Publication: THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deborah Voorhees
TRAVEL
PASO LAJITAS, Mexico - Scribes have long romanticized thedesolate beauty of Mexico's Chihuahuan desert with itsconquistadors, banditos and dark-eyed maidens.
So, as we set out to conquer this land, we decide to travel as they did - close to the earth - not as interlopers in aclimate-controlled vehicle. Besides, where we are heading, theBadlands of Mexico, not even the all-terrain Suburban can go. Our selected mode of transportation: the horse.
This three-day trip, packed by Lajitas Stables, marries twoextremes: the rugged and the pristine. It's for those who want tosee Mexico away from the resort hotels and from other tourists, forthose who desire to wander among its people and countryside.
Our ride begins in Paso Lajitas, Mexico, just south of the U.S.border town of Lajitas, Texas. Here, most of the 20th century dissolves in an instant. Dirt streets are lined with humble flat-roofed casas made of adobe, stone and concrete. Most have running water and electricity, but clearly a few, with nothing but mother earth for floors, are too primitive for either. The long-crooked arms of the ocotillo fence in pollos, cabras andcaballos (chickens, goats and horses).
The Rio Grande, which divides the two towns, has long been used as a crossing, dating to the conquistadors. Its hard limestone bottom makes it ideal for artillery wagons and such.
After our group's guides - veteran vaquero Onorio Orozco and 16-year-old wrangler Mesquite - match the guests' riding skills to the appropriate horses, we head out of town into the sparsely populated back country of the Chihuahuan desert. Here, barbed-wirefences are a rarity. The ground is hard and rocky and looks sunstripped, an opal color, rather than earthy, and the dust stirs at the slightest breeze or movement of the hooves.
We ride up and over the rocky hills of the desert, past abandoned haciendas to the dry creek bottom of Las Mangas, where we weave through squat limestone canyons. The walls are so brittle it's as if this arid land has robbed them of moisture. Limestone sheets along the floor of the creek form periodic tinajas, catchbasins for water, where the horses drink.
For miles in every direction, all is raw and barren, seemingly uninhabitable. Yet, a few Mexican families continue to eke out an existence. At times, hillsides are so blank it's easy to assume they've been strip-mined, but it's just the lay of the place. Not ablade of grass exists from extreme overgrazing and draught. A cow eats a worncotton T-shirt.
Little grows other than tuffs of mesquite, creosote and sage, and smatterings of purple prickly pear and ocotillo. Even the turkey vultures, eerily absent, seem to know this place is void of life and consequently of death. As if to prove us wrong, a dot of yellow flits by. The butterfly looks lost in this dry desert.
Equally out of place, growing almost flat to the ground, is a clump of yellow flowers. Senor Orozco, the head wrangler, dismounts and picks a petal. Offering it to everyone to smell, he explains that it's Lemoncilla, a plant used to make a lemon-flavored tea.
As we move on, we learn of a Mexican legend right beside us. The blond Mesquite started riding at age 4 and began training horses just three years later. A U.S. citizen, she lives on both sides of the border and speaks both languages fluently. Since taking this wrangler job, she has been renting a room in Lajitas, but she still stays occasionally with her mother, a nurse, who has been allowed to live among the Mexican people because she gives them needed medical care.
Sitting astride her feisty stallion, Mesquite explains that Mexico can be very old-fashioned. Girls spend their days tending to household duties, not riding horses. Mesquite not only doesn't stay close to home, she breaks broncs. On most days, she can be found racing her horse across the
desert.
"People I don't even know will stop me and ask if I'm Mesquite, "she says.
Legends, old and new, make this place all the more unique: stories of hidden Spanish treasures, Comanche and Apache raids, and the hunters and gatherers who inhabited this place long before the Spaniards came to conquer.
Tres Boquillas, one of the stops of the day, is an Indian site with metate holes, which archaic Indians used for grinding grains. Later tribes created wonderfully clear pictographs of running horses. The paint used in these bright-red images is probably a mixture of water, an iron-based mineral called ocher and then a type of binder such as urine, blood, honey or egg whites.
Other sites on the ride have piles of broken rock and charcoal-colored earth, marking where Indians cooked sotol, which is said to taste sweet like cabbage.
As the sun drifts downward, the evening light turns the dull, lifeless colors of the desert into rich purples, reds, oranges, golds and yellows. On this first night we sleep on the grounds of a modest ranch, where the horses can be corralled.
On the rancher's covered patio of his cement hacienda are three spent golden shells, probably from a .22. About 50 yards off, up on a rise, sits an untouched Tecate aluminum can. To the house's westare healthy rows of corn.
Behind it, on top of a rocky rise, is a capilla, a doll-size chapel, with a wooden cross and corrugated-tin roof. Inside the concrete structure are spent candles, a box of matches and a framed image of the Madonna. These miniature chapels dot the countryside. It's not uncommon for vaqueros, in dusty jeans and sweat-stained cowboy hats, to pause from their chores to pray for safe passage, for rain, for the sick or for any such thing.
After Senor Orozco shoes a couple of the horses, he prepares a supper of pork, tomato and green pepper as Mesquite makes a chocolate cake in a dutch oven. We eat by the light of a propane lantern, shortly afterward falling off to sleep exhausted from the day.
After a breakfast of Mexican egg burritos, fruit and yogurt, we mount and head out on a 20-plus-mile ride to the town of San Carlos, or Manuel Benavides - maps use the latter, locals the former. We start down La Mora trail, which locals say has been traveled for at least 200 years. It's hard to argue differently when hoof prints have actually been embedded like fossils in the slabs of limestone.
This worn trail leads us into the San Carlos mountains and the Badlands, both formed by ancient volcanoes. Ash - with layers of gray, purple and red - created the Badlands' narrow canyons and its other-worldly formations. Some resemble castles and Moorish temples; others are more lunar in shape. Regardless, nothing grows in the ash, which at times is as fine as baby powder.
Lunch time takes us to one of the miracles of the desert. The wetness of natural springs invites tall cottonwood trees to pop up like mirages. In this spot, the trees' gnarled roots form a perfect circular dam that stands a good two feet off the ground, looking like something out of a Tolkien fantasy where elves, sprites and fairies should light. After watering the horses, we fill our bottles where cool spring water flows in a steady stream as if from a faucet.
From under the shade of the cottonwoods we can see far in the distance, the Chisos and Sierra del Carmen mountains as well as a notch in the horizon from the magnificent Santa Elena Canyon. In the foreground is an abandoned limestone ranch house and corral -the perfect spot to eat our steak burritos with avocado slices.
Senor Orozco points to a white speck just south of the mountains and explains that that's his ranch.
"I've traveled through all this land, but not on a pleasure ride, rounding up cattle, " he says.
After lunch we head out to ride around the San Carlos mountains made of lava. Intruding between the deep purple rocks of La Morapeak are tall limestone fingers with crevices situated just as the holes in an organ's pipes.
Little time passes before the afternoon sun turns our newly found water hot. While it still provides the body what it needs, the mouth longs for something cool. Some riders begin incessantly discussing anything cold: snow, mountain creeks, Colorado wintermornings.
Later, Senor Orozco tells us about the "Mexican walk." In this country, horses aren't for hobby as are many of their northern brethren. The animals must work cattle and often are the only form of transportation. In fact, Senor Orozco, after finishing his job at Lajitas, rides horseback 25 miles home across the desert.
Mexican ponies are taught with a strong hand to have a fastwalking gait. The training process is evident as Senor Orozco tames the skittish mare he's riding. Repeatedly, he takes a thin piece of leather and snaps it on one side of the neck, then the other, letting it know the slow "gringo walk" just won't do.
About 4 p.m., our thirsty, dusty crew spots a long line of cottonwoods far off in the distance. This means water! Our supply is low and almost as hot as if coming from a simmering pot. Spring-fed San Carlos creek, unlike the dry creeks we've been traveling through, flows with real water over rocks and boulders of limestone.
All along this amazing site is the town of San Carlos. Built here because of the water source, the town seems close enough to touch, but things always appear closer than they are in the desert, making it all the more miragelike. We keep moving closer, but the town remains evasive.
About an hour later, we finally reach this pristine, sleepy village. Most of the streets have been modernized with concrete, but some are still cobblestone. The casas, modest but meticulously kept, are made of real mud adobe or concrete or limestone. Most of the yards have a good sampling of fruit trees, gardens, horses, goats, chickens. Compared to Paso Lajitas, the town looks quiteprosperous.
A dark-eyed nina with long-unsculpted locks peeks through herscreen door as the desconocidos (strangers) pass through town. A couple of ninos in bleached white T-shirts peer from behind the side-yard gates. Senors and senoras stop their chores to watch, albeit subtly. They come to their windows, doors and gates. Some smile, some are expressionless. A girl in a thin blue dress shyly giggles as she flashes a stranger a grin.
Unlike tourist destinations, no one has anything to sell. There are no mercados, only a small drugstore for locals to buy everything from fruit and vegetables to ice cream.
At the end of a cobblestone street is our destination: Gloria'sBed and Breakfast, a pristinely kept casa with a veranda wrappingaround it. A true slice of paradise, with its terraced garden of bougainvillea, roses, yucca and a water canal. Gloria, the owner, also grows watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers and chile peppers, as well as pecan, peach and mimbreo trees. The latter, similar to the apple, is stewed for making jams and such.
The home, with its picturesque view, is circled by hills, mountains and mesas on all sides, and is a stone's throw from the spring-fed creek. From here are lots of places to hike: Indian caves, old mines, the ghost town of Mina Grande, the mine of MinaDos Marias and the canyon of San Carlos. The Sierra Rica mountains also are close by with their pines and oaks and trees that smell of cinnamon.
As we stop our horses, Gloria, in a brightly colored dress, greets us with ice-cold, hand-squeezed limeade. This honey-sweetened delight goes down quickly with our thirsty bunch. Inside her meticulously kept place are photos of her on the film set of "Streets of Laredo," but the most impressive site for this crowd are the oversized bathtubs in which to get squeaky-clean.
Most nights, dinner is served on the veranda, with starched, bone-white tablecloths, but a sudden high wind and the threat of rain causes everyone to grab the vases of bougainvillea and race for shelter. Still, nothing could spoil the gourmet Mexican dinner of mole chicken, spicy cactus, guacamole, beans, rice and flour tortillas, handmade just before they're passed out. After dinner, the winds have gone and, for all the wrath-of-God theatrics, barely a spit of rain hits the ground.
Gloria opened her B&B because San Carlos is her childhood home. After living on both sides of the border, she decided this is the place for her.
"The pace is slower and less stressful, " she says. "Just to live is so expensive in America."
She knows her venture is risky, considering she's in such a remote spot. But she also knows if the right people find out about it she'll do fine. It's perfect for anyone wanting to get away from it all. Gloria knows that better than anyone.
"Here, I can retire, " she says. "If my business fails, I can live off my fruit trees and garden. If I can't afford it, I don't need electricity."
After dinner, some relax on the now calm patio while a couple of us head into town to take one of Gloria's helpers home. There the husband, sitting at the kitchen table with the glow of the TV in the background, is quick to apologize in Spanish for the slightly cluttered table, explaining his wife has been working all night.
We stay only a moment, then head into the town square with its white gazebo. All along the way, homes are lighted and mariachi music reigns. Gloria explains this party atmosphere with a simple statement: "It's Saturday night."
In the square, the town's people have gathered for a Baptist revival and fiesta. "There are not too many Baptists here. Any excuse for a party, "she says.
Nov. 1-5, she says, is the big Catholic fiesta. People from the small ranches and towns all around bring their babies to bebaptized. "There will be dancing everywhere, cockfights, horse racing andlots more, " Gloria says.
Not much has changed since Gloria was a 14-year-old.
"I remember sitting right there on that bench. I wasn't supposed to have a boyfriend yet, " she says. But a boy she liked came to court her. "My uncle took me home right then. Oh, I cried and cried. They were very strict back then."
Now with a 14-year-old daughter of her own, Gloria says she too has to be strict - but perhaps she wouldn't take her home. "Some of the ranch families are still that strict. Here, you have to be strict with your girls. Boys, they can do anything, but not girls."
And apparently the people are strict with their women, too. Only men are allowed in the cantina. Mesquite explains that only a woman selling herself would dare go in, and she would be shunned by society.
In the morning, Gloria fixes us a huge Mexican breakfast with garden-fresh watermelon on the veranda. Afterward, we slip into shorts and sandals for a hike up San Carlos creek, which runs over a bed of limestone rocks and boulders. On the towering canyon walls ferns grow where springs trickle down.
A limestone enclave has a constant mist raining down, and just a little farther up, low to the ground, is a shower of springwater, warm from volcanic activity. This is a tropical sub-climate, surrounded by cliffs with sotol, mesquite, yucca and prickly pear pushing through the canyon's rock sides.
At one point, way above the creek is an Anasazi-style ladder leading to a niche in the limestone walls. Inside is a santos witha candle for worship. There's an old Indian site here, too.
Later in the morning, we head back into the Chihuahuan desert toward the town of Paso Lajitas, understanding full well why Gloriahas decided to stay right here. Next trip, we plan to stay awhile longer, too.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Lajitas Horsewoman Linda Walker
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deborah Voorhees
Astride a feisty black mare, Linda Walker explains that her job has two requirements: the ability to "shoot bull and ride."
