Abilene Public Library Centennial Series 1981 “Abilene: The Village in My Heart” A. C. Greene March 19, 1981 32 minutes

Arlita Hallam: ....coordinating this Centennial series for the Abilene Public Library as our Centennial project for this year. In addition to these monthly programs, we have produced a brochure and I hope you all get a copy of it. This has just a synoptic history of Abilene as well as a list of our monthly programs on the centerfold. And we do have a couple of changes. On April 23 rd , next month, our program will be Juanita Zachry. She was originally scheduled for the September program. And then in May, Katharyn Duff will be doing the program, instead of Jack North and Jack North is doing his in September. So we get them all in. We just changed a few of the dates around. So do come back on April 23 rd for the program “Barbed Wire and Ranching in Taylor County.”

Tonight we are particularly pleased to see such a large turnout. I realize that some of you may have to stand, but we’re glad that you are here and we know this is going to be a worthwhile program for you. Tonight to introduce our speaker A. C. Greene, we have invited Pat Bennett. You see last year Pat wrote a book called Talking with Texas Writers and one of the fascinating writers that he talked to was A. C. Greene. So this is a chance for you to get to meet Pat, who is a local author, as well as A. C. Greene. So without holding you any further, I’d like to introduce you to Patrick Gree.., or Patrick Bennett, I almost changed your name, who will then introduce our speaker, A. C. Greene. Pat.

Audience laughs and applauds.

Patrick Bennett: According to the Abilene Centennial calendar, in November of 1913, the Lytle Dam broke and emptied the city’s only water reservoir. It caused quite a stir. Ten years later, according to the source book, Contemporary Authors , in November of 1923, A. C. Greene was born. There wasn’t much of stir that time, but the effects were longer lasting. [ Audience laughs ] As soon as A. C. got big enough to talk and to write, the stir started and is still going on. A. C. earned his diploma from Abilene High School and began studies at Abilene Christian College before World War II interrupted. He served in the Navy in the Far East during World War II and returned to complete his bachelor’s degree at ACC in 1948. He intended to become a schoolteacher, but he got sidetracked when Hal Sayles hired him in 1948 to write for the Abilene Reporter-News. He also ran a notable bookstore here for awhile. Finally A. C. looked for a broader stage of action and took a position with the Dallas Times Herald, where he became editor of the editorial page as well as book critic. For some time, he had been selling articles to various magazines and finally in 1965, he took the plunge. He quit newspapering and wrote his first book, A Personal Country. It was published in 1969 by the most discriminating publishing house in North America, Alfred Knopf. As a work of art, it is the best book every published about Abilene. Eight additional Greene books followed.

1 The latest is Elephants in Your Mailbox, which was published in 1980. My personal favorite is the Santa Claus Bank Robbery. A.C. was long gone when I joined the Reporter-News staff in 1963, but the memory of a strong and original personality does not evaporate quickly and there were a good many Greene stories around the newsroom when I got there. I felt I already knew him before Sherwyn McNair introduced us two or three years later. I have always found him an intelligent and generous man. He helped me a great deal with my own recent book both with his sound advice and in more concrete ways, such as helping me get important interviews with Frances Mossiker and John Graves. Now the best way to meet most writers is not in person, but through their books. Nature has struck a better balance with our guest tonight. A. C. is both an interesting writer and an interesting talker. He has displayed this gift as a “talker” on television shows with Jim Lehrer and Billy Porterfield and others and most recently on his own ambitious radio show. I think you will enjoy meeting and hearing our guest speaker this evening, Abilene’s best known writer, A. C. Greene.

Audience applauds.

