PART FIVE:

LEARNING TO BE TEXANS

 

 

Chapter 21

First Year in Denton, Texas:

Texas State College for Women

 

 

It was hot as the hinges most of the way from New England to Texas, even though we broke up the trip very pleasurably, stopping along the way in Bloomington, Indiana, to visit the Stallknechts and another couple we had known at Bowdoin - then Bill's parents in St. Louis, where we visited the zoo, celebrated Tommy's fourth birthday and took a boat ride on the Mississippi - then visited a couple Bill had known since high school, living in a little Missouri town - and finally, explored the Meramec Caverns (of Jesse James fame), in southern Missouri. But even though we spaced out our stops so as to arrive in campgrounds every night and took out time in the mornings getting back on the road, we were pretty hot, sweaty, tired, dirty, girdled by chigger bites at waist and ankle &endash; and both disgrunted and plain cross as a group, by the time we arrived in southern Oklahoma. We crossed the Red River into Texas at top speed, and sped down the highway running right into the center of Denton!

 

As we arrived at the town limits sign, the weather, which had been looming threateningly over our heads for miles, the sky all black, green and blue like a great bruise, suddenly "broke" into a downpour, and we arrived in the middle of a spectacular - and most welcome - rainstorm! I can see it so vividly! We are driving due south down the main north-south street through town, rain pouring in great sheets everywhere around us; we come up over a sudden rise, and lo! - there before us is a vision that could have come right out of Moscow! - the Denton County Courthouse! There no way I could ever improve on Bill's description of this experience:

 

Sunday, August 10:

Normal, trans-Stygian weather.

 

It was quite pleasant in Stigler [Oklahoma] around seven this morning when I got up. The change from daylight saving to standard time, which will probably hold in Denton also, makes me more of' an early bird. Old timers, casting a wary eye at the exceptionally brilliant sky assured me, however, that this was going to be "another scorcher." They've had lots of them recently.  

 

First westward, across a wasted river that looked like a salt desert, then southward, from a place with the incongruous name of Canadian. The roads improved the farther we went. The country changed from flat to rolling, then back to flat again. At Atoka we bought some supplies for lunch but delayed eating it because we couldn't find any shade. We forced on and on. At Durant we began holding our breath, a bit prematurely, for the border. At last it came! Over the Red River and into Texas! 

 

We stopped for lunch in a little grove of trees near a filling station. The thermometer in the shade of the filling station canopy read one hundred and four degrees. 

 

We pressed on through Dennison and Sherman and Whitesboro, where we got on Route Ten, the direct road to Denton. At Tioga we stopped at a roller skating rink for drinks. It was the only place that seemed to be open this torrid Sunday afternoon. People were actually skating. Some of the kulaks whistled at me because I was wearing shorts. We were just about to depart when a passing boy pointed out to us that our left rear tire was going flat. We pulled into a closed filling station and ran some air into it. The air blew out a nice little hole in the casing. We went to another nearby filling station, the only one open on Sunday afternoon, but the two characters in attendance didn't seem much interested in changing the tire. I didn't much blame them. They did however jack up the car with their hydraulic jack. I changed the wheel, unearthing our spare from the luggage. The thermometer on this filling station read a. hundred and seventeen.  

 

By now we were all very tired and dirty and cross. Billy was outdoing himself at being impossible. We drove on to the south. Great black clouds rolled up to the west. We could see sheets of rain pouring down here and there in the distance, and at one place something that looked rather like a "twister". Thunder, lightning, and then, just as we approached the northern outskirts of Denton, great wild rain.  

 

We drove through town in a downpour. What we could see of it didn't look too bad. Then we came to the center of town, the courthouse square, and there was a courthouse to end all courthouses, a truly uninhibited example of this peculiar department of architecture, during its most florid period. It was so weird that we thought for a moment we were in Moscow, onion domes and all.

 

 The Mighty Denton Courthouse

 

We drove into the southwestern section of town, where Mary thought the college was. After a while we came to college buildings, some of them quite modern. Only somehow none of them looked quite like the buildings in the college catalogue. Then we passed a building labeled "Men's Gymnasium". This didn't seem at all right. Finally we saw a sign, which read, "North Texas State College." What had happened to the "Texas State College for Women"? Had they changed the name without telling us? We soon reached the correct but rather incredible answer to these problems. There are two state colleges in Denton. This other one is coeducational. They are, of course, rivals, and they duplicate their services to a large extent. Could this happen in any other, state? 

 

We returned to the mighty courthouse square, went round and round it, (like Booth's army in Vachel Lindsey's poem), parked and sought a phone. It was now raining hard again.  