This red-headed wrangler and former team roper can surely shovel and ride with the best. At her stables in Lajitas, Texas, Ms. Walker runs horseback trips that can last up to five days through the Chihuahua desert of Mexico and Texas. The windswept, wide-open vistas are as much a part of her as the octillo and cholla are a part of the landscape - a desolate stretch along the Rio Grande.
"This big, unpeopled land is essential to my well being, " says the 43-year-old Ms. Walker. "It takes away the layers of the onion and leaves no place to hide. "It's being able to see yesterday going and tomorrow coming."
Few folks have the disposition to live in Lajitas, one of Texas' last remaining outposts. It takes the likes of Ms. Walker, who has the heart of a hippie and the soul of a wanderer. She doesn't see isolation or emptiness as she looks out over the sandy hills and desert mountains.
"It looks vast. It looks like opportunity, " she says.
These days she gets paid to do what she grew up doing. Her earliest pack trips started while she was a youngster in Colorado, where she'd hunt with her father. They stalked deer and elk for food, not sport.
"Given the choice of shooting a spike (a young elk with just one fork on his rack) and an 8-point bull, my father would tell me to shoot the spike. They're much more tender. The older bucks are tough and not as tasty."
When not in school, she'd ride and work with her father, Billy Walker, who in his day managed several ranches in Colorado. Her chores ran from working cattle to something "as benign and wonderful as going out and pulling our own carrots and as realistic as butchering cows and chopping chickens' heads off."
By age 15, entertainment meant gathering a few friends and riding into the wilderness for days at a time, packing in food and supplies. Linda was as comfortable sleeping under the stars as most are snuggling in their beds.
All this became the groundwork she'd need to run her own string of horses, learning many do's and don'ts along the way. "I've been in more physical scraps than I can shake a stick at." To name a few: She has had horses roll off mountains ("taking them where they don't belong"). She's been dragged across rocky terrain with her spur caught in her stirrup. She's been thrown a few times. A couple of hard hits gave her a concussion and a broken back.
The latter happened during her first month running Lajitas Stables, her home for the past 10 years. "Right out of the box, I had a runaway."
That morning she had sent 10 guys out with a wrangler on an all-day ride. Concerned some might want to bail, she had planned to meet them for lunch. Her first mistake, she says, was letting a novice with horses hook up her wagon team. Her second was having him fix the bridles he had improperly put on the horses (he had placed the bit under the chin rather than in the mouth). Instead of keeping hold of the horses, he took the bridles completely off the horses, and the newly freed animals bolted with Ms. Walker on the wagon."I rode it for a quarter mile, maybe a half. The wagon started fishtailing and I was afraid it would roll so I jumped off the side. I flew with the greatest of ease but didn't land so well."
This was a harsh welcome for a newcomer who wasn't at all sure she even wanted the concession. Friends of her grandparents asked her to take over the stables after hearing she, along with her sister, Debra, used to run seven- and 10-day pack trips, mostly for groups of women, into the wilderness of Colorado (where she also worked as a vet assistant at a clinic in Durango).
She turned the offer down. They asked her to make an offer. She did. "Much to my surprise they took it, " she says. "What they didn't know is I didn't have a clue how to do an hourly trip. I had never even been on an hourly ride. I came in real green."
By year two, she added pack trips to her repertoire, becoming one of the few - if not the only - to regularly offer multi-day horseback wilderness adventures in Texas. Her next bold, which came seven years ago, was to ride into Mexico. At the time, she didn't even speak the language. The trips have become some of her most popular. Initially, she would run six or seven trips a winter. Now she leads that many a month.
Much of her success on the border is her respect for Mexico's culture.To gain permission to cross Mexican landowners' property, she sends a male delegate to negotiate. In the United States, she's accustomed to bargaining for herself. Plus, guests have to understand the town of San Carlos, designated as Manuel Benevides on many maps, which they'd often pass through, is not a border party town.
Few norteamericanos ever come through here, she says. "You have to act like you're a guest in someone's home - be on your best behavior." Women are not allowed in the bar, and Ms. Walker asks the men to stay away also. "The combination of drunk Americans and Mexican bravado can be volatile. We have turned many of Mexico's border towns into sideshows. We do things in their front yard we wouldn't do in our backyard."
Border trips are a tough sale during the summer, when desert temperatures are like standing next to a blast furnace. To keep her string of horses earning their hay, she hauls them north during the hottest months. Some of her horses give hourly rides on a 3,000-acre ranch just outside of Canyon City, Colo., and others join her for pack trips in Taos, N.M.
For her, it's the perfect set-up. For a few months, she enjoys the restaurants and chamber music of Taos and Santa Fe, and then the rugged beauty of the Big Bend country the rest of the year.
When Ms. Walker left her Durango, Colo., home for Lajitas, her family thought she had lost her mind - especially her mother. As a young woman, she had lived in this town when Ms. Walker was just an infant. Her father had gotten a job on a seismic crew. "When my mom got there, all there was was a trading post and three adobe houses - no running water and no one spoke English . . .
"Lajitas is either a place you really like or really don't." Her nieces and nephews call her "crazy old Aunt Linda." Her siblings, who have 9-to-5 jobs, have a hard time understanding her choices. Ms. Walker doesn't.
"If I fell over dead tomorrow, I could honestly say I've lived my life fully. I haven't put off until tomorrow to live.
"I have friends who think they're going to make their stories tomorrow. I have great stories today."
Deborah Voorhees
Astride a feisty black mare, Linda Walker explains that her job has two requirements: the ability to "shoot bull and ride."
This red-headed wrangler and former team roper can surely shovel and ride with the best. At her stables in Lajitas, Texas, Ms. Walker runs horseback trips that can last up to five days through the Chihuahua desert of Mexico and Texas. The windswept, wide-open vistas are as much a part of her as the octillo and cholla are a part of the landscape - a desolate stretch along the Rio Grande.
"This big, unpeopled land is essential to my well being, " says the 43-year-old Ms. Walker. "It takes away the layers of the onion and leaves no place to hide. "It's being able to see yesterday going and tomorrow coming."
Few folks have the disposition to live in Lajitas, one of Texas' last remaining outposts. It takes the likes of Ms. Walker, who has the heart of a hippie and the soul of a wanderer. She doesn't see isolation or emptiness as she looks out over the sandy hills and desert mountains.
"It looks vast. It looks like opportunity, " she says.
These days she gets paid to do what she grew up doing. Her earliest pack trips started while she was a youngster in Colorado, where she'd hunt with her father. They stalked deer and elk for food, not sport.
"Given the choice of shooting a spike (a young elk with just one fork on his rack) and an 8-point bull, my father would tell me to shoot the spike. They're much more tender. The older bucks are tough and not as tasty."
When not in school, she'd ride and work with her father, Billy Walker, who in his day managed several ranches in Colorado. Her chores ran from working cattle to something "as benign and wonderful as going out and pulling our own carrots and as realistic as butchering cows and chopping chickens' heads off."
By age 15, entertainment meant gathering a few friends and riding into the wilderness for days at a time, packing in food and supplies. Linda was as comfortable sleeping under the stars as most are snuggling in their beds.
All this became the groundwork she'd need to run her own string of horses, learning many do's and don'ts along the way. "I've been in more physical scraps than I can shake a stick at." To name a few: She has had horses roll off mountains ("taking them where they don't belong"). She's been dragged across rocky terrain with her spur caught in her stirrup. She's been thrown a few times. A couple of hard hits gave her a concussion and a broken back.
The latter happened during her first month running Lajitas Stables, her home for the past 10 years. "Right out of the box, I had a runaway."
That morning she had sent 10 guys out with a wrangler on an all-day ride. Concerned some might want to bail, she had planned to meet them for lunch. Her first mistake, she says, was letting a novice with horses hook up her wagon team. Her second was having him fix the bridles he had improperly put on the horses (he had placed the bit under the chin rather than in the mouth). Instead of keeping hold of the horses, he took the bridles completely off the horses, and the newly freed animals bolted with Ms. Walker on the wagon."I rode it for a quarter mile, maybe a half. The wagon started fishtailing and I was afraid it would roll so I jumped off the side. I flew with the greatest of ease but didn't land so well."
This was a harsh welcome for a newcomer who wasn't at all sure she even wanted the concession. Friends of her grandparents asked her to take over the stables after hearing she, along with her sister, Debra, used to run seven- and 10-day pack trips, mostly for groups of women, into the wilderness of Colorado (where she also worked as a vet assistant at a clinic in Durango).
She turned the offer down. They asked her to make an offer. She did. "Much to my surprise they took it, " she says. "What they didn't know is I didn't have a clue how to do an hourly trip. I had never even been on an hourly ride. I came in real green."
By year two, she added pack trips to her repertoire, becoming one of the few - if not the only - to regularly offer multi-day horseback wilderness adventures in Texas. Her next bold, which came seven years ago, was to ride into Mexico. At the time, she didn't even speak the language. The trips have become some of her most popular. Initially, she would run six or seven trips a winter. Now she leads that many a month.
Much of her success on the border is her respect for Mexico's culture.To gain permission to cross Mexican landowners' property, she sends a male delegate to negotiate. In the United States, she's accustomed to bargaining for herself. Plus, guests have to understand the town of San Carlos, designated as Manuel Benevides on many maps, which they'd often pass through, is not a border party town.
Few norteamericanos ever come through here, she says. "You have to act like you're a guest in someone's home - be on your best behavior." Women are not allowed in the bar, and Ms. Walker asks the men to stay away also. "The combination of drunk Americans and Mexican bravado can be volatile. We have turned many of Mexico's border towns into sideshows. We do things in their front yard we wouldn't do in our backyard."
Border trips are a tough sale during the summer, when desert temperatures are like standing next to a blast furnace. To keep her string of horses earning their hay, she hauls them north during the hottest months. Some of her horses give hourly rides on a 3,000-acre ranch just outside of Canyon City, Colo., and others join her for pack trips in Taos, N.M.
For her, it's the perfect set-up. For a few months, she enjoys the restaurants and chamber music of Taos and Santa Fe, and then the rugged beauty of the Big Bend country the rest of the year.
When Ms. Walker left her Durango, Colo., home for Lajitas, her family thought she had lost her mind - especially her mother. As a young woman, she had lived in this town when Ms. Walker was just an infant. Her father had gotten a job on a seismic crew. "When my mom got there, all there was was a trading post and three adobe houses - no running water and no one spoke English . . .
"Lajitas is either a place you really like or really don't." Her nieces and nephews call her "crazy old Aunt Linda." Her siblings, who have 9-to-5 jobs, have a hard time understanding her choices. Ms. Walker doesn't.
"If I fell over dead tomorrow, I could honestly say I've lived my life fully. I haven't put off until tomorrow to live.
"I have friends who think they're going to make their stories tomorrow. I have great stories today."
Urban Scrawl: Graffiti Artists
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deborah Voorhees
When New York sanitized its subways and ghettos of graffiti in the late 1980s, Norman Mailer compared the city to a jungle without foliage. He even bemoaned the controversial art form's death. That assessment has proven premature.
Galleries around the country, and especially abroad, are showing the work of graffiti artists with nicknames such as Crash, Stitch, Phase 2, Ozone and Vert. Last month alone, exhibitions opened in Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, Germany and Australia, as well as in the Dallas area.
"Aerosol Scrawl: An Indoor Graffiti Extravaganza" runs through Saturday at the University of Texas at Dallas in Richardson.
"Graffiti art is going through its first revival since [Keith] Haring, [Kenny] Scharf and [Jean-Michel] Basquiat had front-row seats in the art world in the late '70s and early '80s, " says Greg Metz, coordinator for UTD's main gallery. "It's time for graffiti to claim its place as an art form."
These days accomplished graffiti artists, called "writers," receive commissions to do work for bars, galleries, restaurants, record stores and other businesses. In New York, three former street kids - who go by nicknames Nicer, Bio, BG183 - started Top Artistic Talents to create urban art; clients include Coca-Cola, Reebok and Seagram's Chivas Regal. Others have taken the skill they honed on the street to Internet Web sites and advertising art.
Even lesser-known artists are getting commissions for their work. Dallas graffiti artist Greg Contestabile (a.k.a. Ozone), whose works are in the UTD exhibit, makes much of his living painting urban scenes and graffiti for clients that include several Deep Ellum clubs and area businesses, as well as the television series Walker, Texas Ranger.
"When they're doing an episode about gangs or an urban scenario, they call me to do the graffiti, " says Ozone, who's 36. "I've done about five or six episodes now."
Even though graffiti has gone beyond the scrawls on bathroom walls and subways, it remains a contentious subject because of its roots in vandalism. "It's discouraging when you see "Lobos' or "East Side Homeboys' scrawled across a wall, " laments 19-year-old Luke Harnden (a.k.a. Vert), who also has work in the UTD exhibit. "That's how many people view graffiti. "Masters' [accomplished graffiti artists] set out to make the environment look better, not worse."
