A caveman came to town and has never left
IRAAN —Two signs along the road of life that you’ve been left on the shoulder: 1) The furniture you grew up with is now ensconced in museums under the catch-phrase midcentury modern; 2) A passing remark about “Alley Oop” is met with a blank stare.
I suppose a museum is as good a place as any for a Formica kitchen table, circa 1956 — we had a pink one, with gray swirls — but anyone who ever sprawled across the livingroom floor perusing the Sunday comic-strip adventures of the loincloth-wearing caveman from the Kingdom of Moo knows that he deserves a new generation of fans.
Two points of fact before we get into why this little West Texas town off the beaten track, in the middle of nowhere — whatever isolation cliché you want to use — has ties to a cigar-smoking, top hat-wearing troglodyte:
First, it’s pronounced Ira-Ann, not Iran (as in the nation President Donald Trump loves to hate). The Texas town, population about 1,200, is named after Ira and Ann Yates, who became instant millionaires in 1926 when their hardscrabble ranch became the most prolific oil field in America, perhaps the world.
Second, mention Alley Oop to anyone under, say, 40, and only basketball fans will presume to know what you’re talking about. They’ll know that an “alley oop” is a looping pass, usually from a point guard out front, in the general direction of a big man near the basket who leaps, catches and dunks in one motion. That’s not Iraan’s alley oop connection.
That connection dates to the late 1920s when Iowa native Victor Trout Hamlin was working as a young oil-company carto-
grapher around Iraan, the newly sprouted boomtown. Hamlin’s day job was to make terrain sketches for well locations, but what struck his fancy were fossils being dug up prior to drilling, fossils that were simply trucked away and dumped somewhere.
As a kid he’d drawn cavemen and dinosaurs, but as an adult he filled in the details with Alley Oop and his pals, including a winsome girlfriend named Miss Moola and a loyal pet dinosaur named Dinny. Hamlin — who studied journalism at Drake University and had worked briefly as a Houston Press photographer — managed to get “Alley Oop” syndicated. The comic strip made its newspaper debut on Dec. 5, 1932, and would soon be a funny-paper staple, appearing at its peak in some 800 newspapers around the country. (Alley Oop is an English variation on the French phrase for “Let’s go!”)
Oop making a comeback
Hamlin produced the strip until his retirement in 1971. A series of artists continued his work until earlier this year, when it went on hiatus. Alley Oop fans worried that their beetle-browed buddy was gone forever, lost to pre-history, so to speak, but the New York Times reported recently that he’ll be back after the first of the year. A new creative team will tell the tale of Oop and friends six days a week and on Sundays will shift to the story of Li’l Oop, a new, pre-teen version set in Alley Oop’s middle-school years.
“I definitely don’t want to alienate the old readers, but I want to create a starting point for new readers,” writer Joey Allison Sayers told the Times.
Evans Turpin, a retired petroleum engineer who spent most of his career with Marathon Oil Co., recalled earlier this week how he and his fellow Iraanians in the early 1960s tried to use their community’s Alley Oop connection to energize their little town.
“A local preacher got us all excited” about creating a city park with an Alley Oop theme, he recalled.
Opening in 1965, the shady seven-acre park included picnic tables, a concrete Dinny the Dinosaur for kids to climb on, a giant rendering of a cigar-chomping Alley Oop and a tall observation tower. The town was hoping that Alley Oop fans from around the country would make the trek to Iraan.
“The big plan didn’t materialize the way we thought,” Turpin said.
The park still exists, although Alley Oop and pals are showing their age. The little museum inside the park, focused on archaeology and local history, is closed temporarily while the city replaces ’60s-era electrical wiring and waits for its volunteer director to get back on her feet. Ninety-two-year-old Edna Snooks Collett — everybody calls her Snooks — was on an Indian petroglyph hike not long ago when she fell and hit her head. She’s out of the hospital, Turpin said, and should be back on her feet soon.
Town is dwindling
Turpin, 80, lived in Houston, Austin, Midland and elsewhere when he was working for Marathon but drifted back to Iraan years ago. “I just liked the small town,” he said.
He was living in Houston when he retired early, during the 1986 bust. “I was thinking that if I retired, maybe I could save someone else’s job,” he said.
He worked as a consultant for 20 years, then retired for real. For the next 20 years, he and his late wife wore out three RVs traveling the country. These days he’s deeply involved with the Lions Club, the local archaeological society and other civic endeavors. He worries about the little town’s boom-and-bust susceptibility. Iraan is just outside the shale boom and, although a vast wind farm and a pipeline are going in nearby, neither requires many employees after they’re up and running. A superb school system is losing students.
“We’re sinking down as low as it’s been since I’ve been here,” Turpin said. “I’m hoping there’s a bottom, but I’ve got a fear in the back of my mind there isn’t.”
Nancy Beck is hoping too. For the past 19 years, she’s been the proprietor of Mesquite Wood Bar-B-Q, a meat-lover’s mecca where Alley Oop himself would show up if he rode Dinny into town. If he happened to amble in on Thursdays, he might meet half the town, lured by the Thursday-special giant baked potato piled high with brisket.
“This town is the greatest town I’ve ever lived in,” Beck, a Midland native, told me. “It’s clean, there’s no violence, the schools are great. Everyone is so nice here.”
She said she’s known four or five people over the years who broke down in Iraan and stayed. She also mentioned “a nice, little airport” outside town. If Houstonians want to fly in for barbecue, she said, she’d be happy to drive out to the airport and pick them up.
You never can tell. There’s no Katy Freeway traffic, no hurricanes, no crowds except at Iraan Braves football games on fall Friday nights and Mesquite Wood Bar-B-Q on Thursdays at noon. Like Alley Oop, those flying Houstonians might just end up staying.