 

I called Spencer Stoker, the head of my department. For a brief moment there was a gnashing of gears - he said that there really wasn't any place around where we could set up our trailer; suggested we go to a motel - then southern hospitality swung into high gear, and it was an awful and wonderful thing to behold. He excused himself a minute to confer with his wife, then returned to the phone to insist that we all come directly to his place and stay there till we found a place to live. I tried to beg off, but to no avail! I finally said that we'd come over but that we would try to dissuade him from taking us in.

 

Stoker turned out to be a considerably older man than I had expected, bald and rather benign. His wife, also a teacher, frightened us a little by her almost militant southernism, but she too seemed to want to be very kind. We were in an awful mess when we arrived. I stank. They turned over their elaborate guest room with its own dressing-room and bath to us. I helped Stoker get some cumbersome but comfortable folding beds out of a storeroom and carry them into the house. Mary and I were given very comfortable twin beds. An attic fan and special water screens in the windows made the inside temperature almost tolerable. Stoker backed his big Lincoln out of the garage so we could run our trailer in. Mrs. Stoker prepared dinner for us, fussing elaborately over all of the details.

 

That old joke about "southern hospitality" isn't such an exaggeration. There's a strong masochistic angle to it that renders its recipient almost helpless. We could see that they were determined to go to extremes of suffering to make our stay a pleasant one. The children, of course, helped to make things difficult, but I must say, to their credit, that they could have been much worse.

 

After a bath I felt physically much better, but my conversations with the Stokers certainly didn't put my spirit, at ease.

 

First, I discovered that they probably, among the cultural leaders of the community, represent a conservatism so unmitigated that one would certainly call it a violent reaction, except for the fact that there obviously was never anything more liberal about, from which they would be reacting. I only got a few glimpses of their attitudes, but these revealed to me truly frightening depths of dark atavistic shadows.

 

I tried to pin Stoker down again on the loyalty oath issue. He said, sure there was a loyalty oath, but he didn't recall its wording. After all, it was meant only to weed out "communists" and fellow travelers. It had nothing to do with him. They just passed it out at a faculty meeting at the beginning of each year, everybody signed it and handed it back.

 

And as for the information which I could gather about procedures and academic standards at TSCW, wel1, the less said the better. We were both feeling pretty depressed by the time we went to bed.

 

By now it was mid-August. The drought that was responsible for above one hundred degree temperatures every day continued unabated! We rented a bungalow on a tree-lined street close to the campus, moved both of the mattresses from the Gilkie into the house so we wouldn't have to sleep on the bare floor, and began hunting down second-hand items like chairs, a table and a refrigerator. We also made inquiries about our four big shipping boxes from Massachusetts, but received no word on their whereabouts. Bill began preparing to move into his new office at the college and making the acquaintance of his colleagues. The Stokers - and our new neighbors - were very kind and friendly, but it was still very hard for us to feel anything but alien.

 

 

When our boxes - which included all our cooking equipment, bedding, books and papers, clothing and the kids' toys as well as outdoor play equipment, our bikes and garden supplies - still had not arrived by the end of September, we began to get very worried. We called the moving company in Boston, who assured us that the entire shipment had gone out around the same time as we had left home. No one seemed to know where it might be! We also suffered acutely from the alienness of the culture, feeling that we would never find a friend or colleague like Dorothy Korgen or Sam Mencher with whom we could really speak our truth without feeling endangered. It was this sense of being very far indeed from our "kind" that was the worst aspect of living in Texas and contributed most to our sense of being in exile. I actually got over that to a great extent as we began finding friends - most of them, but not all, other displaced "Yankees" - but Bill never really did, I think. His was a double onus, because, in addition to the feelings I had which I have just described, he also had a feeling of acute isolation as an intellectual and as a professor of philosophy, having no colleagues with whom he could share his ideas. The culture was profoundly conservative politically, culturally rigid - this being the Bible Belt - and intellectually arid. Bill writes his reactions in the journal:

 

… In the main entry to the Administration Building is located a reproduction of the Winged Victory from the Acropolis. Probably the most symbolic thing about it is that it has no head.

 

Other causes of irritation, discouragement and depression: Mary finds that we were over-optimistic about the cost of living - most foods are actually higher than in New England. Steak is cheaper, but still not cheap. Services are cheaper and restaurants are cheaper, probably because of their reliance on slave labor. The children all have heat rashes, or something of the sort. We were a little worried about Peter at dinner tonight. He had voluntarily gone into his room and taken a nap some time earlier, and it was impossible to rouse him enough to get him. To eat his dinner. His neck was quite supple, however.

 

Sleeping on the hard floor isn't getting any more comfortable. And living in a vacant house, especially when it seems to be a fishbowl with all sorts of people constantly observing us, is getting on our nerves.

