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On November 4, 2005, A.C. would have been 82.

This is a photo of A.C. taken in the 70s at the height of his success, A Personal Country had just been published by Knopf, and though it is critically acclaimed, even in the New York Times, Knopf doesn't publicize it at all, one damn ad in the New York Times Review of Books. Same thing happened except in a more shameful way with Knopf's publication of A.C.'s Santa Claus Bank Robbery. This was a book perfect for the screen. Columbia Pictures liked it enough they kept the option on it for many years, with a check for $25,000 that came every other week or so, I know because I saw the first one he got--he made sure I saw it. Before Santa Claus, before Personal Country, while A.C. was still the editorial page editor of the Dallas Times Hearld, the Dallas afternoon newspaper, he got the option to buy the stock of Mrs. Tom Gooch, the widow of the founder and publisher of the paper. Mrs. Gooch said she was doing it because of all of the proper publicity and awards his editorials on the Kennedy assassination got the paper. After Mrs. Gooch died, it took several friendly connections, a couple of personal lawyers of Lyndon Johnson, for instance, for A.C. to get the million or two needed to fullfil the option. When the option was fulfilled, A.C. found himself on the Board of the paper, except the managing editor, Felix McKnight, Chairman of the Board, bitterly opposed A.C.'s position and barred him from Board meetings. As a result, A.C. sued the Board for mismanagement. The suit was pending when the L.A. Times offered 95 million for the Times Hearld and its teevee station KRLD. That was the biggest offer ever made for a newspaper in U.S. history. Because of my brother's suit, the Board could not accept the offer until they settled with him, which they had to to get rich themselves. In the early 70s, A.C. became a 10th owner of the L.A. Times, well, anyway, his share of the sale came to 30,000 shares of L.A. Times stock. You believe that? It was documented in Newsweek, in about April or May of 1972. The day he got the news he had won his case and he was a millionaire, he took me with him into Austin, to Austin's biggest department store, to buy his wife some luggage for her birthday. We walked in and the clerk began showing us the latest Samsonite crap--the kind an elephant could stand on and not crush it, referring to a common practice carried on in airport baggage facilities in those days. My brother looked up on a top shelf and pointed and remarked, "Hey, that looks nice up there. How about that?" "That, sir, is Hartman, and it is our top line, very expensive." A.C. said, "Great. That's what I want then, a full set of Hartman." A.C. looked at me and said, "See what you can do when you are a millionaire?" I will never forget that day.

A.C. wrote a part of Personal Country in the back of a 1961 Volkswagen Microbus, travelling about West Texas. He took the back seats out and put a table and chair back there. He had along his favorite Underwood upright typewriter. He would stop at roadside parks or at riversides, creeksides, just off the backroads sometimes, setting up his typewriter on the table, balancing himself in the chair and typing away in his rapid-pecking, two-finger, newspaperman style of typing, and A.C. could type, he could, like a bolt of lightning and a streak of heat. He loved Underwood typewriters and the one he had on this odyssey was from his early newspaper days. He said he used it up until it literally fell apart one day. After his traveling ended, he came back to Dallas with a pretty complete rough draft simply in need of being tied together with a cohesiveness that fit his style. In 1969, he won a Dobie-Paisano writing fellowship from the University of Texas. Frank Wardlaw was the director of the fellowship and later was involved in A.C.'s attempt to get a PhD from the U of Texas. The fellowship allowed A.C. to live on J. Frank Dobie's Paisano Ranch for 6 months. The ranch was out west of Austin on Barton Creek, nestled in the elbow of the bend of that mighty creek as it swept around from north to west, the high bluffs across from the ranch giving the place its own ampitheater, with the front porch facing the creek and the bluffs and the evening killer sunsets of colors of such burning passion they mesmerized you as you rocked on that porch as evening descended over the ampitheater with a brilliant performance. I arrived in Austin from New York City while A.C. was just finishing up his stint at Paisano. At A.C.'s farewell party at the ranch, I met J. Frank's widow and her weird brother, his name was Edgar, I believe, who was the author of a huge tome on the birds of Texas. It was at Paisano that A.C. put the finishing touches on his masterpiece, A Personal Country. This was A.C.'s bible on the reality, spirit, and inspiration of "the West Texas country" that was definitely his "personal country." It is a personal book. I reread it after he died and I was amazed at how revealing it was and how like me he was, which I can tell from the things that seduce him and the things that hang him up with his philosophy, which is "write it out" and let your reader read between the lines to obtain your biography.

