The Day the Wolfman Cried

Preface:  During the summer of 1958, when I was  fourteen,  we moved to the rocky canyons and high plains of Val Verde County. There was  a sense of unease the moment that hot Southwest Texas wind blasted  through the open window of the family Chevy. 
Mother, Daddy and I had arrived in our new home: Del Rio---an Air Force town by the Rio Grande, bordering  Villa Acuna, Mexico. (Now Ciudad Acuna.) At that same time, a fledgling misfit disc jokey  steam rolled into that same town, shaking up the status quo---and , me as well.


Note:*** Bio information often claims Robert Weston Smith (1938-1995) known as Wolfman Jack, started his career in the sixties. Not true. He was in Del Rio/Acuna on air in 1958.  (It is unclear as to whether he was licensed at that time.)           
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 My father was devoted to saving souls, and that border town of Del Rio had sent for my father. The local congregation, combined with its south of the border Villa Acuna members, had found us a house on East Fourth Street --- an old Victorian with a wide front porch and a single barren peach tree out back.

"I don't feel right without  trees around me," Mother said.

It would be the last time she voiced her feelings for the duration --- at least in my presence. As  a preacher's wife , she kept her thoughts and emotions in check under all circumstances. As soon as all our belongings were in place, she went straight to that big old fashion kitchen and got out the mixing bowls.

"When I'm down I bake," she proclaimed.

She must have felt really low, because there would be a weekly stream of  loaves of bread and rolls coming out of the oven during our time there. Mother had her baking. I had my radio. We would get by.

Brother Joe was back in East Texas at college, so life was much quieter and oddly off kilter---like a broken compass unable to find true direction. Yet I settled in , choosing one large bedroom to the front of the house, overlooking the porch. I unpacked  my Philco  and my sketch pad and  stationary for letters to the friends I had left behind. I thought I might never come out. I thought I might  throw myself across the bed and sleep forever. I would  fall asleep with the soft  sounds of the late fifties.

 That first night I flipped the dial  to the sound of an unearthly howl that pierced the stillness of my room."AWOOOOOO!" 
I jerked down the volume for fear of waking my parents.  Then came a gravelly deep growl with a  New York accent. What kind of half human was this?

 This outlaw d.j. who called himself Wolfman Jack announced his new broadcast for XERF radio headquartered on Pecan Street,  not far from our house. Little did I know this was to be the beginning of the semi-legal "border blaster" 250,000 and eventually 500,000 kw. station whose transmitting tower was  on the Mexican side  near Villa Acuna. Mexico had no restrictions on broadcasting power, but the United States did. Wolfman spun the records into the late night.

"Tears on my pillow, pain in my heart " crooned Little Anthony.

The  hits were  interlaced with some of the strangest advertising known to man . I had it all there in my radio: rock and roll, rhythm and blues and some slightly disturbing "soul" I had never heard---and in between, Wolfman did commercials pitching cloths dipped in holy water from the River Jordan, life size statues of the Virgin Mary complete with blinking lights.. Then "Blade Man" took over and sold reconditioned razor blades. No doubt my father would have thought the Wolfman was inappropriate and a mental case to boot---had he known about him that is. I owned the radio, and it was my room, and I spent much  of my  time there that summer .I knew no one , and  school was two months away. Instead, I wrote letters ... lots of them, while listening to Wolfman Jack late at night.

 I was too young and full of life not to come outside eventually.
That summer I got to know some of the kids at church. We visited  Judge Roy Bean's old store and jailhouse in Langtry and got a sense of the Old West . Then there were  barbecues out at  Sam Mc Bee's ranch. His grandson  drove us around the ranch in an open jeep, bouncing over rocky and hilly terrain and splashing through low lying creeks. When I almost fell out, I informed Bart he was crazy and that I was ready to go back to the party.

"Awooooooooo!" came the boy's reply,  head back, howling in laughter.

 I half expected fangs to appear . This was my first indication that I was not the only kid listening to the border blaster record spinner. It was just  a matter of time before someone's parents found out about the Wolfman and his unsettling influence.The world had not yet caught on to that secret domain of teens.

Brother Joe visited us that summer, and he and I decided to cross the border into Villa Acuna . I was not prepared for the street children with their dirty faces and outstretched hands begging for money. On the side of the street was a tar paper shack where a woman slouched, hands on hips,  cigarette dangling from her mouth. She watched intently as the street urchins worked the touristas. I wondered if they were her children  and if they would someday escape the misery of that village, with or without her.