 

What is it that is so foreign and disturbing about life down here? The caste system, the hard ruthlessness that peeps out from under the formal friendliness and saccharine sweetness, the primitive Old Testament religion, the general intolerance, the jingoism: all of these and more. I feel as though I had suffered some sort of fantastic accident in time, slipped back a hundred years or so, and was hopelessly cut off forever from my own time and culture. All the external appurtenances of modernity are here - things are clean and light and handsome. But people's minds are dark and tortured and too disgusting to contemplate.

 

Maybe it's the difference between Bergson's "open" and "closed" societies. I'm used to a relatively open society; where universal principles of justice and fair play hold some sway, and where one is treated, relatively at least, as an individual. Here we have a closed society, a tribal society, a society governed by brute feeling rather than rational principle, a society that recognizes not individuals but only friends and enemies. One is either totally within the group, with status and complete support, or one is completely an outsider, to be feared and hunted down. It's a strange and awful experience to come upon this sort of thing in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States of America.

 

It's very difficult to explain. Perhaps only former occupants of Hitler's concentration camps have felt - much more intensely of course - what we sense vaguely and unclearly, brooding here under this torrid sky.

 

I think we all suffered from culture shock for the better part of that school year! By the end of a week of settling down my old symptoms of heart pain and irregularity began to emerge again, and I started looking for a doctor. One of the few who was not on vacation or otherwise engaged was a family doctor named Hal Norgaard. I made an appointment with him, and saw him that afternoon. Looking back, I think one dimension of my symptoms that may have kept them going was my lack of understanding of their significance. Dr. Norgaard quickly and easily filled that gap by handing me a big bound volume entitled Psychosomatic Medicine, by Weiss and English &endash; and suggested I take it home and read up on "pseudo-angina."

 

He also gave me some medication to relieve the symptom of heart muscle spasm - but what really set me free was learning from this text what the "meaning" of the symptom was, according to the psychosomatic idiom projected by the authors. All I remember of their description was that it is a symptom which represents symbolically - "stands for," in other words, an understanding of oneself as a "person in the dark." It fitted!

 

Never after that visit did I become overwhelmed by the fear that had devastated my sense of basic security and "okayness." The actual tightness in my chest eased up gradually, and finally disappeared entirely. This was a burden I had been carrying for a very long time, and laying it down was a great relief. It was to resurface in another form forty-five years later, and the "lesson" of its meaning would need to be re-learned once again, in a more profound and far-reaching context, but for now, this was enough!

 

I'm not quite sure why I felt so vindicated by having learned this "truth" about myself, but I did. Perhaps it was because the alternative had been living in fear of my own body, not knowing when or why it might betray me! I had certainly felt that way during labor &endash; and in spite of the explanation given me for the origin of the "heart attacks" that had twice laid me low that they had occurred because of the massive doses of thyroid extract prescribed for me by my father, it had become clear to me that my whole system was still out of balance in some profound way, and I had been living in fear of recurrence of the acute symptoms. It would now be possible to lay that down.

 

It was well into September when we finally tracked down our boxes of household goods. They had been sitting on the dock in Houston for well over a month, having come by boat from Boston! A lot of our things were either broken or damaged from having been jostled around badly in transit by sea - but at least we now had beds to sleep in, dishes to cook with and eat from, a clock, a radio and some other niceties. Finally getting back our lares and penates did a little to make us feel less like outcasts or exiles - but there were still times when I would feel as though I were suffocating, and couldn't get my breath! I remember running a tubful of the brown, lukewarm, iodine-tasting Denton water, immersing myself in it until only my nose was outside and still feeling ready to explode with the claustrophobic oppression of heat throughout my body! We both had intense dreams about water.

 

It was now moving into mid-September - school time. We enrolled Tommy in the college nursery school, and he began relaxing into a daily sense of pleasurable anticipation of a day of rewarding activities. We enrolled Peter and Billy in the Demonstration School run by the college, which they both decided they liked it &endash; at first, but Peter especially soon began wanting not to go to school. When his illness patterns began recurring, I set up a visitation morning in his class to try to find out what was wrong, It was soon quite clear to me why he no longer wanted to be there. Mrs. Harding, his teacher, was trying to discipline him by making him spend time lying on the floor in the coatroom because he couldn't seem to stay in his seat. She told me he was immature, and said she wished parents would not try to push immature children ahead in school. I didn't know we had an option.

 

Billy, on the other hands, seemed OK with his school teacher, and began showing interest in creating electrical gadgets using batteries, wires and light bulbs and buzzers. He also began asking for a bike, so we gave him the bike we had planned as a birthday present, and helped him learn how to balance on it. He did well and was soon cycling around the school yard where we had taken him to practice,

 

During this period, I also decided to go back to school, to work toward a teaching certificate. The courses I enrolled in were not very interesting or well-taught, but the course in Social Psychology introduced me to anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, material which was an eye-opener for me - and this reading made up for the lack of class stimulation, so I made do with my school participation. At least it wasn't difficult.