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The Great Artie Shaw died 12/31/04 in L.A. at 93

A Letter From Artie Shaw

The following is an answer to a letter I had sent to Artie telling him how much I appreciated his benevolent friendship with my brother, A.C. Greene

Artie Shaw died in Los Angeles 12/31/02 at 93. R.I.P. to a great man.

Artie Shaw, at the time of this insert, 9/27-02, is 92 years old, still daily active, living in L.A.,, in the hills, personable, talkative, opinionated, as my brother noted so many times, and working on a huge novel that encompasses the world from beginning to end. In A.C.'s posthumous book, Chance Encounters [it can be ordered from many places on the Internet, including Amazon.com, all you have to do is type in "A.C. Greene, Chance Encounters" on Google and it will lead you to a place where you can order it.], there exists the only time A.C. ever revealed his "chance encounter" with his teenage hero, the great American musician, author, raconteur, a man in the true Greene tradition of "live and let live"--a friendship that developed into what A.C. has told me many times was his closest friendship. What Artie is referring to in the Charlie Parker comment was a time my brother first visited Artie's house in L.A. A.C. told me, "David, you wouldn't believe what is stacked around the walls of Artie's music room--I saw transcriptions, unreleased masters, everything of his ever recorded, 78s, LPs, wartime transcriptions for radio broadcasts or later for broadcasts to the soldiers in the various theaters of war during World War II. I found one record where Artie recorded with...." and I thought he said Charles Parker, which is possible, as Charles was in L.A. just after the war, working with Dizzy Gillespie until he ran into hard times, meaning he couldn't get any drugs and had to go to Camarillo Sanitarium and cold turkey, but, as you see, in the letter Artie says it was probably Count Basie. Artie joined the Navy during WWII, they made him a captain, and he thought he was going to do music stuff and morale stuff, but instead the Navy screwed this great American artist, but you can read about that in his books. My old Santa Fe friend from the late 60s, Bob Clay, bon vivant, drummer, and damn fine artist, was in the Fifth Marines on Guadalcanal in the South Pacific when he said he looked up one day and there came ashore his hero, Artie Shaw, in a Navy officer's uniform and not all that happy considering his situation and the situation of the Marines at that time. Bob said he had been carrying with him a weird old drum set, a snare and a bass drum and one cymbal, and he said one night, but, he said as he remembered, Artie probably would never remember it...one night they had jammed, the Marines and Artie kicking the gong around while the most horrible of horrible wars was continuing on around them--the stories Bob Clay could tell--but that will be later when I induct Bob into my staff at the Little Greene Schoolhouse A.C. was in the Sixth Marines who slowtrailed the Fifth Marines, who went on from Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima.

A BROTHER'S REMEMBRANCE

My first memories of my brother arrive in Enid, Oklahoma, when I was 3 years old. A.C. was 17, and he had been living with my grandmother, Maude E. Cole, the head librarian at the Abilene Carnegie Public Library, and going to A.C.C. (Abilene Christian College, but we always called it by its acronym--and I later thought it might even be named after A.C.). When we moved to Enid, A.C. transferred up to Phillips University, a beautiful old college that was built back in Cherokee Strip days, Enid being the capital of the Cherokee Strip. [ I have an old deed from Enid, Oklahoma Territory, that is a Cherokee Strip deed, very clean, and signed by Theodore Roosevelt, obviously a copy of his signature, but signed by the Secretary of Land, or whatever the cabinet position was called in those bygone years--all veiled in tears, too, I tell you. I was in the army at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and went out with Anadarko Indian girls whose families had at one time been huge landholders and worth millions of good old dirty oil bucks, but were later swindled out of all their holdings by crooked oil leasors.] So A.C. was going to Phillips and I was a kid playing in a sandbox behind a garage on Washington in Enid, just a short walk down to Springs Park, one of the most beautiful parks there ever was, with sunken gardens, trails, and a wonderful big people's swimming pool and even greater, a beautiful kids pool with a huge marble sculpture fountain right in the middle of it that fell water over its sides in beautiful cool flowing falls. I wanted so bad to get in that pool, but my mother was a fundamentalist Christian, a member, at that time, of the Church of Christ and they didn't believe in "mixed bathing," as they so piously called it [Abilene was home of the HOME church for the Church of Christ; members were called Campbellites because of Alexander Campbell, a great forceful preacher, orator, debator of the late 19th century in and around Nashville, Tennessee, and Louisville, Kentucky. Except in Enid, my mother got to going to an independent church pastored by a man named Charles Weber. I remembered he was on the radio and mother would listen to him faithfully].