A. C. Greene: Thank you, Pat. There are just far too many people here tonight that have meant a lot to me, meant a great deal to me, for me to recognize you name by name, but I want all of you to know that I am very happy to see you. In some cases, I haven’t seen you in a good number of years. But in all cases, I am happy to see you and know that I am giving a personal greeting to you even though I’m having to do it sort of en masse or, however, you pronounce that word. [ Audience laughs ]

It was very interesting to sit and listen to Pat do my life in, what, two minutes - jumping over five years of pain and heartache with quote, “awhile” unquote, and talking about the dam at Lytle Lake breaking. The most important thing that ever happened to me at Lytle Lake was many years later after the dam, after my birth. I was out there with a very cute blonde and we were sitting, holding hands on the dam and suddenly someone began to fire a gun at us. [ Audience laughs ] Turns out it was the lake keeper. He took his job very seriously. [ Audience laughs ] Some of the rest of you may have undergone that same indignity.

I want to read the first part of the chapter of my book A Personal Company , which is about West Texas. There has been some criticism of the book. Frank Tolbert, he’s a good friend of mine. He writes a column about once a year saying how crazy I am in my definition of West Texas. In this book, my definition of West Texas is from the Brazos River to the Pecos and up to the Caprock and down to about San Angelo. And everybody says, “Well, that’s not West Texas. El Paso is farther west than that.” And I say, “Well, that’s not my West Texas.” So that’s my definition of West Texas and this is a chapter, a very short paragraph or two, out of the first part of the book.

Every man has a village in his heart, whether he comes from abounding of Manhattan or the prairies of West Texas. It may be a crossroads town where every face was a daily familiarity, it may be one certain block within a metropolis, but there is a

2 village he has kept. The village is what he refers to when he is making his life decisions. When he cannot go back to the village and display his prizes, in pride or in scorn, he finds less satisfaction in achievement. He does not always love the village but he can never destroy it, for it is himself in it that makes it his village. Abilene is my village. It is the place I know best, the spot I have kept against change, although the town that made my village is very different, and so am I.

And I’m going to speak on “Abilene, the village of my heart” with the understanding now that you take this paragraph into consideration that the Abilene we are going to be thinking about tonight is not the Abilene that surrounds us. Sooner or later, if you are from a small town, (and the definition of small town is impossible to pin down), someone will ask you if you didn’t wish that you’d come from a big city. This is like trying to ascertain who’s the richest man in the world. Where do you start and where do you stop? What do you mean by rich? What do you mean by big and small? I didn’t consider Abilene a small town when growing up here. It was populated by somewhat fewer than 25,000 persons. I was fiercely loyal to Abilene and nothing gave me a bigger thrill than finding Abilene’s name in a news story or hearing it pronounced on the radio. Once when I was twelve years old, I sent in a half a dozen postcards, (they were one cent each at that time), to the Literary Digest straw vote, the predecessor to the Gallup Poll. I voted for William Lemke, the Farm Labor candidate for president from somewhere in the upper Midwest. But the Literary Digest straw vote was a nightly feature of one of the radio networks and I was electrified one evening to hear the radio announcer say, “And out in Abilene, Texas, there is a sudden surge for Lemke.” [ Audience laughs ] I badly wanted recognition for my role in getting Abilene’s name of national radio, but I was too afraid to admit to anyone that I was the sudden surge for Lemke out in Abilene, Texas. The Literary Digest straw vote, you may remember, forecast a presidential victory for Alf Landon, whom F.D.R. defeated by the biggest margin in history. And Lemke didn’t even show up on the charts, as might be said now. And how could he, when his biggest West Texas supporter wasn’t old enough to vote. [ Audience laughs ] Incidentally that disastrous straw vote broke the back of Literary Digest , which soon went out of business. I hate to think that I was part of that.

Of course, in its day and in its place, Abilene was not a small town. You had to go nearly two hundred miles away to find something bigger. On the other hand, when people asked if you wished you’d grown up in a big city, what do they mean? Dallas is certainly a big city. Houston is a big city. Yet a fair number of people will ask you that same question if you live in Dallas or live in Houston. Don’t you wish you lived in a big city? I never know what to answer. So besides being an impossible question to answer and certainly an impossible question to answer satisfactorily, it creates as many diverse answers as it has heroes. Wish I lived in a big city. Yes, I wish I could have lived in a big city from time to time. Once I thought I would surely live in Philadelphia. I even went so far as to apply for entry into the University of Pennsylvania, thinking in my western innocence, it was a state school. I was brusquely rebuffed with the dual

3 information that it was a private school and had plenty of more qualified applicants to pick from. The only basis for the latter rebuff that I could figure out was the Texas postmark on my letter.

