The Time of My Life Read online

  The face in the picture seemed to be smelling some thing terrible. Something rotten in Washington, maybe. It promised “full employment through voluntary participation…education through smaller classes and better equipment…better efficiency in government.” The press, the leaflet said, “has the responsibility to the public for news content.”

  As I wondered who Cleaver might be, a mustachioed figure in a brown leisure suit sprang from be hind a big column, much as the premier danseur flies onto the stage during the second scene in Swan Lake. “Any questions?” he asked. He seemed to be experiencing the same olfactory unhappiness as the man on the leaflet. He wore a lapel tag declaring, “Hello! My name is H. Cleaver for president.”

  “You’re Cleaver,” I said.

  “Yes, I am,” he sniffed.

  “Do you always leap out like that?” I asked.

  “Yes. And I’ve been interviewed three times already. Once by NBC.”

  “How long have you been in the race?”

  “I started last March,” he said. “I took a look at the other guys and decided I was as qualified as they are. I’ve been in business. I know how to fire people.”

  I opened my note pad.

  Q. Fire people?

  A. Yes. If Nixon had fired Haldeman and Ehrlichman and that bunch, he would have been all right. And if he had turned over the tapes. Those were the only two things wrong with him. But I can do that. I can fire people. I’ve been in business.

  Q. What business are you in?

  A. At the present, I’m unemployed.

  Q. What did you do when you were employed?

  A. The security business.

  Q. Security?

  A. Yes. I was a security guard for Montgomery Ward.

  Q. Have you campaigned much?

  A. In all fifty states.

  Q. No kidding?

  A. By mail.

  Q. Where are you from?

  A. About twenty-two miles south of Albany, New York.

  Q. But where?

  A. I just told you. Twenty-two miles south of Albany.

  Q. What’s the name of your town?

  A. The town of Kinderhook. As opposed to Kinderhook County. It’s not a town, actually. It’s an un incorporated village. On Route Nine.

  Q. Mr. Cleaver, besides your business experience, what qualifications do you have to be president?

  A. I’m glad you asked me that. I took a twenty-two-day tour of Russia last summer. And I’ve answered some international questions, like how to defend Austria from the Soviet Union.

  Q. How would you do that?

  A. Blow up the hydroelectric plants. If you take away what the Russians want, they don’t have any reason to invade Austria, right?

  Q. Who asked you about this?

  A. A friend of my wife. I don’t remember her name.

  Q. Do you think you have a chance at the nomination?

  A. Sure. The convention is going to be deadlocked, and I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t turn to me. Do you?

  Q. If they turned to you, who would you choose as your running mate?

  A. I have several under consideration. Right now, I’m leaning toward Tower.

  Q. Senator John Tower of Texas?

  A. Right.

  Q. Why?

  A. Well, I think New York and Texas would give a nice balance to the ticket, don’t you?

  Before I could answer, Mr. Cleaver leaped into the elevator and was gone.

  August, 1976

  King Dolph and the Eagles

  NOW IT CAME TO PASS in those days that certain shepherds and goatherds in the hills and deserts of the Kingdom of Texas did go out unto their pastures and cast their eyes upon certain lambs and kids laid waste, yea, torn asunder by beasts of the wilderness.

  And they were sore vexed and lifted their eyes unto the heavens in despair. And behold, the sun glittered on the wings of an eagle.

  The men rent their garments and poured ashes upon their heads and made their way unto Austin, even unto the palace of the good King Dolph (or perchance to the other palace at Uvalde) and made a piteous plea unto him.

  “O good king!” they cried. “Our lambs and kids are laid waste upon the fields! Yet the golden eagle, from which we profiteth not a shekel, circleth above with the sun glinting upon his wings! Dost thou not perceive the connection?”

  Now King Dolph was a keeper of herds himself and knew truly well from which beasts a herdsman doth profit and from which he profiteth not. Wise ruler that he was, he also perceived in the twinkling of an eye from which beasts a king doth profit at election time, and from which beasts a king profiteth not. A king, he did perceive, profiteth not from eagles.

