Dallas, You Fun Your Own!
Now and then I see the Mobil Flying Red Horse prancing and dancing through the midst of what was a place where you went stepping out and you got your “Ps and Qs” on how to sit up straight at the Old Warsaw. Back when, I was a clothes horse and dressed to the nines, I got my Norfolk jacket like the well- attired gentlemen wore on the Titanic at Irby-Mayes, and my Parker of Vienna sweaters that Andy Williams wore at Dreyfuss & Son. It was obvious that there had to be some relief in what you were expected to become in Dallas. The Dallas WASPs, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the Highland Park crowd, were the aristocrats and the in-crowd, the intellectual elite who bred their own brand of sophistication while the rest of “us” were seen rather as extras and outsiders. I think of how such people were shown in fleeting cameos as portrayed in Edna Ferber’s (boy, did she hate Glenn McCarthy!) Giant, in which the Mexican woman was not received at Neiman Marcus Downtown Dallas Salon. It was no big deal, though, because my mom went there and was graciously received, and believe you me, she was not “Dallas”. Johnny Winter had Dallas pegged right when he said he was going to take “his gun and his straight razor to have some fun!” There is the hustle and bustle of the big city and the smoking of the tires of police cruisers hooking corners. You definitely could fall through the cracks in “Big D”, but there were places you could go and get out from under the norms imposed by Judge Lew Sterrett. His unwritten “rules” dictated how you behaved in “his” city. Also you could see the “truth” on Channel 13 as well as any news channel could assemble it in fifteen minutes. The Lovin’ Spoonful presented it in “And there is another side to this life I have been living!” If Channel 13 could turn back Rory Calhoun and The Low Price of Fame, they couldn’t be all bad. The “Quiet Man” was visited by my favorite Dallas reporter Mike Ritchey who, in his own simple way, tried to defend what the “Quiet Man” really was: “An oasis in a sea of do like me while I tell you what to say and let’s make the Dallas day!” There was ace reporter Tom Johnson in his Bogart trench coat that came in the “Man” and we all would talk anti-jigaboo hard slam politics that might change things just a little and let everybody into our version of “Giant”. “Austin, Houston, San Antone…just like a Giant in the sprawling sand.” Everybody always knew the “brains” to effect change and what was to be done up front were in “Big D”, but somehow where the rubber met the road, the Wide-Track Pontiac was not squalling the Tiger Paws. We were running in molasses. My “Cox’s Army did not need a new Douglas MacArthur of Dallas” to unleash horse cavalry on our march on their “Bastille”; there were a lot of creative people like Herb Croner, our concentration camp displaced Jew, and Carl Brannon, our First Unitarian Church socialist who merely wanted to toss out food for thought. True, Richard Milhous Nixon himself declared Dallas an “all-American city” and I applaud Mr. Nixon. But there were more citizens in Dallas than the “Highland Park Lassie”. Mike Ritchey brought elements of our town, if I may make so bold a statement, to you to be enjoyed and not immediately crushed like a homosexual impulse. Mike saw the “Highland Park crowd” in their true Buddha nature, and they wanted the Texarkana Fix applied to the “Quiet Man” back in the back alley of Dallas politics. The “Man” had a tremendous cross section of what Dallas really was: “off the record” guys and gals who would spin your head around and cause you to think twice. Mike defended us and he defended you. There was unseen pressure building up against the “Quiet Man” and I knew “Knox” couldn’t remain “that way” forever, but it was a shot in the arm to listen to people come in at the end of the day and let their hair down. Mike Carr always listened to their side and poured them a “Mike Carr Head” on their somewhat cold beer. Mike Ritchey tried to show the folks that places like the “Man” needed to be accepted and that they were not dangerous. Sure we got some wild characters in and bikers came by, but by far and large, we were okay Joes who had not dropped out of society; we wanted to find out what really made us tick without a public image. I did a trilogy on the “Quiet Man” to show you it’s back then essence: There was the great artist Bill James, the “Work Makes Free” Jew Herb Croner who fought for every cockamamie cause in the ghetto, and Mike who tried to give you a fair shake so you told the truth and not Mike’s interpretation of your truth, and that is the best thing you can say about a newshound. Thanks! Mike, I knew Tom Landry had our back all the time. He was the ultimate B-17 man our Norden bombsight of that which was right. Amen.