At another point in my life, I badly needed to live in New York City, but I hadn’t the means or the motivation at the time. In fact, until the Dallas TV show got so popular, New York agents and editors used to ask me why in the world I didn’t move to the Big Apple. Today, the New York editors are all wanting books about Dallas and Texas from the same people they were hustling up to New York a few years ago. On visits to them, I’ve had a nagging longing to live in London and Jerusalem, but history impelled me as much as anything else. Not that Jerusalem is a big city. It is the most cosmopolitan city the western mind can conceive and from being dragged off to Sunday school those many years in Abilene, I felt like I knew the city of Jerusalem almost as if I’d been born there. [Audience laughs ] Incidentally I’ll take, make a little aside that I was able to guide some of my Israeli guides around Jerusalem. [ Audience laughs ]

But all of these desires to have gone to New York or to have lived in cities, like London, are after the fact. And I’ve always been reluctant to look back on my own circumstances. I’m a rabid collector of what I call “life mottos.” And I once had a life motto, which I used to charm a female reporter down at the Abilene Reporter-News , which stated boldly, “Never look back and never give up.” It worked even better than I expected on that particular Reporter-News staff member because 31 years later she’s still throwing it back at me in certain moments of disillusionment and despair. [ Audience laughs ] I probably should have moved to New York, for instance, early in my adult professional life, looking back on things. Maybe I should have left Abilene as soon as I got out of high school or maybe I should have gone to the City of Brotherly Love after World War II as I planned to, but I didn’t. And you have to live with what you’ve got, not from a sense of resignation, but in the turmoil of opportunity. The excitement of curiosity about where you are, not where you want to be or ought to be.

The late Bob Nail of Albany used to tease me and call me a “minutiae historian” because when we went out to look over old forts or ranch houses or cemeteries, he said I walked staring at the ground, looking for square nails and broken china and flint chips. I plead guilty. I’ve always believed that one starts with where one is, whether it’s history, economics, or the great American novel. As I said, you have to live with what you’ve got. And in my case, I have a village, a town of my own. A big place, a small place. I call it “Abilene,” but that name must go in quotation marks because that Abilene is not this Abilene or even the Abilene I road a bicycle through, delivered papers to, cruised around looking for girls in. It is, as stated in my preface, a village of my heart. And the size does not matter. What my mind and my imagination does with it makes the difference. And I can not believe that having been a native of Abilene, having been raised in that so-called small town, having spent my most formative years there, having been taught, and having taught myself within its boundaries has cost my one penny’s worth of opportunity or possibility. Oh to be sure, it might have profited me in mundane ways of keeping score if I had grown up within a society which forced its sons and daughters to measure up to a certain preconceived definition of success. I might have

4 gained a different sort of insight into human affairs if I had watched life’s endless parade on say Fifth Avenue or Oxford Street, rather than viewing it on Pine, Cedar, and Cypress, but I doubt it. I have often said that man is unchanging. This is profound. There are only three relationships possible to a human – man with himself, man with other men, and man with the other force whether that force is thought to be nature or the Almighty. So after all the same humans, who might have passed in review in New York and London, passed in review on the sidewalk in front of Woolworth, McClellan, and Grant’s on Pine or sat on the benches in front of the feed store over on Chestnut. I saw enough humanity in Abilene, Texas, to do an artist, an artist of any kind, for a life time. What different can one learn honing a soda fountain in Brooklyn or a soda fountain at the Clinic or Jack Clinton’s. Some of you may know Clinic or Jack Clinton’s and some of you may not.