Of course, the Dallas city ordinance banning graffiti reflects a different perspective. "I've seen some great work out there, " says Dallas police Sgt. Mark Langford, who serves on the gang unit. "Some of these guys have real talent. But it doesn't matter if it's a gang symbol or a pretty picture. If they don't have the owner's permission, it's illegal."
Vert has done illegal pieces. Some owners and anti-graffiti citizen groups "paint over anything in the realm of graffiti, whether it has artistic merit or not. That's [disappointing] but someone has to clean up, I guess." The ultimate compliment to artists is when their work is left alone.
Vert has been fascinated with graffiti since age 13 when he first saw it towering 10 stories above on an abandoned rice mill in Houston. "It drove something inside of me, " he says. "There's just something exciting and dynamic about the architecture of words, bending letters around and making them into images."
Early on, the danger element appealed to him, but these days Vert and his peers are as likely to paint legally as illegally. Not having to worry about getting caught gives them the time to do detailed pieces. "I'll approach bar owners and other business owners and proposition them, " says Vert.
Local artists rarely see their works in galleries; for some, the UTD exhibit has been their first chance. Mostly, their work is temporarily displayed on a few walls and fences around Deep Ellum and Lower Greenville. The free-for-all space where owners have given their permission is limited and highly competitive, and work can literally disappear overnight. Part of the tradition of graffiti is to photograph your work; often, it is the only lasting record of it.
"There's always another artist ready to paint over your work, " says Vert. "I try not to let it get to me."
In Dallas and around the country, graffiti art has not held collectors' interest since the first surge in the early 1980s. Still, last November, the self-portrait by Mr. Basquiat, the late graffiti artist, sold for $3.3 million at a Christie's auction in New York.
"Internationally, graffiti art has remained very hot in Holland, Germany and now Japan, " says Jan Ramirez, deputy director of collections at the Museum of the City of New York. "Many of the early New York writers - Crash, Daze, Phase 2, Mico, Lady Pink - have gone on to have major international careers."
Despite the renewed interest among some galleries, museums rarely explore the genre. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art had the Bay Area graffiti artist Twist spray a wall mural in 1996 that stayed up for four months. The Museum of the City of New York owns urban artist Martin Wong's private collection of New York graffiti art and hopes to mount an exhibit in 2004 after completing a new 35,000-square-foot hall.
Historically, graffiti has always been primal and public. "Prehistoric predecessors wrote on cave walls, " says Mr. Metz. "Many were done similarly to spray painting. They'd blow pigmented oxides through hollow bones to record their signature or codifier. It became a permanent record [or] shadow of their temporary life form."
Throughout history, the impulse to make one's mark in a public space has endured. Pompeii and the Great Wall of China are famous for their graffiti. In World War II, troops scrawled messages on walls.
As a contemporary genre, graffiti first came out of the ghettos, subways and sewers - a kind of modern cave - in the 1960s as a way for gangs to mark their territory. The writing explosion didn't occur until 1971 when The New York Times profiled "Taki 183, " a delivery boy who wrote his "tag" nickname all over the city rather than just confining it to his own neighborhood.
"The newspapers were a great stimulus to graffiti because they covered it like they were covering a war, " says Jack Stewart, who earned his doctorate in subway art from New York University. "They [the youths] all wanted to get their names in the papers."
By the end of 1971, the scrawl covered the city. Writers had to invent new ways to draw attention to their name. Bold color and exaggerated three-dimensional letters began showing up, and the images grew larger and more abstract.
"It was the voice of the people from the underground, " says Vert. "It was a common man's way to fame."
By 1972, the subway was carrying youths' names around the five boroughs of New York, and the once isolated gangs formed writing clubs as a way to exchange creative ideas. "They got to know each other because they admired the talent of writers from other neighborhoods, " says Mr. Stewart.
Graffiti art is as uniquely American as jazz, rap and rock 'n' roll. The New York graffiti marks the first stylistic change to wall scrawling since Paleolithic times, says Dr. Stewart. "There has been no other graffiti that was created as a work of art until these youths in New York, " he says.
Graffiti artists such as Vert still follow their lead. The style of lettering remains remarkably the same whether the graffiti is in Italy, Germany, Holland or any American city. Artistic talent and daring feats, such as hanging over a bridge to "bomb, " or paint, a hard-to-reach spot, are still highly regarded.
Unlike their predecessors, Vert and his peers think nothing of using brushes and rollers along with their spray can. The skill that's required when working a spray can is still admired. Drips come from the inexperienced hand, and Vert, as those before him, uses different size tips to get varying spray widths. Some tips he plucks from other aerosol cans and others he makes himself.
Writers still have tight networks, but their selection of canvases has grown much larger. Not only do graffiti artists share "pieces" from around the world on the Internet, but they also no longer just paint their own cities.
They travel the highways to reach legal walls. Cities such as San Diego, Phoenix, Kansas City, Mo., and St. Louis have put on writing events for artists around the country. In August, Vert and his crew rented a van and headed to St. Louis to participate in a massive aerosol "bomb" on a Mississippi River flood wall, which runs several miles under a railroad bridge through downtown.
Crews marked out their spots, like homesteaders plotting off land. Vert and his crew ended up at the end of the line with about an 80-foot section. At events such as these, they meet other writers, exchange ideas and often stay in touch. Vert, who gets a particular thrill painting freight and passenger trains, receives letters from artists in other cities who have seen his work.
Trains offer youths increased visibility that the metropolitan transit systems just can't. But more has changed than national recognition among these artists. Characters and images - something purists balk at - have been creeping into the art form for years.
"If it doesn't have letters, it's not "graf, ' " says New Yorker Hugo Martinez, who 27 years ago was the first to encourage graffiti artists to put their work on canvas. He owns Martinez Gallery, which shows graffiti art.
Ozone sees it differently. His attraction has always been to images, not letters. He's known for a cartoon punk with bug eyes and a pack filled with aerosol cans slung over his shoulder. At the UTD exhibit, the character stands in front of a fire hydrant looking out over the city.
"That's where the symbolism comes in, " says Ozone. "He's like a dog marking his territory."
Deborah Voorhees
When New York sanitized its subways and ghettos of graffiti in the late 1980s, Norman Mailer compared the city to a jungle without foliage. He even bemoaned the controversial art form's death. That assessment has proven premature.
Galleries around the country, and especially abroad, are showing the work of graffiti artists with nicknames such as Crash, Stitch, Phase 2, Ozone and Vert. Last month alone, exhibitions opened in Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, Germany and Australia, as well as in the Dallas area.
"Aerosol Scrawl: An Indoor Graffiti Extravaganza" runs through Saturday at the University of Texas at Dallas in Richardson.
"Graffiti art is going through its first revival since [Keith] Haring, [Kenny] Scharf and [Jean-Michel] Basquiat had front-row seats in the art world in the late '70s and early '80s, " says Greg Metz, coordinator for UTD's main gallery. "It's time for graffiti to claim its place as an art form."
These days accomplished graffiti artists, called "writers," receive commissions to do work for bars, galleries, restaurants, record stores and other businesses. In New York, three former street kids - who go by nicknames Nicer, Bio, BG183 - started Top Artistic Talents to create urban art; clients include Coca-Cola, Reebok and Seagram's Chivas Regal. Others have taken the skill they honed on the street to Internet Web sites and advertising art.
Even lesser-known artists are getting commissions for their work. Dallas graffiti artist Greg Contestabile (a.k.a. Ozone), whose works are in the UTD exhibit, makes much of his living painting urban scenes and graffiti for clients that include several Deep Ellum clubs and area businesses, as well as the television series Walker, Texas Ranger.
"When they're doing an episode about gangs or an urban scenario, they call me to do the graffiti, " says Ozone, who's 36. "I've done about five or six episodes now."
Even though graffiti has gone beyond the scrawls on bathroom walls and subways, it remains a contentious subject because of its roots in vandalism. "It's discouraging when you see "Lobos' or "East Side Homeboys' scrawled across a wall, " laments 19-year-old Luke Harnden (a.k.a. Vert), who also has work in the UTD exhibit. "That's how many people view graffiti. "Masters' [accomplished graffiti artists] set out to make the environment look better, not worse."
Of course, the Dallas city ordinance banning graffiti reflects a different perspective. "I've seen some great work out there, " says Dallas police Sgt. Mark Langford, who serves on the gang unit. "Some of these guys have real talent. But it doesn't matter if it's a gang symbol or a pretty picture. If they don't have the owner's permission, it's illegal."
Vert has done illegal pieces. Some owners and anti-graffiti citizen groups "paint over anything in the realm of graffiti, whether it has artistic merit or not. That's [disappointing] but someone has to clean up, I guess." The ultimate compliment to artists is when their work is left alone.
Vert has been fascinated with graffiti since age 13 when he first saw it towering 10 stories above on an abandoned rice mill in Houston. "It drove something inside of me, " he says. "There's just something exciting and dynamic about the architecture of words, bending letters around and making them into images."
Early on, the danger element appealed to him, but these days Vert and his peers are as likely to paint legally as illegally. Not having to worry about getting caught gives them the time to do detailed pieces. "I'll approach bar owners and other business owners and proposition them, " says Vert.
Local artists rarely see their works in galleries; for some, the UTD exhibit has been their first chance. Mostly, their work is temporarily displayed on a few walls and fences around Deep Ellum and Lower Greenville. The free-for-all space where owners have given their permission is limited and highly competitive, and work can literally disappear overnight. Part of the tradition of graffiti is to photograph your work; often, it is the only lasting record of it.
"There's always another artist ready to paint over your work, " says Vert. "I try not to let it get to me."
In Dallas and around the country, graffiti art has not held collectors' interest since the first surge in the early 1980s. Still, last November, the self-portrait by Mr. Basquiat, the late graffiti artist, sold for $3.3 million at a Christie's auction in New York.
"Internationally, graffiti art has remained very hot in Holland, Germany and now Japan, " says Jan Ramirez, deputy director of collections at the Museum of the City of New York. "Many of the early New York writers - Crash, Daze, Phase 2, Mico, Lady Pink - have gone on to have major international careers."
Despite the renewed interest among some galleries, museums rarely explore the genre. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art had the Bay Area graffiti artist Twist spray a wall mural in 1996 that stayed up for four months. The Museum of the City of New York owns urban artist Martin Wong's private collection of New York graffiti art and hopes to mount an exhibit in 2004 after completing a new 35,000-square-foot hall.
Historically, graffiti has always been primal and public. "Prehistoric predecessors wrote on cave walls, " says Mr. Metz. "Many were done similarly to spray painting. They'd blow pigmented oxides through hollow bones to record their signature or codifier. It became a permanent record [or] shadow of their temporary life form."
Throughout history, the impulse to make one's mark in a public space has endured. Pompeii and the Great Wall of China are famous for their graffiti. In World War II, troops scrawled messages on walls.
As a contemporary genre, graffiti first came out of the ghettos, subways and sewers - a kind of modern cave - in the 1960s as a way for gangs to mark their territory. The writing explosion didn't occur until 1971 when The New York Times profiled "Taki 183, " a delivery boy who wrote his "tag" nickname all over the city rather than just confining it to his own neighborhood.
"The newspapers were a great stimulus to graffiti because they covered it like they were covering a war, " says Jack Stewart, who earned his doctorate in subway art from New York University. "They [the youths] all wanted to get their names in the papers."
By the end of 1971, the scrawl covered the city. Writers had to invent new ways to draw attention to their name. Bold color and exaggerated three-dimensional letters began showing up, and the images grew larger and more abstract.
"It was the voice of the people from the underground, " says Vert. "It was a common man's way to fame."
By 1972, the subway was carrying youths' names around the five boroughs of New York, and the once isolated gangs formed writing clubs as a way to exchange creative ideas. "They got to know each other because they admired the talent of writers from other neighborhoods, " says Mr. Stewart.
Graffiti art is as uniquely American as jazz, rap and rock 'n' roll. The New York graffiti marks the first stylistic change to wall scrawling since Paleolithic times, says Dr. Stewart. "There has been no other graffiti that was created as a work of art until these youths in New York, " he says.
Graffiti artists such as Vert still follow their lead. The style of lettering remains remarkably the same whether the graffiti is in Italy, Germany, Holland or any American city. Artistic talent and daring feats, such as hanging over a bridge to "bomb, " or paint, a hard-to-reach spot, are still highly regarded.
Unlike their predecessors, Vert and his peers think nothing of using brushes and rollers along with their spray can. The skill that's required when working a spray can is still admired. Drips come from the inexperienced hand, and Vert, as those before him, uses different size tips to get varying spray widths. Some tips he plucks from other aerosol cans and others he makes himself.
Writers still have tight networks, but their selection of canvases has grown much larger. Not only do graffiti artists share "pieces" from around the world on the Internet, but they also no longer just paint their own cities.
They travel the highways to reach legal walls. Cities such as San Diego, Phoenix, Kansas City, Mo., and St. Louis have put on writing events for artists around the country. In August, Vert and his crew rented a van and headed to St. Louis to participate in a massive aerosol "bomb" on a Mississippi River flood wall, which runs several miles under a railroad bridge through downtown.
Crews marked out their spots, like homesteaders plotting off land. Vert and his crew ended up at the end of the line with about an 80-foot section. At events such as these, they meet other writers, exchange ideas and often stay in touch. Vert, who gets a particular thrill painting freight and passenger trains, receives letters from artists in other cities who have seen his work.
