Growing Up In Texas
Life while growing up in Texas, during the 1940s and ‘50s, was very similar to life as depicted in “The Christmas Story,” that wonderfully written movie which is broadcasted on TV every Christmas Season. I should say, it was very similar with one major exception, and that exception was the setting of Texas. In those days, things were pretty much straight forward and simple, even when they were complex. The lines of life were very clearly drawn, and everybody knew when he or she wasn’t coloring within them. Furthermore, there seemed to be only one gray crayon in the big Crayola box of life, and that color wasn’t used very often, so most everything in life was colored in black and white, even though I probably saw it less that way as I grew to maturity.
The “Christmas Story” description really did capture my life as I was growing up, with that major difference between the movie and my life being the location of “Texas”. I think that Texans tend to identify more closely with their state than other people do with their states. I have always ascribed those feelings to the validity of one of my favorite sayings, which is, “Texas is a state of mind I take with me wherever I go.” It seems that “Texas” just tends to take place, wherever Texans happen to be. When you get a bunch of Texans together, “Texas” just seems to break out – and if you haven’t experienced that, you will know it when you see it.
Therefore, growing up in Texas was unique and different from the rest of the U.S., and it differed primarily in the fact that Texas still had not been discovered – at least not in the figurative sense of that word, because that is the way visitors from other parts of the country seemed to view it. Texas, and in particular, Dallas Texas, was not heavily populated in those days (Dallas was only about 200,000 in population in the 1940s), and in keeping with that fact, Texas was not all that popular of a place to visit. Since there were not a lot of people living here, then it just follows that not a lot of people visited here, either.
The reason for my knowing all of this as a young boy was the fact that my mother worked as a waitress at the restaurant, Dobbs House, which was located at the Dallas Love Field Airport on the “Lemmon Avenue” side of the field. One of the more enjoyable aspects of her job was the fact that she had the opportunity to talk with visitors as they arrived at, and departed from, the airport. She enjoyed being kind of an unofficial ambassador for both Dallas and Texas, because she took note of the many visitors’ opinions that she met, as she worked the 3:00 PM to 11:30 PM shift at the restaurant. She would talk to everyone she met as they arrived at the airport or prepared to depart from it. The mutual subject that both parties had in common was embodied in the question, “What do you think of Dallas?” Naturally, everyone had an opinion or a comment, and she didn’t have to coax them too much before they shared it.
Sometimes, I would wake up when she came home from work, and we would talk about how our days had gone, and she would invariably tell me what the visitors were saying about my Dallas, and my Texas. It seemed normal to me that a young kid would be concerned about what visitors thought about his hometown. It was evidently part of my responsibility to insure that strangers liked Dallas, and it may be a uniquely Texas thing to burden a young kid with, but that did not seem to be a uniquely Texas burden to me. I thought that we were all responsible for insuring that visitors liked out city and our state. I mean, don’t all little kids feel that way? And if they don’t feel that way, then why don’t they? In reflecting further on that thought, it probably isn’t just a Texas thing, but if it is, I’m proud of it – and in Texas, we’re always looking for things to be proud of, and we normally don’t have to look too hard to find them.
I recall that the biggest impression my Mom had while sampling the opinions of visitors coming to our town, was the traveler’s disappointment in not seeing cowboys everywhere upon their arrival, and that was in spite of the fact that cowboys were much more prevalent back in those days – and of course, we’re talking about real cowboys, not the drugstore kind. Even though my family had owned a few cows over the years, and I had a horse – and even though I had roped a cow or two from horseback – that does not a real cowboy make, in fact, that is an excellent way to bite off more trouble than you can ever possibly chew. When you are a little kid, and you rope a cow, then you are faced with a new and more difficult problem – how do you un-rope him? Getting a rope off of a struggling cow can be a mite more difficult than getting it on him in the first place!
Real working cowboys are hard working men who seem to derive their nobility from that hard work and the earnest lives they live. Therefore, everyone in Texas knew the difference between, “real” and “drug store”. But every fall, we would put on our boots and hats and go to the State Fair of Texas, and celebrate the fact that we were Texans. Even though, we weren’t real cowboys, we were cowboys at heart – and that’s the most important part, because in addition to being a state of mind, Texas is also a “state of heart.”
And just as Texas made a difference in a young boy’s life while he was growing up, so did Dallas, because as a city, Dallas really is a “state of mind”. In fact, it is purely a mental contrivance – in every good sense of those words. Dallas is not a physical crossroads of anything. It isn’t located near any navigable body of water, nor is it situated in any type of strategic topographical location. It exists only because people wanted it to exist, and instead of those facts being a criticism of Dallas, those facts are actually a compliment to Dallas. Dallas is a creation of strong wills, and the city of Dallas epitomizes that concept, just about everyday.