John O’Hara, a writer I discovered with a shock when I was in the book business at 65 Cypress here in Abilene, as Pat said, “for awhile,” for five years awhile. John O’Hara was being interviewed after the publication of another one of his books about Gibbsville, Pennsylvania. That’s the mythical town he used for many of his fictional backgrounds. “How many books have you written about Gibbsville?,” the interviewer asked him. “This is number eight,” O’Hara replied. “Can you write a dozen books about one little town?” the interviewer asked. And O’Hara said, in that marvelous supercilious tone of voice that he had, “I can write a dozen, dozen books about one man in one room for one day.” That without the bravura of Mr. O’Hara, perhaps, is much the way I feel about the village of my heart. That Abilene that gave me such opportunities and such exciting moments of discovery. What was missing? There were the Queen, the Majestic, the Paramount theatres to give me beautifully illustrated instructions about thousands of strange, sad, and lovely places and people. There was KRBC radio to give one kind of musical education and Burgess and Bernice Brown of the record shop to keep filling in the blanks of the other kind of music which Annie Beth Chambers and Abilene school system, assisted by Roger Damrush on the radio, had tried to teach me to appreciate. In 1940, when I earned my first dollar working in a radio station, singing gospel hymns with the Meads Quartet, [ Audience laughs ] it was a world very much like I have been exposed to in about half a dozen radio stations in the forty years since. And even that nasty national mind trap, television, hasn’t turned out to be so vastly foreign to what I first encountered at KRBC-TV in 1954 doing a ten, eleven, twelve, or fifteen minute show after the 10 o’clock news at night. The time period was indefinite because advertisers got a lower rate if they accepted whatever was left over from the newscast. [Audience laughs ]

As for sophistication and worldly knowledge, there were the lobbies of the Hilton, the Wooten, and even the dear old Grace hotels. And if those weren’t enough, the T&P station brought a load of fantasies through Abilene each evening. And I went down to meet the Sunshine Special and get the big city newspapers off of it and perhaps walk through the cars and see all of the Hollywood stars and the notorious Chicago hoods and the Washington politicians and the New York artists or, at least, I suspected that was what I was seeing every time. [audience laughs.] I glimpsed a lovely, mysterious woman and her rich looking escort. Sin was never more successfully put together then during my

5 stroll through a T&P club car heading for LA. [ Audience laughs. ] I got off, you understand, quickly as soon as I’d sold a few copies of the Dallas Times Herald or the Dispatch Journal or the Ft. Worth Press , delaying my visit dangerously on those summer evenings when perchance there was an observation coach attached to the swift steam train. I digress for a moment to say that I used to go through these cars selling these papers and these people in the cars would say, “How in the world did these papers get out here so quick from Dallas?” And I thought, “You’re not very bright. They came on the same train with you.” [ Audience laughs ]

And, of course, while not as glamorous as the Sunshine Special , there was always the Greyhound Bus Station over on North 3 rd or over on South 1 st if you really have a memory. Or the American Cafe on North 1 st where the All American bus came in with its load of cursing northern sailors. It’s the first place I ever heard the Lord’s name taken in vain. “Jesus Christ.” I went home horrified. I thought that the American Bus Line was named for the American Cafe, incidentally for years and years. [ Audience laughs.] Even the American Airlines flying in low over Abilene first in Ford Tri-motors and then Douglass –D3s, not DC-3s and Lockheed Electras, even those far above me literally and figuratively, taught me human lessons that years later, Idlewild Airport did no better job of because if I could persuade some adult to take me we could quickly drive out to the airport east on the Bankhead Highway and sometime beat the plane in. Planes were pretty slow in those days and then we could stand at the fence a few feet away while the passengers de-planed to eat a bite at the Derryberry’s Abilene Municipal Airport. It was a long way to Dallas.

