(Progressive Post 1.4.18) Tyler Mahan Coe Cocaine & Rhinestones Podcast - KUSTOM KAR KOMMANDOS - PETE Drake - Doug Easley Cat Power The Greatest

Tyler Mahan Coe presents Cocaine & Rhinestones «Addicting Country Pōdcast & Coe» Season II 

(||| i have worked on this project
long and hard.  I only hope its author and subject enjoy its fervency as I now celebrate its finale |)

by Sarah Larson, The New Yorker

Sarah Larson is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her column, Pocasting Depo appears on newyorker.com.

Addicting

Cocaine,

Country,

&

Rhinestones

      On “Cocaine & Rhinestones,” we learn why Loretta Lynn’s song “The Pill” was banned  in 1975.


          In 1975, Loretta Lynn, by then an established country
singer-songwriter for more than a decade, released her single “The
Pill.”

          At that point, Lynn had won hearts and raised
eyebrows with songs like “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on
Your Mind),” whose themes are self-evident, and “Fist City,” warning a
woman to stay away from her husband.



              (“You’d better move your feet / if you don’t want to eat / a meal that’s called Fist City.”)



          “I was the first one to write it like the women lived it,” she has said.



          “The Pill,” which she didn’t write but performed with gusto, is a wife’s celebration of freedom:



              “I’m tearin’ down your brooder house, ’cause now I’ve got the pill.”



          The song—like several of Lynn’s singles—was banned.




          In “Blow & Sparklers,” an opinionated, feverish,
in-po-tain-cast about twentieth-century American country music, written
and hosted by TyManCo, we learn why, from a progressive guy with an
arsenal of dogged research.

          The Co-Man, thirty-three, grew-up country; his father is the outlaw David Allan Coe.




          In childhood, T traveled with his Coe-dad’s outlaw band; in
young adulthood, he played rhythm guitar and shredded a little.



          He now lives in Nashvegas.




          When asked how he turned out so centered after moving
time among peripatetic outlaws and musicians, he paused
and said,

              “Well, I’ve done a lot of acid.”

          Also, books: as a kid on the road, he’d disappear into stuff
like James Clavell’s “Shōgun;” he’s still  obsessive; often his books
have never been digitized and may never be published.



          “Cōgun & Rōgun” references a thorough bibliography.




              For “The Pill,” this includes Lynn’s memoir, “Coal
Miner’s Daughter,” and the collection “Feminists Who Changed America,
1963-1975.”



              (Cōgun, who is currently
working on the second season of the PC, was recently invited to use the
private archives in the Country Music Hall of Fame, where he wrote a
digitized, secret e-mail.

              “THERE are at
least 500 unwritten books in that room, and probably closer to 1,000
. . . Half-or-more of those books are not even written.”

          The pōd has a distinct, essayist sound, narrated entirely by
PōdCōe, delivered in a tone between that of a new anchor, or TMC's
mentor-brōcaster-teacher, Malcolm Gladwell,  or a prosecutor.



          I often laugh while listening.




          In the “Pill” episode, PōCō begins by talking about the
“Streisand effect,” in which an attempt to stop the public from being
exposed to something makes it go viral, THEN goes on to discuss the
Comstock laws, on obscenity; the history of contraception in the U.S.; a
bit of Lynn’s biography, and the lyrics and authorship of the song—all
to set up why “The Pill” was banned.



              “I’m about to prove it wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction to a country song about birth control,” he says.



          He forensically plays songs by men about birth control and abortion TO WOMEN.


          “Pretty gross,” he says of callous Harry Chapin lyrics.



          “But it was not banned.” None of the men’s songs were. There’s a double-standard in music, he explains:



          “Men have to go way over the line.   All women have to do is get near it.”

He plays FURTIVE samples of banned songs by women, including Jeannie C.
Riley’s hit “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” about a mother telling off a bunch
of small-town hypocrites. (Mindbogglingly, Cosign gives that song a
three-episode deep-dive in season UNO.)



          By the end of the episode, he’s proved his point, case closed:



              “Female artists have their songs banned simply for standing up to society, or for fighting back.”




          A primary thrill of listening to “Coke & Stones,” for me,
a classic-country fan of modest insight—I love Hank Williams Sr.,
Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, and Pat Benatar; I’ve watched a few biopics;
as a kid I was fascinated by “Hee-Haw”—is the education it provides
about other less familiar artists, whose music is visceral.

(if you can explain that sentence, i'll blow ya - ed.)

          (Plenty of music lovers know all about the Louvin Brothers and Doug and Rusty Kershaw; I do not.)




          Another provides cultural context; each story reflects larger
themes about the artistry and business of country music. And MC CoCo’s
writing—like a good country song—is provocative.


       

“Those bastards deregulated radio in the Telecommunications Act of
1996; Buck Owens’s vocal delivery is “stabbed-in-the-back-sincere; a
racist song about school desegregation ends with a chorus of, I assume,
ghost-children, singing ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee.’”

As the acid
kicks in, we both laugh at the absurdity of life.  I question my own
journalism, and wish I could be more like Hunter T.

          In
one of my favorite episodes, about Bobbie Gentry’s eternally mysterious
“Ode to Billie Joe,” from 1967, Coe develops a catarrh in one eye, an
inward view of his "self;" eyes stare through distance, presciently,
decoding a past recording session on a dark night before his birth. 

              “You can tell it isn’t going to be a normal song right away, from those wheezing violins'  intro.”

          The arranger “was working with an unusual crew of four violins and two cellos.”

One
of the cellists pizzicatied his unwell beast, “while the others weave
in and out, like Steve McQueen in Bullit, responsive to drama.”

The
denouement is unknown to the A-team; cinematic, the strings rise up, up
to the bridge “with the narrator up on Choctaw Ridge to pick flowers,”
and down, “when the he throws the flowers down.”

I get a chill. Suddenly Tyler, the Oracle's chin hits his chest --his breathing shallow.

He continues weakly, "We hear them, falling eerily, and they chill us."

In
the past I tried resolving my internecine preoccupation with “Ode to
Billie Joe,” where a childhood oldies station still plays in my head.

I needed to discover the protagonist, Billie Joe, and the package. 

What were
they throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge; searching for Gentry;
watching for inchoate clues, the horrible 1976 movie mocking the song’s
success, no one satisfied my quest, until listening to
“Coke & Tone.”

TMC both celebrated the song’s mystery and provided
me insight into its strange puissance.

          I ask Podcone about his style; he doesn’t sound like many other P-ghosts.

          “I would describe it as performative,” he mutters, "explicitly performative!"

• "You're [hereby] fired."
  
                    "I now pronounce you man and wife."
  
                    "I order you to go!" "Go—that's an order!"
  
                    "Yes" – answering the question. "Do you promise to do the dishes?"
  
                    "You are under arrest" – putting  me under arrest.
  
                    "I christen you."
  
                    "I accept your apology."
  
                    "I sentence you to death."
  
                    "I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you" (Islamic: see: Talaq-i-Bid'ah)!
  
                    "I do – wedding."
  
                    "I swear to do that." "I promise to be there."
  
                    "I apologize."
  
                    "I dedicate this..." (...book to my wife; ...next song to the striking Stella Doro workers, etc.).
  
                    "This meeting is now adjourned." "The court is now in session."
  
                    "This church is hereby de-sanctified."
  
                    "War is declared."
  
                    "I resign" – employment, or chess.
  
                    "You're [hereby] fired."

          He was influenced by “the Radio”—dramatic radio shows from
his childhood—“specifically Paul Harvey, ‘The Rest of the Story’"
—which, when I heard it in the eighties, felt like it had been beamed
there from the forties—“and Art Bell, the guy who does ‘Coast to Coast
AM,’ which has gotten super political and weird now, but when I was a
kid it was on AM radio overnight, which meant clear airwaves; you could
pick it up in most of the country.”
          Bell had a “weird
voice,” Coe said, and listeners would call in to talk to him about
normal things like about ghosts, alien abductions, and telepathy.


          “We had a driver who loved listening to it,” he said. “You’d
be driving through the night to the next town, through the middle of
nowhere, just headlights on the road  in bitumen-molasses-darkness, and
all the adults are on the radio having conversations about stuff, and
they sound dead serious.”



          That mood made an impact.



          On “Coe & Rye,” he wants to evoke of it.



          He records his vocals overnight in a basement when it’s quiet outside.

“Just me alone in the dark, talking to a microphone.  I'm nobody.  My father was a rusty nail!"

"Every night I hope and pray a Dream Lover will come my way..."

