Wonderful Room (4 page)

In the years since, I have come to realize how lucky I was to get some of the assignments I did. To the green kid that I was, some were frightening. I knew so little. But to show my fear would invite ridicule from the other reporters. They would see me as “the mullet,” the useless fish that Lynwood Abram had called me when I arrived.

The first famous person I interviewed was Conrad Hilton, the hotel tycoon. He owned a large hotel in downtown El Paso and was a director of
the city‧s largest bank. He flew in a few times a year for board meetings. He also was a buddy of our publisher. So every time Hilton came to town, some
Times
reporter had to interview him.

All the reporters had done the Hilton story at least once and thereafter dodged the assignment if they could. The newest guy got stuck with it.

The elevator zipped me to Hilton‧s penthouse. A polite black man in a white waiter‧s coat ushered me into the living room, where stood a huge bar. The president of the bank was standing behind the bar, and Hilton was perched on a barstool. Their faces glowed like Christmas trees. They were swacked.

“What‧s your pleasure?” the bank president asked me.

“Bourbon and water,” I said.

He gave me scotch and soda.

I asked Hilton what he thought of President Eisenhower‧s economic policy. He said he liked it. I shot a picture of him and the bank president shaking hands and left.

I had a drink – I think several – with Ty Cobb, too. The great hall of famer had come to town to make a speech to the kids on Little League opening day. He and a quart of vodka were holed up together at the Gateway, a plain but clean little hotel on Texas Street. He told me baseball stories. He said he never intentionally spiked anybody when he slid into those bases, as many had accused. True, he said, he sometimes sat in front of the dugout and sharpened his spikes with a file, but just to intimidate the
opposing team. He never hurt a fly, he said.

Years later, I read that Ty Cobb was a nasty, violent, racist man. But on that day he was a great and funny storyteller and I was a happy and slightly tipsy listener.

One Sunday afternoon, Engledow sent me to Liberty Hall to interview Andrés Segovia, the great Spanish classical guitarist, who was rehearsing with the El Paso Symphony Orchestra for their impending performance together. Hitherto, the only guitar playing I had heard was the likes of Les Paul and Chet Atkins on the radio and mariachis and famencos in Juárez. I had heard almost no classical music of any kind.

Segovia, an older man, was slouched in one of the audience seats, listening to the orchestra rehearse another piece, waiting for his turn. He was smoking a pipe. So was I. Pipe-smoking was something “college men” did in those days. Segovia and I compared and discussed our pipes. His was an elegant, expensive Dunhill from England. Mine was a $2 Kaywoodie from Sun Drug Store. Segovia pretended to admire it.

He gave me a ticket to his performance. My seat was in the front row. On the night of his performance, when he walked onto the stage, he winked at me.

Another night, Engledow gave me a slip of paper with “Louis Armstrong” and “Coliseum” scribbled on it. “Grab a camera and get a little feature,” he said.

Small round tables with white cloths and candles covered the basketball-court floor. A huge white sheet draped tent-like from the ceiling, probably meant to keep the music from bouncing about the Coliseum‧s cavernous depths. Dressed-to-the-nines couples, black and white and brown, were dancing.

A black, sweaty man was fronting the orchestra, grinning, holding a golden trumpet with a white handkerchief. I knew how great he was. I had heard him on the radio and owned a few of his records. I had been a trumpet player at Fort Davis High School.

I made my way among the dancers, holding my big Speed Graphic camera before me like a shield. By the time I reached the stage, Armstrong was playing. I stood at the stage edge, my eyes level with his shoes. When he stopped, I reached out and tugged on his trouser cuff. He bent forward and cupped his ear with his hand.

“
El Paso Times,”
I said. “May I ask you a few questions?”

“OK, man,” he said. “Next break.” He pointed to an empty table near the stage that apparently was reserved for him. I shot a couple of pictures. My big flashbulbs exploded like lightning. I sat down and listened.