Abilene, too small, and life here too limited. Let me tell of two incidents. On my very first visit to New York City, as an enlisted man in the U.S. Navy in World War II, I stepped ashore from a Jersey ferryboat and a rear admiral of the same U.S. Navy stopped me and asked, more tourist than I was, “Sailor, where is the Flat Iron Building?” And I told him. The sailor from Bayonne, New Jersey, who was with me, looked perplexed as the admiral had weighed anchor for the Flat Iron and said, “How the Hell do you know that? I don’t know where the Flat Iron Building is and I’ve lived just across the river from New York all my life.” So had I. I had been going to New York at least two or three times a year since the age of six at the Paramount, the Majestic, the Queen, the Rex, the Bobby Walker, the Texas, the Broadway. And in my high school days, sitting miserably in Study Hall D, in old Abilene High School at South 1 st and Peach, I heard the jukebox at the Pollyanna Shop, just across Peach, making music which floated up through the open windows and it was Artie Shaw’s Begin the Beguine. And even though I was not allowed to dance, (my mother and father raised me properly), I loved the swing and jazz bands, especially the melancholy sadness of Artie Shaw’s clarinet. So twenty- five years later when I met Artie Shaw and we spent many evenings together, he asked me, knowing that I had not been from quote “a big city” unquote “How did you get to know so much about my music?” And I told him I learned both him and his music in Abilene, Texas.

Little coincidences. Desperately going from shop to shop late one afternoon in New York, trying to rent a tux for an unexpected evening, one tiny place still open and a

6 tux, tried it on, didn’t fit, the tag said “Grissom’s, Abilene, Texas”. [ Audience laughs.] Desperate, I asked for a bigger size. The shopkeeper says in a very accented, “I just got one more 46.” Tried it on. Perfect fit. Label reads, “Minter Dry Goods, Abilene, Texas.” [ Audience laughs ] “Where the Hell did you get two tuxes from Abilene, Texas?,” I asked, thinking surely there was a story. The little old shopkeeper looked at me like I was questioning him in Tagalog, “Abilene, Texas. Never heard of it.” [Audience laughs. ]

The education of a person consists of him picking up the pieces, he sees lying there in the dirt, brushing them off, holding them up to the light or wetting a finger to see what the true shade may be, trying to ascertain their importance. The education of a person consists of things sticking out of the sand, which do not look quite like a twig or a pebble. The education of a person consists of the sudden recognition that what is peeking from under, just barely a stone, is not your ordinary peeking from under the stone thing. In taking them all with him, a minutiae education. Spending twenty years trying to find out who Locke was that laid so many sidewalks I walked on. Feeling fear as I stood between the shelter and the rail bed when a big Texas engine came steaming into the Abilene station. Tramping along Elm Creek while Sheriff Will Watson tried to locate the brick kiln where he worked offloading bricks as a boy. Understanding, somehow, but eventually that girls named, (I hope none of them are in the room,), Johanna Crawford, Clara Hesselbeth, and Lucille Martin, Billy Jean Glass were truly as alluring, as beautiful as inviting as others named Carol Lombard, Greta Garbo, Paula Goddard, or Marilyn Monroe. [ Audience laughs ]

But the true university, the kindergarten that became a graduate school, was here and now I mean right here where we are standing. In my case standing, sitting in your case. Incidentally, this was the auditorium of the old library that got torn out so they could make the children’s library. Of course, somewhere the ghost of that old auditorium is still with us. It was about as big as the first six rows here. [ Audience laughs. ] If there is a spot sacred to me in the village of my heart, we are worshipping on it tonight. My grandmother, Maude Cole was head librarian of Carnegie Library for something like twenty years. For me, from the time before recognition ‘til age twenty-two or three and long gone to war. She was not a woman of heavy intellectual or formal training, but she adored the imagination and dedicated herself to those who tried to use it. Herself a painter and poet, I needn’t go into her role as Abilene’s fountainhead of literary inspiration in those days because almost every librarian, if he or she stays in the calling long enough, serves that same role. Her place in the village of my heart is not just a devoted grandmother, who perhaps showed too much devotion to a grandson, but as a definer of life for him. Through her and the library, I was liberated from the need for a bigger city, as well as the restraints of a small one. In the library, I was given a new identity, one I defined for myself. The personal image of myself, I’ve sought to accommodate forever since. I became convinced that there was no one else on earth, nor ever had been, who was me and most important or whom I needed to be. That I think is freedom.

