by Laura Bush
Our parents' generation might have been glued to the radio for news and the somber-toned voice of Edward R. Murrow from London, but in Midland, the radio and later television were our gateways to music and our Edward was simply an Ed, Ed Sullivan. I was not quite ten when Elvis Presley first sang and shook on The Ed Sullivan Show, and I remember watching him at Gwyne's house. Her parents were out for the evening, and we had a babysitter. The two of us were alone in her den, and when Elvis got up and began to swivel his hips, we did too, shimmying as the King crooned and danced on the grainy black-and-white screen.
We were raised on rock 'n' roll, and the adults didn't complain. Buddy Holly was from Lubbock, and Roy Orbison was from another West Texas town, Wink, so we felt as if the music was almost homegrown. Late at night, after Mother and Daddy had gone to bed and all the local radio stations had signed off, I'd shut my door, prop open my school books, and listen to Wolfman Jack play hits out of Nuevo Laredo or tune in to KOMA Oklahoma City, whose signal carried across the skies at night on the AM radio, reaching as far away as Wyoming and the Dakotas in the north, or west to Arizona, on the cool, clear air.
I had some records, and I bought the Beatles' first American album when it was released, but Regan was the one with what we considered a priceless collection of 45s, which her mother boxed up and sold for pennies on the dollar at a garage sale once Regan was grown and gone.
To be truly daring, we snuck out of the house on sleepover nights. We would tiptoe out of a bedroom and quietly open the front door. The more daring kids might climb out a window and drop down--no one ever had a second-floor bedroom and at most you risked hitting a low bush. Then we would walk around the neighborhood streets in our pajamas under the faint glow of the streetlights. When we went to Peggy's house, we crossed over to the big Cowden Park, which had once been a buffalo wallow and now became a lake when it rained, with frogs that called to each other deep into the darkness.
Some girls snuck out of doors and windows to go to their boyfriends' houses, and some took their parents' cars as well. I never did any of that, although I did ride around one time with my friend Candy after she put her parents' car in neutral and rolled it out of the garage. She made it around the neighborhood on numerous nights until our friend Mike Jones opened the car door as we pulled into the driveway. Candy kept driving and smashed the car door into the side of the garage. The door closed on Mike's foot, and the garage wall left a huge dent in the door. Candy sat there in total shock; until that moment she had always gotten the car home without a scratch.
My one foray backing into the pole at Agnes's at age thirteen had cured me of any desire to sneak our car out, and I was a classic only child who never wanted to disappoint Mother and Daddy. My biggest acts of teenage bravery were trotting along Midland's sidewalks in checked pajamas.
After San Jacinto Junior High, I should have attended Midland High, but instead I went to the brand-new high school, Robert E. Lee, because we had moved again. Every other school in Midland was named for a Texas hero or event, from Jim Bowie, Sam Houston, James Fannin, Mirabeau Lamar, Davy Crockett, William Travis, and Lorenzo de Zavala to San Jacinto and Alamo, for the famous battles against Mexico. Looking back, there were likely a lot of reprobates in the Texas group, but they seemed so much more distant from our own time and place. And of course, in Texas, they were venerated and then some. As John Steinbeck once mused, "Like most passionate nations Texas has its own history based on, but not limited by, facts." It is almost impossible to be raised in Texas and not know that Texas was once an independent nation. To make sure that no one in Midland forgot, we studied Texas history in the fourth grade and again for the whole of the seventh, and every morning, we crossed under our heroes' names emblazoned on the brick or concrete block of our school buildings. The only outside hero was George Washington Carver, whose name adorned the segregated high school where Midland's black students went. But now there was Robert E. Lee.
Midland had not existed during the Civil War, and it seemed both absurd and wrong to name a school for a Confederate commander in the year 1960. At the time, my mother told me that one school board member was adamant about calling it Robert E. Lee and with a shake of her head just let it go. And I did too. No one I knew protested; it was simply considered to be out of our hands. As kids, we lived in our own little world, where we could ride our bikes wherever we wanted and sneak out in our pajamas because Midland was a safe town and we were safe within its limits. Our parents were not afraid for us to dash outside the minute school was over and play until the front porch lights and streetlamps flickered on and it was time to come in and eat. We lived our lives in a kind of easy oblivion and ceded the important decisions to the adults.
At Lee, they played "Dixie" at the football games, and we were expected to sing when we heard the first chords. Our teams were called the Rebels, our annual was the Rebelee. But it bothered me. It bothered me from the moment I went.
I went to Lee because Daddy had sold our house. It wasn't even for sale. One afternoon, a real estate agent came to the front door and rang the bell. Daddy answered, and the woman asked if she could buy the house. She had a client who was willing to offer Daddy a very good price, and on the spot, Daddy said yes. It is the one time I remember Mother being upset and disappointed. She loved that house and did not want to leave, but we did. We packed up and moved to a spec house that Daddy had recently built on Hughes Street and then, a couple of years later, to another home over on Humble Avenue, the last house that Daddy ever built for us, our "nice" house.
