CLOSE ENCOUNTER
SAVED BY THE BELL Those chicken scratches were indecipherable.
She worked with Larry Hagman on the school paper.
Thirty miles west of Fort Worth, Texas, is a charming little place and my hometown, Weatherford. The town was also home to Broadway legend Mary Martin and her son, Larry Hagman. I went to high school with Larry, and in 1949 we worked together on the school newspaper, The Grass Burr.
One day Larry walked into the typing room and handed me a piece of paper on which he had written something. He said, “Wanda, would you type this up for me?” I said sure, took the piece of paper, looked it over and thought, Oh my gosh!
I can’t read a word he wrote down.
Just then the bell rang. I handed the paper back and told him I had to get to my next class.
Larry graduated at the end of that school year. I graduated the following year, but after our time on the paper, I never saw him again.
When Larry was on I Dream of Jeannie, I couldn’t believe how he looked. When we were in high school, he was a tall, skinny kid with ugly horn-rimmed glasses.
Once, while Larry was on the hit television series Dallas, my husband and I were checking in at an airport in Ireland to fly to London, then on to Dallas. The young woman who checked us in said, “I’ve been wanting to ask someone from Texas if the characters on the TV show Dallas are really from Texas.”
“I don’t know about the rest of the actors,” I told her, “but I know Larry Hagman is from Texas because I went to high school with him.”
She beamed with delight. She said her dad loved that show; she could hardly wait to tell him that she had met someone who actually went to school with J.R.
As it happens, my husband and I were probably the only people in Texas who didn’t watch Dallas.