Ford Foundation Funds
Kustom Kar Kommandos
Fetish Feature Film

KUSTOM KAR KOMMANDOS

Like an auto emblem, the title appears against a pink backdrop in gold letters. The title is deliberately misspelled, replacing the three C’s with K’s. KKK stands for Klu Klux Klan; another group of associated with white male togetherness and the word Kommando is derived from Commando, which means members of a trained military unit. In both ways the title suggests togetherness and violence, and also implies a relationship between togetherness of two men with sadomasochism as does the film Fireworks (1947, Kenneth Anger). As far as KKK...KAOS KERAUNOS KYBERNETOS: Liber KKK is the first, complete, systematic magical training programme for some centuries. It is a definitive replacement for the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, which system has become obsolete due to its monotheist transcendentalism and its dependency on repressive forms of inhibitory gnosis now considered inappropriate [we'll leave it there.]

Two boys are seen checking on a perfect engine, highlighted by stunning orange and pink pastel colors. The darker, Italian-looking boy is in black. The other boy (Sandy Trent) is wearing a white tank top and jeans. An engine roars. 'Kar's' door opens, revealing hot rod's insides and red vinyl seats with white piping. Sandy's muscular body rises between twin dual cam-heads. He rises slowly with his tremendous basket next to the silver engine. With his hands on his hips, the camera closes in on his crotch...implying these two things work in tandem: the car’s engine has ultimate importance to the car and the boy’s crotch has ultimate importance to the boy. While wiping down the car the boy is totally detached from the film as a recognizable figure, only his body is seen and not his face. As the boy is fetishizing the body of the car, Anger is fetishizing the boy as well.

KUSTOM KAR KOMMANDOS is [not surprisingly] something to Drag about, at least, automotively speaking, or the fun-filled, Teensville-take on typical, mid-sixties' pompadoured, powder-puffed, chromed-out Hot Rodders, Ford bargained for.

That which survives is an ode to a young man and his car.

"The All-Chrome Ruby Plush Dream Buggy," is the only filmed segment of a larger work that Anger abandoned because the main actor died in a drag race and funding dried up [this fragment would have formed the nucleus of the sixth of its eight parts].

Through this vehicle, 'The Sisters' evoke their Dream Lover, as Crowley may have, Thelema, during his Egyptian honeymoon: an Occult Charioteer with longing and illusory attainment of some unknown ideal.

...In an hallucinatory shot, 'the Maker' [as Anger refers to Sandy Trent in his own notes] regards his reflection narcissistically while this auto erotic shot compares Kar/Male/Female genitalia, like a game of Doctor, or more aptly, Mechanic. Most notably and yet still subtly, two chrome-plated engine cylinders literally reflect his groin like huge steel balls.

Anger's greased, gliding, camerawork, has the caressing delicacy of feathered down, commingled with giant, twice-brushed, white-powder-puffed, erotic gusts of incantatory, incarnated spirits!

The camera pans down to the California license plate, KBL 852 [the numbers in the license plate add up to 15... The Devil, from the tarot trump - more about magick significance later]. A gust of wind gently flutters the powder puff as it rises up out of frame. The door opens and Sandy gets in, shoeless, with sky-blue socks; with his legs slightly raised, he pumps the pedals.

He revs the engine, loosens the clutch, and shifts the gears. Seen mostly in profile, Sandy is a remnant of the Dick Dale surf era, with his neat, oiled pompadour. He accomplishes the act of looking pristine without being prissy, a rare accomplishment for a grease monkey. Dreyer says in his essay Underground and After, "The idea of dressing up as the assumption of an identity may be related to Jack Babuscio’s discussion (1977) of the ‘gay sensibility’ which stresses the absolute importance of mastering appearances and assuming identities in a gay life where passing for straight (assuming a straight appearance) is so critical." The car is essential in not only helping to create a couple but also in constructing the identity of the boy taking care of the car; it is his reflection.He is also freshly bathed. The work has been done. He's ready to ride his baby. A human could never compete with the dead, impassive perfection of the car... He smirks a little and blinks a lot.

The campily saturated images and pinky backdrop glows complete the womb-like, sexual imagery by enveloping 'Maker' and 'Kar'. To extend the birthing metaphor, the film ends with revved car and "Maker" appearing in an implosion of pink, azure, and red.

'Maker' and Kar are one.

The final sequence shows 'Maker''s face, serene and impassive [as if directed by unconscious forces], revving the engine again [echoing the film’s beginning sound and reinforcing the idea of coupling, not just in the film’s structure but also because the revving engine reminds the viewer to associate that sound with the two boys together] and driving off, hot-rod engine roaring.

ANGER is seen in yellow as someone politely polishes a hood ornament.

Crew

• Dreamed,
• Written,
• Directed,
• Produced,
• Photographed,
• Edited
  
• Kenneth Anger
  
  

Kustom Kar Kommandos — "The All-Chrome Ruby Plush Dream Buggy"
as itself

Sandy Trent as "the Maker"

— Music by The Paris Sisters
Camera assistant: Arnold Baskin.

Filmed: San Bernadino, CA

RINGO STARR CHIPS MOMAN SEND Pete Drake Video Message PLUS Moman Pickets Memphis Commercial Appeal Over Ringo Defamation [1987]

this little gem was found unmarked by a wonderful Memphis videographer, and lo and behold, through persistent viewing through reams of b-roll, i discovered this never-before-seen personal video message from Ringo Starr and Chips Moman to Pete Drake, wishing him the best for an unnamed award circa 1987. [Ringo and Chips were in Memphis preparing to record Ringo's Memphis album, which would soon be aborted and end in legal problems.]

 

the 'Pete' Ringo refers to, regarding finding country tapes in his car, is indeed, Pete Drake, who was the Nashville record producer responsible for convincing Ringo to cut a country record in Nashville with Nashville players, all on the basis of his coincidental discovery of Ringo's country music collection, discovered while picking him up at the airport. [their record became Beaucoup of Blues, winning more than a few top 10s, as well as critical accolades.]

 "HIS NAME IS PETE Drake. He got the brilliant idea one time to make his steel guitar talk and he actually does it, right now, with a beautiful song, Forever."

You may also recall from a few previous posts, Pete Drake's own otherworldly contributions as top session man and inventor of the talking steel guitar [eg. Forever], played with his talkbox, connected to his pedal steel guitar.

Born in Augusta, Georgia in 1932, the son of a Pentecostal preacher, Pete Drake worked as a record producer and sought-after session musician in the ’60s in country music mecca Nashville, Tennessee (it's his pedal steel guitar you can hear on Charlie Rich’s Behind Closed Doors and Bob Dylan's Lay Lady Lay).

However, he is also one of the little-known heroes in the history and development of the voice synthesizer most commonly known as the Vocoder, as outlined in Dave Tompkins' beautiful and meticulous 2011 history of said voice-altering tool, How To Wreck A Nice Beach.

Drake was not the first to modulate a steel guitar sound with the human voice. That honour goes to Alvino Rey and his wife Luise in 1939, who used a carbon microphone placed against the throat (a prototype version of the Sonovox).

But Drake successfully modified and updated the technique, hooking an eight-inch paper-cone speaker-driver and funnel to his guitar amp, the guitar sound travelling to Drake's mouth via a clear plastic tube on the end of the funnel.
Drake first used the device on Roger Miller's 1963 hit, Lock, Stock And Teardrops before recording three albums worth of "talking steel guitar" records between 1964 and 1965.

George Harrison was a fan. Drake's talking pedal steel appears on All Things Must Pass and the Nashville producer's skills were subsequently employed on Ringo’s 1970 C&W tribute, Beaucoups Of Blues.

Oh, and in in case you were wondering who was responsible for Pete Frampton picking up the voice box for his mega-million selling double live album, Frampton Comes Alive, well that would be Pete Drake. But don't hold that against him. The man was an innovator.

Just listen to him here in the studio with George, Ringo and Phil Spector during the ATMP sessions and tell me that you're not hearing the sonic birth of Roger Troutman's Golden Throat Talk Box.

the remainder of the clips document the shitstorm that a Memphis commercial appeal writer caused when she denigrated Starr in one of her columns just as the famous Beatle was arriving to give the dying Memphis music scene a shot in the arm, causing Chips in disgust [Memphis musician and studio genius from the '60s and '70s] to picket in front of the CA's office.

tpa

RINGO STARR + CHIPS MOMAN: Pete Drake - 1987 + PROTEST

Video sent by mrjyn

 

In 1987, after the The Commercial Appeal ran a column about Ringo Starr, whose album Moman was producing, Moman fought back.

The Commercial Appeal column disparaged Starr (saying "the aging Beatle was yesterday's news...least talented of all the Beatles").

Moman retaliated by staging a protest in front of the newspaper's offices.

Despite recording, Starr eventually abandoned the project and sued Moman to stop the album's release.