It was in our nice house that one afternoon I answered a knock at the door. Standing on the front step were two men in suits. They held up their badges and said, "We're from the FBI." The next thing they asked was, "Is Harold Welch at home?" Daddy was taking a nap, and I was quite nervous to go wake him. But I did. The FBI men were in the process of "busting a bookie," as they put it, and they wanted to know if Daddy could come downtown and help identify him. Daddy shook his head. "No," he said. "I've only talked to him on the phone. I don't know what he looks like." The men thanked him politely and left. Betting itself apparently didn't bother them.
Our Humble Avenue house sat at the intersection of Humble and Lanham, but it was so quiet that if a car cruised down the street late at night, the low rumble of its engine would wake me from a sound sleep. On Humble, Regan and I spent a lot of time in my room, which stood at the end of the house, adjacent to the sidewalk and the street. At night, when the streetlights began to glow, we would prop open the window--the same one that blew in during a particularly fierce dust storm, spraying glass, sand, and grit all over my room--and our boyfriends would tiptoe along the side yard to stand on the grass and talk to us through the screen. One of my neighbors, Dick Taylor, preferred to shoot out the streetlight with his .22 gauge hunting rifle and then amble over in the dark to stand at the window and talk. Each time he shot it out, Mother would call the city and say, "You need to replace the streetlight, somebody else has shot it out." But it was only Dick with his .22. The city would put in a new light, and Dick would wait a week and then shoot it out again. My parents made no real effort to investigate; they liked Dick. And my mother was waging her own stealth battle with the lamppost. She had joined the Audubon Society and eagerly devoured its magazine and mailers, which were crusading against the pesticide DDT. Quietly around our blocks, bright yellow Ban DDT bumper stickers began appearing on utility poles and light posts. Mother was hardly in a position to turn Dick in. Still, I'm sure if I had ever crawled out that window, Mother and Daddy would have done far more than make another call to the city authorities.
But living on Humble Avenue meant that I was no longer in the Midland High School district, and from that, so much else changed.
All of Lee's home football games were held at the Midland High Stadium. I had been going to the Friday-night games since I was a fifth grader at Bowie. There was something thrilling about those Friday nights. Everyone went, parents and children, people whose c
hildren had long since moved away, even people with no children at all. It was football and Friday night in Midland. I would watch neighbors stream out of their houses and walk down the streets or more often see lines of cars snaking toward the parking lot. The stadium rose up out of the ground like a great bowl, and everyone had a place in it. Kids did not sit with their families; they sat with their school and their grade. The fifth and sixth graders from all the city's elementary schools sat in the bleachers on the elementary end in one end zone. The other end zone was reserved for the junior high students, in seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. The high schoolers sat together in the middle of the stadium; the adults sat around them. If anyone bothered to look down at either end zone, it seemed as if the whole stadium was levitating, because most of the kids didn't sit still, they spent the entire game jumping around and talking. The boys would race to the top row and pretend to leap off the top of the stadium or would flutter their arms and kick their legs as if they were about to fall off into the inky dark night. All around them, the girls had their eyes trained on the boys. I think Midland and Lee had good football teams all the years I was there, but I can't recall who won or lost each game.
By high school, the game watching changed. A boy might invite you to a game, but most girls hoped they would be dating a football player down on the field. If you were going with someone on the team, he would send you a big mum with his number on it; for Midland High, it was a big gold chrysanthemum with the player number twisted in purple pipe cleaners and adorned with long purple and gold ribbons. Lee High School players sent white mums with their numbers in maroon pipe cleaners and trails of maroon and white ribbons. Football players' girls pinned these chrysanthemums to their jackets or sweaters so everyone could see them. For several years, I dated a boy who played for Midland. He couldn't afford to send me a chrysanthemum for every game, but he did have one delivered for the big contests, and I pinned it on my clothes and then brought it home to wilt for months afterward on my bulletin board.
The biggest game was between Midland and Lee high schools at the end of the season, but otherwise on Friday nights, the two teams played the Odessa schools, Odessa Permian and Odessa High, and teams from San Angelo and Abilene and other towns in the district. The visiting teams would ride in big buses with convoys of cars, fans who came to cheer for their school.
Midland hardly ever has a fall. Occasionally, we would get just the right mix of rain and cool to turn the red oaks a bright, rich russet, but most of the time, summer with its shimmering heat would linger well past October. Then suddenly, around November 17, the cold would barrel in on a tight, hard wind, and the grass would freeze. There was very little in-between. But because Midland sits at the edge of the desert, the nights, even in the baking heat, would be cool. It was possible to actually feel cold when you went to a football game, sitting under that enormous, star-laced sky. The blazing stadium lights couldn't dim the vast display of stars overhead, an arc of light beaming back down upon us.
