Change comes slowly to Central Texas town
TEMPLE — Driving through Temple not long ago, I found myself musing about potato chips, about chicken fried steak at Temple’s Bluebonnet
Cafe (now gone), about the Temple Wildcats’ two-toned football pants (blue in front, white in back).
I also got to thinking about Temple’s two-toned populace, black and white when I knew Temple well, no doubt more diverse these days. That memory led me to a day long ago and a scene that’s haunted me ever since. Recalling what I saw then also got me to thinking about how things have changed over the years. For the better.
I was 8 that summer and was helping my dad on his potato chip route. We had finished up at a little neighborhood grocery store, one of maybe a dozen stops we had in Temple. Back in the truck, we headed across a bridge over a weed-choked dry creek on an unpaved city street. We pulled up beside the Brown Derby, our next stop. Hopping out of the truck, I squinted against the glaring sun.
The Brown Derby was a beer joint on Temple’s East Side, the black side of town, literally on the other side of the wide expanse of tracks in what had long been a railroad town. It was a ramshackle frame building, windowless as I recall, its paint a faded, peeling brown.
Since streets on that side of town were gravel in the 1950s, a pall of dust, particularly in the heat of summer, settled over everything - the buildings, the scraggly trees, the overgrown weeds and tall Johnson grass alongside the road, beat-up cars parked on the street or up on concrete blocks in sun-baked front yards.
The Brown Derby’s proprietor — whose name was Brown, I believe — was an old woman, old to me, anyway. She usually had a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, her face wrinkled into a perpetual scowl. She and my dad always talked like old friends, and in a way they were. He had been calling on her once a week, every week, for years.
On the day I’m remembering Dad parks the yellow truck with the green Creamer’s Clover Fresh Potato Chips spelled out in cursive on the side panel, and I hop out the sliding door we always keep open as we drive. It’s cooler with the door open, plus we can scramble out quicker. We are at the side of the building.
We have walked maybe half a dozen steps when three men lurch around the corner; they have burst through the front door. It takes me a second to realize that two of them are white cops, and between them they have a black man, his head bald like a bullet, like a darker version of the Ike cartoons I’ve seen in the Waco Times Herald. In his 30s perhaps, he is well-dressed, in a blue suit, white shirt and dark tie. The cops have hold of him by the upper arms and are beating him around the head with billy clubs.
I have never seen the lethal-looking long, black batons, the leather straps wrapped around the cops’ heavy wrists. They chop down at the man with hard, quick motions, the batons bouncing off his head, shoulders and neck. They make a grunting sound each time the batons hit.
Red blood, shiny against his dark skin, rivulets down the man’s face. Oblivious to us, the cops curse the man and keep swinging, but he won’t go down, why I don’t know. They have revolvers in their holsters but never draw them.
The man’s eyes loll back in his head. He isn’t really trying to fight back, but still he won’t go down. He never says a word the whole time.
We back slowly toward the truck, my dad shielding me with an arm, and we watch the cops drag the man to a black-and-white patrol car. Finally, his legs give way, and he slumps against the door. The cops push his head down and shove him into the back seat. Then they speed away, leaving a curtain of dust hanging over the gravel parking lot.
Once we get inside, Mrs. Brown tells us the man was making a nuisance of himself, so she called the cops. I remember, even now, the brutality of what I witnessed.
Passing through Temple the other day, I pulled off Interstate 35 and tried without success to find where the Brown Derby might have been so many years ago. Everything, of course, has changed, including the once-gravel streets.
As I drove around the East Side I thought of another hot afternoon in Temple, maybe the same summer as the Brown Derby incident.
While my dad called on a mom-and-pop grocery store across the dry creek from the beer joint, I played catch in the sunbaked side yard of the store with two brothers about my age. One was left-handed, like me, and let me borrow his glove.
The boys’ parents — a young black couple, very serious, as I recall — owned the store; the family lived in rooms behind it.
The boys and I didn’t talk much as we tossed the ball back and forth, occasionally throwing grounders or flies. What I was thinking, though, maybe for the first time in my life, is how they were just like me. They’re black, I’m white, but so what?
“Good catch,” we’d say. “Good catch.” Post Script:
Those little boys playing catch are, of course, grown men by now. With children of their own, perhaps. Maybe grandchildren. I wonder how they’ve fared.
Their city has certainly changed. When I knew Temple, its population was 30,000 or so. Today it’s approaching 80,000. It’s the second-largest city in Bell County, behind Killeen.
An incident that barely made news beyond Bell County would suggest that some things never seem to change — in Temple and elsewhere. On Dec. 2, 2019, a Temple police officer named Carmen DeCruz attempted to stop a speeding vehicle. The driver, a 28-year-old black man named Michael Dean, did not stop immediately, and “a short pursuit ensued.” When Dean finally stopped, DeCruz walked up to the car, service weapon drawn and finger on the trigger. Apparently reaching through the driver’sside window to turn off the ignition, he shot Dean in the head and killed him. Dean was unarmed.
DeCruz, a nine-year veteran of the force, resigned before the Temple Police Department could take action. In February, a Bell County Grand Jury indicted him on one count of second-degree manslaughter. A trial date has not been set.