At the break, Armstrong sat down, too, and grinned at the skinny white boy. He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offered me one. He took one, too, and lit both with his lighter. A waiter
brought us drinks, scotch and water, I think.

He said, “What can I tell you?”

I don‧t remember what I asked. I don‧t remember what he told me. I remember that for 15 minutes I was in the presence of a god.

W
henever I
substituted for Monty Montgomery on the police beat, I hung out late at night in the office of the captain of detectives. Unlike many cops, the night captain liked reporters, at least Monty and me. I could monitor the police radio there, and the captain would let me use the phone. On slow nights, he would sit at his desk and drink coffee with me and tell jokes.

Round midnight, a jail trusty would come in to empty the wastebasket and mop the floor. It was usually a different trusty every night. But then the same trusty showed up several nights in a row. He was a skinny middle-aged white man with graying hair who walked with a limp. One night when the captain was out, this man and I fell into conversation while he was mopping.

He told me his name. I don‧t remember it. I‧ll call him Bob. I don‧t remember why he was in the El Paso County Jail, either, but he said his profession was burglary. He had first gone behind bars when he was 14, he said, and had spent more than half his life in the state prisons of Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas. One time when he was trying to swing aboard a freight train, he missed his grab and fell. The train ran over his foot and severed his toes. He hated the limp because it made it easy for cops to spot him, and he could no longer run from them.

“When I get out of here, I‧m going straight,” he would say. “I‧m going to make something of myself.” He said that every night, deeply sincere. He talked
about hoboes, crooks and convicts he had known, as someone might remember cousins or schoolmates.

Next time I went home to Fort Davis, I looked up my grandmother‧s newspaper clippings about the 1932 murder of my grandfather, Audie Gibson, a Hamilton County deputy sheriff. Two robbers attacked him on a snowy night and shot him with his own gun. They were sentenced to life in the Texas pen. I wrote down their names, and next time I saw Bob I asked if he knew them.

“Yeah,” Bob said. “They‧re down in Huntsville. Killed a deputy in Hamilton County.”

“Tat deputy was my grandfather,” I said.

“Oh. Sorry to hear that.” He sounded sincere, not even awkward about it. Like a preacher or undertaker.

“So they‧re still alive.”

“Yeah. They‧re good baseball players.”

When Monty got back from vacation and returned to the police beat, I told him about Bob. He was even more fascinated by the burglar than I was, and believed Bob really did want to go straight and make something of himself.

Monty had a talk with Gill, who owned the Stag Bar, where the newspapermen hung out after work. Gill, a huge, redheaded Viking of a man, was tough, generous and funny, the perfect host for a joint inhabited nearly entirely by reporters, cops and GIs. Monty told Gill about Bob‧s criminal life and his prison record. He asked Gill to give Bob a job after he got out of jail.

If there were two more cynical guys in El Paso than Monty and Gill, I never met them. But, like many hardened reporters and bartenders, they each held a secret hope that, given the chance, fallen men want to become good. Despite the risk he knew he was taking, Gill gave Bob a job.

It was much like being a trusty. Bob mopped the floor, wiped the bar, washed beer glasses, lugged the garbage out to the alley. Whenever Monty and I were in the Stag, Bob would slide into our booth and tell us how grateful he was for the break that Gill and Monty and I had given him, although I hadn‧t anything to do with it.

“This is the berries, boys,” he would say. “No more jail for me. I‧m going to make something of myself.” Then he would tell us what an easy thing it would be to break into the bank next door, and how he would go about it.

As we walked along the sidewalk one day, he pointed out various ways he could get into any business on Mills Street in less than five minutes. The best time to break into a department store, he said, is at closing time, while the employees are getting ready to go home.

A couple of weeks after he hired Bob, Gill discovered the old pickup that he kept parked in the alley wasn‧t there. He went to unlock the Stag‧s back door and found the lock was broken. Inside, the coin boxes of the jukebox and the pinball machine had been jimmied and the nickels were gone. Gill called the cops, who made a lot of fun of him.

