I Meet A Hero
When
we moved from Ohio Street some time in 1950, my dad bought a small mobile home
(8 X 28 foot), which he set up behind a lumberyard on Broad Street between 6th
and 7th Streets. This was a new world for me. I was half a block
from the Boys Club, and across the street from the Wichita Falls Memorial
Auditorium. The mobile home was small, and didn't have a bathroom, but it was
probably as big as the little apartment we lived in on Ohio Street for three
years. There was a storage room in the big house, which had a bathroom for our
use, a step above an outhouse. We had to take baths in a washtub.
The Boys Club In
Background
I
joined the Boys Club and it became a home-away-from-home for me. It had a
library and a workshop where I learned to make things on machines, a gym with
lots of activities, and the employees saw to it that we had things to do every
day. On Saturdays, they provided a buss to take kids to the Tower theater for
the Saturday Matinee, but I never went. Across the street from the Boys Club
was an orphanage with a fenced-in playground. I felt sad for the children
inside, for they would stand at the fence and watch us playing outside, and
were unable to join us. A block and a half from me was 8th Street
Park - those further up the road called it 9th Street Park. It
covered the whole block and had slides, swings, and merry-go-rounds; in later
years, it was given the official name of Bellevue Park, the swings and slides
removed, and million-dollar architecture was added. Ugly.
Me With Clinic In
Background
The lumberyard
had a wooden trailer parked in front with wood scraps for the neighborhood, and
National Geographic magazines tossed inside, free for the kids. It was some
benefactor's way of seeing that children had something educational to read. The
free scraps of lumber were a novelty also. Try going to a lumberyard today and
asking for free scraps! A medical clinic was across the alley
My
little world had suddenly changed from sidewalks and winos, theaters and five
& dimes, to parks, playgrounds, and the Boys Club. Here, too, I had many
kids my own age to play with. I didn't miss Ohio Street, nor did I ever go
back. I would visit Indiana Street once in a while, but for some reason I was
afraid to venture back to where I had spent three years of my life.
The
Memorial Auditorium was open during the weekdays, and I had the run of the
place, often helping out the office workers when they needed someone to run an
errand. It wasn't all concrete and parking lot at the time, either. There were
large grassy areas on both sides of the building, and these became the local
children's playground in summer and winter. We would ride our bikes down the
hill in the summer, and slide cardboard boxes down it in the winter. No one
said anything to us. I did catch a black widow and her babies in a glass jar
once and showed it to the janiter, who quickly washed the spiders down a drain
and warned me not to play with spiders. I still play with spiders and bugs
today, however. My sisters and their boyfriends also set pallets on the grass
and made out when they could get rid of me. Usually that cost their boyfriends
a dime or quarter. I would still run home and tell my mother that they were
kissing their boyfriends!
My Sisiter And Friend
On Auditorium Lawn
Something else
about the Memorial Auditorium, they brought shows to town. I'm sure they
charged for them, but I was always given a free pass. We only lived in the
mobile home about a year, and when my dad couldn't make payments on it, we had
to move. So the time would be around 1951 when one of my heroes came to town. I
was given a pass for the show that night, and onstage was Lash LaRue and Al
"Fuzzy" St. John, western stars I had watched at the picture shows
downtown on many Saturdays. Lash would pop that 15-foot long bullwhip, and
Fuzzy would roll a cigarette with one hand, then they would put on a mock
fistfight for our entertainment. I sat in wonderment, as only an
eleven-year-old boy could throughout the show. Then when it was all over, Lash
and Fuzzy visited with the audience, and spoke with us. I even got a pat on the
head from Lash LaRue!
Me Playing Cowboy
However, there
is sadness even in such glorious times as this. Much later, I learned that in
1951 the B Westerns were dying, and all of the western stars were making the
rounds trying to promote interest in a dying entertainment industry. Their
contracts were up in 1951 and '52, and the studios were not renewing them.
Westerns were growing up, and TV was taking the place of the Saturday Matinees.
Cowboy stars like Lash LaRue were drifting away, their careers finished.
About
ten years after his last movie, the police found a man passed out in the gutter
and threw him in the drunk tank to sleep it off. Someone at the station
recognized him and notified the newspapers. The next day, the headlines
read, "Cowboy movie star, Lash
LaRue arrested for public intoxication!" What could have been the final
nail in his coffin actually revived his career to a small degree. TV networks
heard about the arrest, and it wasn't long before Lash LaRue was making special
appearances on network television. Conventions also started asking him to
appear as Guest of Honor. Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson hired him in a
bit part for their television remake of "Stagecoach". He died in
obscurity at age 80 in 1996.
They
looked so much alike that Lash LaRue could have passed for Humphrey Bogart's
twin. The likeness was often a curse for Lash, as people would often mistake
him for Bogart. He enjoyed telling one story at conventions that went something
like this: One day an actress he worked with asked him:
"Are
you related to Humphrey Bogart?"
"I
don't think so," he replied.
"Humm,"
the actress continued. "Did your mother by chance meet Bogart before you
were conceived?"
When
I met Lash LaRue in 1951, he was a giant. Perhaps his only claim to fame,
besides his resemblance to Bogart, was that of a B Western movie star. But for
kids growing up in the 1940s and '50s, our heroes were bigger than life. They
were the good guys that we needed. The fathers we didn't have. They brought
justice to the West, and gave us someone to emulate when we grew up. And that
wasn't a bad thing.