7 This spot and I can draw every brick, and describe every foot of shelf in that old building, was where the world came to meet Abilene, Texas, and A.C. Greene, at his invitation. Thomas Wolfe wrote in a Time in the River about striding down the aisles of the New York Public Library, pounding his head in frustration because he knew if he lived to be a thousand years old he could never read all of the books that he wanted to read that were lining the aisles in that immense place. But I felt somewhat the same way before I ever read it in Wolfe in Abilene, Texas. Small enough to be crammed into anyone of the dozen or more of the reading rooms of the New York Public Library, the Abilene Carnegie Public Library had, nevertheless, far too many books on far too many subjects for one life to exhaust. I cited Tomas Wolfe for comparison, not with A. C. Greene’s feelings, but to indicate that same compelling frustration was felt by dozens or hundreds of other Abilenians. They were here, right here at the same time, probably walking down the same aisle, maybe sitting at the same table in the old reference room where I poured over maps, tables of history, and Time. Or bringing the thought up to our own time a bit, one summer in 1969 I worked just below in this building going through files and bound runs of newspapers and magazines and reports writing a book about an event that remained most vividly alive within the covers and wrappers of items, which could be found no where else, than in this building. And I would pass, touch, possibly apologize for slight physical intrusion, or I would ask politely if I might get in here for a moment and always without the need for recognition of each other as travelers from home in a strange land because we were none of us in a strange land. We were in a true residency - our real homeland.

In 1975, I wrote an article in Texas Monthly magazine about Abilene, growing up here mainly, as I remembered it. I received fifty or so personal letters following that publication. Now that’s not extraordinary because if one writes about any particular locale in a magazine as widely distributed in the region as TM is, one can expect just about that sort of response. But what made these letters so unusual or a good many of them, at least, was that they came from people who had grown up in Abilene at the same time that I had, who wrote to say that they shared the sights and experiences I described or the frustrations inherent of being young as well as being in Abilene, Texas. And not one of them had I known. I suppose I must have received at least two dozen of those “I was there too” kind of letters. Same time, same little town, and we never knew each other. Why? Well, some of the letter writers had lived too far out on the North Side, and, of course, I lived on the South Side. Some of them lived in Belmont and I was a product of South 7 th Street near, but not in, Elmwood. One of them, I recall, said that they had gone on to private schools in other cities, not Abilene High, and one went to St. Joseph’s, which was Abilene’s parochial school in my upcoming years, and which had few occasions to mix as pupils with public schoolers. But for whatever reasons, we never met. Some of them mentioned knowing the Carnegie Library very well, spending hours there. Even knowing my grandmother well, but we never met in those years in that small place. Lives that never crossed paths, yet were dedicated to and partially at least, directed by the same tiny set of circumstances. That I found and still find remarkable.

But it is the less I think, I was trying to teach myself when I wrote “Every man” (and that includes women, of course) “has a village in his heart.” I didn’t know it at the

8 time. How true that is . His village, his heart. Not my village and my heart. Named the same, perhaps. Located the same place on the map and in time, but his village. Abilene is the village of my heart.

Thank you.

Audience applause.

Arlita Hallam: Would anyone have any questions that they would like to ask of A. C. Greene? Or any memories you want to bring back while we have a few moments.

Man in audience: We enjoyed it so much that we want him to do it over.

Audience laughs.

Arlital Hallam: [Laughing ] What nicer compliment can you have? Okay, well, I know some of you have asked to meet A.C. Greene and you want to bring back some memories so we will adjourn now. We invite you back on April 23 rd to hear Juanita Zachry and we thank you for coming.

[Applause ]

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