  The king’s heart did burst asunder when he saw the weapons in the hands of his countrymen and knew with what eagerness the hands did itch. “Yea, verily,” quoth he, wiping copious tears from his royal eyes. “‘Tis an awful thing to gaze upon lambs lying dead upon the field and great birds without profit soaring freely in the heavens, gathering unto themselves the rays of the sun. If ‘twere the good days of old, I would lead thee and thy vassals against them myself, and smite them hip and thigh with mine own jaw bone. But the imperial government in faraway Washington understandeth not the good ways of old. The faraway rulers understandeth not the joy that leapeth in the hearts of good herdsmen at the sight of skies empty of eagles. And when spies did reveal unto yon government the scarcity of eagles in our land, it stayeth our hand, even unto this day.”

  “But sire,” wept the shepherds and goatherds. “Does thou not perceive the connection? The lambs are dead, but the eagle liveth!”

  “Yea, verily, I perceive it,” answered the king. “I shall inquire.” So he did urge the imperial Fish and Wildlife Service to bless the slaying of any golden eagle that didst presume to make its home in hills and deserts of the kingdom where lambs and kids did also reside.

  And it came to pass that a still, small voice called unto the king. “King Dolph,” it cried, “wherein is the connection? ‘Tis the custom of gold eagles to feed upon mice and rabbits and carrion slain by other beasts. ‘Tis a rare thing indeed to find a lamb verily slain by an eagle.”

  “Once is enough,” quoth the king. “When shepherds and goatherds desire to cast their eyes upon dead eagles, who am I to say them nay?”

  “But couldst not the Kingdom of Texas pay for the carcasses of the few lambs verily slain by eagles? Or mayhap some group of citizens who doth love to watch the wings of eagles gather unto themselves the sun? ’Twould be but a small price to pay for such a sight. And a rare sight it is, forsooth.”

  But King Dolph was not moved. “Thou under-standeth neither shepherds nor goatherds nor kings,” quoth he. “The only beautiful eagle is one spread upon a fence of barbed wire, where thou canst mea sure its wingspan and take its picture and put it in the weekly newspaper. That hath always been the way in Texas. Depart ye, and cry in the wilderness henceforth, if thou canst find any.”

  And it came to pass that wild dogs and coyotes and sundry beasts did slay a lamb or kid from time to time. But no more eagles did gather the rays of the sun.

  October, 1976

  A Quiet Tear for Other Days

  WHILE WATCHING THE TV networks Tuesday night, with all their colored maps, computers, key precincts, pollsters, slightly pompous commentators, and attendant rigamarole of this video-political age, I couldn’t help wondering what the folks in Jeff Davis County were doing.

  The same thing I was doing, I suppose—slumping bleary-eyed and bloated with junk food, like a kid mesmerized by a nonstop Walt Disney festival.

  But when I was growing up in Fort Davis, a mere thirty years ago, before the cable brought television into the mountain canyons, Election Night was really something.

  The real Election Night, of course, wasn’t in November. It was the Democratic primary in July, when the mountain night breeze was as soft and cool as satin against our cheeks after a blazing hot day. We had a village Republican, though. And a village
drunk, a village idiot, and a village atheist. Fort Davis, though small, is equipped with the truly necessary people.

  The setting of this extraordinary event was the town square (or plaza, depending on your language preference), which has a small, tombstonelike Confederate monument in the center and was surrounded in those days by the courthouse, the Gulf station, the drugstore, the Limpia Hotel, the Union Mercantile, and Harry Jarratt’s Motorport, a garage.

  They would set up a big blackboard on the drug-store porch, and at sundown the whole town would gather in the square. The women and old men would stay in their cars and chat with their neighbors through the windows. The young men would tell jokes and smoke and whittle. The teenagers would neck in the tall Johnson grass beside the Union, and the youngsters would pester them and play hide-and-seek among the cars.

