The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (28 page)

All about the room, the Bulldogs are regarding each other with that chin-raised, eyelids-lowered, peering-through-bifocals gaze. The tags on their chests display their senior yearbook pictures alongside their names, and it's the young, smiling faces of 1941 that make the memories click into place:

“Ah! My goodness! Look who's here!”

“Is that really you? It's so good to see you!”

They speak of Saturday matinees at the Knox Street Theater and midnight shows at the Majestic, smoking cigarettes behind the rifle range in back of the school, skinny-dipping in the school pool during PE class, double-dating in the family's ‘37 Ford and parking in the moonlight on Flagpole Hill.

“The most precious memories to me are the school assemblies,” says Mitzi Schaden Messier. “They were always big productions, and I just loved them. When the band would play
Deep Purple
I would cry. And Saturday night there was always a dance in somebody's home. We danced to the big-band sound: Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Frank Sinatra…”

Others recall hours without end spent in detention in Room 103, under the watchful eye of Miss Minnie Keel. “She was a fiery little redheaded woman,” Erwin Hearne says, “and everybody gave her a hard time, rolling marbles down the aisle, setting wastebaskets on fire. She endured it well, though. She died a few years ago at 107 years of age.”

“Remember how we would lay the fuse of a pack of firecrackers across a burning cigarette in the locker room, and then go off to class?” Billy Sempert says. “And the cigarette would bum down? And when we had been in class about five minutes, it would reach the fuse and set off the firecrackers? And how those teachers would run out into that hall, trying to find out what in the world had happened?”

Alan Myers, editor of the yearbook and staffer on the school newspaper, says he wasn't the mischievous type. “Due to my particular nature, I went through North Dallas High School kind of in a dream. The only bad thing I remember doing was when we were studying Browning in English class, and five or six of us played hooky one day to go down to the Browning Museum in Waco. That was my only deviation from the straight and narrow.”

At a table at the edge of the hubbub, Caroline Cherry Shoemaker is holding court. She was a baton twirler and the drum major, and she has brought her scrapbook, full of pictures and newspaper clippings from her twirling days.

She has lived in Dallas all her life, she says, but this is her first reunion, because the planning committee didn't know her last name until now. “The others have seen each other every five years, but I don't know who these people are,” she says. “A gentleman called and wanted to bring me tonight, and I didn't recognize him when he walked up the steps.”

As they recognize her picture on her name tag, the men approach her with a kind of shyness, as they must have when they were boys. They shake her hand and speak to her in low, respectful tones. But the women greet her with gushes of enthusiasm:

“Ooooh! Caroline! I would never have recognized you!”

“Isn't she pretty?”

“Yeeeees! You're gorgeous!”

“I twirled a baton with fire at both ends,” Mrs. Shoemaker tells a visitor, “and we were the first ones to wear short skirts. Before us, the skirts were below the knees. We had a good band. Our band was selected to lead all the bands one year from downtown Dallas to Fair Park, so of course I got to lead them all.”

As she talks, her eyes are scanning the milling crowd. “It's strange when you're in high school, and you're a senior—remember?—and you're so in love and you've been going steady and you just know you're going to marry that boy and live together for 50 years and be happy. But you didn't marry him. I don't know if he's here tonight or not. I wouldn't recognize him. In the annual he took a whole page and wrote of his enduring love, he would never ever leave me, death do us part. He would marry me and we would be forever flying away. I started to bring that annual tonight, in case he was here with his wife.”

Woody Brownlee and O.S. Castlen ran the Cole & Haskell Drug at the comer of those two avenues, just across the way from North Dallas High. The store had a soda fountain and a jukebox, so of course it was a Bulldog hangout.

During World War II, Mr. Castlen published a little newspaper called
Bulldog Bull
, which he mailed to all the North Dallas boys who were in the service, to let them know what was going on at their school and what was happening to their classmates.