A.C. had to pay his own way to college all the way through his college, and in Enid he worked at what he found he did best, as a lunchroom worker at Phillips. Plus he worked banquets as a waiter at the two big hotels (the Youngblood and the Broadway) in Enid, one on each end of the town square, and he would work two banquets at once, running from one hotel to the next all night, getting home really early in the morning and then having to get up still early and make his classes out at Phillips.

I used A.C. as a horse, riding him in throes of glee all around our small living room, also as someone who would let me pull his hair as hard as I could (in fact he encouraged me to do it saying it was good for his hair and would make it grow strong and thick. And he did have nice hair all of his life, up until he died having never lost any in terms of receding hairline, etc.), or I would jump up and down on his stomach, that one giving me the most fun and him surely the worst fun. He would also take my hands and swing me around like a swing. Once, later, in Philadelphia, while we were visiting him there where he was stationed at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, we stayed in the very tall Adelphi Hotel right in the center of Center City, and A.C. took me by my ankles then and held me out that window, me hanging right over the whole city of Philadelphia, William Penn looking right at me from atop the City Hall. What a thrill; but what a fright for my poor mother and grandmother who were there screaming and threatening A.C.'s life if he should drop me.

Above is an airview of Enid, Oklahoma, at exactly the time the Greenes lived there. The big tan building right in the middle of the picture is the Youngblood Hotel, one of the hotels A.C. waitered at to pay his way through Phillips University. The other hotel, the Broadway, is the red brick building straight across left and north from the tan building. And notice at the very top of the photo the many grain elevators surrounding Enid, which was wheat country--also boasting of some oil, too, the Champlin Oil Refinery that produced a once-famous brand of motor oil, for example. I need a little research into dear old Enid. But there it is, the way I remember it.

Here is a postcard from 1913 showing Oklahoma Christian University, which became Phillips University when A.C. went there almost thirty years later.

Here's a postcard of Springs Park. This park was just down the street, Washington, down a fairly steep hill, to a kid, from our house; the area to the right, the red roofed building, was where the big swimming pool and the kids wading pool, with its beautiful, to a kid, marlbe fountain in its middle, with the water flowing over a series of bowls and also coming out of lions' heads at several points on the creation.

The reason we lived in Enid was my father's fault. My father, Alvin Carl Greene, Sr. (yes, A.C. was a junior, though he legally changed his name in the fifties to simply "A.C." to spite my father who had been known in Abilene all his life as Alvin C. Greene (see photo below)), was an expert paint, glass, and mirror man.

Here is a photo of Carl Greene just after we moved back to Abilene from Enid. In front of 628 Vine St.

He had a formula he had gotten from a Belgium mirrormaker for making mirrors, a mixture of zinc, lead, and some silver (the process was called "silvering"). My dad was the best mirrormaker in Abilene and started his own Abilene Paint and Glass Company in the late twenties and early thirties--I am not sure and only A.C. would know for sure, but I believe dad's store was on Walnut or Pine (I would bet on Pine). My mother said what ruined the business was Carl allowed domino playing in the front of the store, games in which he also participated rather than filling his orders (when he had them). My dad was also an excellent colorist with paints. These were the days paint dealers had buckets of white lead paint and then they would add the coloring from packets of ground colors to the paint then put the bucket on a machine that shook the paint can vigorously to mix the colors. My dad would then put the proper color swatch on top of the can to identify it. I remember him saying one time that robin's egg blue was a tough color to mix. But, then it was the time of the Great Depression and the business failed and my dad struggled hard to make a living, getting jobs driving trucks, delivering ice for the Longhorn Creamery in Abilene, housepainting, whatever he could find. My mother's sister, my Aunt Gertrude Inman, used to talk about how she and her husband, my famous or infamous depending on your morals Uncle Stub Stubblefield Inman, a one-eyed half-Cajun from Beaumont, Texas (where my mother and her sister were born), would get together with Carl and Vivi (my mother's nickname--I never heard say where it came from), their son Jerry Joe, A.C., and my grandmother, Maude E. Cole (my mother's mother), and cook out in a hole in the backyard potatoes, sometimes as few as two or three, boiling them over the coals adding water and rocks, that's right, stones, giving the soup an earth flavor, to the mixture until they had a really tasty potato soup at the height of the Depression. Throw some wild onions and dandilions in that, with salt and pepper, and they said you had a very elegant backyard dinner. My dad's out-of-work struggle went on and on throughout the Depression. My mother had to get a job at Banner Creamery out on Butternut wrapping butter at a penny a stick. A.C. for years had a paper route in Abilene, one he told me included the mother of the great Texas band leader Bob Wills [It's in his book, Chance Encounters]. Finally, with World War II looking like it was happening for sure in the late thirties, and then for really sure in 1941, on that day still living in infamy, I assume. Just before the Japanese bombed the hell out of Pearl Harbor, my dad landed a job with the Sherwin-Williams Paint Store on the square in Enid. I think he read about the job in the Abilene newspaper--A.C. would know that, too, but there is no A.C. to answer these kind of questions anymore. That, to me, is a sad affair. I kick myself in the ass, believe me, for not interviewing my brother extensively over the years--or at least have jotted down all the information he gave me over the phone, or over barbecued steaks in his many backyards, while sipping his famous martinis, served in big crystal glasses with olives or onions, your choice--and they were breathless martinis, always made with Bombay London Dry Gin.