After he closed for the night, Gill went home and learned Bob had broken into his apartment and made away with all his clothes. Who knows why? Gill was three times Bob‧s size.

Somebody in New Mexico got suspicious about all those nickels Bob was spending. He was arrested and returned to El Paso. Monty and I visited him in jail.

“I‧m sorry I let you boys down,” Bob said. “I can‧t make a go of the outside. It‧s too hard.”

J
immie Cotten
was an excitable guy with a big ego. He thought he was a gift to newspapers and women and spent a lot of time looking into a pocket mirror he carried and combing his wavy brown hair. He was a snappy dresser. He was a braggart. He thought every story he wrote was the best of the day and should be on the front page with his byline on it. Nobody in the newsroom liked him much, especially Engledow and the women, but Cotten didn‧t know or didn‧t care.

One night he was covering cops for Monty. Around midnight he burst through the swinging doors and dashed for his typewriter, shouting: “Is mad-dog hyphenated!”

That homicide wasn‧t any more notable than the three or four Monty might cover in the course of a month or the one or two that I might. Other reporters covered a killing from time to time, too, but Monty was the regular police reporter and I was his most frequent substitute, so we got most of them. And since I used the Speed Graphic with more ease than Monty did, I often was sent along as photographer to his more photogenic crime scenes. Most homicides rated maybe three or four inches of type. Only a few were worth a picture, but I shot a lot just in case Engledow decided he wanted them.

Almost two years had passed since I rode with Mr. Scobee and Sheriff Gray to that Jeff Davis County ranch to look at the dead Mexican, my first corpse. In that time I had become accustomed to seeing dead bodies. So used to it I worried that
something was wrong with me. At first, the cops at a homicide scene would watch out the corners of their eyes to see the kid‧s reaction to the horror and the mess. I tried not to show any. I pretended the bloody sight had no more effect on me than on the detectives. After a few months, I wasn‧t pretending. Dead people didn‧t bother me. Was that natural? I worried about it.

But 50 years later, some of those dead still inhabit my mind, so maybe I wasn‧t so tough as I thought I was.

Two little black boys, 8 or 9 years old, stole a couple of cigarettes from their mother and went to the tarpaper privy behind their home to smoke them. The boys somehow set the privy afire. The tarpaper stuck to their bodies like napalm. The fames killed them in a few terrible seconds. The stench of burnt flesh and melted tar has never left me.

Those little boys were part of my worst week on the police beat, when I had to look at 11 corpses in five days.

One was a suicide on the Mesa Street side of San Jacinto Plaza. A man, well dressed in suit, necktie and overcoat, was standing on the sidewalk among the pedestrians on a cool evening and pulled a revolver from his pocket, stuck the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. A crowd gathered to gawk. The first cop on the scene, trying to control the spectators while waiting for detectives to arrive, took of his own coat and draped it over the dead man‧s head. I shot his picture like that. The pool of
blood that oozed from under the coat reflected the streetlamps.

I mentioned the cop and his kind deed in my story. Monty had taught me the way for a reporter to make a cop a friend was to put his name in the paper. So whenever I wrote about a shooting or a bar knifing or a bad car wreck, I stuck in the names of the responding officers and sometimes quoted them. The cops appreciated it. Fire fighters, too. Many of them kept scrapbooks.

Sometimes when I was hanging around the police station and a couple of cops would be leaving to respond to a call, they would come find me. “Hey, Woolley,” they would say. “You want to ride?”

Riding with cops, siren screaming, lights flashing, was a thrill I didn‧t care for, especially when the driver‧s partner would slip into the back seat and leave the front passenger seat to me. The El Paso cops had been taught to drive by bats out of hell. They few at 60 or 70 miles per hour through heavy traffic on dark streets, their lights and sirens scaring the bejesus out of every citizen within sight and hearing. I braced my feet hard against the floor and one hand hard against the dash to avoid sliding across the seat and banging into the driver, thus causing him to lose control and pilot the car into oncoming traffic, killing us all. I was certain it would happen eventually. I would die in a traffic crash with a cop driving.