Trains offer youths increased visibility that the metropolitan transit systems just can't. But more has changed than national recognition among these artists. Characters and images - something purists balk at - have been creeping into the art form for years.
"If it doesn't have letters, it's not "graf, ' " says New Yorker Hugo Martinez, who 27 years ago was the first to encourage graffiti artists to put their work on canvas. He owns Martinez Gallery, which shows graffiti art.
Ozone sees it differently. His attraction has always been to images, not letters. He's known for a cartoon punk with bug eyes and a pack filled with aerosol cans slung over his shoulder. At the UTD exhibit, the character stands in front of a fire hydrant looking out over the city.
"That's where the symbolism comes in, " says Ozone. "He's like a dog marking his territory."
Swing time: Three women played professional baseball in Negro League
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deborah Voorhees
Mamie "Peanuts" Johnson just wants folks to know that three women played professional ball in the men's Negro Baseball League.
"We were there all right, " says Ms. Johnson. "Not too many people know about us now."
But in their day, they drew crowds for the Indianapolis Clowns. Their names and images were on posters tacked up in barber shops and grocery stores.
"Everyone was curious about the girls playing, " says Gordon "Hoppy" Hopkins, a former teammate who lives in the Washington, D.C., area. "They had never seen women play before and they wanted a firsthand look."
The first woman to break the "gender barrier" was 32-year-old Toni Stone, who played second base for the 1952-53 season. Her real name was Marcenia Lyle Alberga, but she thought that was too cute, so she changed it.
The next year, the Clowns recruited second baseman Connie Morgan. And pitcher Mamie Johnson, who will be at the African American Museum in Dallas Saturday as part of an event commemorating the Negro League. She is the only one of the three women still living.
"Some say it was done strictly as a gate attraction, " says Larry Lester, an independent Negro League researcher. "But these women could hold their own on the ball field. When there was a collision on second base, they were able to brush themselves off and go back to the dugout. They were athletes first."
Ms. Johnson's training started on her South Carolina farm, where their home had a fireplace in every room and a big wrap-around porch. By age 7, she and the neighborhood kids regularly put games together, and when no one could play, her Uncle Leo tossed balls to her.
"There was nothing else to do where I come from, " says Ms. Johnson, 63. "This wasn't the city. The houses were about a mile apart, but everyone knew by the end of school where we were going to meet to play ball after chores were done."
By age 11, pitching became her specialty - a skill that would eventually earn her a spot on a men's team, the Alexandria All-Stars, which played in the Washington, D.C., area. Her dream was to play for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which was chronicled in the movie "A League of Their Own." But Ms. Johnson's attempts to try out were blocked. She heard the same story many black men had heard before Jackie Robinson broke the major leagues' color barrier in 1947: No blacks allowed.
All was not lost for "Peanuts, " a nickname she got for being so tiny: 5-foot-3 and 110 pounds. In 1953, the Clowns saw Ms. Johnson play at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., and asked her to come to a city park to try out. Her pitching landed her the job. "I was overjoyed because it gave me the opportunity to do just what I wanted, " she says.
Her specialty pitch was the curve ball. She learned it during a game with the Kansas City Monarchs. The great Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige came over to her. "I was so little, he said he'd teach me something to keep me from throwing my arm away." That curve became her "ace in the hole." She struck out a lot of players with that pitch. "If you struck out any of those men, you were good, " she says.
The man responsible for bringing the three women into the Negro League was McKinley "Bunny" Downs, a former player and the Clowns' business manager. "Bunny used to tell us, "The girls are the moneymakers here. I want you to treat them like ladies or you can be replaced. If anyone messes up, I'll walk you to the bus station and buy you a ticket home, ' " says Mr. Hopkins.
Ironically, the women's big drawing power improved the men's salaries, he says. "One time, Toni got hurt, " says Mr. Hopkins. "Her right arm was in a sling. But they had posters out saying she was playing. Bunny said she had to put on her uniform and play anyway." And she did. For most games, she'd come out for the first three or four innings, and then one of the other players would take over, says Mr. Hopkins. When asked why she didn't play the whole game, he just says, "You don't have to give folks a whole hog for them to know they're eating pork."
For the 1954 season, Ms. Stone was traded to the Monarchs, who paid her $400 a month plus a $200 bonus, and the Clowns recruited Ms. Johnson and Ms. Morgan.
The women took to the road - side by side with the men. For nine months, they played seven nights a week, sometimes two games a day. Ms. Johnson pitched every five or six days. The players usually slept on the bus, as they often had to drive all day and night to reach the next game. When they did stop for rest, Mr. Downs always made sure the women had separate accommodations, says Mr. Hopkins. "He took real good care of them."
"Quite often the women were underestimated, " says Layton Revel, director for the Center for Negro League Baseball Research in Dallas. "When Mamie was pitching, they'd think, "Oh, anyone could get a hit off this "girl." ' The next thing the batter knew, he was walking back to the dugout with his bat in his hand 'cause he just got struck out."
Ms. Johnson says she never heard a bad word from any of her fellow players. "Back then, men were gentlemen, " she says from her home in the U.S. capital. "Even if they didn't like you, they wouldn't say something bad."
Things were different for Ms. Stone, who clocked in at 11 seconds in the 100-yard dash. She set the tone for the other women. "I still remember a story Toni used to tell, " says Mr. Revel. "When she was signed, she was asked to wear shorts, but she wouldn't have anything to do with that. She told them she was a ballplayer and was going to play like everyone else."
At times, the guys gave her trouble in the dugouts, too. Mr. Lester quoted Ms. Stone saying to him in an interview: "They give me a fit when they started bench jockeying. They tell me to go home and fix my husband some biscuits, or anything. And they didn't spare me because of my sex. But I've heard so much cursing in my life and have been called so many bad names that now it doesn't upset me at all."
Ms. Stone was cut from a different cloth, says Mr. Lester. "She walked with the strut of a man, had unmanicured fingernails and had a rough appearance. Connie and Mamie could have been beauty contestants. But all three were excellent athletes."
When Ms. Stone signed her contract with the Indianapolis Clowns, she agreed to play for $350 a month.
Her biggest moment came one Easter Sunday during a game in Omaha, Neb. She stepped up to the plate with Satchel Paige on the pitcher's mound.
"That was the happiest moment of my life, " she told Mr. Lester. "I got the only hit we had against him that day."
Deborah Voorhees
Mamie "Peanuts" Johnson just wants folks to know that three women played professional ball in the men's Negro Baseball League.
"We were there all right, " says Ms. Johnson. "Not too many people know about us now."
But in their day, they drew crowds for the Indianapolis Clowns. Their names and images were on posters tacked up in barber shops and grocery stores.
"Everyone was curious about the girls playing, " says Gordon "Hoppy" Hopkins, a former teammate who lives in the Washington, D.C., area. "They had never seen women play before and they wanted a firsthand look."
The first woman to break the "gender barrier" was 32-year-old Toni Stone, who played second base for the 1952-53 season. Her real name was Marcenia Lyle Alberga, but she thought that was too cute, so she changed it.
The next year, the Clowns recruited second baseman Connie Morgan. And pitcher Mamie Johnson, who will be at the African American Museum in Dallas Saturday as part of an event commemorating the Negro League. She is the only one of the three women still living.
"Some say it was done strictly as a gate attraction, " says Larry Lester, an independent Negro League researcher. "But these women could hold their own on the ball field. When there was a collision on second base, they were able to brush themselves off and go back to the dugout. They were athletes first."
Ms. Johnson's training started on her South Carolina farm, where their home had a fireplace in every room and a big wrap-around porch. By age 7, she and the neighborhood kids regularly put games together, and when no one could play, her Uncle Leo tossed balls to her.
"There was nothing else to do where I come from, " says Ms. Johnson, 63. "This wasn't the city. The houses were about a mile apart, but everyone knew by the end of school where we were going to meet to play ball after chores were done."
By age 11, pitching became her specialty - a skill that would eventually earn her a spot on a men's team, the Alexandria All-Stars, which played in the Washington, D.C., area. Her dream was to play for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which was chronicled in the movie "A League of Their Own." But Ms. Johnson's attempts to try out were blocked. She heard the same story many black men had heard before Jackie Robinson broke the major leagues' color barrier in 1947: No blacks allowed.
All was not lost for "Peanuts, " a nickname she got for being so tiny: 5-foot-3 and 110 pounds. In 1953, the Clowns saw Ms. Johnson play at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., and asked her to come to a city park to try out. Her pitching landed her the job. "I was overjoyed because it gave me the opportunity to do just what I wanted, " she says.
Her specialty pitch was the curve ball. She learned it during a game with the Kansas City Monarchs. The great Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige came over to her. "I was so little, he said he'd teach me something to keep me from throwing my arm away." That curve became her "ace in the hole." She struck out a lot of players with that pitch. "If you struck out any of those men, you were good, " she says.
The man responsible for bringing the three women into the Negro League was McKinley "Bunny" Downs, a former player and the Clowns' business manager. "Bunny used to tell us, "The girls are the moneymakers here. I want you to treat them like ladies or you can be replaced. If anyone messes up, I'll walk you to the bus station and buy you a ticket home, ' " says Mr. Hopkins.
Ironically, the women's big drawing power improved the men's salaries, he says. "One time, Toni got hurt, " says Mr. Hopkins. "Her right arm was in a sling. But they had posters out saying she was playing. Bunny said she had to put on her uniform and play anyway." And she did. For most games, she'd come out for the first three or four innings, and then one of the other players would take over, says Mr. Hopkins. When asked why she didn't play the whole game, he just says, "You don't have to give folks a whole hog for them to know they're eating pork."
For the 1954 season, Ms. Stone was traded to the Monarchs, who paid her $400 a month plus a $200 bonus, and the Clowns recruited Ms. Johnson and Ms. Morgan.
The women took to the road - side by side with the men. For nine months, they played seven nights a week, sometimes two games a day. Ms. Johnson pitched every five or six days. The players usually slept on the bus, as they often had to drive all day and night to reach the next game. When they did stop for rest, Mr. Downs always made sure the women had separate accommodations, says Mr. Hopkins. "He took real good care of them."
"Quite often the women were underestimated, " says Layton Revel, director for the Center for Negro League Baseball Research in Dallas. "When Mamie was pitching, they'd think, "Oh, anyone could get a hit off this "girl." ' The next thing the batter knew, he was walking back to the dugout with his bat in his hand 'cause he just got struck out."
Ms. Johnson says she never heard a bad word from any of her fellow players. "Back then, men were gentlemen, " she says from her home in the U.S. capital. "Even if they didn't like you, they wouldn't say something bad."
Things were different for Ms. Stone, who clocked in at 11 seconds in the 100-yard dash. She set the tone for the other women. "I still remember a story Toni used to tell, " says Mr. Revel. "When she was signed, she was asked to wear shorts, but she wouldn't have anything to do with that. She told them she was a ballplayer and was going to play like everyone else."
At times, the guys gave her trouble in the dugouts, too. Mr. Lester quoted Ms. Stone saying to him in an interview: "They give me a fit when they started bench jockeying. They tell me to go home and fix my husband some biscuits, or anything. And they didn't spare me because of my sex. But I've heard so much cursing in my life and have been called so many bad names that now it doesn't upset me at all."
Ms. Stone was cut from a different cloth, says Mr. Lester. "She walked with the strut of a man, had unmanicured fingernails and had a rough appearance. Connie and Mamie could have been beauty contestants. But all three were excellent athletes."
When Ms. Stone signed her contract with the Indianapolis Clowns, she agreed to play for $350 a month.
Her biggest moment came one Easter Sunday during a game in Omaha, Neb. She stepped up to the plate with Satchel Paige on the pitcher's mound.
"That was the happiest moment of my life, " she told Mr. Lester. "I got the only hit we had against him that day."
Play time for Albert Wong, 9-year old prodigy, is playing classical music like a pro
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deborah Voorhees
CARROLLTON - Nine-year-old Albert Wong isn't blessed with the long, elegant fingers of a classical pianist. His tiny hands look as if they would be more proficient at constructing mud forts than tackling Beethoven or Bach.
Yet this child, with his buzz cut and untucked T-shirt, has amazing command of the keys with strong, assured strokes that han- dle the complicated fingering of Mozart's Twelve Variations K. 500 and Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu Opus 66, a standard piece for concert pianists' encore repertoire.
"I've seen university students who have studied the piano for years who aren't at his level, " says Joseph Banowetz, a professor of piano performance at the University of North Texas in Denton who is also Albert's coach. "In raw talent, I'd say he's in the top 1 percent."
Dr. Banowetz first met Albert when the boy was only 5. One of his former university students, Alton Chin, prodded him until he reluctantly agreed to an audition. Dr. Banowetz decided he'd test the boy, politely suggest a couple of piano instructors and move on. He had never taught a child and didn't intend to start now.
Besides, his hectic schedule as a professor, international performer, recording artist and competition judge did not allow for private students. That is, until Albert. Immediately, Dr. Banowetz saw that the boy knew his way around the keys, but that wasn't enough to alter his thinking.
