Bowie(Carl Brooks) BOWIE

(Echoes from a Padded Room)
By
Carl Brooks


Most families in our small Texas community of five thousand owned but one car in those days (the 1940’s), and we were no exception: ours was a 1941 ford, two-door sedan. Of course Dad needed it for his business on a daily basis, so Mother had no transportation except when he was at home. Weekends, and mainly Wednesdays (due to Wednesdays being Green Stamp Day), were reserved for major grocery shopping, paying bills, running errands and doing most everything else not possible during the week. While living on the Ft. Worth highway, Mr. and Mrs. Brown's small grocery store was next door, so Mother could get by if a food emergency arose. Milk was no problem: The milkman left plenty on the front porch early each weekday and Saturday mornings. Thick glass bottles of sweet cream, or buttermilk with rich cream which had risen to the top, and ready to be poured first for a coffee additive, cereal, or baking. The bottle's lid was a round, flat paper disk which was easily removed to drink directly from the glass container, an act which Dad regularly did, and one that we kids were never allowed to indulge in… at least when anyone was looking. Margarine came in a clear plastic bag. It was colorlessly white with an orange-yellow dot the size of a quarter in the center of the mass. One of us kids was always recruited to massage the bag until the colored dot was spread throughout the margarine, making it come alive with the correct and appetizing golden tint and hue.

Family entertainment consisted mainly of listening to the radio, an occasional drive around town on Sunday, or a real treat was for Mother to make a batch of home-made ice cream. Peach, made with our own backyard, hand-picked fruit, as well as chocolate, were our favorites (except for my sister; she was partial to vanilla.)

Even in such a small town there were anywhere from one to three downtown movie theaters operating at any one time. Admission was a whopping nine cents. Dad gave each of us three kids a quarter on Saturdays and fifteen cents on Sunday to indulge in this, our favorite past-time. Aside from the admission price, we could spend the remaining fortune any way we chose. That discretionary spending led to some pretty hard choices for us. Popcorn was five cents a bag, and so was a coke. There was plenty of penny and nickel candy available to ensure the movie theater ended up with every cent before the day was ended. However, movies ran continuously from opening to closing, so people could stay inside as long as they wanted; watching the same show over and over again. I did just that. Besides, they had the only air conditioning in town.

We didn't figure out until much later that the generous stipend given to us for the movies was really to allow Mother and Dad time alone. It worked really well. Generally, I don't remember being much of a problem to Mother or Dad, however, I spent the vast majority of my waking time outside playing, lost in imaginative thought or scrounging building supplies for a club-house, fort, pirate ship, or attacking someone else's. Since my older brother, Dale, was off somewhere with his friends, I recruited whoever else was available; usually, either Gerry Prestwood or Benny Fred Brady.

Sometimes alone and sometimes not, some adventures took us to the far reaches of our small community. The places we ended up would scare the be-Jesus out of parents today. We’d walk the railroad tracks looking for… anything we could find and sometimes that was considerable. Taking the tracks all the way across town to my great grandparent’s house, the always wide-eyed visit to the hobo camp, or just a half day trip to our favorite fort and hide-out on Cougar Mound. All were exciting and we brought the fun with us. Cougar Mound wasn't much as mountains or even hills go, but it was ours.

Cougar Mound was special. Although just an ancient outcropping of boulders on the edge of town about 100 feet high, legend had it that some time ago, a cougar lived up there and had at one time carried off a little girl and ate her up. Somewhere in the dark recesses of our minds we knew the story was fabricated to keep us kids away from there, but the story just added more excitement to our visits. It was a really neat place with large boulders, crevices, small caves, or Caribbean islands, forts, pirate ships and cowboy campsites. It was anything we wanted it to be. From the top, you could see several miles in any direction. It was perfect. We were always certain to bring along our single shot, lever action Red Ryder B-B guns, or Roy Rogers .45 caliber cap-pistols to add yet another dimension to our duel-to-the-death gun fights. I can still smell that pungent black powder in the air as we triumphed over the outlaws. In reality, a hundred years ago that entire area of north central Texas was deep into Comanche Indian territory. Finding arrowheads on the mound was a pretty common occurrence.