 

Bill's summary, in his journal of our family's status for the year 1952 is worth including here:

 

The time for the annual summing up has come. First, we are all a year older. For the children, this. Means a year of growth. They are bigger and stronger and more competent. They all seem a little healthier than they were last year. Peter is still prone to chronic colds in the winter, despite having his tonsils out, but still, he has been able to be upand about, and out of doors much more this winter, Tommy has good color for the first tlme in his life. Billy's general vigor seems considerably improved. He has had only one cold so far this winter.

 

As for their mental health and general adjustment we've had sort of a scare about Billy but we think now that our fears were perhaps somewhat exaggerated. Mary still intends to take him to see Dr. Hoextra in January however. He still regresses to infancy every evening when it comes time to go to bed, but during part of each day at least he seems to be in fair control of himself, as long as he is not crossed.

Peter may after all have more serious problems than Billy, though they are of a different nature.

 

There is something fey and wild and untamable in Peter, something which runs the rest of him and is capable of making him put up a smooth, socialized exterior, in order to gain his own ends.

 

Billy commits anti-social acts in order to relieve tension. For him they are inadequate resolutions of conflicts, and he feels them as inadequate and still seeks better adjustments. Peter commits anti-social acts from habit, from true vicious inclination, growing smoothly out of what looks like a natural "inclination." For him they are pleasant and unrepented. Everything else is a relatively superficial gloss.

 

Tommy is probably the best-adjusted member of the family. He is capable of the freest expressions of aggression of all of them, but, somehow, there is nothing very threatening in his aggressions.

 

..

 

Mary during this year has certainly gained more insight into her troubles, though she is still bothered by "symptoms" to some extent. Indeed, Mary may have discovered her métier during the year, clinical psychology, guidance, counseling and such.

 

As for me, well, I don't know about myself. I lifted one great burden of guilt off my back during the year &endash; finally getting that damn thesis out of the way - but other matters have quickly rushed in to take its place - the press of preparation for my courses, current and prospective, and the job of revising the thesis for publication. Besides, I seem to have been having more trouble with my eyes lately. Anyway, I am temporasrily at least, supporting my family, which should give me a great deal of satisfaction.

 

Poor Bucky is a year older and feebler. Her best friend in West Newton, Eleanor Leatherbee, died during the year, which, along with our moving away, was quite a blow to her. It is a tribute to her remaining vitality that she was able to bring herself to travel all the way down here by air to join us...

 

Of course the most startling change in our lives is our transplantation from cool, misty New England to the torrid plains of Texas. We don't like Texas very much, and we - at least, Mary and I - feel tremendous nostalgia for New England. Even Missouri looks pretty good to us in contrast to Texas. There are no trees - at least what we call trees - here, the prevailing color is brown, rather than green, and we find the people very depressing indeed. As for the institution where I work and the conditions of my employment, well, I just don't feel like talking about it.

 

Mary's parents and mine carry on in much the same way as they have in recent years, My mother's accident [she had broken her hip during the year and we had taken the train up to St. Louis to be with her while she was in the hospital] was a severe disruption of my parents' routines, but they have both come through it better than we feared they would.  

 

Mary's parents' ménage à trois is still going strong, and Jeanne and Bob and their family have joined the happy party at the farm. The Macombers intend to turn the big house over to them and are building a little house, just large enough for three, out on the point near the boathouse. We still have twinges of regret about leaving the farm, especially when the Zottolis seem to be getting a better deal than we did, but, in our more rational moments, we know that we are well out of it.

 

Not much use in commenting on the state of the world. It seems to be only slightly worse than it was last year at this time, but, of course, the Republicans haven't really taken over as yet. Still, every year that passes without the final act of destruction increases the slim hope that civilization may survive. The internal climate of opinion in this country is definitely worse than it wa s even a year ago, however, and it seems to be deteriorating at an accelerated pace. And here in Texas it really stinks.

 

A final emphasis on the positive aspects of our situation. We have raised three children more or less successfully to school age. None of us is seriously ill. I have a moderately decent job. We are living in our own house, even if it is rented and rather delapidated. We have enough household goods to make living fairly convenient if not "gracious." We drive a car. We own four bicycles and a red fire engine. We have plenty to eat and a very good cook to prepare it. We're not very far in debt, and hope to pay that off in a few months. Our social environment is pretty dull and empty, but we still enjoy each other's company and have access to a fairly decent library.

 

Another year coming up. I am still not able to plan for the future or even to think about it without anxiety, but the future doesn't look entirely black. Indceed, we even have some vague but pleasant intentions of touring New Mexico and perhaps other parts of the west during this year.

 

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