Our parents met as students in Abilene High School (this is the high school my dad's father built in about 1910)--it was on South First, but behind the "new" Abilene High of A.C.'s time, now called Lincoln Middle School, fronting Jeannette and South Second. Before it was demolished, the original high school became the Central Ward School, where I went to first grade and a part of second grade.

Carl Greene was an upperclassman when he met 14-year-old Johnnie Marie Cole, who everyone called "Vivi" but who thought of herself as Marie. She was a pretty blonde, short, fitting just right in my father's strong arms; he was as handsome as Clark Gable, dark black hair, expensively clothed, favoring silk shirts and tennis flannels, jaunty in his energetic charismatic pose, sweet with the right smiles and right "coos" in his charming pose, entertaining, especially to young girls, with his sense of humor--witty in a jokey sort of way, just the kind of cleverness my mother needed in relief of her overserious family, a hardnosed mother, a tough, bitch sister, and an enterprising but unsuccessful very dominating-over-women brother. After mother's father died, she, her sister, and their mother followed the brother, my Uncle Grady, to West Texas, first landing in Abilene, where Grady opened a battery shop, big in those days, and my grandmother opened a hat shop in the Wooten Hotel, which she later converted into a flower shop. Grady Ambrose Cole's ambitions in Abilene also included opening the first airport, or flying field, there, with the Maker Brothers, where he planned to make a living taking people on airplane rides or giving them flying lessons in his beautiful biplane, a Curtiss two-seater. My mother's first airplane ride came in that airplane out of that airport (almost 40 years before I took my first plane ride) and Uncle took A.C. up for his first stint in an airplane (A.C. later took flying lessons under the G.I. Bill at the old municipal airport on which they later built the West Texas State Fairgrounds when they built the new muni across Highway 80 in the late fifties). Uncle's airport was out on the west side of Abilene, off South First or U.S. Highway 80 (originally called the Bankhead Highway for Tallulah Bankhead's old southern daddy), a well-travelled highway that breezed through Abilene, along the Texas & Pacific railroad tracks, hooking around Lytle Lake to get into town and then bulleting right on out through town into the setting sun as straight as a well-aimed bullet, on down the line to Tye, Merkel, Sweetwater, etc., etc., right almost directly on out to the wilder west to Los Angeles and La La Land. Later, Raymond Thomason built the Sands Motel and Restaurant out where my uncle's airport was. Raymond, one of A.C.'s best friends from when they were kids, intended the Sands to be Abilene's first effort at travel snazziness, complete with a nightclub--I saw the Crewcuts (their fifties hit was "Sh-Boom") sing there one night--I went with my friends Jerry Bryan, Ernie Hodges, and Freddy Bryan. It was amazing and amusing at the same time. The band that backed them was led by a tenor sax guy and a trumpet player, Tommy Newsome, who later went on to take over the "Tonight Show" band when Doc Severinson would go out on the road with his own band--and I think Tommy actually took over the band at the tailend of the show's running. I remember Raymond as a big gawky man with an overwhelming personality, with oil money, who loved acting and started or certainly revived the Abilene Community Theater, building the new theater in the fifties by the old Sears Auction Arena in Fair Park, over by the tennis courts and Mockingbird Lane.