The difference came when he tested Albert's pitch memory. First, Dr. Banowetz played individual notes. By sound only, Albert properly named each one. Dr. Banowetz played several clusters of notes. Albert named each one. Finally, he slammed his fist onto the piano, and Albert also named those notes. Instead of refusing Albert, he found himself accepting - temporarily - the coaching position he had no time for. That was four years ago.
"There are different degrees of perfect pitch, " says Dr. Banowetz, 64. "His is extremely acute."
At a recent solo recital, Albert walks onstage, bows and smiles an endearing yet awkwardly boyish grin. He's playing a benefit for the Texas Steinway Society's scholarship program.
To reach the pedals of this black grand piano, he has to sit on the edge of the bench. Using no sheet music, he lays his hands on the keys, pausing for just a moment, and tackles works from J.S. Bach, Mozart, Chopin and others.
After his Mozart piece, he hops up and walks off the stage. It's not the intermission, and within moments he returns, bows and begins again. This is one of his concert rituals. At least once, he'll stop to hug his mom, who always waits backstage for him. He likes having someone he knows close by, says his mother, Yen-Lih Chang.
When Albert plays, the little boy in him disappears. He feels the music's emotion. Closing his eyes, his shoulders rise and fall as the music intensifies and softens. At times his fast, aggressive fingering blurs his hands as they fly across the keys.
"The technique you have to practice, but the feeling comes naturally, " says Albert, who made his debut at age 5. His performance of Kuhlau's Sonatina Op. 55 No. 2 third movement earned him first place and a grand prize at the 10th annual North Texas Music Competition at Richland College. Since then he's performed recitals at UNT and with the Northeast Orchestra of Fort Worth and Fort Worth Chamber Music Society.
Neither of Albert's parents is musical, but when Albert was 3, Ms. Chang was overwhelmed trying to sate her son's appetite for knowledge. Learning an instrument, she hoped, would help keep him busy. He picked the piano because he liked its sound.
Albert studies with the professor at the university for a couple of hours each Thursday. He doesn't like to play a piece more than 10 times before a recital, and practice sessions typically last two hours, five days a week.
Technically, Dr. Banowetz says, Albert's not quite ready for the most advanced Beethoven sonatas or Rachmaninoff. "Piano is a building process, " says Dr. Banowetz. "You don't tackle the last Beethoven sonatas until you've had a sampling of the early and middle sonatas. . . .
"But I teach Albert phrasing, style, balance just like I do advanced university students. This isn't a case of monkey see, monkey do. He's extremely intelligent." Nothing needs to be dumbed down for him.
And that goes for all he tackles. Albert is not an idiot savant, excelling at one thing. Rather he's a child prodigy. By age 3, he started reading. Even then, he constantly asked questions about everything from what are infinity and negative numbers to how does the digestive tract work. By age 4, he taught himself to write by tracing letters with his finger. He has also taken up the violin and gave his first solo performance with the Dallas Chamber Orchestra at age 6.
These days, he's home-schooled by his mother, who's an engineer with two master's degrees. She quit work several years ago to raise Albert, and his father, Chi-Pong Wong, is a senior engineer at IBM.
Even above music, he loves reading. He'll read anything from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to Mark Twain's short-story collection to a biography on Thomas Edison to the encyclopedia.
Popular music such as rock and country hold little to no appeal. "Rock is too loud, and the tunes are very simplistic, " says Albert. "They keep on repeating themselves."
Albert's big frustration with his own music is that his hands can't reach an octave, limiting his repertoire. As soon as his hands grow, he has his ears on Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody and Beethoven's Concerto No. 5.
Deborah Voorhees
CARROLLTON - Nine-year-old Albert Wong isn't blessed with the long, elegant fingers of a classical pianist. His tiny hands look as if they would be more proficient at constructing mud forts than tackling Beethoven or Bach.
Yet this child, with his buzz cut and untucked T-shirt, has amazing command of the keys with strong, assured strokes that han- dle the complicated fingering of Mozart's Twelve Variations K. 500 and Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu Opus 66, a standard piece for concert pianists' encore repertoire.
"I've seen university students who have studied the piano for years who aren't at his level, " says Joseph Banowetz, a professor of piano performance at the University of North Texas in Denton who is also Albert's coach. "In raw talent, I'd say he's in the top 1 percent."
Dr. Banowetz first met Albert when the boy was only 5. One of his former university students, Alton Chin, prodded him until he reluctantly agreed to an audition. Dr. Banowetz decided he'd test the boy, politely suggest a couple of piano instructors and move on. He had never taught a child and didn't intend to start now.
Besides, his hectic schedule as a professor, international performer, recording artist and competition judge did not allow for private students. That is, until Albert. Immediately, Dr. Banowetz saw that the boy knew his way around the keys, but that wasn't enough to alter his thinking.
The difference came when he tested Albert's pitch memory. First, Dr. Banowetz played individual notes. By sound only, Albert properly named each one. Dr. Banowetz played several clusters of notes. Albert named each one. Finally, he slammed his fist onto the piano, and Albert also named those notes. Instead of refusing Albert, he found himself accepting - temporarily - the coaching position he had no time for. That was four years ago.
"There are different degrees of perfect pitch, " says Dr. Banowetz, 64. "His is extremely acute."
At a recent solo recital, Albert walks onstage, bows and smiles an endearing yet awkwardly boyish grin. He's playing a benefit for the Texas Steinway Society's scholarship program.
To reach the pedals of this black grand piano, he has to sit on the edge of the bench. Using no sheet music, he lays his hands on the keys, pausing for just a moment, and tackles works from J.S. Bach, Mozart, Chopin and others.
After his Mozart piece, he hops up and walks off the stage. It's not the intermission, and within moments he returns, bows and begins again. This is one of his concert rituals. At least once, he'll stop to hug his mom, who always waits backstage for him. He likes having someone he knows close by, says his mother, Yen-Lih Chang.
When Albert plays, the little boy in him disappears. He feels the music's emotion. Closing his eyes, his shoulders rise and fall as the music intensifies and softens. At times his fast, aggressive fingering blurs his hands as they fly across the keys.
"The technique you have to practice, but the feeling comes naturally, " says Albert, who made his debut at age 5. His performance of Kuhlau's Sonatina Op. 55 No. 2 third movement earned him first place and a grand prize at the 10th annual North Texas Music Competition at Richland College. Since then he's performed recitals at UNT and with the Northeast Orchestra of Fort Worth and Fort Worth Chamber Music Society.
Neither of Albert's parents is musical, but when Albert was 3, Ms. Chang was overwhelmed trying to sate her son's appetite for knowledge. Learning an instrument, she hoped, would help keep him busy. He picked the piano because he liked its sound.
Albert studies with the professor at the university for a couple of hours each Thursday. He doesn't like to play a piece more than 10 times before a recital, and practice sessions typically last two hours, five days a week.
Technically, Dr. Banowetz says, Albert's not quite ready for the most advanced Beethoven sonatas or Rachmaninoff. "Piano is a building process, " says Dr. Banowetz. "You don't tackle the last Beethoven sonatas until you've had a sampling of the early and middle sonatas. . . .
"But I teach Albert phrasing, style, balance just like I do advanced university students. This isn't a case of monkey see, monkey do. He's extremely intelligent." Nothing needs to be dumbed down for him.
And that goes for all he tackles. Albert is not an idiot savant, excelling at one thing. Rather he's a child prodigy. By age 3, he started reading. Even then, he constantly asked questions about everything from what are infinity and negative numbers to how does the digestive tract work. By age 4, he taught himself to write by tracing letters with his finger. He has also taken up the violin and gave his first solo performance with the Dallas Chamber Orchestra at age 6.
These days, he's home-schooled by his mother, who's an engineer with two master's degrees. She quit work several years ago to raise Albert, and his father, Chi-Pong Wong, is a senior engineer at IBM.
Even above music, he loves reading. He'll read anything from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to Mark Twain's short-story collection to a biography on Thomas Edison to the encyclopedia.
Popular music such as rock and country hold little to no appeal. "Rock is too loud, and the tunes are very simplistic, " says Albert. "They keep on repeating themselves."
Albert's big frustration with his own music is that his hands can't reach an octave, limiting his repertoire. As soon as his hands grow, he has his ears on Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody and Beethoven's Concerto No. 5.
MARY NAN WEST: The boss lady runs Rafter S
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deborah Voorhees
HIGH PROFILE
RAFTER S RANCH - Mary Nan West's grandfather once told her that she needed to be as comfortable in the parlor as sitting on the side of the corral.
Running the family's South Texas cattle ranch has come naturally for this 73-year-old stalwart of the West. She's at home among the Rafter S' scrub brush, where for years she rounded up cattle from horseback, and vaccinated, branded and castrated alongside hired hands.
It was the parlor lessons that used to give her fits. "A needle was just something that never fit into my hand, " Ms. West says. And she didn't care much for the piano practicing that her Victorian grandmother, Robbie Bedell West, insisted on.
"When my grandmother would take a nap, I'd get one of the [workers' daughters] to pound on the piano and I'd run off and ride the calves, " Ms. West says. "I knew about when she'd be getting up, and I'd make sure to be back in that seat before she woke."
The young Mary Nan preferred driving cattle or taking daily shooting lessons with her grandfather, George Washington West. "He used to stand behind me, and he'd help me hold a .45 pistol. I couldn't have been more than 4 or 5 years old, but I remember it as if it was yesterday." Her parents divorced when she was about 2 years old, and her maternal grandparents raised her.
Mary Nan's grandfather groomed her to take over the ranch from a very young age. He had her do everything from work cattle to mend fences and windmills.
"He used to tell me, "If you don't know how to do something, you can't tell someone else how to do it, ' " she says.
Proficiency with firearms was another thing her grandfather stressed. He was there when Mary Nan killed her first deer. "I don't remember exactly how old I was; I just know I was very young. I shot it with a 30-40 Krag, " she says. "It kicked like a mule. I had a bruise on my shoulder and the side of my face. My grandfather was so proud."
Mary Nan's grandmother often scolded her husband, saying he was trying to turn the girl into a boy. To counter the ranching and hunting, her grandmother insisted that Mary Nan go to society parties in San Antonio.
"That was something I never enjoyed, and most particularly if I had work to do here, " Ms. West says. "That was a constant tug-o'-war beween my grandmother and me." But her grandmother did reap the benefits from some of the boyish activities. Mary Nan and her .22 bolt-action rifle kept her grandmother supplied with squirrels, a delicacy she loved.
By the time Ms. West turned 19, her grandfather was aging, and the time had come for her to take over the 36,000 acres of ragged country landscaped with mesquite trees, blackbrush, catclaw and guajillo, a desert brush that has tiny, lemon-yellow blooms inthe spring. The same land her grandfather started working almost a century before.
"Whatever is here in the way of flora is thorny, " Ms. West says. "Anything else that's alive will either sting ya or bite ya, including rattlesnakes."
The country is made for cattle, not sheep, Ms. West says. "It's too brushy and thorny. It will pull all the wool off."
These days, she's affectionately called "The Boss Lady, " and everyone says, "Yes, ma'am" to her out of respect, not fear.
"She's a throwback, " says George Bodden, her 29-year-old grandson. "She believes you can make a deal on a handshake. . . . You always know where you stand with her because she'll always let you know."
Not surprisingly, these are the same words Ms. West uses to describe her grandfather. After all, she is her grandfather's granddaughter.
She still runs her life and ranch much as he did. "I was raised that I didn't have to sign my name to a piece of paper to have a binding contract, " she says. "My word was my bond."
But the times have made ranching more complicated. She has to deal with more government regulations, and higher property taxes and overhead.
"A good ranch truck used to cost $1,500. The last one I bought was about $27,000. . . . And I assure you that rural electrification didn't come cheap."
Ranching today requires more than a knowledge of livestock. "You have to know bookkeeping, tax laws, federal and state regulations, and it doesn't hurt to have an "in' in the political world, " she says. "You have to be half doctor and half nurse when you grow up in the country, especially early on when we didn't have phones."
Her grandson, an agriculture graduate from Texas A&M, is her foreman. "George came back [from school] with good ideas such as clearing land and adding permanent grasses, " she says. "Wonderful idea. I couldn't understand why I never thought of it." He also saves on vet bills because he handles the medications and palpates the cows (checking for pregnancies).
These days, Ms. West and Mr. Bodden run the ranch. She's a part of buying and selling livestock, and she still feeds the herds, but she leaves Mr. Bodden and the hands to handle the cattle in the pens.
"She's the boss, though, " Mr. Bodden says. "I check in with her. She just can't scale a fence to get out of the way of a steer as fast as she used to."
As a youth, Mr. Bodden worked beside her, filling syringes as she vaccinated and castrated.
"I can remember her horseback. She sure knew how to work cattle. She could ride with anyone."
Her work force is smaller than when she took over the ranch, and the only horses left are retired. Roundups are done with trucks, utility vehicles or helicopters.
"If you have someone who knows what they're doing, you can drive the cows all the way to the pens with a helicopter - all you need is a guy to open the gate, " says her son-in-law Richard Traylor, who also uses helicopters on his ranch about an hour away.