In more modern days, Dallas has been accused of being plastic, and to that, I would honestly have to say, “Guilty as charged, your honor”, but if it is anything, it is the way people who live in Dallas want it to be. Dallas is unusual and unique in the citizen’s eyes, and they evidently wanted to keep it that way. As a city, Dallas is “Cosmopolitan Cowboy”, or kind of like the Dallas Cowboys football team, themselves, Different. And I hope Tom Landry will forgive me for saying this, but Dallas and everything in it has always been different, and that is a quality I think that is a direct result of this contrivance. Irrespective of that argument, Dallas has a reputation, much like Texas, in that it is known throughout the world. As Texans travel around the world, they discover that Texas, and Dallas, have unique reputations that are known the world over. But I have found that Texans actually have to get outside of Texas to appreciate those facts fully.
And speaking of football, as I was growing up in Dallas, the one thing that really stuck in my craw was the fact that Texas had never won a National Championship in my favorite sport – College Football! I grew up hearing about Doak Walker because I lived in Dallas, but I could not become a fan of SMU, and I don’t know why. Maybe it wasn’t Texas enough for me. Therefore, I kept looking to the University of Texas to win a National Title. This was during the Coach Ed Price years, so I had to wait for someone from Oklahoma, named Darrell Royal. I cannot tell you how Coach Royal captured my imagination as the epitome of a true football coach hero who shined in every facet of life, and especially in the sport of college football. To me, he made College Football come alive, and I can’t adequately describe how much I love the game and how I felt when Texas finally won the National Championship. If you were making a College Football movie and you sent to Central casting for a heroic football coach, Darrell Royal would show up on the set…and if you needed an additional stand-in, Bear Bryant, Bill Snyder, or John McKay would do the job for me.
For those Texans who do travel outside of Texas, in addition to realizing how well known Texas is the world over, they also realize the fact that Texas (and specifically, Dallas Texas) has probably the worst weather in the world! As the old saying goes, “If I owned both Hell and Texas, I would live in Hell and rent out Texas!” Well, Texans from Dallas typically double down on that saying.
At the time that I was old enough to appreciate the uniqueness of my birthplace, which was during the 1940s, the concept of a “DFW Metroplex” did not exist. Ft Worth was a good half day’s journey from Dallas, and if you were not just talking about distance, the two cities were even farther apart than that. Going to Ft Worth was like going to another state – almost another country – a fact that I grew to appreciate more and more, the older I became. The differences between the two places were enough, almost, to make you want to buy souvenirs when you went to Ft. Worth, and in comparing the two cities, while Dallas, or “Big D”, was “unique”, Ft Worth, or “Cowtown” was “mystique”. Everything about Ft Worth said “cowboy”, or “Texas”, or more precisely, “Texana”, which is an adjective coined to describe anything that is deeply Texas. Everything about Ft Worth was Texana, and God must have said, “It is good,” because Ft Worth grew and prospered, too, but just not in the same way that Dallas did, because while the story of Dallas is about a city that is in Texas, the story of Ft Worth is about Texas. The two entities (Ft Worth and Texas) are so intertwined that Ft Worth couldn’t possibly exist in any other state except Texas. That city epitomizes what Texas is all about: i.e. “Texana”.
I had to get older in order to appreciate fully, Ft Worth’s cultural mystique. Ft Worth is a town where you not only can wear you cowboy boots on sales calls, but you can and should wear your cowboy boots with your Brooks Brother’s suits on all of your business calls. And in making those calls, you don’t even have to make an appointment. All you have to do is just “drop in,” as if you were visiting an old friend, and in addition to facts like that, there were many other notable differences between the two cities. In fact, when my wife and I did not have the time or money to take a vacation to some far away spot, we would go to Ft Worth for a long weekend. It was like going on vacation to another state, even though it was only about 30 miles from Dallas. As time went by, it grew closer to Dallas, travel-time-wise, and so much so, that it became only about a thirty minute trip from Dallas, but it was still much farther away, culturally and spiritually. This was the early days of IT, but what we more properly called, “Data Processing” at the time that we invented it…”we, being IBM and us, the employees, who, if we didn’t invent it, we sure as hell smoothed out the wrinkles, and there were more than just a few.”
As a salesman for IBM, I knocked doors in downtown Dallas and sold large IBM computers door to door. The reason I sold large computers is because there weren’t any small IBM computers in those days. There were punched card machines, that when grouped together, would perform the functions of a large computer system, and we called those systems, “Unit Record Clusters”, and that is the way computer systems started out in those early days of “Data Processing” – long before “Information Technology” came into being. In those days, every “bit” of information was stored on punched cards – pun fully intended – although changing the holes in those cards into electronic bits involved a lot of “big iron”, a lot of computing power. So, the term, “Big Iron” became our description for any large and powerful computer system – but that is a story for another day.