Soon after landing in Abilene, Uncle, that's what A.C. and I called him (his sisters and mother called him "Brother") became an entrepreneur, starting his own car battery business. Uncle called A.C. "Dago" and me "Davo." I heard mother tell why he called A.C. "dago"--she asked him when he first started calling him that and Uncle said because A.C. was so damn skinny, it looked like a family of dagoes had just moved out of the back of his pants. Yes, Uncle was a bitter man who hated just about everybody, especially himself, though he had a great appreciation of beauty and a classy quality to him that made you kind of overlook his bitter disrespect for most human beings. Uncle had a tragic life really. First, he was the only man in a situation involving 4 strongwilled women. Yes, he knew his father, Ambrose Hutchinson Cole, but Ambrose up and died of "catarrh" (it probably was tuberculosis) around the time Uncle headed off to war with the U.S. Navy. On the way home from the war, Uncle's ship docked in Glasgow, Scotland. He came back and told his mother that when he had looked out over the Scottish landscape as they sailed down the Atlantic coast into Glasgow harbor he knew he was home...so much home to him that he jumped ship to go AWOL there but chickened out at the last minute.

Uncle's battery business in Abilene was predictably unsuccessful. He did, however, have some good luck; he won a Maxwell automobile in a contest, a big touring car. I remember my grandmother had a photograph of her sitting in the backseat of that big open car, it had a canvas top you could pull up when it rained, but most times you drove them with the top down, even if it were cold. My grandmother had joined my uncle and his wife Pat as they drove up into New Mexico, where my uncle, who by then had a movie camera, was shooting the opening of the road over Red River Pass, that at-one-time engineering marvel that boogied right over the high Rockies and right smack-dab down into the little valley resort town of Red River, in the Red River Valley, in New Mexico, and not the famous Red River in Texas the song was written about. Uncle always had the best cars...all the years I knew him he drove brand new Packards, cars that were long of hood, really sporty, sharp, known for their excellent build and performance (Packards had once been the same as Caddies, LaSalles, Lincoln 8s...luxury cars), with a hood vent that looked like alligator teeth to me.

Uncle was notorious for driving right down the middle of a highway. One time we were way out near Monahans, way out Highway 80 in the potash country just north of Big Bend and about half way to El Paso from Abilene and Daddy said, "Here comes Grady." We all said "Huh?" and he said, "Look...coming down the highway." Looking up we saw what was definitely a Packard like Uncle drove, a cream-colored business sedan (two-door), called business sedans because travelling salesmen used them, and it was coming directly toward us straddling the white-line...right down the damn middle of the road. He would have been out in that neck of the woods, too, as in those days he owned several movie houses around the state, including one at Fort Stockton, which was just south of Monahans, so it was easy to figure that's where he was coming from. Sure enough, as the Packard whizzed by us, there was G.A. Cole, wearing his best Adams hat, dressed to the nines, barrelassing along minding his own business...and no matter how we honked and waved and hollered, he went on his merry way never noticing us.

After failing in the battery business in Abilene, Uncle picked up and moved his business out to Colorado City, Texas (it was originally simply Colorado, Texas, a railroad town and was later famous for its Cosden oil refinery). Even daddy and mother moved out to that desolate town, so daddy, who seemed to always need a job, could help Uncle in the battery shop. That venture, too, failed, and when Uncle moved back to Abilene and started his flying school and whatever else he did...he married a woman the family called Little Marie, my mother being Big Marie. One afternoon during an Abilene winter, Little Marie changed into a ball gown in readiness to go out that night with Uncle. As she moved over to the fireplace to get warm, on the hearth, he dress caught fire and Little Marie burned to death. That was Uncle's first wife. His second wife was Pat Barber who was the daughter of a prominent San Antonio doctor, Doctor John (?) Barber, a urologist...and in those days that meant he treated "social" diseases...like the clap, gonorrhea, syphilis, that sort of thing. But he was rich. Except, because his precious daughter married Uncle, he cut her off from the family and the money. And when A.C.'s Aunt Pat died, and she died very young (she was a beautiful woman), from cancer, the Barbers took Little Grady, Grady Ambrose Cole, Jr., Uncle's only child, away from him and raised him themselves...never letting Uncle see the kid ever again...they wouldn't even let Mibby see the kid, except she went down there one day, went right up to their front door and demanded to see Little Grady. They conceded and he and Mibby corresponded the rest of Mibby's life. Grady Jr. rose to the rank of Major in the Air Force, and right before A.C. died, Grady Jr's son, Edward, came to see A.C. in Salado. A.C. said he was a really nice, clean-cut man, a retired Air Force Major himself, just like his daddy. Uncle's last wife, my Aunt Helen, was a Phi Betta Kappa in journalism from the University of Missouri, a brilliant woman, a teacher at Southwest Texas Teachers College then, I think, now Southwest Texas University, at San Marcos. After Uncle died in 1949 or 1950, of lung cancer (he chained smoked Pall Malls), Helen moved to University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where she taught business writing until she went mad and died in a Nevada facility for the insane. And thus have disappeared Uncle's connections to the mortal coil, except as of this writing I think Edward Cole is still living in the San Antonio area.