"Cowboys have almost become a thing of the past, extinct you might say, " Ms. West says. "We still need someone who knows how to handle cattle in the pens. We still firebrand, and we still castrate with a pocket knife. Some things don't change no matter what they teach you at the university."
As for the mechanization of the ranch - she hasn't decided if it's good or not. "Oh, I suppose it is, " she says, grudgingly. The roads have made fixing fence and getting around the ranch easier. "But every time I turn around, something has broken down. You didn't used to have breakdowns because there wasn't anything to break. Now we have so many conveniences, but never any time to sit on the porch and rock."
Over the years, she has survived many droughts, including the seven-year 1950s dry spell that inspired Elmer Kelton's novel "The Time It Never Rained." Her grandfather died in 1956, one year before the drought ended. She remembers going to him for advice. "He said, "This won't be your last drought if you stick with this business, ' and I said, "Yes, sir.' So, in other words, "Deal with it.' "
Many ranchers and farmers lost everything. Others moved their cattle to greener pastures. She considered doing the same. George West believed leaving would cost more. So she stayed.
"That was a goody. We weren't into a big cow/calf operation at the time, " she says. "We had steers, which was good. Steers you can unload any time."
By the time the cows had eaten most of the prickly pear, she bought green-corn silage at $3 a ton and packed it into pits with a bulldozer. The concoction kept what few cows she had alive.
"That drought was odd. There was no forage on the ground, but we never had a tank go dry, " she recalls.
Her land is a bit wetter these days. Ms. West looks out the kitchen window surveying it. "This is my favorite time on the ranch. There's just nothing like the green after a rain."
She recalls how, as a child, the Leona River, which runs through the property, was her playground.
"I fished and swam in it. We'd get ticks all over us. When we got too many, I'd divide the girls and boys, and we'd strip down and wash them off, " she says. "When we saw a snake, we'd kill it. We grew up knowing how to take care of ourselves."
And that's how she raised her two daughters, whom she brought up after divorcing their father, Joseph Clarence Adams Jr., in the early 1950s. The girls were about 6 and 7 years old.
"By the time I was 7, I could prepare a dinner and put it on the table, " Mary West Traylor says. Her sister, Robbie Bodden, was the tomboy. She spent her time in the pens with her mother, helping to bring the steers down so they could be vaccinated and castrated. (Today, Ms. Bodden and her husband live in Dallas.)
One recent evening, Ms. West and Mr. and Mrs. Traylor took a drive around the ranch. The steers and heifers trot up as they hear the dinner bell (the honking of the horn).
"You want to feed them just enough to keep them gentle, " says Ms. West, who keeps stopping the truck, giving Mr. Traylor time to rip open sacks of feed and scatter a few morsels on the ground. Mrs. Traylor finally asks, "They already ate this morning, didn't they?"
"I can't help it. I just can't pass them by, " Ms. West confesses.
Most of the cattle come right up. A few wait in the bushes until the truck drives off, but all eventually wade in to get a taste. A little farther down the road, she looks over at a few cattle heading toward the truck. "They have the size but not the "groceries' to put weight on."
"You have about 30 days until sale. They'll put on conservatively 2 pounds a day, " Mrs. Traylor calculates. "I'll be happy if they put on a pound a day, " says Ms. West.
Ms. West sees a spotted steer with a patch around one eye. He's wet and muddy from the drizzle. After getting out of the truck, she strokes his forehead and hand-feeds him a couple of pellets, which he eagerly gobbles. "Hi there, Patches."
"That's one steer that won't go on the cattle truck with the rest, " Mrs. Traylor says.
"I got to keep a couple of the gentle ones around to teach the others, " Ms. West says. She's always had a couple of favorite cows that spend their lives on the ranch. Her soft spot is evident with other animals, too. She's taken in a couple of emus and several stray dogs that were dumped on her property. Wild deer come at dusk and dawn for grain, apples and carrots.
Still, her sure aim has put down more than a few rattlesnakes and a rabid coyote that wandered about 150 yards from her back door. And most of the cattle eventually will head to the meat packers. "That's just the way things are in the country, " Ms. West says.
She's also chased off a few intruders of the two-legged variety, albeit by accident. Not long ago, she was driving through the property and past a few illegal immigrants who were camped out. They weren't hurting anything, so she let them alone.
Just down the road, she saw a rattler and pulled over and shot it. "When I turned around they had all run off in five different directions. I really wasn't trying to scare them, just kill a snake."
Around the state she's been the first woman in many arenas such as the first woman chairman on Texas A&M's board of regents, and the first to serve as President and chairman of S.A.L.E, which puts on the San Antonio Stockshow and Rodeo. She has pushed its growth for 25 years, and currently, she is the chairman of the board.
"She not only worked in a man's world, but in a good old boy's world, " says Keith Martin, executive director of SALE. "If Mary Nan feels strongly about something, she'll get it done."
When she started working with SALE, it had only 300 volunteers compared with more than 3,000 today, and she says it was the first rodeo to pay equally to barrel racers (which is often the only rodeo event women compete in).
Among the many programs she started is the SALE scholarship fund. Since 1984, $11.5 million has been raised to help aspriring agriculture majors. Using her own money, she set up a $40,000 endowment for Mexican citizens to study agriculture at Texas A&M's undergraduate program.
"We should have good relationships with our neighbors, " says Ms. West, who speaks Spanish fluently. She learned Spanish as a girl while playing with the Mexican ranch hands' children.
Ms. West didn't attend college except for a brief stint at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her grandmother wanted her to study liberal arts, not agriculture. So she came home to run the ranch.
"I've been here all my life, and I wouldn't have lived anywhere else, " she says. Still, her life experiences are far from narrow. She's well-read, sophisticated and has seen the world. She's traveled to places such as Africa, England, Ireland, Japan, Antarctica, Easter Island, China and Greenland.
Her eclectic home decor mixes treasures from around the world with Texana such as an antique Colt .45 and an elaborate silver saddle and holster, suitable for Trigger and Roy Rogers.
Ms. West eventually learned to be comfortable in the parlor. Over the years, she has thrown dinners and parties for several foreigners wishing to visit a real Texas ranch.
"She can be in jeans fixing a fence or having dinner at the White House, " Mr. Martin says. "She has friends who are big politicians and others who are clerks at the grocery store. She treats them all the same."
"I don't care when you see Mary Nan - she's always perfectly groomed, even when she's horseback, " Ms. Freeman-Lee says. This trend may have started with her grandfather.
When Mary Nan was about 15, he took her to the Frost Bros. store in San Antonio. "He said since all the women in the family had a mink coat that I should have one, too. Being very female, I thought I should, too." He often would say to her, "You can do anything a man can do and still be a lady doing it."
Perhaps with this in mind he took her to Sol Frank Co. in San Antonio and had khaki pants, with a side zipper, made for her. "Back then they didn't make jeans for girls, and I didn't have the figure for men's jeans, " she says. "I guess that's something I did different than the women of my day. I wore pants. . . . But these were more ladylike."
On the ranch, Ms. West still wears pants, but whenever she goes to town, she slips on a dress and her hair is styled. However, she draws the line at the dressy hats such as those ladies wore during her youth.
"I swore if I ever grew up enough that I would never wear a hat - except for a cowboy hat on the ranch, " she says. And she has stuck by that. All in all, she says, "I've done the best that I can do, and as my grandfather said, "That's all a mule can do.' "
Deborah Voorhees
HIGH PROFILE
RAFTER S RANCH - Mary Nan West's grandfather once told her that she needed to be as comfortable in the parlor as sitting on the side of the corral.
Running the family's South Texas cattle ranch has come naturally for this 73-year-old stalwart of the West. She's at home among the Rafter S' scrub brush, where for years she rounded up cattle from horseback, and vaccinated, branded and castrated alongside hired hands.
It was the parlor lessons that used to give her fits. "A needle was just something that never fit into my hand, " Ms. West says. And she didn't care much for the piano practicing that her Victorian grandmother, Robbie Bedell West, insisted on.
"When my grandmother would take a nap, I'd get one of the [workers' daughters] to pound on the piano and I'd run off and ride the calves, " Ms. West says. "I knew about when she'd be getting up, and I'd make sure to be back in that seat before she woke."
The young Mary Nan preferred driving cattle or taking daily shooting lessons with her grandfather, George Washington West. "He used to stand behind me, and he'd help me hold a .45 pistol. I couldn't have been more than 4 or 5 years old, but I remember it as if it was yesterday." Her parents divorced when she was about 2 years old, and her maternal grandparents raised her.
Mary Nan's grandfather groomed her to take over the ranch from a very young age. He had her do everything from work cattle to mend fences and windmills.
"He used to tell me, "If you don't know how to do something, you can't tell someone else how to do it, ' " she says.
Proficiency with firearms was another thing her grandfather stressed. He was there when Mary Nan killed her first deer. "I don't remember exactly how old I was; I just know I was very young. I shot it with a 30-40 Krag, " she says. "It kicked like a mule. I had a bruise on my shoulder and the side of my face. My grandfather was so proud."
Mary Nan's grandmother often scolded her husband, saying he was trying to turn the girl into a boy. To counter the ranching and hunting, her grandmother insisted that Mary Nan go to society parties in San Antonio.
"That was something I never enjoyed, and most particularly if I had work to do here, " Ms. West says. "That was a constant tug-o'-war beween my grandmother and me." But her grandmother did reap the benefits from some of the boyish activities. Mary Nan and her .22 bolt-action rifle kept her grandmother supplied with squirrels, a delicacy she loved.
By the time Ms. West turned 19, her grandfather was aging, and the time had come for her to take over the 36,000 acres of ragged country landscaped with mesquite trees, blackbrush, catclaw and guajillo, a desert brush that has tiny, lemon-yellow blooms inthe spring. The same land her grandfather started working almost a century before.
"Whatever is here in the way of flora is thorny, " Ms. West says. "Anything else that's alive will either sting ya or bite ya, including rattlesnakes."
The country is made for cattle, not sheep, Ms. West says. "It's too brushy and thorny. It will pull all the wool off."
These days, she's affectionately called "The Boss Lady, " and everyone says, "Yes, ma'am" to her out of respect, not fear.
"She's a throwback, " says George Bodden, her 29-year-old grandson. "She believes you can make a deal on a handshake. . . . You always know where you stand with her because she'll always let you know."
Not surprisingly, these are the same words Ms. West uses to describe her grandfather. After all, she is her grandfather's granddaughter.
She still runs her life and ranch much as he did. "I was raised that I didn't have to sign my name to a piece of paper to have a binding contract, " she says. "My word was my bond."
But the times have made ranching more complicated. She has to deal with more government regulations, and higher property taxes and overhead.
"A good ranch truck used to cost $1,500. The last one I bought was about $27,000. . . . And I assure you that rural electrification didn't come cheap."
Ranching today requires more than a knowledge of livestock. "You have to know bookkeeping, tax laws, federal and state regulations, and it doesn't hurt to have an "in' in the political world, " she says. "You have to be half doctor and half nurse when you grow up in the country, especially early on when we didn't have phones."
Her grandson, an agriculture graduate from Texas A&M, is her foreman. "George came back [from school] with good ideas such as clearing land and adding permanent grasses, " she says. "Wonderful idea. I couldn't understand why I never thought of it." He also saves on vet bills because he handles the medications and palpates the cows (checking for pregnancies).
These days, Ms. West and Mr. Bodden run the ranch. She's a part of buying and selling livestock, and she still feeds the herds, but she leaves Mr. Bodden and the hands to handle the cattle in the pens.
"She's the boss, though, " Mr. Bodden says. "I check in with her. She just can't scale a fence to get out of the way of a steer as fast as she used to."
As a youth, Mr. Bodden worked beside her, filling syringes as she vaccinated and castrated.
"I can remember her horseback. She sure knew how to work cattle. She could ride with anyone."
Her work force is smaller than when she took over the ranch, and the only horses left are retired. Roundups are done with trucks, utility vehicles or helicopters.
"If you have someone who knows what they're doing, you can drive the cows all the way to the pens with a helicopter - all you need is a guy to open the gate, " says her son-in-law Richard Traylor, who also uses helicopters on his ranch about an hour away.
"Cowboys have almost become a thing of the past, extinct you might say, " Ms. West says. "We still need someone who knows how to handle cattle in the pens. We still firebrand, and we still castrate with a pocket knife. Some things don't change no matter what they teach you at the university."
As for the mechanization of the ranch - she hasn't decided if it's good or not. "Oh, I suppose it is, " she says, grudgingly. The roads have made fixing fence and getting around the ranch easier. "But every time I turn around, something has broken down. You didn't used to have breakdowns because there wasn't anything to break. Now we have so many conveniences, but never any time to sit on the porch and rock."
Over the years, she has survived many droughts, including the seven-year 1950s dry spell that inspired Elmer Kelton's novel "The Time It Never Rained." Her grandfather died in 1956, one year before the drought ended. She remembers going to him for advice. "He said, "This won't be your last drought if you stick with this business, ' and I said, "Yes, sir.' So, in other words, "Deal with it.' "
Many ranchers and farmers lost everything. Others moved their cattle to greener pastures. She considered doing the same. George West believed leaving would cost more. So she stayed.
"That was a goody. We weren't into a big cow/calf operation at the time, " she says. "We had steers, which was good. Steers you can unload any time."