I couldn't change the childrens' world  nor mine. Yet somewhere in that Mexican village without hope, while cruising  in Joe's fifty-four Chevy, the powerful XERF transmitter blasted an American song by a new group called the Elegants .The sky filled with stars while the children begged for pennies, and  Wolfman howled happily.


"Twinkle. twinkle, little star. How I wonder where you are.
Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky.
Wish I may, wish I might.
Please grant this wish I wish tonight.


 Something shifted in the galaxy on February 3, 1959.
The newsman on my radio said the Midwest was bracing for a blizzard.  The next announcement was that a plane carrying  rock and roll greats Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens and Buddy Holly had crashed in a snow covered cornfield in Clear Lake, Iowa  after performing  at  The Surf Club. No survivors. How many times had I listened to their latest hits. How many times had their music chased the blues as I adjusted to my new home.Yet I didn't cry. Someone did that for me: Wolfman's voice was heavy with unspilled tears as he broke the news to his listening audience. Then he cried quietly----for that  monumental loss to himself and to rock and roll. Was it possible that the irreverent,  devil-may-care  renegade had human feelings?

The songs of the stars played on , even as their bodies lay in a morgue thousands of miles from Del Rio:

 Chantilly Lace and a pretty face...I had a girl. Donna was her name...I love you Peggy Sue...on and on the records played.


Robert Smith, the mortal man, morphed back into the unflappable Wolfman Jack  and howled happily once again.  I guess he now knew what I knew: there were no more miracles---no matter how many samples of holy water were sold from the River Jordan.

In the meantime, Daddy saved some souls, a few  urchins were saved from the streets of Villa Acuna, Mother came to grips with her baking obsession, and the struggling peach tree out back actually bore fruit. And we left Val Verde County.

As for  me? I was much the same wherever we moved: always listening late at night, when across the crystal clear air wave  at ominous power, the would be miracle worker spun the gold.

The music could not die. Signing off for now.....

Emory's Ember

After the death of my mother in 2006, unseen photographs of her mother, Winnie Potts Bridges, magically appeared.  Like long lost spirits freed from the prison of a cardboard box, those buried treasures  sprang  to life... images  from the late eighteen hundreds and early twentieth century. Creased and faded from time, they became a bittersweet  study in what might have been and why it had not. Contributors: Cousin Ileene Dillard and  citizens of Rains and Hopkins Counties: Woody and Gail Garmon, Kathey Russell Weatherford and The Rains County Leader.

                                                   

Winnie Potts and friend.

Mother knew I would find the photos of her mother after she passed away. Those surprising, long ago images  presented a  tender  chapter  in the story of Winnie and Clyde... before our grandfather Harold rewrote the ending . Mother may have known that an ember of girlhood romance died when her mother Winnie took her last breath. She had never shown me those pictures for a reason and kept them separate from the family albums, as if they were part of an old secret.

Before I found the photos,  I never really knew my grandmother in depth. She  was frozen in time .... as simply  "Gram-ma"of my early childhood,  in Angelina County, Texas. In my mind's eye, she is still in her garden pulling okra and butter beans, working  silently, her face half hidden by her cotton  bonnet with the tiny blue flowers, looking back to make sure I am close by. I see her churning  butter on the back porch,  sleeves rolled up, expression determined, working the wooden paddle  endlessly and pressing the final product into the round butter mold  with the daisy pattern.The image of that glorious mound of pressed fragrant spread, was and is an amazement to me.

 Then the intricate butter flowers  melt slowly in the heat of my grandmother's kitchen...as if a thing of perfection can hardly be expected to last... 

Winnie Elizabeth Potts Bridges was as  solid and enduring as a boulder...she who secretly watched from behind the curtains, as I rode my bike around the bend and past  my grandparents' little rock  house...right up until I arrived safely at the school across the road. There is little doubt that she checked on me at recess from her front porch. It was she who sent my uncles over with the huge old upright piano, so I could practice my lessons at home, and of course, it was a misplaced good deed, as I preferred the woods to sitting at the piano bench... try as I did to conform in a family of musicians.

Without a doubt, my grandmother Winnie was a good woman and even a fun-loving woman when she had the chance to be. Yet , sometimes, there was about her a slight sense of detachment, as if she were somewhere else in time.

Then many years later, after my grandparents were gone and mother had joined them, I pulled the first photograph from the box while going through my mother's personal effects. I would not have known it was my grandmother had I not read her name scrawled at the top. She was a dark haired teenager, smiling coyily at a WWI soldier sitting beside her on a bale of hay. His name was written beside hers: Clyde Kearney.

Winnie Potts and Clyde Kearney, 1918.