The hobo camp was a hit and miss situation most of the time. Sometimes no one would be there at all and other times several men would have a makeshift camp set up. Everyone told us to stay away from there but, of course, that just made us want to go even more. Most of the hobos were men who had been discharged from the service after World War II and had just never made it home yet. Others had no home to go to. We never really found anything sinister about any of them. They were just regular people who seemed to like to ride the rails and experience what there was out there. One of the common reasons some of the men seemed to share was that no one was telling them what to do, or when to do it. They had fought for our freedom during the war, saved the world, and now they wanted to enjoy some of it. But there were others who had been wounded in places that you couldn’t readily see; they had scars that would never heal. I remember several occurrences during that time period when men would knock at the back door of our house (always the back and never the front door) and ask if they could do any kind of work in exchange for food. Mother always fed them, even if there was no work for them to do. They were always very nice and polite and always paid particular attention to me, as a child of about 5 or 6 years old. In other circumstances you'd have thought they lived next door instead of in a hobo camp. The ones I met were never mean or sneaky or dirty, or in any way desperate acting. They always offered to do work for their meals and seemed to just enjoy the company. I remember those instances quite vividly.

Whenever I wanted to go somewhere, be it down the block to Gerry’s or Benny Fred’s house, up town to the picture show, or a trip down the dirt road to swim in Mr. Latham’s cow pond (or “tank” as we called them), there were but two choices of transportation: riding my brother’s huge bicycle, or walking. I had no problem with walking five or more miles, barefoot, along very hot and rocky dirt roads to get to where I wanted to go. Summertime brought very visible heat waves rising up from the roads and dry vegetation in our little corner of the world. The red dirt roads often burned my seasoned feet and I would use any discarded materials available to fashion “walking pads” to shield them against the heat. Old cardboard worked pretty well; I’d tie strings to a piece, then, hold the string to keep the cardboard snugly against my feet. It worked pretty well if I wasn’t going far. Finding patches of green or dry Johnson grass was always welcomed as makeshift shoes. In summertime, wearing real shoes was never really an option. As soon as school was out for the summer… the shoes came off.

Something else was always present from July through October… the buzzing, rattling sound of cicadas. Although most everyone around there called them locusts, later on I learned the difference. Their constant buzzing always heralded the coming of the hotter periods of summertime. I can’t hear them to this day without instantly being mentally transported back to those times.

Of course, during bad weather or rainy days, we weren’t allowed to stray far from the house, so we’d all meet at the nearest deep ditch, in the rain, and catch craw-dads with our hands. It didn’t rain often in Bowie, but when it did the ditches would fill up fast. We never understood where those craw-dads lived when it wasn't raining, or even during some of our worst droughts, but there were plenty of them during the floods. When we got a jar full, we’d release them and start all over again. When the rain finally ended, we looked liked craw-dads ourselves, muddy and wet from head to toe. Of course, our mothers would yell at us, but I think that was just for show. The situation gave them an excuse to throw us in the bathtub, something they dearly loved to do. They knew that we knew that we were filthy and couldn’t argue. Besides, all that fun was worth a bath.

My entrepreneurial endeavors were varied and somewhat imaginative when living in the house on the Ft. Worth highway. Sometime during my first or second grade in school (this was around 1947 - 48), while playing in the alley behind our house, I discovered an inordinate amount of scrap metal lying about, unclaimed. Most of it was rusty hunks of discarded farm equipment, car parts, utensil parts, etc. The 2nd World War had only recently ended and scrap metal was still in demand.

Halfway down the block lived a man who was crippled and who I visited almost every day, Jimmy Pierce. All of his waking hours were spent sitting in a make-shift bed installed in the rear seat of a custom 1938 Buick parked in front of his house. He fixed broken household appliances, as well as buying scrap iron from anyone who would bring it to him. He supplied me with a toe-sack and I was in business. I ranged to literally every corner of our community, through every alley, into every barnyard, through every ditch and culvert and along vast stretches of railroad tracks in search of my rusty gold.

Jimmy paid me a penny a pound for it, rust and all, and three cents a pound for copper and brass. It was a veritable bonanza. Even at my young age, I had lots of money to spend on anything I wanted. Of course, this opportunity proved to be somewhat time consuming. An all day trek on Saturdays looted me maybe thirty cents. That was a lot of money to me in those days. Besides, I thoroughly enjoyed going places, seeing, exploring and experiencing new and different things, while still being engaged in productive and gainful employment. I loved my work. During my tenure and toil in this line of endeavor, I became sort of known around town and people looked out for my welfare and safety. There weren’t the same dangers out there for a small child as has developed in later times. Mother allowed me lots of room to grow and experience life. This combination of just the right elements fit my personality and needs perfectly.