  There were no presidential candidates on the ballot, but it didn’t matter. Everyone knew how Texas would vote in that one later. Except for FDR’s fireside chats and Harry Truman’s whistle-stop train, which stopped briefly in Marfa, only twenty-one miles away, the president of the United States was as remote from our lives as the king of Siam, anyway U.S. senators were almost as aloof—except for once when Lyndon Johnson flew over the town in a helicopter and landed in a pasture, to which we children rode in the backs of pickups, more eager to inspect the senator’s strange aircraft than to hear his speech. And congressmen, governors and lesser state officials were strangers who breezed through the town every year or so to buy coffee at Louie’s Cafe and lecture high school assemblies on good citizenship and the glories of the American Way.

  There were so few votes in those vast West Texas spaces that candidates seldom considered it worth the gas to come get them.

  But the county races—sheriff, judge, clerk, and treasurer—those were the offices we understood and dealt with in the courthouse on the square. And competition for them was as intense and bitterly personal as only small-town politics can be, sometimes creat ing ill feeling that would divide the county into factions for years.

  As the night drifted its unhurried way, the arrival of the ballot boxes from Limpia or the X Ranch or New Town or Valentine would be greeted with cheers and the honking of automobile horns and a surge of the crowd to the blackboard as the count was tallied beside the names of the candidates.

  It didn’t take long to count the votes. There were only three or four hundred of them. And if an election official didn’t develop car trouble on the long mountain road from Valentine or the X, the voters could go to bed early, knowing who won; the winners could sleep the sweet sleep of the triumphant, and the losers would rail against the Fates or scheme toward another year.

  Nobody outside the borders of Jeff Davis County knew or cared what happened there, and so far as I know, no candidate ever elected there has pursued a political career even as far as Austin. Certainly none has been mighty or counseled the mighty. But those cool summer evenings are still my mind’s picture of democracy in action.

  I would like to think that it is better now, with Cronkite and Severeid and Moyers and Brinkley and Chancellor and Reasoner and Walters and their legions feeding it to us blow-by-blow in our darkened rooms, telling us who won before the votes are counted. But even in Jeff Davis County nobody can lean through the car window and argue with them.

  I think we have lost something in the trade.

  November, 1976

  His Town Is His Monument

  IN MY MOST VIVID memory of Barry Scobee, he is scrambling up the steep slope of Dolores Mountain, outside Fort Davis, Texas, to take a panoramic picture of the town with the ancient camera he is cradling with such care.

  I was only seventeen years old that day, but it never occurred to me that he was almost seventy. I would have been surprised if he had told me, for I had known him most of my life and he never seemed to change. The source of his youth and energy, I assumed, was inexhaustible.

  During that climb, he was teaching me the rudimerits of journalism, as always. I had landed a job as a “stringer” correspondent for the El Paso Times, selling the news of Fort Davis for fifteen cents a column inch.

  Although I thrilled at being paid to write—the first step in a career that I knew would lead eventually to the Pulitzer and the Nobel—my monthly paycheck seldom would have reached the two-figure range without Mr. Scobee. Not much that was news to Fort Davis was news to El Paso, you see. But Mr. Scobee taught me that not all the news happened yesterday or today.

  On the day of my first visit to his small, cluttered office in the Jeff Davis County courthouse to ask his help, it had rained—a rare and joyous occurrence there. The scent of the water mingled with the scent of the pines outside his window and the musty odor of old newsprint in the little room to produce a perfume whose cool, lazy sweetness still lingers in my mind.

  He began talking and pulling out yellowing scrap-books—stacks of them—full of a half-century of his own work as a writer, most of it as a “stringer” for various West Texas newspapers. The story of our small, out-of-the-way spot on the globe suddenly surrounded me—his voice and his clippings about the Union and Confederate soldiers who had served at the Old Fort, of the Indians they fought, of the land barons and cowboys and missionaries and teamsters and good and bad women who settled at that high, beautiful spot on the Overland Trail, and of their loves and struggles and deaths.

