(adapted from Wingspread: A Memoir of Faith and Flying by James P. Hurd)
The sun has riz, the sun has set, and we is still in Texas yet.
My Uncle John from Amarillo, Texas wasn’t a Fundamentalist. Actually, he wasn’t named John, he wasn’t my uncle, and he wasn’t originally from Texas. I thought I knew him when I was a child, but trying to understand him took up most of my adult life. Recently I quizzed my brother and sisters, scanned through old photographs, Googled his name and searched for information about the Texas Panhandle, all trying to find out who he was. A long search.
John’s real name was Clien John Fowlston but he didn’t like Clien so he always went by John. He was born in Dubuque, Iowa and only later moved to Texas. He was nephew to my grandmother Loretta (he called her “Aunt Ret”).
I wonder about John’s brief first marriage—he never talked about it. But I remember his second wife, Syble—a tall woman, her silver-gray hairbun held tight with a black comb. Texas bred, she had a clear complexion and beautiful, soulful eyes that oozed Texas upper-class grace. Reserved but easy to talk to, she exercised a civilizing influence on John. “Johnny, why don’t you change your shirt?” or, “Johnny, why do you give presents to one child and not to all of them?” or, “Johnny, don’t shout.”
We always anticipate Uncle John and Aunt Syble’s driving up to our house in a Cadillac or Lincoln. (He isn’t burdened with a conservationist conscience. He says, “I always try to buy the car that uses the most gasoline.”) John brings each of us things, like a big Eisenhower silver dollar or ten dollars “to spend on whatever you want.” He brings me a tennis racket (a sport I will enjoy into my sixties). Our family of seven never goes out to eat except when Uncle John takes us to Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Restaurant at Knott’s Berry Farm, an amazing world of tastes and smells.
Uncle John stands six-foot-two and has pale skin and disheveled white hair. His Texas hat complements his gravelly voice. He wears cowboy boots (no spurs) and a belt with a silver buckle around his ample middle, the epitome of a prosperous Texan cattleman. He holds his lips somewhere between a smile and a grimace and when he laughs he says, “Keeesh, keeesh.” He’s loud and Horatio Alger optimistic. He intimidates.
In California John seems exotic . He walks with too much swagger, talks too loudly and is too conservative, even for Dick Nixon’s Orange County. He’s an uneducated millionaire and seems puzzled that other people are not wealthy. He boasts, “After I left fifth grade, I learned everything else that I needed to know by myself.”
But, like the panda bear or the Komodo dragon, one can best understand John in his native habitat—Dumas, Texas. He sits at his massive desk on the fifth floor of the Amarillo building where a sign on his desk reads, “C. J. Fowlston, Investment Counselor.”
I remember preparing to travel to Dumas, our longest family vacation. Long before first light we leave Orange, California in our light-green Ford station wagon packed with all our food for the trip (we don’t do restaurants) and with “gospel bomb” tracts wrapped in red cellophane which we will throw at pedestrians. We join historic Highway 66 near San Bernardino and follow it all the way—Barstow, Needles, Flagstaff, Winslow. We cross the Mojave Desert in the cool of the morning before the burning sun rises. Mother first knew the great Mojave as a small child, when Grandfather drove her and his whole family from South Dakota to California in his new Model T. Their constant quest for water dominated his trip journal. Today the Mojave still challenges us, especially Mother. A canvas water bag hangs on the front bumper and Mother drapes a water-soaked cloth in the passenger window to help with the heat. At night we pull into a miserable little motel in Gallup, New Mexico. The screens are ripped and the floors uneven. But Mother bursts into tears when she finds out how much it costs. Dad packs us up and moves on to a humbler motel.
It takes forever to get to Texas. We roll through Gallup, Albuquerque, Tucumcari and finally into Amarillo. In 1857, Ned Beale used camels to map out this route along the old Santa Fe Trail. The 1880s railroad line followed the Beale Wagon Road and eventually so did Route 66, America’s “Main Street.” Just thirty years before our Texas trip, haggard dust bowl survivors trekked westward along this same highway, traveling in wheezing, radiator-boiling cars piled high with all their belongings. In California I went to elementary school with their kids—we called them “Okies and Arkies.” They wore overalls and smelled your crotch when someone farted. We didn’t like them.
You can’t tell Texas is coming but the mountains and mesas of New Mexico gradually morph into undulating plains as we enter the Panhandle. When we pass the vast ranches and the horse-headed oil donkeys, I wonder, Does the Panhandle produce anything besides oil and cattle? Bold, proud, independent, self-made Texas. She doesn’t even seem to notice we’ve come.
We finally arrive at Uncle John’s ranch, drive through the gate with the cast-iron brand “Derrick Ranch” overhead and park in front of the brick rambler. John and Syble emerge with a warm welcome and soon we’re sipping sweet tea in their living room. A photo hangs on the wall—it’s John and Syble in Egypt, astride camels, with the pyramids in the background. But the heart of the house is behind. A massive wooden door, carved in Taos, New Mexico, opens into a huge rec room with knotty pine walls. A sign hangs over the bar—”No drinking before 5:00 p.m.” Mother doesn’t approve of Uncle John’s drinking. Windows on all sides give a view of the vast, watered cornfields. I can see cows stretching their necks over the fence.
Uncle John introduces me to Texas racism. He boasts, “There isn’t a n— in all of Potter County.” Amarillo is scrubbed clean of African Americans and most Mexicans, people that John tars with the same brush. He once asked my brother-in-law who worked at United Airlines, “Do any n—s or ch—s work there?” Rich replied, “Well, some black people and Chinese people work there.” One time my friend Dave and I were traveling Route 66 from Chicago to California, and after driving way too long without sleep, we stopped to see Uncle John in Amarillo. He immediately delivered his ultimate insult—“You California drivers are worse than Mexican drivers.” Before he would talk to us, he installed us in an Amarillo motel and demanded that we sleep.
