Like a pebble on a Texas stream, tales ripple out
One of the pleasures of mining musty small-town museums, distant memories and forgotten Texas tales is the response from readers. Occasionally, the response comes in the form of a correction, which I appreciate — he says with gritted teeth — particularly if the correction arrives in time to make it right online. More often, I’m the happy recipient of additional information, an engaging personal story, maybe a suggestion for a future column. Invariably, I learn something.
The problem is, I’m usually the only student, unless, over coffee on a Saturday morning, my wife will hear the inevitable, “Hey, Laura, listen to this!” (Laura is the one, by the way, who first heard about last week’s subject, the mysterious Pansy Carpenter, from a 1994 article in “Cite” magazine.) This week, I thought I would expand “the class” with a few random re
sponses to recent columns.
Pansy, the former trapeze artist who spent much of her life building distinctive shacks for oilfield workers in McCamey, prompted my friend Jerome Loving to remind me that she wasn’t necessarily the most famous resident of the little West Texas oil-field town. For that honor, he nominates Gary Gilmore.
Yes, that Gary Gilmore, the convicted killer whom the state of Utah executed in 1977 for the two murders he committed there. His life and firing-squad demise were the subject of the 1979 novel “The Executioner’s Song” by Norman Mailer and the 1982 TV movie starring Tommy Lee Jones as Gilmore. Mailer won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, Jones an Emmy for his performance.
As Jerry points out, Gilmore was born in McCamey’s Burleson Hotel in 1940. His father, Frank Gilmore, traveling with his wife Bessie, was a con man on the lam. The little family stayed in McCamey about six weeks after Gary’s birth.
Jerry, an Aggie professor of American literature and culture, knows whereof he speaks. He’s the author of “Jack and Norman: A StateRaised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer’s ‘The Executioner’s Song.’ ” Published in 2017, his book explores Mailer’s ill-fated connection to another convicted killer, Jack Henry Abbott. (A movie is in the works.)
Martha Hunt, who grew up in Houston in the early ’50s, has more benign memories of McCamey. Her dad occasionally rescued the family from Houston’s summer heat and humidity by working a deal with his employer, Humble Pipe Line Co., to get out of town for a while. One summer, probably when she was 11 or 12, they escaped to McCamey — a far cry, she recalled, from her life in leafy West University.
“Although my mom did not consider McCamey much of a vacation, I loved it,” she wrote. “We lived in the only rent house my dad could find. The Humble Pipe Line ‘Camp’ — the most upscale part of town! — was full. We lived in one of five identical shotgun white-frame houses that the owner had won in a poker game. And the good part: It was right across the street from the city park and public swimming pool.
“There was one ‘real’ tree in one yard in the town, plus mesquites in the park. But that desert summer was fun! There were friends to play with from neighboring houses, a swimming pool right there for cooling off in the afternoon, a movie theatre that had coolish air blowing & changed movies once a week & horned frogs to catch — you just had to keep an eye peeled for the huge red ants whose bite felt like a nail in your bare foot!”
A couple of more tidbits about the intriguing Pansy: Nancy Campbell, a distant relative, recalls a cousin telling her that Pansy went to California for a shortlived acting/singing career. Nancy, who lives near Eastland (home of Ol’ Rip, the immortal horned toad) also remembers going with her mother and other family members to Pansy’s house in McCamey after she died in 1972. They found money throughout the house — “in books and jars and hidden everywhere.”
The column about the WASPs, women pilots during World War II who trained at Sweetwater’s Avenger Field, prompted Michael Bludworth of Houston to make a slight correction. In the column I mentioned that the WASP program got its start at Houston’s Howard Hughes Airport. I shouldn’t have called it Howard Hughes Airport, Michael said.
“The airport was named for Hughes in July of 1938 but rescinded in November of 1938,” he wrote. “Although the use of the name may have continued informally after that time, the airport resumed its earlier name of ‘Houston Municipal Airport.’ ”
The reason for rescinding the name, I read later, is that regulations at the time did not allow federal improvement funds for an airport named for a living person. In 1967, Municipal Airport became William P. Hobby Airport, three years after the death of the former Texas governor.
Michael also knows whereof he speaks: He maintains two Facebook groups, “Houston’s Aviation History” and “TransTexas Historical Society.”
As an aside, he mentioned that the company that trained the WASP pilots, conducted classroom studies and maintained the aircraft was Houston-based Aviation Enterprises, forerunner to Trans-Texas Airways. Remember TTA, derisively known as Tree-Top Airways? TTA under Frank Lorenzo became Texas International Airlines, which acquired Continental in 1982; Lorenzo merged the two and called it Continental.
The WASP column prompted Randy Riha of Houston to suggest a column about airway beacons constructed in the mid-1920s by the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Commerce to speed up transcontinental mail service. Before radar was invented, approximately 1,500 beacons guided night-flying pilots from city to city — in Texas from Texarkana westward across the state.
“The pilots flew biplanes ‘line of sight’ between these beacons, which were spaced 10 miles apart,” Randy wrote. One of the few beacons still in existence is on his ranch near Sweetwater.
I’ll get back to the historic airmail beacon system and the concrete arrow on Randy’s ranch in a column later on, but his suggestion prompts a confession: I’ve noticed a tendency recently to tilt westward on my Native Texan ramblings, which means I too often ignore the richness of East Texas.
Maybe it’s because Laura and I have a little get-away home in Marathon. When I’m there, I hear a lot of Big Bend-area stories at the Gage Hotel’s White Buffalo Bar and elsewhere, and yet every time I’m in Nacogdoches or Carthage or Kirbyville or Henderson, I hear stories just as compelling (the Marx brothers in Nacogdoches, Tex Ritter in Carthage, a runaway elephant in Corsicana). I’m in the market for stories from behind the Pine Curtain.
Whether it’s East Texas or West, North Texas or South, I really appreciate hearing from Native Texan readers. I’ll try to be less selfish about sharing now and then.