  Many of the characters preserved in the five books and two thousand or more newspaper and magazine articles that he had written were still living. And he retraced his steps with me, introducing me to the past lives of early cattlemen J. W. Merrill and Uncle Billy Kingston, Indian fighter Anton Agerman, the Apache orphan Selso, Chisholm Trail drover Tom Granger, and many others whom I had known only as the town’s old people. Their stories, which they were delighted to tell again, were news—or entertainment—in El Paso, and won me a place as a real Times re porter two weeks after I finished Fort Davis High School. The success of his “pupil,” as he called me, pleased Mr. Scobee.

  “Look at it, Bryan,” he said on the crest of Dolores Mountain. He waved his arms across the limitless expanse of blue Davis Mountain peaks and flats and the trees and houses of the town. “Is there any place else to go but heaven?”

  Not for him. He had settled in Fort Davis permanently in the 1920s, after a career as a farm hand, soldier, surveyor, lumberjack, hotel manager, merchant seaman, and, most recently, San Antonio news paperman.

  He stayed because that was where he wanted to be. He served the town for decades as justice of the peace, county Democratic chairman, weatherman, secretary of the Masonic Lodge, unofficial one-man chamber of commerce, parole officer, chief lobbyist for the creation of the Davis Mountains State Park, McDonald Observatory, and Fort Davis National Historic Site, and, of course, chronicler of its past and present.

  None of his jobs paid much money. Most didn’t pay any. But he didn’t care. “At all the funerals I’ve attended,” he used to say, “I never saw a coffin with saddlebags.”

  His reward was in doing what he loved to do in the place where he loved to be, and in the love that the people of that place held for him. The fiftieth anniversary of his marriage was a community celebration. He was one of only six Americans to be named an honorary ranger by the National Park Service, be cause of his efforts to preserve and restore Old Fort Davis. His brother newspapermen referred to him in his later years as “Mr. Fort Davis,” a title he laughed off but secretly cherished. And in 1965 the State of Texas named a peak on the edge of his town Barry Scobee Mountain.

  The man and the town were so much a part of each other that to think of one without the other is as impossible for me as imagining Mount Rushmore without its faces. But the Alpine Avalanche says that Barry Scobee died last month, and I’m trying to believe it.

  He was only ninety-one years old—too short a life for such a man.

  April, 1977

  A Boy of Summer Grows Older

  SUMMER IS COMING to the Metroplex Saturday, officially. At 3:0
5 P.M. (O glorious hour! O bodacious day!) a man in blue in Arlington will call, “Play ball!” and the shiny new season will begin, officially.

  I await that day, that hour, as Capistrano awaits the swallows. Is there order in the universe? Is God in His heaven? Is all—is anything—right with the world? Until 3:05 P.M. Saturday, I live on faith alone. But when the first Ranger pitch is pitched—against the sublime New York Yankees, at that—the senses will replace the will, and I will know. Yes, there is summer. Yes, there are beer and peanuts. Yes, people still know the divinely ordained purpose of the sun. Rave of groundhogs and crocuses, if you will. The glory time arrives with baseball.

  A man of forty summers can’t embrace the season with the innocent joy he has known in the past, perhaps, for the shadow of his mortality looms in the background of his pleasure. The glory of the day re calls the glory of other first days of other seasons and sets him counting how long ago they were….

  The first major league baseball games I saw were in, of all places, Alpine, Texas, a small, beautiful mountain town across broad deserts from even minor league cities. In those days the distances were even greater, for the teams we considered our “home boys” were the Cardinals and the Browns of Saint Louis, then the westernmost outpost of the major leagues. Somewhere in the dim north were the White Sox and the Cubs, we knew, and eastward were the Reds. The others inhabited darkest Yankeeland.

  We weren’t deprived. They all had come to us via the Liberty Baseball Network and the voice of a Dallas broadcaster named Gordon McLendon, who (unbeknownst to us) read play-by-play accounts of the games off a ticker tape and re-created them for the radio audience in the hinterlands with studio sound effects and a voice so filled with drama that Shakespeare would have applauded him, standing.

  On the Liberty Baseball Network the crack of the bat was a rifle shot, the roar of the crowd was a tidal wave, and Musial, Robinson, Dimaggio and Feller stood as tall as McLendon’s voice and our imaginations could make them. Taller than any mortal stands now or ever will again.