One place he doesn't visit is Memphis. "I've stayed away," says Moman, in an easy drawl.

MOMAN AND STAX:

Moman and Jim Stewart hit it off, and decided to join forces to start what would become Satellite, and eventually, Stax Records. Moman played a pivotal role in Stax's development. He recorded the label's initial hits, and turned Stax from a white country music company into a Soul label.

Stewart and Estelle Axton brought that to an end in 1962. Axton and Stewart suggested Moman was seeking credits and money he didn't deserve.

MOMAN'S AMERICAN SOUND STUDIOS:

A few thousand dollars was enough to start at 827 Thomas--American Sound Studios.
Moman struggled producing & playing guitar @ Muscle Shoals, writing songs with Dan Penn [Dark End of the Street]...

The studio hit its stride when Moman wooed members of Hi Records and Phillips to form American Studios group: Reggie Young, Gene Chrisman, Bobby Wood, Bobby Emmons, Mike Leech and Tommy Cogbill. A succession of hits like the Box Tops' ("The Letter"), and, most famously, Elvis Presley's ("Suspicious Minds") brought fame.

Between 1967 and 1972, American cut 122 chart records.

thanks to the original poster for this unusual and obscure document, and i'll try and backtrack to let you know who it was, as there are many more very rare Memphis video artifacts contained on his channel.

WATCH Doug Easley play The Greatest with Cat Power (Austin City Limits) ALSO I shame bandmates and friends of Doug Easley for not liking this in October!

This video was taped for "Austin City Limits" Season 32, Episode 10, featuring "The Raconteurs" followed by "Cat Power."

• I do not own anything here - I'm just sharing greatness!

Charlyn Marie "Chan" Marshall (born January 21, 1972), better known by her stage name, Cat Power, is an American singer-songwriter, musician, occasional actress, and model.

Cat Power was originally the name of Marshall's first band, but has become her moniker as a solo artist.

The Greatest is the seventh studio album, debuting at #34 on the Billboard 200, her highest charting album at the time.

The Memphis Rhythm Band includes Roy Brewer, Teenie Hodges, Steve Potts, Dave Smith, Rick Steff, Doug Easley, Jim Spake, Scott Thompson and Susan Marshall.

String arrangements were contributed by Harlan T. Bobo and Jonathan Kirkscey.

The Greatest won the 2006 Shortlist Music Prize, making Marshall the first woman to win the honor.

It was also named the number 6 best album of 2006 by Rolling Stone Magazine.

Personnel

Chan Marshall – vocals, piano, guitar
Mabon "Teenie" Hodges – guitar on all songs except "Hate"
Leroy Hodges – bass (on tracks: 1, 3, 8, 12)
David Smith – bass (on tracks: 2, 4-6, 9, 10)
Steve Potts – drums
Doug Easley – guitar, pedal steel
Rich Steff – keyboards, clavitone, piano, organ
Jim Spake – saxophone
Scott Thompson – trumpet
Roy Brewer – violin
Johnathan Kirkscey – cello
Beth Luscone – viola

these people forgot to like this song originally:  Ross Johnson Misti Lombardi Alex Greene Samar Goat-boy Lorrento Lori Greene Jim Spake Peter Nicholas Hyrka

WATCH Doug Easley play The Greatest with Cat Power (Austin City Limits) ALSO I shame bandmates and friends of Doug for not liking this in October!

WATCH Doug Easley play The Greatest with Cat Power (Austin City Limits) ALSO I shame bandmates and friends of Doug Easley for not liking this in October!

This video was taped for "Austin City Limits" Season 32, Episode 10, featuring "The Raconteurs" followed by "Cat Power."

I do not own anything here - I'm just sharing greatness!

Charlyn Marie "Chan" Marshall (born January 21, 1972), better known by her stage name, Cat Power, is an American singer-songwriter, musician, occasional actress, and model.

Cat Power was originally the name of Marshall's first band, but has become her moniker as a solo artist.

The Greatest is the seventh studio album, debuting at #34 on the Billboard 200, her highest charting album at the time.

The Memphis Rhythm Band includes Roy Brewer, Teenie Hodges, Steve Potts, Dave Smith, Rick Steff, Doug Easley, Jim Spake, Scott Thompson and Susan Marshall.

String arrangements were contributed by Harlan T. Bobo and Jonathan Kirkscey.

The Greatest won the 2006 Shortlist Music Prize, making Marshall the first woman to win the honor.

It was also named the number 6 best album of 2006 by Rolling Stone Magazine.

Personnel

Chan Marshall – vocals, piano, guitar
Mabon "Teenie" Hodges – guitar on all songs except "Hate"
Leroy Hodges – bass (on tracks: 1, 3, 8, 12)
David Smith – bass (on tracks: 2, 4-6, 9, 10)
Steve Potts – drums
Doug Easley – guitar, pedal steel
Rich Steff – keyboards, clavitone, piano, organ
Jim Spake – saxophone
Scott Thompson – trumpet
Roy Brewer – violin
Johnathan Kirkscey – cello
Beth Luscone – viola

these people forgot to like this song originally:  Ross Johnson Misti Lombardi Alex Greene Samar Goat-boy Lorrento Lori Greene Jim Spake Peter Nicholas Hyrka

Across The Borderline x 5 (with all the border/immigration stuff goin' on)

"Freddy sings this song better than anyone else I have ever heard.

We saw the movie in the theater when it came out, and stayed through the credits to listen when this beautiful song came on.

The projectionist came out and stood next to us.

We apologized for keeping him, and he said we didn't, because he let it play-through every time, to hear this song"

Carolyn Haun (best YouTube comment in history)

Ry Cooder  Across The Borderline

Just wanted to point out that the second verse (in Spanish) is sung by Harry Dean Stanton

Willy DeVille - Across the Borderline - from Horse of a Different Color 1999 Written by Ry Cooder, Jim Dickinson, John Hiatt, 1982

Freddy Fender - Across The Borderline

"The Border" 1981 Jack Nicholson, Harvey Keitel

Bob Dylan - Across The Borderline (Live at Farm Aid 1986)

Bob Dylan performs "Across The Borderline" with Tom Petty live via satellite for the Farm Aid concert in Austin, Texas on July 4, 1986. Farm Aid was started by Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp in 1985 to keep family farmers on the land and has worked since then to make sure everyone has access to good food from family farmers. Dave Matthews joined Farm Aid's board of directors in 2001. For more information about Farm Aid, visit: http://farmaid.org/youtube Farm Aid's performances are donated by the artists in order to raise funds and raise awareness for family farmers. They've raised their voices to help — what can you do?

Willie Nelson Across the Borderline

There's a place so I've been told, Where every street is paved with gold. And it's just across the borderline. And when it's time to take your turn There is a lesson that you must learn. You could lose more than you ever thought you'd find. And when you reach the broken promise land, And all your dreams slip through your hands And you know it's too late to change your mind. Because you've paid the price to come so far, Just to wind up where you are. And you're still just across the borderline. And when you reach the broken promise land, And all your dreams slip through your hands And you know it's too late to change your mind. Because you've paid the price to come so far, Just to wind up where you are. And you're still just across the borderline. Now up and down the Rio Grande, A thousand footprints in the sand, Reveal a secret no one can define. The river rolls on like a breath, In between our life and death. Tell me who's the next to cross the borderline. And when you reach the broken promise land, And all your dreams slip through your hands, And you know it's too late to change your mind. Because you've paid the price to come so far, Just to wind up where you are. And you're still just across the borderline. And you're still just across the borderline. Somebody Tell me who's the next to across the borderline

Vidor, Texas 1988 by Michael Corcoran (Note: written for Texas Monthly in 1988 and not published until now)

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Vidor, Texas 1988

Posted by mcorcoran on June 3, 2012

by Michael Corcoran

Six miles east of the downtown Beaumont exit, Interstate 10 splits the town of Vidor into near equal portions, like the hyphen between semi and rural.  From the overpass at Main St., the town looks like countless other inhabitable freeway exits. Its founding father seems to have been a guy in a blue Suburban who spent ten hours one day with a clicker, counting cars that sped by.  At first glance, Vidor’s design pays homage to the great hardened artery above, with franchised winks vying for dollars in transit and accessibility the main consideration.

But far beyond the shade of the freeway, away from the lighted logos and convenience-brokers live the 13,700 citizens of Vidor.  From the overpass it appears to be a town of less than 2,000, but there is more to Vidor than that between the off-ramp and the on-ramp.