Another money-making scheme was cutting weeds for the neighbors. I was not afraid of hard work. It seems that Johnson-grass grew everywhere in our town and no one liked or wanted it around. Livestock couldn’t eat it without making them sick; it was unsightly and grew so fast no one could keep it cut for any length of time. Of course, I was too small to use a lawn mower yet, but was a demon with a weed-whacker (we called it a Yo-Yo.) Anyhow, I would cut entire pastures, acres of Johnson-grass in the summertime. I’d swing that blade until I couldn’t move. People who hired me would bring me fruit jars of ice-cold water, wet towels, baloney (sic) sandwiches, cookies, etc. because I’d rarely take a break until the job was completed. I learned to appreciate and like work during that period. Besides, it paid well. For a four hour job, I’d get maybe fifty cents. That’s a lot of movie-time, not to mention popcorn for me, Gerry Prestwood and Benny Fred.

One other scheme which worked pretty well was when Dad was building a garage apartment behind our house. I’d take buckets and fruit-jars full of ice-cold water to all the workmen. They were very appreciative. Most times I collected a nickel from each of them and made many, many trips. Overhead was low and profit was high. Everybody won.

In watching boys in the movies, selling newspapers by hawking them on street corners, I stumbled onto another opportunity. I made a deal with the Bowie News to buy their surplus issues at noon for three cents a copy. Then I’d stand on the corner and hit every store, barber shop, the pool hall, taxi stand, drug store in town and sell them for a nickel each. Many times, though, the customer gave me a dime, and told me to keep the change. Mostly men did that; women were a little tighter with their money. Later, when living in New Mexico, I used the same tactic, except the retail price was a bit higher. Hobbs, New Mexico, had quite a few bars and they were a fertile market. When I had a slow day in the newspaper business, checking pay phone coin-return slots was a decent source of income. In Hobbs, I had a regular route which I checked every day.

During my scrounging around town, I came across many discarded bicycle parts, broken chassis’ and bits and pieces. With a little help from my friends and neighbors, I managed to put together a sort of bicycle which was so large that I could barely ride it. We had a family bicycle, but it was handed down so many times that it had been stripped and barely functioned as basic transportation. I added the parts I could scrounge during my travels and Jimmy Pierce, the scrap metal dealer, added some more. Soon I was in business. It was a 36 inch bike and I wasn’t much taller. By climbing up onto a tree stump, boulder, high curb, or porch stoop, I was able to mount the thing and become mobile. When pedaling, my legs were so short that I had to shift my entire body from one side of the bike to the other in order to apply any force to the pedals. (Opting to settle for a girl’s bike with the center bar lowered was out of the question.) There were no handle-bar grips, so when I fell (and that was very often), the butt-end of the handle-bar would jam into my shirtless stomach, causing a near permanent round scar which was rarely allowed to heal, due to falling so often, re-injuring the injury. A chain guard was out of the question also. I’d clip my pant-leg with a clothes-pin to keep it out of the rotating chain and sprocket. Mother frowned heavily when I showed up with chewed up holes in my pant-legs. Besides, when the sprocket did snag my pant leg, the catch prevented my foot from reaching the ground when I needed to jump off the bike. That bike changed my life. All of a sudden I got to places quickly, which took me ten times as long when walking.

This new mobility tripled my freedom and range. That is until one day I found myself on the opposite side of the Ft. Worth highway from my house. I was moving very fast down the sidewalk, watching for a break in the trees in order to turn and cross the busy highway while keeping my speed up. A good place to turn and cross the highway was the driveway of Gail Woods’ house. (She was the older friend of my sister. She was beautiful and I loved her.) I looked through the trees and up the road then made my turn on to the highway to cross. BANG! I slammed into the side of the cab of an eighteen wheel, semi-truck, going at least 45 mph. I was thrown over the rusty handle bars, over the hood of the truck and landed in the lane on the other side. Another truck, traveling parallel to the first one, slammed on his brakes, narrowly stopping in time to prevent my short life from coming to a tragic end. People screamed, my sister dropped the ice cream cones that she and Gail Woods were carrying and came running to my rescue. I had never gotten so much attention in my entire life. My bicycle was, of course, demolished, but I was fine, except for a scrape and bruise or two. I just knew I’d catch it for that stunt. I guess Mother and Dad were so relieved, they forgot to punish me. Besides, my fast traveling days had ended with the demise of my hand-me down, Western Auto (mostly) bicycle. Huummph! Parents have no sense of humor.

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