By the time the cows had eaten most of the prickly pear, she bought green-corn silage at $3 a ton and packed it into pits with a bulldozer. The concoction kept what few cows she had alive.
"That drought was odd. There was no forage on the ground, but we never had a tank go dry, " she recalls.
Her land is a bit wetter these days. Ms. West looks out the kitchen window surveying it. "This is my favorite time on the ranch. There's just nothing like the green after a rain."
She recalls how, as a child, the Leona River, which runs through the property, was her playground.
"I fished and swam in it. We'd get ticks all over us. When we got too many, I'd divide the girls and boys, and we'd strip down and wash them off, " she says. "When we saw a snake, we'd kill it. We grew up knowing how to take care of ourselves."
And that's how she raised her two daughters, whom she brought up after divorcing their father, Joseph Clarence Adams Jr., in the early 1950s. The girls were about 6 and 7 years old.
"By the time I was 7, I could prepare a dinner and put it on the table, " Mary West Traylor says. Her sister, Robbie Bodden, was the tomboy. She spent her time in the pens with her mother, helping to bring the steers down so they could be vaccinated and castrated. (Today, Ms. Bodden and her husband live in Dallas.)
One recent evening, Ms. West and Mr. and Mrs. Traylor took a drive around the ranch. The steers and heifers trot up as they hear the dinner bell (the honking of the horn).
"You want to feed them just enough to keep them gentle, " says Ms. West, who keeps stopping the truck, giving Mr. Traylor time to rip open sacks of feed and scatter a few morsels on the ground. Mrs. Traylor finally asks, "They already ate this morning, didn't they?"
"I can't help it. I just can't pass them by, " Ms. West confesses.
Most of the cattle come right up. A few wait in the bushes until the truck drives off, but all eventually wade in to get a taste. A little farther down the road, she looks over at a few cattle heading toward the truck. "They have the size but not the "groceries' to put weight on."
"You have about 30 days until sale. They'll put on conservatively 2 pounds a day, " Mrs. Traylor calculates. "I'll be happy if they put on a pound a day, " says Ms. West.
Ms. West sees a spotted steer with a patch around one eye. He's wet and muddy from the drizzle. After getting out of the truck, she strokes his forehead and hand-feeds him a couple of pellets, which he eagerly gobbles. "Hi there, Patches."
"That's one steer that won't go on the cattle truck with the rest, " Mrs. Traylor says.
"I got to keep a couple of the gentle ones around to teach the others, " Ms. West says. She's always had a couple of favorite cows that spend their lives on the ranch. Her soft spot is evident with other animals, too. She's taken in a couple of emus and several stray dogs that were dumped on her property. Wild deer come at dusk and dawn for grain, apples and carrots.
Still, her sure aim has put down more than a few rattlesnakes and a rabid coyote that wandered about 150 yards from her back door. And most of the cattle eventually will head to the meat packers. "That's just the way things are in the country, " Ms. West says.
She's also chased off a few intruders of the two-legged variety, albeit by accident. Not long ago, she was driving through the property and past a few illegal immigrants who were camped out. They weren't hurting anything, so she let them alone.
Just down the road, she saw a rattler and pulled over and shot it. "When I turned around they had all run off in five different directions. I really wasn't trying to scare them, just kill a snake."
Around the state she's been the first woman in many arenas such as the first woman chairman on Texas A&M's board of regents, and the first to serve as President and chairman of S.A.L.E, which puts on the San Antonio Stockshow and Rodeo. She has pushed its growth for 25 years, and currently, she is the chairman of the board.
"She not only worked in a man's world, but in a good old boy's world, " says Keith Martin, executive director of SALE. "If Mary Nan feels strongly about something, she'll get it done."
When she started working with SALE, it had only 300 volunteers compared with more than 3,000 today, and she says it was the first rodeo to pay equally to barrel racers (which is often the only rodeo event women compete in).
Among the many programs she started is the SALE scholarship fund. Since 1984, $11.5 million has been raised to help aspriring agriculture majors. Using her own money, she set up a $40,000 endowment for Mexican citizens to study agriculture at Texas A&M's undergraduate program.
"We should have good relationships with our neighbors, " says Ms. West, who speaks Spanish fluently. She learned Spanish as a girl while playing with the Mexican ranch hands' children.
Ms. West didn't attend college except for a brief stint at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her grandmother wanted her to study liberal arts, not agriculture. So she came home to run the ranch.
"I've been here all my life, and I wouldn't have lived anywhere else, " she says. Still, her life experiences are far from narrow. She's well-read, sophisticated and has seen the world. She's traveled to places such as Africa, England, Ireland, Japan, Antarctica, Easter Island, China and Greenland.
Her eclectic home decor mixes treasures from around the world with Texana such as an antique Colt .45 and an elaborate silver saddle and holster, suitable for Trigger and Roy Rogers.
Ms. West eventually learned to be comfortable in the parlor. Over the years, she has thrown dinners and parties for several foreigners wishing to visit a real Texas ranch.
"She can be in jeans fixing a fence or having dinner at the White House, " Mr. Martin says. "She has friends who are big politicians and others who are clerks at the grocery store. She treats them all the same."
"I don't care when you see Mary Nan - she's always perfectly groomed, even when she's horseback, " Ms. Freeman-Lee says. This trend may have started with her grandfather.
When Mary Nan was about 15, he took her to the Frost Bros. store in San Antonio. "He said since all the women in the family had a mink coat that I should have one, too. Being very female, I thought I should, too." He often would say to her, "You can do anything a man can do and still be a lady doing it."
Perhaps with this in mind he took her to Sol Frank Co. in San Antonio and had khaki pants, with a side zipper, made for her. "Back then they didn't make jeans for girls, and I didn't have the figure for men's jeans, " she says. "I guess that's something I did different than the women of my day. I wore pants. . . . But these were more ladylike."
On the ranch, Ms. West still wears pants, but whenever she goes to town, she slips on a dress and her hair is styled. However, she draws the line at the dressy hats such as those ladies wore during her youth.
"I swore if I ever grew up enough that I would never wear a hat - except for a cowboy hat on the ranch, " she says. And she has stuck by that. All in all, she says, "I've done the best that I can do, and as my grandfather said, "That's all a mule can do.' "
R.C. Hickman Chronicling the black Dallas that many never see
Publication: THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Deborah Voorhees
HIGH PROFILE
R.C. Hickman hid his 4x5 Speed Graphic camera on the floorboard of the car as he drove past a black man hanging in effigy.
A group of Mansfield residents had strung a life-size cloth doll from the high school's flag pole as a message to three black students who were expected to enroll. On a curb nearby sat a handful of white men threatening violence if they showed.
The year was 1956, and Mr. Hickman's editor wanted a photo for the Star Post, one of Dallas' weekly black newspapers. "I agreed to go if John Mitchell would drive me in his souped-up red Buick, " says Mr. Hickman, now 81. "I knew we might have to outrun someone."
When Mr. Hickman arrived, troublemakers already had forced an Associated Press reporter off the road and smashed another photographer's camera. "At first, we drove carefully by, and the angry whites didn't pay us no mind, " he says. "They had been keeping the white media out, but they didn't see me as the media because I was black."
On the second pass, Mr. Hickman scooped his camera up and, with one foot on the floorboard and one on the ground, he clicked two shots. This time, he got the men's attention. They piled into their car and within seconds were on Mr. Hickman's tail. He told his driver to haul toward Fort Worth. He had a buddy who owned the Pinkston Funeral Home; usually, he kept his garage door open.
"I was sure hoping it was open, " says Mr. Hickman. He and Mr. Mitchell sped through the streets, trying to lose their pursuers. As they pulled onto Terrell Street, Mr. Hickman saw the open garage. Mr. Mitchell swerved in and Mr. Hickman pulled the door shut before the other car arrived. Seconds later, it passed by unaware.
This was probably Mr. Hickman's most dangerous assignment as he covered black Dallas during the 1950s and '60s civil rights movement. "I had an exclusive on that photograph, " Mr. Hickman says. "No one else got that shot."
He not only covered news for his hometown weekly, the Star Post, but also free-lanced for national magazines such as Jet, Sepia and Ebony - covering the same city where, as a boy, he pitched pennies on Thomas Avenue and watched movies at the State Theatre.
"I was the one-shot wonder, " Mr. Hickman says. "I had to be. Film was too expensive."
These days, his photographs have been acquired by the University of Texas at Austin, which in 1994 published Mr. Hickman's book, Behold the People, a photographic chronicle of black Dallas. The university celebrated the acquisition with an exhibit, "Black Dallas in the 1950s: Photographs From the R.C. Hickman Archive."
Since then, his works have been exhibited at several places, including Paul Quinn College, the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library and Fair Park. "We don't have a lot of visual evidence of what it was like for African-Americans during this period - Brown vs. Topeka [Board of Education] and the civil rights movement [1950s-'60s], " says Don Carleton, director of the Center for American History at UT. "It's important to preserve this type of work so it can be made available for research."
By the time Mr. Carleton and Michael Gillette of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library & Museum in Austin discovered Mr. Hickman, he had long ago put away his camera. He was selling carpet and living in a one-story, ranch-style home in Oak Cliff. Ruth, his wife of 42 years, had passed away four years before.
It was the summer of '84 when Mr. Carleton and Mr. Gillette arranged to meet Mr. Hickman at his home. They wanted Mr. Hickman's collection for UT. To their delight, they found that Mr. Hickman was a pack rat. All of his negatives had been filed and kept in shoe boxes in the garage.
"It was like uncovering Pompeii, " Mr. Carleton says. With the removal of every layer of dirt, something new was revealed. But for him, the desire to save the photographs went beyond a business deal for the college.
"I grew up in East Dallas, not but about five minutes from R.C., and the only part of his world I knew about was when driving to Fair Park. I only saw it through the window of a car.
"It was a world I wanted to know more about. And - surprise, surprise - his family and neighbors were doing the same things as ours" - the weddings, the homecoming dances, the baptisms, the birthday parties, the parades, the beauty pageants - and Mr. Hickman had recorded it all.
"We covered what was happening in the black neighborhoods, " Mr. Hickman says. "The things that blacks did were ignored by the white papers. They didn't want black faces in their papers."
But the Star Post did (and so did the Dallas Express, the Star's competition). R.C. Hickman was there when notables such as Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Bunche came to town.
He snapped a shot of a 1958 shotgun murder victim. An ambulance arrived, but because the victim was black he had to wait for one designated specifically for blacks.
He photographed youths at South Dallas' Exline Park during the summer of '55, the first year black children could swim in a Dallas city pool. The kids were lined up with broad smiles, their skin glistening with water.
In October of that same year, Mr. Hickman photographed a young woman picketing on Oakland Avenue. She and several other youths, led by Juanita Craft and the Youth Council of the NAACP, were protesting Negro Achievement Day outside the State Fair. She carried a sign, "It is no achievement to be segregated at the fair. Stay out." He photographed Dollie Miles as she escorted her twins into City Park Elementary, integrating the school in 1961.
When black celebrities came to town, R.C. Hickman was there. He snapped shots of Billy Eckstine, Ruth Brown, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr. and Nat King Cole. When Cole came to perform at the Longhorn Ranch House, a popular Dallas nightclub once owned by Bob Wills, blacks could attend only on Monday nights.
"When I left to shoot Nat King Cole, my editor told me to get him with his mouth open, " Mr. Hickman says. "And see that! His mouth is wide open! He was singing "Mona Lisa.' "
His best photo, he says, was the one he didn't get. Martin Luther King Jr. was coming to protest at E.M. Kahn & Co. and Sanger Harris, neighboring downtown department stores. The stores allowed black women to buy clothes, but they weren't allowed to try them on. At E.M. Kahn & Co., "Mr. King first drank out of the black fountain, then he slowly walked to the white fountain and drank.
"Now, that was my picture, but I didn't get it because I was too shook up. I thought there was going to be a lynching or something, " Mr. Hickman says. "But all that happened was Mr. King said, "You know, that water tastes just the same.' " Later that day, he photographed King at the protest and at a pulpit. Mr. Hickman also did photography for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
After the courts determined that separate schools were acceptable if they were equal, the NAACP hired him to document the differences between the white and black schools. He worked under NAACP notables such as Thurgood Marshall, W.J. Durham and C.B. Bunkley. "The schools were as different as day and night, " Mr. Hickman says. "The black classrooms were dilapidated, toilets dirty, and the benches and books were used. Everything was fine at the white schools - everything was new."
His interest in photography first was piqued during World War II while he was watching a fellow soldier in a foxhole develop reconnaissance pictures. Mr. Hickman was stationed in Saipan. (His division was setting up a base so they could furnished ammo for the 4th Marine division.) He asked his superior if he could make a darkroom, and once he was set up, he began photographing soldiers, trucks or whatever his superiors requested.
After his tour of duty, Mr. Hickman developed film at Hall Gentry Photographic Studio in downtown Dallas. Then he applied for a GI loan and studied photography at Southwest School of Photography in Dallas, graduating in '48. He used borrowed cameras while he made payments on a 4x5 Speed Graphic, a large-format camera.
