basin starts in the high plains of the Texas Panhandle and runs through Waco all the way to the Gulf. The runoff from the rain within the basin is the river’s source of water. The Rio de los Brazos de Dios, as it was called by the early Spanish explorers, means the River of the Arms of God. It’s about 800 miles in length, starts as a trickle, and ends as a magnificent flow at its mouth in the Gulf.
The river is and has always seemed magical to me. Its source of water is seemingly endless. Most of the time its flow is as gentle as a small docile kitten as it meanders from shore to shore with an eventual path to the ocean. But at times, it can become a roaring, angry, and out-of-control lion, devouring everything in its path. Its talents are many. It is an artist, carving out beautiful sculptures in the limestone as its countless droplets act as a riffler, shaving off atoms of limestone with each passing wave. It is a musician producing repetitive harmonies as its waves trickle upon its banks. It is a physicist precisely following the laws of fluid dynamics, pushing molecules in a Brownian Motion along their passage to the sea. It is a mechanism in a mammoth watermill as it repeatedly fetches the excess fresh water that the clouds dropped back to the Gulf to start another seasonal cycle. It is vital to life in the area as its aquifer nourishes the thirsty and arid lands.
Without the river, the basin area would not be the fertile area that feeds the lush flora of the river bottomland. In the early days, this lushness and the water source provided a perfect haven for the wild fauna, including deer and the plentiful bison. The abundance of wild game in the area was a draw and provided ample food for the indigenous people who settled there. The Hueco Indians were a peaceful tribe who lived on the local game and tended small gardens. They generally kept to themselves but were chased off their land by a warlike tribe, likely the Comanches.
When the first European settlers came to the area, the Hueco Indians had already become wayfaring refugees, sadly exiled from their home. The settlers came to the area for the same reasons the Indians settled here, good water, plenty of wild game, fertile soil, and peaceful living. Tom Davis’ father was one of these early settlers and was a good man.
But the apple, in this case fell very far from the tree, as Davis wasn’t anything like his father. Davis married a very nice young lady and had a family of six children, with the youngest being just two years old at the time he comes into this story. They lived in a comfortable house on Dallas Street in East Waco and attended the East Waco Baptist Church.
Mr. Davis seemed to have an almost Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality. He would appear cordial and even meek at times, while at other times he would get a crazed look in his eye and do crazy, outrageous, even violent stuff.
Once I saw him helping a couple of elderly ladies get in and out of their carriage. Then in the same breath, he cursed one of his enemies who he saw walking across the street and took on the demeanor of the neighborhood bully. He apparently had some people fooled into thinking that he was a good man, when in reality he may have looked like a decent man on the outside, but inside he was evil. He was a worm-eaten apple, superficially kind and gentle outwardly but inwardly rotten to the core.
As I mentioned previously, Inez had a keen sense for reading people. She could generally tell if someone was kind, evil, intelligent, not very bright, etc. She had Mr. Davis pegged from the beginning as being a callous, deceitful imp. My own personal opinion of Davis was that he was a henchman “want-to-be.” He would seek out dirty deeds that others didn’t want to follow through with, due to their lack of courage or because they were in some high position. This was his way of showing what a big man he was and that people should fear him. He may have wanted to be feared, but then again, he never dared to directly cross Judge Gerald who would have most definitely put the “fear of God” into him.
In Davis’ day job he worked for Mr. Finnie William in his real estate business on South 4th street, but in his night job, he would “take care of other’s business.” Mr. William, Davis’ employer, was a fine gentleman. He would go out of his way to help people and I think this is why Davis was working for him. I think Mr. William was too nice for his own good. He saw Davis struggling to find legitimate work as not many people would hire him. So, he offered him a job because he knew his family from the East Waco Baptist Church and likely felt sorry for them. But even in a legitimate business like Real Estate, bad things can happen and with Mr. Davis, they generally did.
Mr. Bill Fuller, a Sheriff’s deputy, gave another perspective of Davis. He sai
d that Davis was a man that couldn’t control his drinking, gambling, and fighting habits. He said that in Davis’ Real Estate dealings at Mr. William’s place, he’d forged the signatures of several people in town on different notes and that the notes were soon coming due.
Deputy Fuller had been alerted that Davis was planning to rob the H. & T. C. passenger train between Waco and Marlin. This train left Waco daily around 10 p.m. Mr. Fuller and other deputies had secretly boarded the train on several nights hoping to catch Davis in the act of the robbery, but either Davis got wind of the deputies on board or had a change of mind. Anyway, the Real Estate notes that Davis had forged were coming due and the people whose name he had forged were soon going to know about them. Davis was in a pickle and had to try to resolve the issue in order to stay out of trouble, which likely would have landed him in the penitentiary.
Seeing as how the forged Real Estate documents were mostly from local Baptists, including Cranny, he knew he had to do something. He likely thought that he could gain the favor of the Baptists by running their nemesis, Mr. Brann, out of town. Perhaps he thought that by doing this, he’d be forgiven of these debts by the Baptists.
Yes, Mr. Davis scared Inez. Well before anything had really happened, she kept her distance from Davis as she could tell that there was rottenness below the surface of his façade of niceness. I wish Mr. Brann had taken the same position.
Chapter 10
THE FINAL STRAW
I know the Good Book says to turn the other cheek, but back at that time and even today, this wasn’t the philosophy that many people took. Whether it was Judge Gerald, Mr. Hayden, Cranny, the APA, Tom Davis, or folks from the Waco Mob, people didn’t take well to being insulted and disrespected. They would get even with the person who disrespected them in some ways and this generally meant violence.