I loved school. I was a good student with good grades. I learned to write in a style that Mrs. Stallings, my senior English teacher, called the Dr. Guthrie style, after the sermons of Dr. Guthrie, the minister at our First Methodist Church. You stated your argument, found examples to support it, and then summed up your point all over again. I took mostly honors courses and earned five points for my grade point average if I made an A, four if I made a B. I was always in Honors English, where we read the early 1960s definition of the classics: Jane Eyre, Ethan Frome, Shakespeare's plays, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot's Silas Marner. But I loved to read books, all the time, in any class. During the hours we spent on math or science, I would perch my textbook on my desk to look particularly studious, while behind its thick cover I was hiding my latest book. In one case it was Lady Chatterley's Lover, which for 1963 Midland was quite risque. Before I was out of junior high, I had devoured William Goldman's The Temple of Gold and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. I looked for any opportunity to read. I also took a course that was reserved for the top students in the school called History of Western Thought. It was a philosophy course that started with Plato, and at the end of the school year we had to write a big paper, like a thesis. I loved it, reading Plato and Socrates and St. Augustine in the middle of West Texas.
I was not the most popular girl in high school, but I got asked to dances, which had moved from the San Jacinto Junior High cafeteria, where the dance committee would hang green and white crepe paper streamers from the ceiling and girls by the dozen would troop off to the bathroom or mill about at the edge of the linoleum floor, to the newly built youth centers adjacent to Lee or Midland High. They were real dances, with hired bands and couples twisting and turning on the dance floor. Before each dance, most boys sent a corsage of roses or gardenias, sometimes orchids if the date was very special. After the girls had worn them, they tacked the corsages to droop and dry on the bulletin boards that were staples in every bedroom and that held such other prized possessions as the folded-up paper notes that were passed in class and occasional pictures of friends. I pinned my dance corsages next to my shriveled gold football flowers.
Mother was the one who always thought "what if," and the "what if" invariably came back to the same thing, what if she and Daddy had never sold the big house on Princeton Avenue? What if we hadn't sold that house and had just stayed there? If we had stayed on Princeton, I would have gone to Midland High rather than Lee, and then in her mind everything would have been different. Everything was the night of November 6, 1963, two days after I had turned seventeen.
That night, I picked up the car keys and my purse. I stopped in the kitchen to tell Mother and Daddy good-bye. They were standing around the breakfast bar with some of their friends, the smoke drifting up in slow, lazy curls from the ends of four or five half-smoked cigarettes. I was smiling. Everything felt unbelievably light and happy, and someone called back, "Have fun." I walked through the utility room door as I had done hundreds of other times, pulled the car out of the driveway, and headed off down the smooth street to my friend Judy Dykes's house. She was one of my good high school friends; her dad had been a friend of Daddy's from Lubbock. We had made plans to go to the drive-in movies, though in typical seventeen-year-old fashion we hadn't bothered to look in the paper to see what was playing. We decided that we would drive by and see what was there. So I left Judy's house and headed to the loop, which back then was a little country road with no streetlights circling around Midland.
We talked as I drove along the pitch-black road. I knew in my mind that somewhere ahead was a right turn for Big Spring Street, where the drive-in theater was, because the loop almost dead-ended at Big Spring. Beyond the turn the asphalt stopped, and there was nothing more than a trail of unpaved dirt and dust. Most drivers turned right, toward town. I knew there was a turn, but where that turn was seemed very far away until suddenly, off in the middle of a field, I glimpsed a stop sign with the corner beam of my headlights. At that moment, I heard Judy's voice: "There's a stop sign." And I just couldn't stop. I was going along, a little below the speed limit, which was fifty-five miles an hour. The next thing I knew, I was in the intersection, and immediately in front of me was another car. It came rushing out of the darkness, and I was right upon it, without a second to turn the wheel. All I heard was the horrible sound of metal colliding, the catastrophic boom that occurs when two hard pieces of steel make contact.
The next thing I knew, I was rolling on the ground, in the dirt, holding my head. I had been thrown from the car with a force so great that I didn't even hit the asphalt on the road but was tossed clear over to the hard, dry ground alongside. In those awful seconds, the car door must have been flung open by the impact and my body rose in the air until gravity took over and I was pulled, hard and fast, back to earth. I have no memory of being thrown or of raising my hands to my head; it must have been an automatic reaction. Eventually, I stopped rolling and simply lay there, completely stunned. And then slowly Judy go
t out of the car, and I got up.
My face was banged up; I had a cut on my knee that bled in a long red gash, and my ankle was broken, although no one knew it until several days afterward. The doctors didn't find it in the emergency room. In the distance, I saw headlights, and someone else stopped. It was a family from Midland, and they came over and put their arms around Judy and me. We stood there, embraced by them. But I knew we were not the only ones in the crash. There was another car.
The whole time, I was praying that the person in the other car was alive too. In my mind, I was calling, "Please, God. Please, God. Please, God," over and over and over again. Then more cars pulled up, and someone must have gone for help, because eventually we heard the wail of sirens and glimpsed the rotating, flashing lights of ambulances and police cars.
One driver who arrived was a man I recognized, Bill Douglas, the father of my very good high school friend Mike. The Douglases lived up beyond the loop, in a small neighborhood about four long city blocks past that corner of Big Spring Street. We considered it almost a country neighborhood because there was nothing around the houses except the bottom tips of ranches and open land. But, on a quiet November night, that block of houses with their long, wide yards was close enough to hear a thunderous crash at the edge of Big Spring. And I saw Mr. Douglas lean over whomever had been in that other car.