My mother and father were married when she was 16 and he was 20--they were both born on August 24th, which they were always so proud of, it was one of the things that held their fragile marriage together over the years--they were so much alike, though really not--so they got married on August 24, too, in 1922, married in the living room of the once-president of Abilene Christian College, Dr. Sewell, for whom Sewell Hall at ACC was named, in his home on campus out on the "Hill" as they called it, or "Holy Hump" as it was most times known. A year later, November 4, 1923, when my mother was 17, A.C. was born. He was born solid blue and looked like he was turning black as if born rotten. The doctor assumed the limp baby was born dead and threw his little body over in a corner on a pile of newspapers [this came from my grandmother's memory--she should know, as you'll see]. My grandmother went over with doubt in her loving soul, picked A.C. up, and sure enough, he was breathing--he was alive. Mibby had saved his life. She had given him a chance to live 78 years and for that reason he became enchanted by Mibby, her history, her lessons, her tales, her personal experiences--quiet an exciting pioneer woman, born of an even older and more wizened pioneer woman, a life she wrote about in a novel published in 1941 by the Lyman Press in Los Angeles called Wind Against Stone. Before that she had published a book of poems called Clay-bound. [A year or so ago, I found both books on Ebay. Wind Against Stone was autographed and Clay-bound was being sold by the ACC Library, being very nonchalant about it after I informed the woman selling the book for the school that Maude E. Cole was A.C. Greene's, one of their star graduates, grandmother and maybe they should keep it on the shelves with his books...OK, I bought the book, to hell with ACC.]

It was on the move from Abilene to Enid that a great family tale evolved, one that would set both families, Greenes and Coles, to guffawing madly, one of the entertaining aspects of my father's famous tales. This one had to do with daddy's automobiles always falling apart at the most inappropriate times. The automobile was a 1937 Nash, Nashes being a passion of my father's throughout his life, though in his dreams he preferred big cars like Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs. During my time with the old man we had a 1938 Oldsmobile sedan; a 1948 Nash Custom; a 1952 Cadillac Fleetwood; a 1954 Cadillac Coupe de Ville; a 1951 Nash, the bathtub model; and finally, a 1963 Mercury Comet, the car he died in. My mother had a 1952 Nash Custom, Farini designed with a hood arnament by Vargas, and my grandmother had a 1941 Nash coupe and a 1950 Studebaker, designed by Raymond Loewy, the torpedo-nose model. Those were the cars of my youth. A.C. had to deal with Model Ts, Nashes, and then the 1938 Oldsmobile. So they were boogie-ing from Abilene up to Enid, 400 miles northeast of Abilene, up in North Central Oklahoma, almost to the Kansas border, in Garfield County, and suddenly A.C. looked out the back window and said, "Daddy, something's fallen off the car and is spinning around in the highway...I think it's the gas tank." "Nonsense," the old man cried, "these Nashes are put together like battleships...." Chug-a-chug, spoot, sputter, ugh and dead...the car came to a stop. Out of gas. Why? Yep, the gas tank had fallen off and was still spinning around when A.C. and daddy went back up the highway to fetch it. They lugged it back to the car, quite a job since it was almost full of gasoline, twenty gallon tank it was, too. A.C. said daddy struggled for over an hour putting that gas tank back on the car. A.C. searched the highway ditches for rope or wire or something. There was always some fence wire along those highways through that farmland where they had miles of fences. Always several strands of bloody barbed-wire (or bob-wire as we always called it). And with those simply items at hand, my dad managed to wire and rope and strap that gas tank back on that car and they got back in, fired it up, and trundled on up to Enid. I have no remembrance of that event, though I was a participant. A.C. said that on that trip I slept alot in the space between the back seat and the back window, a shelf that was just right for my little ass.

