Tom Johnson published some of my earliest work, in his series of
pulp magazines, and we've been friends and occasional collaborators ever
since. I first communicated with Tom by mail. You remember mail: you would
write or type a letter, then fold it up and put it in an envelope, slap a stamp
on it and drop it in a mail box. Days or weeks later, you'd get a reply. So 20th
century! We did our collaboration on SHADOWHAWKE: FIRST FLIGHT by mail; I'd
write a chapter, send it to him, he'd write the next one, send it back, and so
on.
I recently guest-blogged on Tom's The Pulp Den, and he's been kind
enough to return the favor. Without more ado, here's a stirring story from yesteryear, of Tom and that great Western hero, Lash
LaRue.
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 Sister 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!
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.
"Hmm," 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.
BTW, I too also had the honor and pleasure of meeting and shaking Lash LaRue's hand; he retired to Gaffney, SC, and I met him in the early 80s—over 30 years after Tom's first meeting with a hero.
Here's the incomparable Lash LaRue:
