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When I was a teenager working on a ranch in the Texas Panhandle's Canadian river bottoms, I knew an old cowboy who told great stories about working cattle in the old days. I loved to listen to him while sitting around a campfire at night. His memories were burned into my recollection almost as if I had been there myself.
He told about getting hired for his first cowboy job as a teenager in Big Spring, Texas. A ranch owner who did some banking in Big Spring also owned a ranch in New Mexico, which was about three hundred miles west. My friend was hired on the main street of Big Spring and told to get on his horse and ride out to New Mexico. He was told his ranch foreman would put him on the payroll as soon as he got there.
All he had was his horse, saddle, bedroll and a .22 caliber rifle, but he mounted up and rode. He said sometimes there would be a ranch house in sight late in the evening, and when he rode up, the people would ask him to stay for dinner. Most of the time, though, as it got on toward evening he built a little fire, laid out his bedroll and -- if he was lucky -- he would have a rabbit to roast over the fire.
He wasn't bragging. He was just telling the story about his first job.
He remembered hearing stories about a new-fangled invention called radio. He said he tried to picture words coming through the air and into a little box, but it made his head hurt to think about it. He told me that now that we have radio we would probably some day have pictures coming through the air into a box for us to see, but that made my head hurt. I doubted it would ever happen in my lifetime.
Later on I went to work for the United States Treasury Department as an assistant National Bank Examiner. Of the thirty men in the Texas district, I was the youngest and as a college dropout, probably had the least education. It was many years down the line that I found there were some powerful west Texas ranchers who put letters of recommendation in for me, which was the only reason I got hired.
I reported for duty in Dallas in May, 1952, and was a real hayseed in the big city. I traveled constantly that first year. Most of the guys I worked with were single, so traveling wasn't so bad for them. But I was married and had one child. We rented a three-room apartment in a two-story apartment building that had four units.
To my great surprise, one of our new neighbors had a television set. That was the first TV I had ever seen, and there it was -- right next door. On the weekends we would get invited over to watch a couple of programs. We thought that was the greatest thing in the world.
It's hard to imagine now, but we really looked forward to watching a boxing match or a wrestling match on a huge black and white TV set with a tiny eight- inch round screen. I couldn't believe we would ever be able to afford one of our own.
Just like electronics today, the TV sets started getting cheaper and cheaper. Within a few months a local drug store -- I think it was Eckerd's -- ran a special on a set for $300 with no down payment -- and you could pay it out over twelve months. That doesn't sound like much today, but I was only making $300 per month. So we went in debt for a month's salary for a TV.
It wasn't long before our neighbors started coming to our apartment to watch boxing and wrestling and, of course, "Uncle Miltie." Milton Berle was a program you could not miss.
All the programs then were live, and there was a lot of beer drinking, both on the programs and in front of the set. It became an interesting game to watch for the screw-ups. After an announcer had two or three drinks, there were plenty of bloopers.
They finally prohibited drinking on live TV and it destroyed a lot of the fun we were having, even though it didn't slow down our beer consumption.
One of the great things about Milton Berle was the way he handled the bloopers. He was unbelievably fast on his feet, and some of his funniest routines came when things started going wrong and he ad-libbed. He had a lot of famous people do skits on his shows, and Miltie delighted in saying or doing something unexpected to break them up.
Some of this nonsense was probably written into the scripts, but to us watching, it all seemed spontaneous.
My first year as an examiner was probation time. I spent about three eight-hour days telling my life story to a Secret Service agent. He was a big man with a gun strapped to his waist, and he typed every word I said. They sent agents out to the Texas panhandle to verify every word I said. I got a call from a grocery store where I had once shopped telling me that everyone in the store had been interviewed by government agents and it scared them all to death.
The national news was all about Senator Joe McCarthy investigating communism. It seemed there was nothing else going on in the world. Several of the new examiners I worked with just disappeared after the Secret Service found something in their past. One day they would be working, and the next day they would be gone. Any communist contact I would have had occurred in places you could only get to on horse back. Since none of the agents could ride, I got off scott-free.
But any time that first year when the national news was on TV and they talked about who was being grilled by McCarthy, cold chills went up my spine. I worried that it might be me next.
There were only a few programs on TV, but some of them you had to watch or you couldn't carry on a conversation with the people you worked with. "What's My Line" was one of those must-see programs. If you missed it your co-workers or neighbors would have to tell you all about it, or your whole life would be screwed up.
Early in my examiner career, I caught an embezzler. You would think that would be commonplace, but it rarely happened, and I was a big hero on the examiner force because of my discovery. In fact, I got a citation from Washington and a substantial raise because of that find. When I got home, I didn't even get to brag about it, because "What's My Line" was coming on and that was more important.
Before my first year was up, I got transferred to the Austin district and my TV watching took a definite downturn. Nearly all cities of any size had more than one TV station, but Austin had only one, which limited one's choices of what to watch. There were several companies who wanted in the Austin market but all applications to the FCC for licenses were turned down, and it stayed that way for several more years.
The fact that Lady Bird Johnson owned the Austin station probably had something to do with it.
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The Story's the Thing, Texans know a thing or two about yarns
Apr 9 2002, 07:19 AM