ALL OF US GOING BACK TO ABILENE

A.C. had been double promoted in Abilene during his elementary years (at Fair Park Elementary School, which I believe is now called Alta Vista School). It meant he was a year younger than the kids he went on through high school with, graduating high school when he was fifteen finally entering Abilene Christian College when he was still fifteen in 1939, though that November he turned 16. After the family moved to Enid, A.C. went back to Abilene and lived with my grandmother while he did his first semester at Abilene Christian. He transfered to Phillips during his sophomore year. Enid was the home of Vance Air Force Base so Phillips had become a fairly large school during the war and was already a university. Across the street from where we lived were government-built apartment complexes where a lot of the married airmen lived. Airmen were held in great esteem in WWII, the air force being the infant branch of the services. It was called the United States Army Air Force and you applied for the Air Force and then they would chose you--same for the Navy and the Marines. Only the Army could draft you. Besides, everybody figured airmen had pretty short war lives, that is the pilots and gunners and navigators and bombadeers and such. B-17s, and later B-23s, the Flying Fortresses, had crews of up to fifteen--tailgunners, nose gunners, bomb squads, navigators, pilot, co-pilot, side gunners, top gunners. I remember the first Flying Fortress I saw. It was parked at a fairgrounds in Enid, from Vance. They let my dad and me get in it and, let me tell you, to a kid, it was scary. First you had to leap up, grab a bar, and pull yourself up into the plane, kicking in feet first. Then, you crawled through tight crawl spaces to the working sections of the plane. I didn't like it.

There was a lot of activity going on in Enid, even though the same thing was happening back in Abilene on an even bigger scale. Abilene had an Army Air Force Base, but it also had a huge Army training camp called Camp Barkeley, out the Capps Highway, covering the ground just east of the Santa Fe tracks at View, then going for miles around those plains at the feet of the Callahan Divide, a range of small hills, we called them "mountains," the main landmark in this chain of hills being Castle Peak (or Abercrombie Peak, after a U.S. Calvary officer who scouted all of that area in the mid-1800s) that actually stuck up on the horizon as a legitimate little peak. And A.C. and I had an Uncle Roy, one of my dad's older brothers, who lived right at the foot of Castle Peak in the famous Mulberry Canyon (famous for a yearly rattlesnake hunt, Mulberry Canyon supposedly being an ancestral home to the rattlesnake in the U.S. I mean they were thick in the caves and over hangs of Mulberry Canyon. I went to see Uncle Roy one time--he had a fairly large farm in the Canyon, and just as we drove up to the gate, my Aunt Gladys was hoisting a huge dead rattler up to hang it on one of the tall gate posts. She said she had just killed it. I mean, that snake was huge, at least ten feet long and thick as a big man's arm).

My parents probably weren't happy in Enid, though they really didn't show it to me. My dad was probably having trouble on his job--he seemed to have trouble on all of his jobs. Also, in Enid my parents met one air force couple who lived across the street in the government projects. The man was a warrant officer in charge the civilian help at Vance AFB and clued my dad to the Civil Service Administration, the government agency that tested, graded, and hired civilian workers at all the bases. My dad applied for the new air base they were building at Tye, Texas, just a mere 7 miles west of Abilene. I vaguely recall their anticipating whether daddy had passed the test and whether the government would offer him a job at the Tye Army Air Force Base. What a great chance for daddy. A good paying job it would be, too. More money than my dad had ever made in his life. Warehouse work, which is what my dad thought he was most qualified for.

Enid had been an interesting experience for my parents...for me, too, though at the time the most exciting thing that happened to me there was that I began realizing who, what, and where I was for the first time since I was born...my memory came to life...my being who I am today started developing. I clearly remember Enid...and that to this day amazes me. I was out with A.C.'s son Mark Cole while he was visiting New York City for Thanksgiving. Mark is one of the finest of the U.S. primitive artists, which Mark proudly displays in words on the back of his custom-made Elvis jacket he wears to all his showings. I have always found Mark fascinating. So while eating dinner with him a few evenings ago, steaks at Soho Steak on Thompson Street in the Soho (South of Houston (street)) section of Manhattan, Mark began talking about his grandparents, Carl and Marie, and then about Mibby (Maude E. Cole his great-grandmother). Suddenly he mentioned "Khaki." Whoa, I said, you remember Khaki? Sure, Mark said, and began to describe Khaki, who was my grandmother's dog she had raised from a puppy and who she had trained to be as human as possible for a dog. Khaki could walk like a human on his back legs all over the house. When you asked Khaki to speak, he would bark as though talking to you, looking you right in the eye as he did. An amazing dog, but I hardly considered Mark remembering him. Mark was only 7 years old when both Mibby and Khaki died, in 1961. That's the kind of memory I have of Enid. A first memory, now I suppose, the most memorable part of a kid's life--first realizations that turned into firm memories. And that memory had an even more profound effect on me in a humanitarian way because I clearly have always remembered the black family that lived next door to us in Enid. He was a preacher, and he had a daughter. I clearly recall reacting negatively (white, in other words) on first seeing the daughter. I threw dirt clods at her from our driveway. Her mother came to the back door of her house almost simultaneously as my mother came to the back door of our house, and that black mother cussed me good...and my mother cussed me good and then took me in the house and beat my ass with a "switch," a small limb cut off a tree or hedge...she seemed to always be able to find a switch no matter the barrenness of the place where she was when she needed a switch. Since then, I have been able to control the racism inherent in me. And after that experience, I have tried to learn all I could about the black experience in this country, Mibby later teaching me to never use the "N" word and that it was what the Civil War (which was the most uncivil of wars) was all about and for me not to let any nightrider (Mibby's term for Ku Kluxer racists) tell me otherwise. I had a great-grandmother, Mary Catherine Longley, Mibby's mother, who I have heard say she remembered Mr. Lincoln, having been born in 1857...and Mr. Lincoln and the Civil War were a part of her earliest memories down in Youngsport in Bell County, Texas.