Winnie, Clyde with sister and beau, 1918.

My naive assumption that Winnie had no suitor except Harold Bridges  flew out the window.I call the photo above, left,  the "hay bale picture". It was taken during World War I. The soldier's name was Clyde Edward Kearney. Of Irish descent, he was born in Bristol, Tennessee in 1897 and arrived with his parents to Emory, Texas around 1910. He went to war in 1918 and returned  home safely. Winnie's life, however, took a different direction...away from that quiet rural village, away from a  flame that  may or may not have been  fully extinquished .

The "bouquet photo" below is haunting in its somber, even sad feel. We can guess forever as to what the circumstances might have been. Clyde and Winnie appear younger  and quite serious. Whatever the situation may have been, they are outdoors and dressed up. This image might depict nothing more than  a problem that Clyde resolved with  hand picked wildflowers. Yet  the moment seems significant to me somehow.It may have been the day he shipped out. It may have been something even more tragic.The completion of the puzzle is impossible, as Winnie took the final misssing piece of it with her.

 A pensive Clyde and Winnie, before 1918.

What happened to Clyde and Winnie?

We know by the first "hay bale" photo that the couple continued to be friendly, even after he entered the army in 1918. During his service abroad, Winnie must have met Harold Bridges, they married in 1920 and settled in Lufkin.  Winnie left her home town of Emory  and all she had known.

 My grandfather Harold Bridges was a tall man in his youth, with chiseled features and dark skin. Clyde, in contrast, was slighter of frame with softer features and fair skin. Something makes me sense that he was quiet and sensitive. So what happened? All I know is what my grandparents told me when I was seventeen...but Clyde's name was never spoken.

 "I chased your grandma 'round a lake on horseback 'till I  caught 'er," Grandpa boasted.  I picture Harold on horseback galloping after Winnie and swooping her off her feet, swinging her up into the saddle . Why was Winnie running? Apparently, she was reluctant to allow Harold to court her, because, as she told me:" The girls told me to watch out for Harold."  She then, in certain terms, let me know that  Harold had been  a romeo of sorts...as are many men in their youth. I finally decided, Harold simply swept Winnie off her feet and stole her away most likely while Clyde was away at war.

Harold and Winnie Bridges, married 1920.

The marriage had his challenges. The depression hit and jobs were scarce in East Texas. Nine children were born at home with the use of chloroform to ease the pain. Eight survived until adulthood. Winnie's grief must have been profound after the loss of her baby boy, but there was little time to mend a broken heart, as the next child was soon to arrive.  My guess is the loss of her baby was another reason for the change in her personality.

My mother Ruth, who was the oldest child, related  to me that Winnie was often frail  during pregnancy, and the smell of meat cooking made her deathly ill. When mother was old enough to reach the stove,  it was she who cooked the meat....if there was any to be had. The family's diet consisted primarily of garden vegetables and sometimes milk. The girls  hauled water from a creek  for boiling and washing clothes in the black cast iron pot outdoors. Their hands were raw and numb from scrubbing laundry on wash boards and hanging the clothing in the  chilling wind of winter....a wind that blew through the gaps between the boards of their primitive little house as they shivered in bed after a hard day.

Harold was a proud man who would not accept food subsidies as did many families during those years. In the early years, he got on with the Lufkin Ice Company in the 1920s and delivered blocks of ice by horse and wagon. He was  often  late coming home, causing Winnie to go in search of him. There's was the story of many in that era...clinging to life , surviving, and somehow finding  joy in their music. The marriage was not idyllic. It was real.  The union lasted as much out of  love, I think, as necessity.

 During the thirties and forties, Harold worked for a government program called Civil Conservation Corp. and was a stone mason, traveling all over Texas to  build stone walls and edifices at State Parks. His work remains a tribute to one man's effort to keep his family alive. Harold was not a perfect man, but he matured through the years to become, at last, the man that Winnie wanted him to be...the one who loved her enough to pursue her  on horseback.

And what happened to Clyde Kearney, the old flame who brought Winnie a bouquet of wildflowers? The soldier came home to Emory from World War I,  eventually married, had  a successful business and lived out his days,  uneventfully, until his death in 1979. Did the two old sweethearts ever see each other again? My guess is that they ran into each other at some point on Winnie's visit to family. But it could never be the same. The lively, carefree  girl of  the old photographs was gone, and in her place was a stoic woman who had been tempered to steel. But in my heart I know that the ember from the old flame in Emory glowed dimly... until  1985, when Winnie at last took her rightful place... with Harold in Paradise.