When we moved from Ohio Street some time in 1950, my dad
bought a small mobile home (8 X 28 foot), which he set up behind a lumberyard
on Broad Street between 6th and 7th Streets. This was a
new world for me. I was half a block from the Boys Club, and across the street
from the Wichita Falls Memorial Auditorium. The mobile home was small, and
didn't have a bathroom, but it was probably as big as the little apartment we
lived in on Ohio Street for three years. There was a storage room in the big
house, which had a bathroom for our use, a step above an outhouse. We had to
take baths in a washtub.
I joined
the Boys Club and it became a home-away-from-home for me. It had a library and
a workshop where I learned to make things on machines, a gym with lots of
activities, and the employees saw to it that we had things to do every day.
Across the street from the Boys Club was an orphanage with a fenced-in
playground. I felt sad for the children inside, for they would stand at the
fence and watch us playing outside, and were unable to join us. A block and a
half from me was 8th Street Park - those further up the road called
it 9th Street Park. It covered the whole block and had slides,
swings, and merry-go-rounds; in later years, it was given the official name of
Bellevue Park, the swings and slides removed, and million-dollar architecture
was added. Ugly.
The
lumberyard had a wooden trailer parked in front with wood scraps and National
Geographic magazines tossed inside, free for the neighborhood. It was some
benefactor's way of seeing that the kids had something educational to read. The
free scraps of lumber were a novelty also. Try going to a lumberyard today and
asking for free scraps!
My little
world had suddenly changed from sidewalks and winos, theaters and 5 &
dimes, to parks, playgrounds, and the Boys Club. I didn't miss Ohio Street, nor
did I ever go back. I would visit Indiana Street once in a while, but for some
reason I was afraid to venture back to where I had spent three years of my
life.
The
Memorial Auditorium was open during the weekdays, and I had the run of the
place, often helping out the office workers when they needed someone to run an
errand. It wasn't all concrete and parking lot at the time, either. There were
large grassy areas on both sides of the building, and these became the local
children's playground in summer and winter. We would ride our bikes down the
hill in the summer, and slide cardboard boxes down it in the winter. No one
said anything to us. My sisters and their boyfriends also set pallets on the
grass and made out when they could get rid of me. Usually that cost their
boyfriends a dime or quarter. I would still run home and tell my mother that
they were kissing their boyfriends!
Something
else about the Memorial Auditorium, they brought shows to town. I'm sure they
charged for them, but I was always given a free pass. We only lived in the
mobile home about a year, and when my dad couldn't make payments on it, we had
to move. So the time would be around 1951 when one of my heroes came to town. I
was given a pass for the show that night, and onstage was Lash LaRue and Al
"Fuzzy" St. John, western stars I had watched at the picture shows
downtown on many Saturdays. Lash would pop that 15-foot long bullwhip, and
Fuzzy would roll a cigarette with one hand, then they would put on a mock
fistfight for our entertainment. I sat in wonderment, as only an
eleven-year-old boy could throughout the show. Then when it was all over, Lash
and Fuzzy visited with the audience, and spoke with us. I even got a pat on the
head from Lash LaRue!
However,
there is sadness even in such glorious times as this. Much later, I learned
that in 1951 the B Westerns were dying, and all of the western stars were
making the rounds trying to promote interest in a dying entertainment industry.
Their contracts were up in 1951 and '52, and the studios were not renewing
them. Westerns were growing up, and TV was taking the place of the Saturday
Matinees. Cowboy stars like Lash LaRue were drifting away, their careers
finished.
About ten
years after his last movie, the police found a man passed out in the gutter and
threw him in the drunk tank to sleep it off. Someone at the station recognized
him and notified the newspapers. The next day, the headlines read, "Cowboy movie star, Lash LaRue arrested
for public intoxication!" What could have been the final nail in his
coffin actually revived his career to a small degree. TV networks heard about
the arrest, and it wasn't long before Lash LaRue was making special appearances
on network television. Conventions also started asking him to appear as Guest
of Honor. Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson hired him in a bit part for
their television remake of "Stagecoach". He died in obscurity at age
80 in 1996.
They looked
so much alike that Lash LaRue could have passed for Humphrey Bogart's twin. The
likeness was often a curse for Lash, as people would often mistake him for
Bogart. He enjoyed telling one story at conventions that went something like
this: One day an actress he worked with asked him:
"Are
you related to Humphrey Bogart?"
"I
don't think so," he replied.
"Humm,"
the actress continued. "Did your mother by chance meet Bogart before you
were conceived?"
When I met
Lash LaRue in 1951, he was a giant. Perhaps his only claim to fame, besides his
resemblance to Bogart, was that of a B Western movie star. But for kids growing
up in the 1940s and '50s, our heroes were bigger than life. They were the good
guys that we needed. The fathers we didn't have. They brought justice to the
West, and gave us someone to emulate when we grew up. And that wasn't a bad
thing.