Although Mr. Hickman established himself as a newspaper and community photographer, he still couldn't earn enough to support his wife and himself. At the Star Post, which was next to the Party Grill and the Laundry-Pal Washateria, he held three jobs: circulation manager, advertising salesman and photographer. He was making $50 a week when he quit because he couldn't get a $10 raise. That didn't last. The paper's owner agreed to his request after being unable to find a suitable replacement.
Mr. Hickman stayed with the paper 10 years. "I got very little sleep, " he says. "My wife would help keep me awake so I could get my photos developed at night. Sometimes I didn't even get to bed."
As the circulation manager, he managed the newspaper boys, who earned a nickel of the 15 cents they charged for each paper. "I told them, if you sell 20 papers, you get 20 nickels. A little boy asked, "How much is 20 nickels?' I said, "You'll find out.' "
Photojournalism His first experience as a photojournalist came when he started taking assignments from the Dallas Express and the then-Kansas City Call. The latter was a weekly Midwestern paper that focused on racial inequalities, not violence. Mr. Hickman was the Dallas agent. He sold papers and took pictures. While he was with the Call, he recruited Dickie Foster, a woman who owned a record shop on the corner of State and Routh, to write a column called "Platter Chatter." "It was a social column, and it talked about top-10 records of the week, " Mr. Hickman says. "She sold a lot of records; I sold a lot of papers."
After the Star Post folded in 1962, Mr. Hickman continued his work as a community photographer, taking pictures of weddings, baptisms and such. He documented the places where blacks lived, worked, played and prayed. His snapshots include gas station attendants standing in front of Mac's Texaco, the first black-owned service station in Dallas; Annie Carr Mercer working under the hood of a car at her service station; three waitresses gabbing at the Aristocrat, a black-owned restaurant; a woman barber trimming a man's hair; Jim Randolph, a KLIF disc jockey, sitting in the radio studio; a shot of the Starlite Theater marquee, "Southwest's Finest for Colored Americans"; and the front of Papa Dad's BBQ, a local hangout.
There's little evidence left of these establishments, Mr. Hickman says. "When integration occurred, black businesses suffered, and the Great White Fathers destroy things so no one knows the history. You see, it's not State-Thomas. That's not what it was called. It was Hall and Thomas."
These days, Mr. Hickman takes his images and his stories to schools around Dallas and tells youths about the history of blacks in Dallas. "R.C. has one of the few records of black people and their accomplishments in this area, " says Earlie Montgomery, a longtime friend of Mr. Hickman's and a retired stock-brokerage manager. "I lived through having to sit on all-black train cars. I lived through not being able to use a bathroom in the downtown department stores. So did R.C.
Youths have no concept of what that was like. These photos tell the stories." And the animated Mr. Hickman loves to reminisce. His face lights up as he recalls being chased out of Mansfield or tells about the photograph of King that he didn't get. But the documentarian has finished recording stories. Since his days as a photographer, he has lived many lives. As a carpet salesman, his old boss, J.D. Hall, says, "He could sell ice to an Eskimo." He's also managed a couple of bowling alleys and was the first black manager at a Skillern's drugstore.
These days, he's retired. "My camera has gone to bed, " Mr. Hickman says. "I'm proud of the work I've done, but now I'm glad to just look at it."
Deborah Voorhees
HIGH PROFILE
R.C. Hickman hid his 4x5 Speed Graphic camera on the floorboard of the car as he drove past a black man hanging in effigy.
A group of Mansfield residents had strung a life-size cloth doll from the high school's flag pole as a message to three black students who were expected to enroll. On a curb nearby sat a handful of white men threatening violence if they showed.
The year was 1956, and Mr. Hickman's editor wanted a photo for the Star Post, one of Dallas' weekly black newspapers. "I agreed to go if John Mitchell would drive me in his souped-up red Buick, " says Mr. Hickman, now 81. "I knew we might have to outrun someone."
When Mr. Hickman arrived, troublemakers already had forced an Associated Press reporter off the road and smashed another photographer's camera. "At first, we drove carefully by, and the angry whites didn't pay us no mind, " he says. "They had been keeping the white media out, but they didn't see me as the media because I was black."
On the second pass, Mr. Hickman scooped his camera up and, with one foot on the floorboard and one on the ground, he clicked two shots. This time, he got the men's attention. They piled into their car and within seconds were on Mr. Hickman's tail. He told his driver to haul toward Fort Worth. He had a buddy who owned the Pinkston Funeral Home; usually, he kept his garage door open.
"I was sure hoping it was open, " says Mr. Hickman. He and Mr. Mitchell sped through the streets, trying to lose their pursuers. As they pulled onto Terrell Street, Mr. Hickman saw the open garage. Mr. Mitchell swerved in and Mr. Hickman pulled the door shut before the other car arrived. Seconds later, it passed by unaware.
This was probably Mr. Hickman's most dangerous assignment as he covered black Dallas during the 1950s and '60s civil rights movement. "I had an exclusive on that photograph, " Mr. Hickman says. "No one else got that shot."
He not only covered news for his hometown weekly, the Star Post, but also free-lanced for national magazines such as Jet, Sepia and Ebony - covering the same city where, as a boy, he pitched pennies on Thomas Avenue and watched movies at the State Theatre.
"I was the one-shot wonder, " Mr. Hickman says. "I had to be. Film was too expensive."
These days, his photographs have been acquired by the University of Texas at Austin, which in 1994 published Mr. Hickman's book, Behold the People, a photographic chronicle of black Dallas. The university celebrated the acquisition with an exhibit, "Black Dallas in the 1950s: Photographs From the R.C. Hickman Archive."
Since then, his works have been exhibited at several places, including Paul Quinn College, the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library and Fair Park. "We don't have a lot of visual evidence of what it was like for African-Americans during this period - Brown vs. Topeka [Board of Education] and the civil rights movement [1950s-'60s], " says Don Carleton, director of the Center for American History at UT. "It's important to preserve this type of work so it can be made available for research."
By the time Mr. Carleton and Michael Gillette of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library & Museum in Austin discovered Mr. Hickman, he had long ago put away his camera. He was selling carpet and living in a one-story, ranch-style home in Oak Cliff. Ruth, his wife of 42 years, had passed away four years before.
It was the summer of '84 when Mr. Carleton and Mr. Gillette arranged to meet Mr. Hickman at his home. They wanted Mr. Hickman's collection for UT. To their delight, they found that Mr. Hickman was a pack rat. All of his negatives had been filed and kept in shoe boxes in the garage.
"It was like uncovering Pompeii, " Mr. Carleton says. With the removal of every layer of dirt, something new was revealed. But for him, the desire to save the photographs went beyond a business deal for the college.
"I grew up in East Dallas, not but about five minutes from R.C., and the only part of his world I knew about was when driving to Fair Park. I only saw it through the window of a car.
"It was a world I wanted to know more about. And - surprise, surprise - his family and neighbors were doing the same things as ours" - the weddings, the homecoming dances, the baptisms, the birthday parties, the parades, the beauty pageants - and Mr. Hickman had recorded it all.
"We covered what was happening in the black neighborhoods, " Mr. Hickman says. "The things that blacks did were ignored by the white papers. They didn't want black faces in their papers."
But the Star Post did (and so did the Dallas Express, the Star's competition). R.C. Hickman was there when notables such as Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Bunche came to town.
He snapped a shot of a 1958 shotgun murder victim. An ambulance arrived, but because the victim was black he had to wait for one designated specifically for blacks.
He photographed youths at South Dallas' Exline Park during the summer of '55, the first year black children could swim in a Dallas city pool. The kids were lined up with broad smiles, their skin glistening with water.
In October of that same year, Mr. Hickman photographed a young woman picketing on Oakland Avenue. She and several other youths, led by Juanita Craft and the Youth Council of the NAACP, were protesting Negro Achievement Day outside the State Fair. She carried a sign, "It is no achievement to be segregated at the fair. Stay out." He photographed Dollie Miles as she escorted her twins into City Park Elementary, integrating the school in 1961.
When black celebrities came to town, R.C. Hickman was there. He snapped shots of Billy Eckstine, Ruth Brown, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr. and Nat King Cole. When Cole came to perform at the Longhorn Ranch House, a popular Dallas nightclub once owned by Bob Wills, blacks could attend only on Monday nights.
"When I left to shoot Nat King Cole, my editor told me to get him with his mouth open, " Mr. Hickman says. "And see that! His mouth is wide open! He was singing "Mona Lisa.' "
His best photo, he says, was the one he didn't get. Martin Luther King Jr. was coming to protest at E.M. Kahn & Co. and Sanger Harris, neighboring downtown department stores. The stores allowed black women to buy clothes, but they weren't allowed to try them on. At E.M. Kahn & Co., "Mr. King first drank out of the black fountain, then he slowly walked to the white fountain and drank.
"Now, that was my picture, but I didn't get it because I was too shook up. I thought there was going to be a lynching or something, " Mr. Hickman says. "But all that happened was Mr. King said, "You know, that water tastes just the same.' " Later that day, he photographed King at the protest and at a pulpit. Mr. Hickman also did photography for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
After the courts determined that separate schools were acceptable if they were equal, the NAACP hired him to document the differences between the white and black schools. He worked under NAACP notables such as Thurgood Marshall, W.J. Durham and C.B. Bunkley. "The schools were as different as day and night, " Mr. Hickman says. "The black classrooms were dilapidated, toilets dirty, and the benches and books were used. Everything was fine at the white schools - everything was new."
His interest in photography first was piqued during World War II while he was watching a fellow soldier in a foxhole develop reconnaissance pictures. Mr. Hickman was stationed in Saipan. (His division was setting up a base so they could furnished ammo for the 4th Marine division.) He asked his superior if he could make a darkroom, and once he was set up, he began photographing soldiers, trucks or whatever his superiors requested.
After his tour of duty, Mr. Hickman developed film at Hall Gentry Photographic Studio in downtown Dallas. Then he applied for a GI loan and studied photography at Southwest School of Photography in Dallas, graduating in '48. He used borrowed cameras while he made payments on a 4x5 Speed Graphic, a large-format camera.
Although Mr. Hickman established himself as a newspaper and community photographer, he still couldn't earn enough to support his wife and himself. At the Star Post, which was next to the Party Grill and the Laundry-Pal Washateria, he held three jobs: circulation manager, advertising salesman and photographer. He was making $50 a week when he quit because he couldn't get a $10 raise. That didn't last. The paper's owner agreed to his request after being unable to find a suitable replacement.
Mr. Hickman stayed with the paper 10 years. "I got very little sleep, " he says. "My wife would help keep me awake so I could get my photos developed at night. Sometimes I didn't even get to bed."
As the circulation manager, he managed the newspaper boys, who earned a nickel of the 15 cents they charged for each paper. "I told them, if you sell 20 papers, you get 20 nickels. A little boy asked, "How much is 20 nickels?' I said, "You'll find out.' "
Photojournalism His first experience as a photojournalist came when he started taking assignments from the Dallas Express and the then-Kansas City Call. The latter was a weekly Midwestern paper that focused on racial inequalities, not violence. Mr. Hickman was the Dallas agent. He sold papers and took pictures. While he was with the Call, he recruited Dickie Foster, a woman who owned a record shop on the corner of State and Routh, to write a column called "Platter Chatter." "It was a social column, and it talked about top-10 records of the week, " Mr. Hickman says. "She sold a lot of records; I sold a lot of papers."
After the Star Post folded in 1962, Mr. Hickman continued his work as a community photographer, taking pictures of weddings, baptisms and such. He documented the places where blacks lived, worked, played and prayed. His snapshots include gas station attendants standing in front of Mac's Texaco, the first black-owned service station in Dallas; Annie Carr Mercer working under the hood of a car at her service station; three waitresses gabbing at the Aristocrat, a black-owned restaurant; a woman barber trimming a man's hair; Jim Randolph, a KLIF disc jockey, sitting in the radio studio; a shot of the Starlite Theater marquee, "Southwest's Finest for Colored Americans"; and the front of Papa Dad's BBQ, a local hangout.
There's little evidence left of these establishments, Mr. Hickman says. "When integration occurred, black businesses suffered, and the Great White Fathers destroy things so no one knows the history. You see, it's not State-Thomas. That's not what it was called. It was Hall and Thomas."
These days, Mr. Hickman takes his images and his stories to schools around Dallas and tells youths about the history of blacks in Dallas. "R.C. has one of the few records of black people and their accomplishments in this area, " says Earlie Montgomery, a longtime friend of Mr. Hickman's and a retired stock-brokerage manager. "I lived through having to sit on all-black train cars. I lived through not being able to use a bathroom in the downtown department stores. So did R.C.
Youths have no concept of what that was like. These photos tell the stories." And the animated Mr. Hickman loves to reminisce. His face lights up as he recalls being chased out of Mansfield or tells about the photograph of King that he didn't get. But the documentarian has finished recording stories. Since his days as a photographer, he has lived many lives. As a carpet salesman, his old boss, J.D. Hall, says, "He could sell ice to an Eskimo." He's also managed a couple of bowling alleys and was the first black manager at a Skillern's drugstore.
These days, he's retired. "My camera has gone to bed, " Mr. Hickman says. "I'm proud of the work I've done, but now I'm glad to just look at it."
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