When the war finally ended, he published his last edition, in which he wrote:

“There is one final tribute due and one most hard to express because words are too weak and undramatic when we come to consider those long rows of white crosses… How weak we living appear…when we try to offer anything in comparison to those gallant ones…. So, to those white crosses in Africa and Europe, and on the Pacific's sandy atolls, we offer this promise: There will never be a final chapter ascribed to you. We will never speak the final word for you, but will refresh your memory in the coming generations and point you out to our sons and daughters as time lasts.”

Under the headline “To Those Not Returning,” Mr. Castlen listed the names of 87 North Dallas High School students who had been killed in action, eight who were still missing in action and three who were prisoners of war.

Robert Breault is standing with several others on the front steps of the high school in the cool June 1 morning, gazing across Haskell at the boarded-up building that used to be Mr. Castlen's store. “It was a wonderful place,” he says. “I used to take my lunch money and start off my morning with an ice cream soda before school. And we would go back and play the jukebox and jitterbug after school.”

Many of the group haven't stood on these steps since the night they graduated, but remembering the drugstore triggers memories of the other businesses that used to stand along the streets near the school: Abbott's Barbershop, Patricia's Beauty Shop, Dick & Don's Texaco, Lange Florist, the China Clipper Restaurant, Pat & Monty's Drive-in Grocery, Jack Jolly's Cleaners, Charlie Pittman's Barbecue Stand… “A root beer float was the greatest thing there ever was,” Archie Hunter says.

Inside, M.O. Black, the school's current athletic director, has rescued from the basement several framed pictures of the old senior classes and has cleaned them up and stood them against the wall in the hallway. The grads crouch before them, searching out themselves and their friends.

Mr. Black says he's collecting pictures of North Dallas athletic teams from the past. He plans to have them enlarged and display them about the school. “So these kids today can see that this school once had a great tradition,” he says. “Most of the high schools in Dallas have lost their sense of tradition. We want to bring tradition back to North Dallas.”

Dr. Ewell Walker, 94 years old, father of SMU football great Doak Walker and the first coach that North Dallas High ever had, studies a display of old faculty pictures on the wall. “She's dead,” he says, pointing. “And he's dead, and he's dead, and she's dead.”

Jack Howell is roaming the hallway with his 1941 yearbook and a pen, asking his classmates to autograph their pictures. “I didn't get my annual until after we graduated,” he says, “and I didn't have a chance to get anybody to sign it, so I'm getting them all to sign it now. When you get to the 50th anniversary, you throw all inhibitions out.”

“Jack is having a ball with his little book,” says his wife, Margery. “He'll recognize somebody and look at their picture in the book and say, ‘Oh, my Lord, look how fat he is.'”

“There are only about five people here I would recognize on the street,” says Bill Allen. “The rest are like strangers to me.”

“I've been called John, Bill, one guy called me Stephen,” says Erwin Hearne. “I just answer, ‘Oh, yeah,' to whatever they call me.”

They file into the auditorium and sing the North Dallas fight song and the alma mater, which is sung to the tune that 99 percent of all alma maters are:

Hardy Brogoitti is emcee. “Fellows, do you remember the first box of Valentine candy you bought across the street at O.S. Castlen's Cole & Haskell Drug? And some of the fellows teased you about it, so you said it was for your mother? And it really was? What about the first time you skipped school and you prayed your mother wouldn't be home to answer the phone when Miss Bigbee called? Remember the day you drove your family's ‘35 Chevy to school for the first time, and you circled the school three or four times, and nobody even noticed you? Remember who gave you your first kiss, and where you were? I don't.”

He introduces Oscar Rodriguez, the young current principal.

“The school has changed quite a bit,” Mr. Rodriguez begins.

Of the 1,400-member student body, he says, 65 percent are Hispanic. Most of them are of Mexican descent, but there has been an influx of South Americans lately. Twelve percent are Asian—Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian—and their number is growing. Some of the new students are from Africa. “The last time we counted, we had 32 countries represented here,” he says.