Life while growing up in Texas, during the 1940s and ‘50s, was very similar to life as depicted in “The Christmas Story,” that wonderfully written movie which is broadcasted on TV every Christmas Season. I should say, it was very similar with one major exception, and that exception was the setting of Texas. In those days, things were pretty much straight forward and simple, even when they were complex. The lines of life were very clearly drawn, and everybody knew when he or she wasn’t coloring within them. Furthermore, there seemed to be only one gray crayon in the big Crayola box of life, and that color wasn’t used very often, so most everything in life was colored in black and white, even though I probably saw it less that way as I grew to maturity.
The “Christmas Story” description really did capture my life as I was growing up, with that major difference between the movie and my life being the location of “Texas”. I think that Texans tend to identify more closely with their state than other people do with their states. I have always ascribed those feelings to the validity of one of my favorite sayings, which is, “Texas is a state of mind I take with me wherever I go.” It seems that “Texas” just tends to take place, wherever Texans happen to be. When you get a bunch of Texans together, “Texas” just seems to break out – and if you haven’t experienced that, you will know it when you see it.
Therefore, growing up in Texas was unique and different from the rest of the U.S., and it differed primarily in the fact that Texas still had not been discovered – at least not in the figurative sense of that word, because that is the way visitors from other parts of the country seemed to view it. Texas, and in particular, Dallas Texas, was not heavily populated in those days (Dallas was only about 200,000 in population in the 1940s), and in keeping with that fact, Texas was not all that popular of a place to visit. Since there were not a lot of people living here, then it just follows that not a lot of people visited here, either.
The reason for my knowing all of this as a young boy was the fact that my mother worked as a waitress at the restaurant, Dobbs House, which was located at the Dallas Love Field Airport on the “Lemmon Avenue” side of the field. One of the more enjoyable aspects of her job was the fact that she had the opportunity to talk with visitors as they arrived at, and departed from, the airport. She enjoyed being kind of an unofficial ambassador for both Dallas and Texas, because she took note of the many visitors’ opinions that she met, as she worked the 3:00 PM to 11:30 PM shift at the restaurant. She would talk to everyone she met as they arrived at the airport or prepared to depart from it. The mutual subject that both parties had in common was embodied in the question, “What do you think of Dallas?” Naturally, everyone had an opinion or a comment, and she didn’t have to coax them too much before they shared it.
Sometimes, I would wake up when she came home from work, and we would talk about how our days had gone, and she would invariably tell me what the visitors were saying about my Dallas, and my Texas. It seemed normal to me that a young kid would be concerned about what visitors thought about his hometown. It was evidently part of my responsibility to insure that strangers liked Dallas, and it may be a uniquely Texas thing to burden a young kid with, but that did not seem to be a uniquely Texas burden to me. I thought that we were all responsible for insuring that visitors liked out city and our state. I mean, don’t all little kids feel that way? And if they don’t feel that way, then why don’t they? In reflecting further on that thought, it probably isn’t just a Texas thing, but if it is, I’m proud of it – and in Texas, we’re always looking for things to be proud of, and we normally don’t have to look too hard to find them.
I recall that the biggest impression my Mom had while sampling the opinions of visitors coming to our town, was the traveler’s disappointment in not seeing cowboys everywhere upon their arrival, and that was in spite of the fact that cowboys were much more prevalent back in those days – and of course, we’re talking about real cowboys, not the drugstore kind. Even though my family had owned a few cows over the years, and I had a horse – and even though I had roped a cow or two from horseback – that does not a real cowboy make, in fact, that is an excellent way to bite off more trouble than you can ever possibly chew. When you are a little kid, and you rope a cow, then you are faced with a new and more difficult problem – how do you un-rope him? Getting a rope off of a struggling cow can be a mite more difficult than getting it on him in the first place!
Real working cowboys are hard working men who seem to derive their nobility from that hard work and the earnest lives they live. Therefore, everyone in Texas knew the difference between, “real” and “drug store”. But every fall, we would put on our boots and hats and go to the State Fair of Texas, and celebrate the fact that we were Texans. Even though, we weren’t real cowboys, we were cowboys at heart – and that’s the most important part, because in addition to being a state of mind, Texas is also a “state of heart.”
And just as Texas made a difference in a young boy’s life while he was growing up, so did Dallas, because as a city, Dallas really is a “state of mind”. In fact, it is purely a mental contrivance – in every good sense of those words. Dallas is not a physical crossroads of anything. It isn’t located near any navigable body of water, nor is it situated in any type of strategic topographical location. It exists only because people wanted it to exist, and instead of those facts being a criticism of Dallas, those facts are actually a compliment to Dallas. Dallas is a creation of strong wills, and the city of Dallas epitomizes that concept, just about everyday.