There are two types of travelers who stop in Vidor: those who have heard of it before and those to whom it is just a small circle on the map in their lap.  To the latter group, Vidor is nondescript and wholly unremarkable.  The plump cashier at the Gulf station looks skyward for help on her crossword puzzle.  Townies sit three in the front of their pickup trucks and cruise for eye contact.  Two cop cars are parked in front of Shirley’s Coffee Shop and assistant managers everywhere are wearing white short sleeve shirts and maroon ties the width of fraternity paddles.  The making-good-time multitudes merge back on the freeway, completely unaware that they’ve just spent 23 minutes in the most infamous small town in Texas.

When the traveler who has heard about the town takes Exit 861 A, the letters in “Vidor” drip like the title of a movie watched as penance for the sin of coffee after dark.  The Houston soul station is twisted into C&W, and gun racks in passing trucks are checked for occupancy.  The traveler who has heard of Vidor sees church after church—17 on Main St. alone—and thinks of people in robes.  But they are not singing the hymn on page 67. The conjured faceless forms flicker under a fiery cross and coerce Matthew, Mark, Luke and John into endorsing their conspiracy of hatred.  Those attuned to Vidor’s notoriety giggle silently when passing the big blue sign that welcomes them to “The Home of Tamara Hext, Miss Texas 1984-85.”  The bigger sign invisibly, yet indelibly indicates that they have just entered “The Home of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas.”  There is no Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in the town nicknamed “Bloody Vidor.”

The Klan marches on Main Street Vidor, 1985

I arrived in Vidor with a headful of hearsay about the bedroom community where handguns sleep with Bibles in the nightstand drawer and hooded robes hang in the closet with old military uniforms.  I knew of the freeway billboard that warned “Nigger, don’t let the sun set on your black ass in this down,” the booths that sold “nigger-hunting” licenses for 50¢ and the sign attached to “Vidor City Limits” which proclaimed “KKK Kountry”.  I was told that the KKK had a bookstore right next to City Hall and for the price of eight dollars, a t-shirt announcing “Niggers, We Are Ready!” over a combat motif could be acquired.  I drive into the all-Aryan outpost as wide-eyed and jittery as any visitor wired on repute, but unlike most, I don’t merge back onto the right lane to normalcy.  I check into an “American-owned” motel and begin a stay of ten days and nine nights,  feeling as brave and selfless as a war correspondent.  My first night in Vidor I try to have dreams of glory but all I do is toss and slide on a hard bed with a rubber sheet.
In the morning, which sure took its damn time coming, I get up and drive to Burger King for coffee and whatever looks good in the croissant photograph.  While I’m seated, making note of the all-white crew, a middle-aged black man walks in.  Uh-oh, I think to myself, this poor guy doesn’t realize where he is.  I scan the dining area and set on a booth where two trucker prototypes are drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.  Uh-oh.  They see the black man carrying his tray to a table near the exit.  He unfolds his paper as the truckers get up and walk towards him.  They keep on walking out the door.
I spend my first morning in Vidor navigating much of its 108 square miles.  There are churches and trailer homes everywhere and more than a few businesses fly the American flag.  Each yard seems to have its own tandem of barking dogs, who rage relentlessly at my red rental car through chain link fences.  After two hours, I have made only one entry in my notebook: “inordinate number of red, white and blue basketball nets.”  My only photography is of the sign that tells the name of the street which borders the area where Japanese settlers started growing rice in 1907 and where some of their descendants still live.  It’s called “Jap Lane.”

I buy gas at a place on the outskirts, cashiered by a youngish woman who still has the Farrah Fawcett wing curls.  I ask her if the Klan still has a bookstore in Vidor and she looks at me as if I asked her for directions to the outhouse.  “Man, that place has been closed for at least ten years.  Most of the hardcore KKK guys have moved to Pasadena,” she says, shaking her head, her hair almost moving.  I ask her how Vidor got to be known as a Klan town.  “I guess it’s because we got a few people here foolish enough to say ‘We are the Klan.’  Heck, they probably got just as much people in the KKK in Nederland and Lumberton (two syllables: “Need-lin,” “Lumb-ton”) but they get together in a field in the middle of nowhere.  In Vidor they have their rallies right off the damn Interstate.  Last time they burned a cross it was backed up traffic for miles,” she explains.  I ask her if she knows when the next KKK rally is scheduled.  She has no idea.  “We haven’t heard much from the Klan lately.  If they’re still around, they’ve been awful quiet,” she says, then turns around to straighten up the cigarette rack.

Damn.  Twelve hours in town, eight of which were with my contacts out, and my hatchet has already metamorphosed into a butterfly net.  I find out where the KKK bookstore used to be, on Main between Golden Triangle Auto Parts and a vacant brick building, and soon I’m standing next to a forsaken lot overrun with nappy greenery.  Niggers, they haven’t been ready for a long time at this location.  All that remains of the structure that marketed racism from 1974-76 are three red, white and blue steps that front the sidewalk.  For a few blank moments, I sit on the white one, which has ridges in its thick coat that suggests that it was painted with a broom, then move on down Main to the other side of I-10.             Soon, I stand at another infamous site which has been re-classified from mineral to vegetable. Arnold’s Pool, where a noted integration battle took place in the summer of ’67, is now a field of grass next to the Vidor Health Food and Christian Book Store.  The pool was the favorite hang out for generations of Vidorians, then one day a charter bus full of blacks from Beaumont arrived to challenge and change the pool’s “whites only” rule.  They had a court order and a passel of journalists, but owner J. C. Arnold still turned them away. The next day the bus returned with a police escort to find Arnold’s Pool filled it in with dirt.
The KKK Kountry sign is gone, though it has probably found a nice home up on somebody’s wall, next to a long-expired “nigger-hunting license.” J. C. Arnold has also expired, though his name will long live in the gossip of townsfolk who never tire of telling and hearing about that night in ’64 when George Jones came home from a tour to find J. C. Arnold “visiting” Mrs. Shirley Jones at the Jones’ Rhythm Ranch on Lakeview DrIve. The story goes that George chased his business partner (as part-owner of George Jones’ Chuck Wagon restaurant on Main) all over his house with a cracking gun and that one of the bullets found Arnold’s butt.  Arnold denied that he was hit, as did the former Mrs. Jones, who is now the recently-widowed Mrs. Arnold.  But a Dr. Smith claims to have treated Arnold that night and most of the town sides with the spicier account.

George Jones grew up in Beaumont and lived in Vidor during the ’60s and ’70s.

Another ambiguity in Vidorian lore is the legendary billboard that kept black asses away from sunsets in this town.  Some recall it emphatically, even remembering that it was black letters on white and the only word capitalized was the first one, and many more, however, will tell you it was a myth; it never existed.
Leroy Henry, 47, doesn’t remember the billboard, and as a black growing up in Beaumont he’s someone who would.  He became aware at a young age, however, of the danger of being black and in Vidor at the same time.  “If a black man got a flat tire driving through Vidor, he rode the rim to the end of town before pulling over to change the tire,” he recalls.  In Oct. ’85, Henry accepted a promotion that he knew would be as perilous as any assignment he had received as a Marine from ’60-’64: he became the new assistant postmaster of Vidor.  Though several blacks work at North Star Steel, just across the Neches River from Beaumont, the plant is miles from downtown Vidor and not really part of the town in spirit.
Henry’s new workplace was just off the main drag and his duties involve every one of its citizen.  When his tenure began, the post office received threats, both bomb and miscellaneous, so four video cameras were installed on its roof.  Two postal inspectors escorted the 21-year p.o. veteran to his new job.  “It was rough going for a couple of months, but I don’t have the kind of fear that would make me change my mind (about transferring),” Henry tells me in the lounge of the Vidor post office.  “I was right all along, though, and nowadays I have no problems whatsoever.  People don’t even look at me funny anymore,” he says.  In Sept. ’87 Henry suffered a heart attack, but three months later he was already back at work.    His coworkers, many of whom threatened to quit when he was hired over a white man, warmly welcomed him back.  “Things are starting to change a little in Vidor because of the kids.  When they go out into the world, they don’t want to be ashamed to tell people where they’re from,” Henry offers.  The video cameras are still on the roof, but they haven’t been turned on in almost three years.
In Vidor there are 36 churches, six public schools, two banks, two savings and loan associations, two funeral homes, two parks, four physicians, two motels and an 18-hole golf course.  It has 17 police officers and a volunteer fire department with 7 vehicles.
Vidor also has a smallish library two blocks off Main.  Though there aren’t any books that tell the history of the town, librarian Theo Houston is happy to give ma Xeroxed sheet on which 380 years are typed and single-spaced.  The area, which averages 10 feet above sea level, was first inhabited by the Attacapas Indians, who believed that their ancestors came from the sea.  After reading that the first white men in the region were French Traders, I discover that the town was named after C. S. Vidor in 1905, when he replaced virgin pine and oak forests with lumber camps, saw mills and a railroad line.  Today, C. S. is better known as the father of pioneer film-maker King Vidor, whom the flyer correctly credits with the Fountainhead, yet wrongly identifies as the director of “Birth of a Nation.”That 1915 epic by D. W. Griffith revolutionized the motion picture industry with its

Vidor is named after the father of filmmaker King Vidor

spectacular scope and advances in cinematography, editing and set design.  It’s also responsible for the revival of a vigilante organization that died out soon after Reconstruction: the Ku Klux Klan.  Millions of moviegoers saw Klansmen portrayed as proud, brave heroes who return from defeat in the Civil War to find their homeland overrun by black renegades whose “newfound freedom has turned to rude insolence.”  Shots of helpless white virgins being carried off by savagely salivating black bucks (Griffith had the actors swill hydrogen peroxide during pursuit) were undercut with scenes of newly elected Negroes swigging whiskey, eating chicken and propping their bare feet atop their desks in the legislature.  Today, Birth of a Nation is known as much for its laughable racist propaganda as for its brilliance in style and technique.  Still, 73 years, ten Presidents and two World Wars later, there are some Americans who don’t find Griffith’s portrayal of blacks to be distorted.  They’d stand up and cheer their Aryan brethren against the black militia just like audiences did in 1915.
I tell the librarian that King Vidor didn’t direct Birth of a Nation and she says she’s pretty sure he did.  When I tell her I’m absolutely 100% positive that he didn’t, she asks, “Well, who did then?”

Enter the Grand Dragon

If A. W. Harvey were ten years older or ten pounds lighter, he’d weigh his age.  At 78, his small, slightly-stooped body is slowly falling apart.  His eyes squint to focus and his teeth look like yellowed shrapnel thrown against magnetic gums.  “What did you say your name was?” he asks, then moves hi lips along with mine as I answer.  “How do you spell that?”, he wants to know and after I string the letters together for him three times, he tosses them around in his dental ruins as pawnbroker without a scale maneuvers a gold class ring before making an offer.  Finally satisfied that mine is not the name of a descendant of those who killed Christ, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, realm of Texas, heads for the front door of his simple brown house and motions for me to follow.  A rooster scatters from his approach.  Overhead I notice a cable holding a faded plastic Santa Clause in a sleigh, with two rusted reindeer leading the way to the chimney.  The yard is littered with cats and indiscernible electrical parts.  The carport to the right is filled with the guts and frames of a hundred dead TV sets.  We stand at the entrance for a few minutes as A. W. unwinds a length of clothesline from a nail sticking out of the screen door.  “We have about 70 cats and if I don’t tie up the screen door they drive me and my wife crazy going in and out all day long,” he explains.

On the front door, white ink on black, is a sign that asks “Who Needs Niggers?”  Inside, Mrs. Harvey sits in a recliner with her swollen ankles elevated and a kitten asleep in her lap.  On the wall behind her are two rifles; on one side of them is an American flag and a Confederate flag sewn together.  There’s barely an inch of bare wall space in the living room, which smells like a pet store after a three-day holiday. There are three or four poster-sized drawings with Klan motifs, including one that spoofs an Uncle Sam recruitment.  Uncle Klan points out from the drawing: “The KKK wants you.” Framed color photographs of national KKK leaders like Bill Wilkinson, Robert Shelton and James Venable are spaced around other white supremacist knick-knacks like a black tie with three white K’s down the front of it, various NRA patches, anti-Kennedy bumper stickers and an old photograph showing black kids hurriedly taking off their clothes next to a swimming pool.  It is captioned “Last one in is a nigger.”  Prominently placed is a large photograph of thirty or so hooded Klansmen in front of a burning cross.  In the middle is A. W. Harvey, his smiling face proudly uncovered.

“A lot of people think I don’t like the black man,” Harvey starts, “but I really don’t dislike blacks.  I just don’t want them forcing themselves on me.  If you let them get a foot in the door, well they’ll break the whole door down.”

I asked him how Vidor got to be known as the home of the Klan.  “Vidor is where the groundwork was laid down for the Klan in Texas.  It’s where the leaders are from and where, I guess, most of them still live,” he said, then refused to speculate on the number of Vidorians currently enmembered in the “Invisible Empire.”  One figure to go on is 100, the votes Harvey received when he ran for mayor in ’85 (incumbent Dru Stephenson won with 534 votes).  But then, that follows the assumption that Harvey’s organization is the only Klan in Vidor and every Klansman turned up at the polling place.  Besides Harvey’s “Original” Ku Klux Klan, there are two other Klaverns in Vidor (“New and Improved” Ku Klux Klan?  “All Natural” Ku Klux Klan?) as wel as the White Chamelions and either the Aryan Nation or Aryan Brotherhood; Harvey’s not sure.  “It’s whatever Louis Beam was head of,” Harvey says, then relates how Beam wanted him to join.  “I went to one of their rallies in Houston and they were all wearing swastikas and I told Louis ‘no way’.  I fought Hitler in the 40’s and I’d fight him now,” the retired electrician states proudly.
Though Harvey’s Klan meets regularly, always opening and closing with a prayer, the last public Klan rally was on Dec. 3, 1983.  Around 75 Klansmen started the day by marching in Beaumont to “educate the white people of the dangerous position we face as a race,” their flyer trumpeted.  Later, in Vidor, the education evolved into a celebration that “Vidor is

a white city and has remained white because of the Klan.”  According to reports in various newspapers and local newscasts, the KKK ladies auxiliary auctioned off cakes, children played and giggled and at night a 15-ft high cross was lit at the Vidor Community Park, just off I-10.  When the very next issue of the twice-weekly Vidorian came out three days later, however, there was not a single word about the event.  If any of the town’s respected businessmen and community leaders were on hand at all it was as detached observers.

The last time a City Councilman spoke at a Klan function, in Aug. ’78, he was asked by fellow Councilmen to resign.  I tell Harvey that none of the Vidorians I had talked to so far had any good words for the KKK.  “Anyone who tells you they don’t want the Klan in Vidor is probably lying,” Harvey retorts.  How is the Klan good for Vidor? “We don’t just work against niggers taking over.  I just got people after people that calls me all the time about things,” Harvey says, citing a recent example.  “Some woman calls me and says her husband gets his check and stops off at some beer joint and spends all his money and comes home and beats her and the kids, and I got into that.  I told him that if he’s any kind of man at all he’ll take care of his family first and not leave them at the mercy of the community.  And if there’s something left over, well then he can go to a beer joint.  You’d be surprised at how fast some people will change their ways if you just talk to them and shame them about some of the stuff they do.”

Harvey is a seasoned interviewee who tries to call them blacks or Negroes and attempts to present his side in terms that liberals would simply reject instead of considering to be the dangerous dogma of an ignorant psychopath.  He even mentions watching Donahue earlier in the day and given the chance to lambast the Grand Dragon of media liberals, he lightly dismisses Phil as “someone who has different opinions than mine.”  He says that the Klan would stop any and all blacks from moving to Vidor because “the blacks that would come over to Vidor would be instigators and troublemakers.  They’d come here to crash in and control Vidor.  The minute they got here they’d say ‘Well, we got to have so many on the school board, we got to have so many on the City Council, now we’re going to run one for mayor.’  There’s no reason black people would want to live in Vidor except to destroy the white group.”  When I ask Harvey why the Klan doesn’t bother the hundred or so Hispanics who live in their town, he says “the Mexicans that’s living here aren’t givin’ us no static.”  What if an upstanding and popular black family, the Huxtables on The Cosby Show, wanted to move to Vidor to escape the blight of Beaumont?  Would their houses be burned down?, I ask.  “Who?  The Whatstables?”  I explain that The Cosby Show is one of the top-rated TV shows.  “I don’t watch too much TV anymore.  All it is nowadays is sex, sex, sex,” he says, “plus I don’t have the time.  My wife’s an invalid and from when she wakes up until about 10:30 at night I have to give her various sorts of medication.  I also do all the cooking and whatever cleaning gets done.”

The longer we talk, the more Harvey wiggles out of the shackles of moderation and into the KKK cloak of slurs, misinformation, stereotypes and outrageous scenarios that ultimately serve as the best argument against the theory of white supremacy.  After both sides of my 90-minute cassette are filled with the views of this former Methodist minister candidate from Meridian (60 miles northwest of Waco), he walks me to the driveway.  I ask him if I can take a photo of the cross in his yard, which he lights each night with Christmas tree bulbs.  “Sure,” he says, “do you want me to stand next to it?”  He puts his arm around it and smiles as if it’s his wife and they’re on a beach somewhere; young and in love and thinking it will always be like this.

Has Vidor changed?

WAAA-NNNK!
The horn signals it’s half-time at the Vidor High School gymnasium where victory for the home team is already out of the question. Central High from Beaumont, whose players are all black, built up an early 20-point lead that the slower and shorter Pirates valiantly but unsuccessfully tried to whittle away. With both teams back on the floor soon, warming up for Massacre, Pt. II, the opposing pep squad faces each other with the length of the court between them. “We’ve got spirit, yes we do, we’ve got spirit, how ‘bout you!” The Vidor cheerleaders translate with most of their delegation joining in. Central’s racially mixed pom-pomsmiths return the cheer, though with their outnumbered fans it sounds more like an echo than a challenge. Eager to exploit their advantage, Vidor delivers the chant louder with each successive volley, parents, teachers and even self-conscious teenagers adding their voices. Gamely, Centralites keep the pep challenge going, but it sounds like a shouting match between Herman Milquetoast and Ethel Merman.
Luckily, Central is saved by the horn that announces the break is over and Vidorians stomp and hoot for the last time that night. I’m in the bleachers as far away from the school spirit pulse points as one can sit. The three rows ahead of me are dominated by six or seven men in their mid-thirties to late-forties. When the black ref whistles a Vidor player for charging, one of the guys yells “Hey ref, your son wasn’t set!” and his friends yuck it up in the spirit of good ol’ boy-manship. Within five or ten minutes, though, it becomes pointless to refute any calls. Central scores each time they go down the court, taking it to the hoop with authority, while Vidor is lucky to even get off a shot. Their perimeter passes are regularly picked off and returned to the Central basket with a slam.
At the start of the of the fourth quarter, my gimme-capped neighbors huddle around and pass dollars to one of their own and tell him something like “three minutes.” One guy says “a minute and a half” and the others decide that it has to be rounded off to a full minute. “OK, I say one minute,” he tells the man holding the money. Forty or fifty seconds into the final period, a Central player springs from a crouch and intercepts a pass near mid-court. Three dribbles later he’s airborne at his own basket, catapults the ball from behind his head through the iron circle. Choonk! The guy who bet a minute jumps up and cheers while his friends double-check the time. He won six dollars for guessing that the next dunk would come one minute into the final period.
When the buzzer sounds, the board reads Central 80, Vidor 35, but the game really wasn’t that close. Players from each team shake their opponents’ hands, friends and family of the winners hug and congratulate them and the embarrassed Pirates quickly retreat to their locker room to avoid the well-meaning consolatory cheerfulness that stings like iodine on their open wound. One of Central’s white cheerleaders put her arms around the sweaty waist of her team’s star forward and he pulls her head close to him as they walk toward two waiting buses- one for the pep squad and one for the players and coaches. Just a week earlier, Central’s cheerleaders had their bus stopped and pelted with rocks in Port Arthur after their team lost a close game against an all-black Lincoln High team, but tonight

Vidor High basketball team, 1955

there’s no trepidation in their celebration. A police car is parked alongside the first bus, waiting to escort the team and cheerleaders back to Beaumont. The officer stands at the gym door, joking with the announcer and official scorer about the lopsided game. A mother of one of the Central cagers asks her son how soon he will be ready to be picked up, gathers her three younger children and heads them off to their car on the other side of the parking lot. It’s January 15th. If he had lived,
Martin Luther King Jr. would be 69 today.

Three days later, on the Monday when Dr. King’s birth is officially celebrated, I am in the offices of the Vidor Independent School District, which oversees six schools and 5921 students, none of which are black. Underlining Vidor’s tag as a bedroom community, VISD is the town’s leading employer, with 672 paychecks emanating from its offices. Classes are in session this sorta national holiday, in fact it’s a rather dubious occasion. Community Education director Emily Wetherly is quick to point out that schools will also be open on Memorial Day and President’s Day, with the three non-holidays making up fro three extra days off during Thanksgiving. Then she politely excuses herself and returns with the “new” superintendent, now in his second year at Vidor, Robert Brezina.

The firm handshake and disarming smile belong to the oldest of one of the six football-playing brothers from the University of Houston. “I played on Bill Yeomans’ first UH team in 1959, and from then until 1972 there was always a Brezina on his team”, the 46-year-old product of Louise, TX announces, “and my son Robert Jr. played on Coach Yeomans’ very last team in ’85.” After a year in the NFL on Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers and one in the AFL with the Houston Oilers, the running back became a football coach, teacher, and finally superintendent. I fish for Lombardi-isms, but Brezina doesn’t bite. Instead he changes his expression to one curtaining serious thought and heads me to his immaculate office. He’s already had a rough day; earlier he ordered his first expulsion in Vidor, to a 16-year-old who possessed six marijuana cigarettes at school.

As the superintendent of the nearby Hamshire Fannett school district for seven years, Brezina took the Vidor position fully aware of its students’ reputation as poor white trash racists. “That’s the perception that people in surrounding areas have of Vidor kids and one of my top priorities since coming here is to try and change that misconception,” Brezina states, then throws up an example of how his charges can be hurt by their town’s bad rap: “Let’s say a boy from Vidor goes to the beach where he meets a nice girl and starts up a conversation. When she asks him where he’s from and he tells her, she says ‘Vidor? My parents told me I can never go out with someone from Vidor!’ and that’s the end of that. But if people got to really know them they’d realize that they’re good kids. Of course there are always going to be a few exceptions, but for the most part our students are as smart, friendly and spirited as any I’ve known in the past 22 years.

“The high school is the center of the community,” Brezina states, adding “which isn’t really so prevalent in towns as big as ours.” In southeast Texas, football is religion; in Vidor it’s bigger than Jesus, though there’ll be no cocky John Lennon in shoulder pads to make that claim. The Pirates, the only all-white 5A team in the state, haven’t won the district since 1978, but they’re always #1 tops in attendance per capita. Even during a 22-game losing streak, which stretched from ’81-’83, an empty seat in Pirate Stadium was rare as high fives on the Vidor sidelines. “Sometimes on away games there are more people in the stands from Vidor than there are for the home team,”according to Brezina.

In Vidor, “extra-curricular” means “open to the public” and school programs are vital limbs, to be amputated only when budgetary gangrene leaves no alternative. When the high school needed enlargement in 1982, the white-knuckled (from clenching then tight fists) City Council unanimously earmarked $3 million for the project. The gavel of austerity also pounded loose $7.7 million for the construction of the Vidor Middle School, which boasts a synthetic basketball court, carpeted hallways, an elaborate library, a state-of-the-art auditorium, a twelve-foot high designer clock, 50’s-chic water fountains and even a stylish student lounge of ornate chairs and glass-top coffee tables, sunken under a mammoth stairway. Designed by a noted Houston firm, this school for fifth and sixth graders is more likely to reside in the pages of Architectural Digest, than in “the home of the Ku Klux Klan.”

To Vidorians, their schools are not just an investment in their future, but a source for enlivenment in the present. School-related activities are an entrepreneurial sure thing in this community where families sit together not only on pews, but on stadium benches and in auditoriums. Even in the late

60’s, when America’s dinner tables were ideological battlefields and the kids were advised to never trust anyone over 30, the Generation Gap in Vidor was a slighter crevice than a crack in the sidewalk. In front of City Hall is a monument to the soldiers who never returned home from Vietnam. It was built in 1969, years before our nation’s leaders would similarly honor the dead from that untrendy war. By ’69, eight Vidorians had given their lives for their country in Southeast Asia and each of their names is inscribed in the granite, followed by two newer names and about two feet of blank space. Set into the bottom of the memorial are those responsible for it: the Vidor High School class of ’69.

Though the plentiful satellite dishes and M-TV have exposed Vidor’s youth to new styles, new sounds and new sensibilities, the apple still does not generally fall far from the tree. And though several children of Klansmen belong to the Junior KKK, they are far outnumbered by the Vogue Fashion Fair, one of the most popular talent and fashion shows, five years running. Co-sponsored by the VISD and Cindy’s Fabrics and Bridal Boutique, the Fair is basically a show of formal gowns that have been made from Butterick patterns (the numbers are in the program), interspersed with musical performances by the VHS

 

Madrigals and eight or so student crooners. Half of the soloists are less than a third of the 14 Packard children, Vidor’s version of the Osmonds. The 30 or so models are predominantly in the 14-16 age group, though a few older women walk the fashion plank during the “Daytime and Career” segment. The six or seven participating boys are wearing tuxedos from Cindy’s; the girls are almost entirely in strapless gowns that softly triangulate from the waist. “Simply elegant” is the catchphrase of the day from announcers Jimmie Smith of Beaumont’s KD-98 and Cindy of Cindy’s. About halfway through the three-hour proceedings, Smith cracks a joke pertaining to George Jones’ alcohol bouts, not realizing that Jones’ sons still live in Vidor and one of their wives is sitting in a sportswear booth near the back of the auditorium. Dead silence. Smith realizes that something is wrong, they laughed at his other bad jokes, after all, so he tries to back-pedal into their favor again. “I kid George about his drinking because that’s all in his past now. One thing he still is is the greatest country singer in the world, right?!”, he accents with a hoot. The crowd claps politely, but unforgiving.

Smith yields the microphone to one of the Packard boys for what I incorrectly assume to be the grand finale: a twenty-minute version of “The Most Beautiful Girl In The World” as each and every young model takes a solo twirl down the runway and returns to semi-circle a centerpiece of flowers and pastel balloons. After Packard croons “If you see her, say I’m sorry, sorry” for about the 48th time, I head for the exit to beat the traffic. I’m almost out the door when Cindy announces that it’s time for the moment we’ve all been waiting for, and the pianists starts playing the Wedding March. From the back of the stage comes the bride, or at least the mock bride, as the 300 or so on hands clap furiously. When she reaches her ersatz husband-to-be, the accompanist throws in a few bars of the Twilight Zone theme, everyone laughs, especially the dozen or so men in the audience and then it’s quickly back to the Wedding March. As I leave the confines of the Vidor Middle School, I circumnavigate the Madrigals, who are finalizing their choreography on “Na Na Hey Hey Goodbye”
They move stiffly, without feeling, as if their bone marrow has been replaced by pipe cleaners. These are the kids that parents in nearby communities warn their children about. Begrudgingly, understandingly, they are the victims of a stereotype that fits only a minute percentage of their fellow Vidorians.

Though the white-robed, pointy-hooded demon at the edge of town is responsible for much of the ill regard towards Vidor, the town also suffers from prejudice as the southeast Texas counterpart to Fresno, Cleveland or Burbank. Like those nationally-maligned burgs, Vidor is painted as a Podunk haven for boring, dim-witted hayseeds who lock their keys in their trucks and tell the locksmith to hurry because it’s starting to rain and the windows are rolled down. The person who has probably done most to peg the Vidor type in stereo is radio announcer and columnist Gordon Baxter, a regional institution whom many in the region think belongs in an institution. For more than 30 years, Vidor has served as the posterior in countless Baxter jokes, though the opinion-smith who first called it “Bloody Vidor” (because its frequent train-into-car wrecks) claims no malice. “Some of my best friends live in Vidor,” he says, “and most everyone there realizes that it’s all just good-natured hoo haw.” He cites the time in 1975 when- at the urging of then Superintendent H. J. Cothern, he pulled punches aimed at Vidor’s mid-section. “Doctor Cothern said some of the students were upset and hurt from some of the things I had been joking about, so out of respect to him I laid off for a while,” Baxter recollects, “but after about two weeks I started getting calls from people in Vidor wanting to know why I wasn’t

Columnist, radio personality Gordon Baxter Jr. liked to make fun of the town he nicknamed “Bloody Vidor”

making fun of them anymore. They missed the jabs.” Baxter also remembers an earlier message he received from a few Vidorians after he attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral in 1968 and praised Dr. King in his next column. In his mailbox was a calling card which read: “you have just been paid a friendly visit by the KKK, would you like a real visit?” Soon after, the Klan called Baxter and asked him to plug their upcoming rally –all was forgotten, except for something Baxter would tell me 20years later: “when it comes to ‘niggers’ these people are not joking around.”

Vidor is one of five Texas cities whose population doubled from 1960 to 1970 and the only one of those that repeated the feat from 1970 to 1980. Though North Star Steel brought industry and 630 jobs to the area in 1976, Vidor is still primarily a bedroom community for folks where bacon is brought home from Beaumont, Port Arthur (22 miles away) and Orange (13 miles away). Before the city incorporated in 1960, Vidor’s attraction was as a sanctuary from “blacks and taxes.”
Twenty-eight years after the city taxes were implemented, however, the influx continues, though it’s a mere trickle of its former gush. Hard luck has become the only luck at all in the oil dependent Golden Triangle and the little white circle in the middle feels the crunch. Un-employment and its stubborn cousin, self- employment, have risen wildly; plywood has usurped glass in countless store-fronts on Main St.; the sandpits of Vidor and adjoining Rose City idly testify to the state’s construction moratorium; and Moses would be no match for the sea of red ink that threatens to drown many of the Vidor businesses. All it takes is a drive through a few neighborhoods during the traditional Wednesday garage sales to see that this is a town struggling to make ends meet. It’s nearly impossible to go more than three blocks without passing at least one yard full of clothing, furniture and a black and white TV that either “works!” or “needs fuse.”

Gordon Baxter needs to update his four-point checklist for determining Vidorian housewives. There is still “a disabled car in the driveway, a major appliance in the yard, a dog asleep in their bed”, but they’re not always “barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.” Sometimes they’re barefoot and pregnant in the front yard. And it takes them at least six rings to get them to the phone on Wednesdays. One of the few businesses in town that is having a good year is BF’s Bargain Shop, which looks, from the outside, like something in which the Japanese population of Stockton lived in 1943. The long, wooden, chipped-gray façade may suggest internment, but the owners have done well mining the common ground between folks who’ve been forced to sell their in-essentials and those who need a few things, but can’t afford them new. During its weekly Friday night auction, the store moves more merch than the Wal-Mart down the street.

Packed into fifteen rows of ancient wooden seats that were salvaged from the old movie theatre are 108 people bidding for bargains and making auctioneer Tommy Ard work harder for his 15% than he wants to. I am sure of the attendance number because when I sign in at the cluttered desk that reduces the width of the entrance from twelve feet to four feet I have given a computer card with “109” written on it in blue marker. Ard, who comes to Vidor from nearby Silsbee every Friday, oversees his attentive congregation from a white podium on a three-foot platform. Seated next to him is a woman half his age whose radical nonchalance screams out that she would rather be anywhere doing anything instead of in Vidor recording highest bids. Standing below them are an older gentleman in overalls and an eager lad of 12 or 13 who takes turns displaying the items as they are auctioned.
The old guy holds up a lamp with a lime green shade, lifting it below the base and slowly rotating it. His eyes regard it as an elegant creation; he’s done this before. Ard starts it off at ten dollars and a couple of men standing off to the side guffaw in disbelief; they’ve done this before. “Well, whaddaya think, then whaddaya think? Whosa gonna start it, whosa gonna start it?” Ard quickfires. From off to the side comes “three dollah.” “Three dollah?”, Ard evens the disbelief score. “What watermelon truck did you come into town on?”

Everyone laughs and a few are probably reminded of the auction a few weeks earlier when a big black man showed up. The woman at the front desk recalls how they all figured he was just somebody passing through who didn’t know any better, “then we come to find out he’s lived in Port Arthur all his life and knew exactly what he was doing.” She goes on to tell me how she was out shopping the
day after the integrated auction when the wife of a Klansman “grabbed me by the arm so hard it left a bruise.” When Mrs. Klan asked her what the hell she was doing letting niggers in her auction, she told her she had to let them in; it was against the law if she didn’t. “I don’t know what they expect me to do,” she exasperates, as Ard pleads for a bid of three fifty.
The next morning, the owner of another second hand store offers a similar story. She had an old Pontiac Bonneville for sale in the front of her shop on the I-10 feeder road. After a few fruitless weeks, she finally sold it to a black man from Orange. Three or four days later, she was face to face

with two KKK reps who did not care that the brakes were shot andthe car jiggled when it was driven faster than 30 MPH. “Theysaid, ‘we don’t cotton to niggers’”, she relates in a voice thatowes royalties to Tugboat Annie. “I told ‘em, ‘Hell, I don’t want to live with them neither, but I’ll take their money.”

Maybe I mean Houseboat Annie. It’s that character from the Tammy movies. “They started to tell me how I shouldn’t even take their money,” she continues in that voice you could hang wet cloths on to dry, “and I said ‘Listen. You give me $250,000 and I’ll give you this shop and everything in it and you can sell it to whoever you want to, but until then I’ll run my business any damn way I feel like it.” Imagine Shelley Winters with a Southern twang and you’ve got it.

It’s Saturday night in Vidor. The Skating Palace on HWY
12 is hopping and there’s also a full house of teenagers at the Hot Dog Factory, which is actually a front for a pool hall and video arcade. Across the track, from dry precinct 4, business at The Fall’s liquor store is brisk, in both their booze and video rental departments. I’m in line behind a guy with a fifth of Jack Daniel’s who is trying to decide if he’s already seen Easy Money, the Rodney Dangerfield movie. “Is that the one where he goes back to college?” He asks the pretty girl at the counter. “No, that’s Back to School”, she says. “Is this the one where he’s trying to inherit a bunch of money? Yeah, Easy Money, that’s the one this is,” he says handing it back to her, “I done seen that one. Hey, do y’all have any new Godfather movies?” Thankfully, the other line clears out and I switch over and check out just as I hear the guy who was in front of me ask, “Is this the one where they shoot the guy in the eye?”
When darkness hits, it does so with a screech and a roar as the favorite past time of hometown
adolescents, “dragging Main” begins. For hours they go up and down the essential three miles of Main St., from train track to train track, in their jacked-up Camaros and pick-up trucks with tinted windows, looking for something, anything to fulfill the celebratory responsibility at hand. They duck into the
McDonald’s drive-through with their radios on so loud that they have to scream for their supper, then cruise on over to the Hot Dog Factory where they sit in their cars and eat and wait for those girls in the yellow Mustang to glide by. Later, 30 or 40 of them congregate at the crater-infused parking lot where the movie theatre (“the-a-tre”-three syllables) used to be until it was torn down soon after projecting Vidor’s last picture show in 1963. 25 years later, the ghost of the Leon Theatre still mysteriously draws kids to the spot where many of their parents first held hands; where their mothers pretended that the movie scared them more than it really did. Today’s teens stand around next to open car doors and talk, smoke and occasionally bend into their vehicles to do something that’s not to be seen by cops but not
to be missed by their peers. I swoop close enough to the tailgate party to hear that all radios are tuned to the same station and that Bon Jovi sounds much better that way.
Across town, the weekly dance at VFW Post 8246 is well under way. The sign with the flashing red arrow promises country and western music from 9pm-1am and at 9:10 I wheel into the lot where at least 75 cars are already parked and sounds of Jesse Something and the Something-aires softly flutter and quicken the gait of an older couple who arrive right after me, but move to the entrance long before I do. Lateness is not fashionable in this town hosting four hours of night life each week.
Outside the entrance, a couple in their late 30’s/ early 40’s face off; she in jeans so tight that she’d have to push the seat all the way back to be able to drive, and he under a cowboy hat the size of a pitcher’s mound. “He was too staring at you, and right in front of me”, he says and starts back into
the dance. She grabs his arm and holds on as he tows her about

ten feet and suddenly stops and pivots. “I never even saw that

guy before in my life” she says “and how the hell do you know he was staring at me? What do you expect him to do, look at the ceiling all night?” He just shrugs her hand away and raises an index finger in warning. “OK maybe he just wanted to see what brands of pants you’re wearing. But, I’m gonna keep an eye on that jerk and if he don’t watch himself instead of you, he’s gonna be getting’ a good view of this” he says as he puts his square fist an inch from her make-up. To hear all this, I stand at the entrance and read each of the four or five hand-printed signs about six times.  I follow them inside and give four dollars to a small old man in a VFW hat covered with badges and pins. A policeman stands in back of him against the wall with a “fifteen minutes down, three hours and 45 minutes to go” expression. Knowing that I stick out like Lew Alcindor in his eighth grade class picture, I seek out a dark corner, but the place is lit up like a movie set. When Jesse Something botches the words to “Jambalaya”, I almost expect someone to yell “Cut” and some guy in a beret to jump from the wings and say “It’s ‘Goodbye Joe, we gotta go’, not ‘I gotta go’. ‘We gotta go’, you got it? OK, from the top. Places everyone!”

Under the glare I instantly notice four things: 1) At 32, I’ve just brought the average age down to 49;
2) I’m the only guy in the place not wearing either a cowboy, military or officer’s hat; 3) besides two of the band members, I’m the only guy with long hair; and 4) they’re both wearing cowboy hats. I nervously tap my shoes and ask the guy at the door where they pay phone is. Luckily it’s in an area where I was four dollars richer the last time through, so I get a cosmetic hand stamp and head out at a pace that suggests my first words into the receiver would be “I’m here, where the hell are you?”
I drive about a mile down the road and cross the railroad tracks to buy beer. There are three mini-marts within a few hundred yards and I choose the Country Pantry because there are several pickups in front and I feel guilty about wimping out at the VFW. I head back to the beer department and disguise my snooping as comparison shopping.
A man of about 40, with longish, dirtyish hair that gravity parts, reaches in and pulls out a six-pack of Bud. Halfway to the checkout counter, he suddenly stops and heads back. Trading the 12-ouncers for 16- ounce cans, he explains to me, “I told the ol’ lady I’d only drink a six-pack tonight.” I also pick out a six-pack of tall boys, though the iconoclast in me opts for Miller, and follows him in line. While the cashier looks for a pack of Benson and Hedges Lights for a kid in a letterman’s jacket with a band
patch, I ask the obedient husband if there is anything to do in Vidor on a Saturday night. “There ain’t no bars here, but you can have a few beers and dance at the VFW tonight”, he offers, then realizing that I don’t look like the VFW type, adds “or you could find something to do in Beaumont. Watch yourself there, though. There ain’t a weekend goes by without a few 7-11’s getting robbed and people getting’ shot for their wallets.” The cashier stands in front of the kid in the band with her empty palms outstretched. “Give me a pack of Marlboros then”, he sighs, and is soon out the door.
Vidorians talk a lot about the crime rate in Beaumont. It’s one way of justifying their peaceful co-existence with several white supremacist organizations. The Klan is far preferable to “what they have in Beaumont”, which is ten- year olds selling crack on street corners, 24-hour stores conveniently robbed every night, schools where switchblades are more important THAN slide rules, rapists on every bus who get off when your wife, daughter or sister does, and elderly couples waking up in heaven while young blacks use their credit cards to buy big orange hats, Zodiac jogging suits and radios the size
of luggage. To many Vidorians, Beaumont is blacks, blacks are crime and if the Klan keeps blacks off the streets of Vidor, well, who would care if they marched up and down Main St. in crotchless purple robes from Frederick’s of Birmingham? Hell, if not for the Klan, Walmart’s would sell ski masks year round.
Crime is on the rise in Beaumont, with eight serious crimes per 100 people in 1986, but Vidor isn’t much better, reporting five serious crimes per 100 people during the same time period. According to police sergeant Ken Ray, “One of our biggest problems in Vidor is convincing the people that they do indeed have a crime problem.”(Note: after this was written Vidor resident David Harris became famous as the true killer in The Thin Blue Line.)

Executed murderer David Harris was from Vidor.

On Sunday morning, the mean streets of Vidor bring families
from their homes to those of God, the Almighty. There they
give thanks for His gifts; the wonderful schools, beautiful
parks, loving children and the privilege of living in the best
damn country in the world. Then they will open their eyes,raise their heads, get up off their knees and sing the hymn on page 67. They will sing loudly in their best clothes and their clumsy voices will meld to make a joyful noise. Their assistant postmaster will also be in his best clothes, together with his family, singing the hymn on page 67. But he will be six miles away. It is inconceivable to Leroy Henry that he will ever be able to sing with his family in the town where he works. “I wouldn’t move to Vidor. That would be out of the question,” he remarks with a nervous chuckles. “Uh-uh, nooooo way.”
There won’t be any black people living in Vidor any time soon. There are just far fewer blacks who are willing to give their lives for the right to live there, then there are citizens of Vidor who are willing to go to prison for killing them. That’s the black and white fact of the matter.
There is more to the overall Vidor picture, however, than just in black and white, and I came to find the gray areas. The more I pecked away at the whole, the more it closed up until the peg I had brought no longer fit. Every new person I met made me forget one of the people I brought with me in my mind’s eye. I started my journey with a view from the overpass on the state’s most-travelled interstate and here it ends at the foot of aisle 7 at Wood’s grocery store. Before my eyes are dozens of black faces, or rather, the same black face reproduced on dozens of Northern toilet tissue packages. It is the face of the baby with the round innocent eyes of a young doe as it looks up from the pond to plead compassion from a hunter who squints away.
The toilet tissue display also contains packs with white babies, though they have all been picked out of the top row, and in a few places in the second and third rows. The disarray suggests that shoppers have been moving the black faces aside to get to white ones. I call the young stock boy over and ask him if they had sold any packages with black babies yet. “I dunno. Maybe some of the Mexicans bought some,” he says and goes back to stamping cans of grapefruit juice.
There are two types of travelers that stop in Vidor. Those to whom it’s just a small circle on the map would look at the foot of aisle 7 and tsk tsk about how some people can be racist even in their choice of toiletries.

The traveler who is aware of Vidor’s reputation, however, would be amazed that the packages with black faces were put out at all.

(Note: This was written for Texas Monthly in 1988 and not published until now.)