“But one of the things that hasn't changed is that kids are still kids…. And there are some of us who are trying to bring back some of the values that you learned here, values that create good citizens, which the world needs to survive. The weird, radical things that we're trying to bring back are things like punctuality and manners. We're trying to teach the students that they have to come to school every day, to prepare for going to work every day when they leave here….”

Later, a photographer is trying to arrange the reunionists along the front steps for a picture. They lined up there for many a school picture years ago, and they're behaving now as they did then, fidgeting, talking, not paying attention to the photographer's pleas, making those bunny ears behind the heads of their friends.

“The place hasn't changed much,” Mitzi Schaden Tessier says. “I walked in and felt right at home.”

Along the walls of the Colony Parke ballroom that night are huge displays of pictures, newspaper clippings and memorabilia from 50 years ago. Faculty members, ROTC cadets, sports teams, clubs, cheerleaders.

The class of ‘41 stares in wonder and surprised recognition at the photographs of themselves when they were young. “Look at that. I had on cowboy boots,” says Paul Pond, gazing at an old black-and-white snapshot. “Gollee, that's what I always wore.” He laughs. “Oh, my. Gollee. Oh, gosh.”

Chuck Arlington & His Orchestra open with a mellow rendering of the alma mater. Then the Rev. G.C. McElyeh—a cheerleader in high school and an Episcopal priest now—invokes the blessing of God, and, while the musicians continue softly playing the alma mater, he reads the names of the Bulldogs of ‘40 and ‘41 and ‘42 and ‘43 who have died since their graduation. It's a long list, requiring five minutes to read.

After a moment of silence, Jody Lander, the emcee, says:

“Reunions are a competitive sport. During the first reunion 25 years ago, we compared children, vacation homes, cars. And we regarded with envy and with glee the waistlines of our classmates, their hairlines and their wrinkles. We hated the streamlined and loved the slobs.

“But we come to the 50th reunion, and things have changed. The competition now is just being here… For showing up tonight, I salute you, Bulldogs.”

Art Hill, “the Bulldogs' answer to Old Blue Eyes,” sings
Sentimental Journey
. A troupe of Bulldog volunteers performs a series of slaphappy skits from
The Furlough
, the senior publication of the class of ‘41. Then Mr. Arlington and his men swing into
In the Mood
, and the boys and girls of ‘41 move to the dance floor and suddenly seem young again.

“1941 was a good year,” says Dorothy Burton Sebastian, editor of
The Furlough
. “Things will never be that way again.”

July 1991

WEST TEXAS

The editor of
Westways,
a magazine published in Los Angeles, called me. She was preparing a special issue on West Texas, she said, and wanted me to write an introductory essay. In 1,200 words or less, she said, she wanted me to explain “what and where West Texas is, and why it seems to get into people's blood.” A daunting assignment, trying to explain West Texas to Californians, but I gave it a shot
.

Y
EARS
AGO,
I
WAS
DRIVING
ALONE
FROM
B
OSTON,
WHERE
I
HAD
BEEN
living, toward the place where I had grown up, in the Davis Mountains, in the farthest end of West Texas, which is called the Trans-Pecos.

The first days of my journey, past the cities of the East and Midwest, along the crowded interstates between close-together towns, had been hectic and noisy, and the farther I drove, the more urgently I felt my need to get to the Out There. By the time I cleared Dallas and Fort Worth, I was bone tired. My eyes were scratchy from too little sleep, my nerves tattered from too much coffee. I kept telling myself to get a room and rest, and I kept replying that I would, at the next town. But while the exits flashed by, I kept the car pointed into the sun.

It was somewhere west of Abilene that I felt myself changing. Suddenly, it seemed, I wasn't so tired. My eyes were still gritty almost to the point of pain, but my nerves were quieting, my muscles relaxing.

Then I noticed. The highway ahead was long and straight, and there wasn't another car in sight. The highway behind me was just as straight and just as empty.