In more modern days, Dallas has been accused of being plastic, and to that, I would honestly have to say, “Guilty as charged, your honor”, but if it is anything, it is the way people who live in Dallas want it to be. Dallas is unusual and unique in the citizen’s eyes, and they evidently wanted to keep it that way. As a city, Dallas is “Cosmopolitan Cowboy”, or kind of like the Dallas Cowboys football team, themselves, Different. And I hope Tom Landry will forgive me for saying this, but Dallas and everything in it has always been different, and that is a quality I think that is a direct result of this contrivance. Irrespective of that argument, Dallas has a reputation, much like Texas, in that it is known throughout the world. As Texans travel around the world, they discover that Texas, and Dallas, have unique reputations that are known the world over. But I have found that Texans actually have to get outside of Texas to appreciate those facts fully.
And speaking of football, as I was growing up in Dallas, the one thing that really stuck in my craw was the fact that Texas had never won a National Championship in my favorite sport – College Football! I grew up hearing about Doak Walker because I lived in Dallas, but I could not become a fan of SMU, and I don’t know why. Maybe it wasn’t Texas enough for me. Therefore, I kept looking to the University of Texas to win a National Title. This was during the Coach Ed Price years, so I had to wait for someone from Oklahoma, named Darrell Royal. I cannot tell you how Coach Royal captured my imagination as the epitome of a true football coach hero who shined in every facet of life, and especially in the sport of college football. To me, he made College Football come alive, and I can’t adequately describe how much I love the game and how I felt when Texas finally won the National Championship. If you were making a College Football movie and you sent to Central casting for a heroic football coach, Darrell Royal would show up on the set…and if you needed an additional stand-in, Bear Bryant, Bill Snyder, or John McKay would do the job for me.
For those Texans who do travel outside of Texas, in addition to realizing how well known Texas is the world over, they also realize the fact that Texas (and specifically, Dallas Texas) has probably the worst weather in the world! As the old saying goes, “If I owned both Hell and Texas, I would live in Hell and rent out Texas!” Well, Texans from Dallas typically double down on that saying.
At the time that I was old enough to appreciate the uniqueness of my birthplace, which was during the 1940s, the concept of a “DFW Metroplex” did not exist. Ft Worth was a good half day’s journey from Dallas, and if you were not just talking about distance, the two cities were even farther apart than that. Going to Ft Worth was like going to another state – almost another country – a fact that I grew to appreciate more and more, the older I became. The differences between the two places were enough, almost, to make you want to buy souvenirs when you went to Ft. Worth, and in comparing the two cities, while Dallas, or “Big D”, was “unique”, Ft Worth, or “Cowtown” was “mystique”. Everything about Ft Worth said “cowboy”, or “Texas”, or more precisely, “Texana”, which is an adjective coined to describe anything that is deeply Texas. Everything about Ft Worth was Texana, and God must have said, “It is good,” because Ft Worth grew and prospered, too, but just not in the same way that Dallas did, because while the story of Dallas is about a city that is in Texas, the story of Ft Worth is about Texas. The two entities (Ft Worth and Texas) are so intertwined that Ft Worth couldn’t possibly exist in any other state except Texas. That city epitomizes what Texas is all about: i.e. “Texana”.
I had to get older in order to appreciate fully, Ft Worth’s cultural mystique. Ft Worth is a town where you not only can wear you cowboy boots on sales calls, but you can and should wear your cowboy boots with your Brooks Brother’s suits on all of your business calls. And in making those calls, you don’t even have to make an appointment. All you have to do is just “drop in,” as if you were visiting an old friend, and in addition to facts like that, there were many other notable differences between the two cities. In fact, when my wife and I did not have the time or money to take a vacation to some far away spot, we would go to Ft Worth for a long weekend. It was like going on vacation to another state, even though it was only about 30 miles from Dallas. As time went by, it grew closer to Dallas, travel-time-wise, and so much so, that it became only about a thirty minute trip from Dallas, but it was still much farther away, culturally and spiritually. This was the early days of IT, but what we more properly called, “Data Processing” at the time that we invented it…”we, being IBM and us, the employees, who, if we didn’t invent it, we sure as hell smoothed out the wrinkles, and there were more than just a few.”
As a salesman for IBM, I knocked doors in downtown Dallas and sold large IBM computers door to door. The reason I sold large computers is because there weren’t any small IBM computers in those days. There were punched card machines, that when grouped together, would perform the functions of a large computer system, and we called those systems, “Unit Record Clusters”, and that is the way computer systems started out in those early days of “Data Processing” – long before “Information Technology” came into being. In those days, every “bit” of information was stored on punched cards – pun fully intended – although changing the holes in those cards into electronic bits involved a lot of “big iron”, a lot of computing power. So, the term, “Big Iron” became our description for any large and powerful computer system – but that is a story for another day.