Today, John and Syble take our family to fish and swim at Conchas Dam near Tucumcari. We squeeze slices of white bread into little doughballs and plunge the hook into them, hoping to catch some tiny bluegill for Syble to fry up. John seems to want all of us to have a good time. He walks around the dock in swim trunks tied over his pear-shaped body. He’s bare-chested, with drooping dugs and white chest hair. He has a giant appetite, especially for beef and pork, and in later years will suffer from the gout.
Back at the ranch, John maintains four thousand head of polled Hereford cattle that are destined to feed the hungry maws of the likes of McDonald’s and Burger King. The cows come right up to the fence where I can feel their warm breath. I see John out in the field holding my little sister’s hand while she stands atop a huge bull. He lets us ride his cow ponies, one of which runs away with my sister Mary. Mine takes a sharp turn, but I don’t—I fly off and thud to the ground. When I use his .22 to shoot at groundhogs and rabbits, I don’t hit anything so I switch to a shotgun. In the barn we play on the hay bales and dive into the grain.
One evening John invites dozens of booted cattlemen to eat huge beefburgers that he personally grills in the backyard. He warns, “If the insides aren’t bright red, it’s ruined.” He takes us to the gas and oil museum and points out a sign along a rural road that says, “First Oil Strike in Texas.” Then we drive out north of Dumas to the Amarillo Country Club. I don’t see any people of color, except for the waitstaff.
Mother tries to witness to Uncle John. He attends church sporadically, but he isn’t saved. For our family, being saved was like being pregnant—you either are or you aren’t. Most people we know aren’t. We Fundamentalists don’t smoke, drink or go to the movies. (I will later go to my first movie at age twenty-two.) We suspect Uncle John is Episcopal, not out of spiritual hunger but because of his social status. He says, “Those Fundamentalist radio preachers are all crooks!” Our family frequently prays he will get saved.
Uncle John may have been intelligent but the smartest thing he did was arranging to be born at exactly the right time—1901. The twentieth century gave us automobiles, airplanes, factories and two World Wars, all dependent on massive doses of petroleum. In 1918 the Amarillo Oil Company sunk the “No. 1 Masterson” in the lime, granite and dolomite sediments of the Texas Panhandle. It was soon producing ten million cubic feet of natural gas daily and became the forerunner of the greatest gas field in the world.
Perfect timing for John. When John turned fifteen, his family had left Dubuque, Iowa, for Tulsa to work in the nascent oil fields. Oil lust grew and the oil and gas industry revved up to satisfy the appetites of thousands of automobiles and later thousands of warplanes. After ten years in Tulsa and a detour to work the oil fields in Venezuela, John moved to Amarillo to work in the Panhandle fields and rode the oil gusher to the top floor of one of Amarillo’s office buildings where he became a successful investment counselor. I once sat in his office and heard him say on the phone: “The uranium mine seems good? Okay—buy a hundred shares.”
When we finally depart, Uncle John presents us with a plain white, fat envelope. “Don’t open this until the New Mexico border,” he orders. What’s in the envelope? We speed to the border, pull over to the side of the road, open it, and find enough cash to finance most of our trip. John has scrawled on a piece of paper, “Stay in a good motel. Buy a good Mexican dinner in Santa Fe. Detour up to Taos to see the three-story adobe Indian village.” We obey.
Later, when I am a student in Chicago, Uncle John frequently sends me pages of the Amarillo Globe-Times by third-class mail, underlined, annotated and then rolled up and taped. He always encloses a handwritten letter so he doesn’t have to pay first-class postage. Even when he types his letters I can hardly read them because of their elliptical sentences, missing characters, sparse punctuation and hurried scrawl. I try to decipher them and send a postcard back.
After I am married, I remember telephoning Uncle John to tell him that Barbara and I are adopting our first child (Kimberly) from Costa Rica. I can almost feel him stiffen.
“Are you gonna get a white one?”
“No. I think we’re gonna get a brown one.”
“What’s wrong with a white one?”
“Nothing, but we like variety.”
“Well, the rest of the world doesn’t!”
Yet when we visit him in his old age he warmly receives us, along with our two adopted children from Colombia. He takes us to a rib joint and put us up in a motel. He drives us out to the ranch (but not to the country club). This is the last time I see Uncle John.
John gave us great gifts. A long time ago, he moved my uncles’ coffins. Mother’s brother Calvin died from the fever on their South Dakota homestead in the winter of 1917 when he was two and his older brother, Jamie, nine, died two months later. Grandpa put their coffins in a snow bank and then in the spring after the frost left the ground, buried them in Bonita Springs. Later, Uncle John exhumed the coffins and moved them to Hopkinton, Iowa, near the graves of others in the family. It was a touching act and one of the first stories I heard about Uncle John.
Recently I call Joyce Perkins in Amarillo, a kind woman who for over thirty years has faithfully administered the C. J. and Syble Fowlston Trust. She tells me, “The trust still provides money to Cal Farley’s Ranch for Boys near Amarillo. Their motto is ‘a shirttail to hang onto.’ And, because of John’s interest in The Lawrence Welk Show, I send some money every month to KACV-TV, our local PBS station.”
So, who is Uncle John? Is he “Mr. Texas,” a self-taught and self-made man of the world, a loud, opinionated, rich oil- and cattleman with only a fifth-grade education who rose to be a millionaire? Is he a racist, politically somewhere to the right of Rush Limbaugh? He’s all of these. Yet I remember with gratitude his steady interest in our family, his monthly stipends to us while later we were missionaries in Latin America and especially remember his warm welcome for us at Derrick Ranch. Uncle John, peace to your memory.
Wingspread 