How powerful Enid is in my life. But in the rest of my family, in retrospect, I guess Enid was more a scary situation than a memorable one, since living there was simply due to a need to survive on my parents' part. They really wanted to be back in Abilene and making it there. So, one day, the mail came, my dad and mom started whooping it up...yes, daddy got the job at Tye Air Force Base, as a warehouseman, and making big bucks for the first time in his life. He was 40 years old when he got that job. And then one day, we were back in Abilene, at 628 Vine Street in a duplex my parents had bought just before my birth from money they had gotten from an insurance policy on their first owned house on Sammons Street, which had burned to the ground...and A.C. had been there when that house had burned. That and an old long-gone apartment house down on South Second were the places of his first realizations and developing memories.

THE GREENES MOVE BACK TO ABILENE, TEXAS

I remember it snowing in Enid...really deep snows. I remember one winter I walked out of the apartment house, down the rock steps out to the sidewalk...I was 4 years old...about 3 feet tall...and the snow was over my head...drifted up into the yard and piled high over me from where someone had shoveled the sidewalk clean. I can never recall that deep a snow in Abilene, Texas. At the time I remember Abilene it was a city of 20,000 or more, the downtown highlighted by the enormously tall, to me, Wooten Hotel, on the corner of North 3rd and Cypress, a 17-story building atopped by a huge glaring red neon sign several stories high itself "HOTEL WOOTEN"--it could be seen several miles before approaching Abilene from any direction.

Here is a great old postcard of the Wooten at Night (see that beautiful old sign). The Wooten is now, I believe, an apartment building...maybe an old folks home for all I know.

So, my dad got a job with the Civil Service as it was called and glory be he got assigned where he wanted, the Tye Army Air Force Base in Tye, Texas, on Highway 80 West, where Dyess Air Force Base is today. He was going to be a warehouseman with a chance to advance to a Warrant Officer. Boy, were my folks happy about this gig. It was a big one for my dad. He was going to make some "war bucks"...and he did. Not only did he make some big war bucks, but he also fixed up the attic into an apartment, which he and mom rented out to army and air force guys...right across Capps Highway directly south of the air force base was Camp Barkeley, which became one of the biggest army training camps during WWII. Thousands to young men came to Abilene to train, a lot of them, to go to Europe or the Pacific to get killed...though a lot of them came back too. But, I am getting ahead of myself...when we moved back to Abilene, Camp Barkeley

was still developing all over that jack rabbit, snake, varmint, cedar shrub, centipede, wild dog, wolf, fox infested stretch of land that was flat as a pancake until it gradually rose, sloping up to become the Callahan Divide, what we in Abilene called "the mountains," though they were only about 1800 feet or so at their highest elevation, which was Castle Peak, or Abercrombie Peak, as it was named by its discoverer back in the western Indian war days (you can read all about it in A.C.'s book 900 Miles on the Butterfield Trail, published by the University of North Texas Press).

Back in Abilene we moved back into 628 Vine, just north of South Seventh, around the corner from the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, on the corner of Peach and South Seventh, a strange church to me, a little "Christian" boy who had learned from being a curious kid that my type Christian was leery of the Catholic Church. They worshipped idols, images of the Savior and his mom the Virgin Mary and his dad Joseph the carpenter, and they also had an Italian guy who was called "The Pope," and I knew the part of the chicken that was last over a fence was called the "Pope's nose," and when I was a kid the Pope had a huge nose. Pope Pius...the Sixth was his name, I think, though I wouldn't swear on a Vulgate about if he was the sixth or not. When we would drive by Sacred Heart, and we did a lot because my grandmother lived on up South Seventh across Sayles Boulevard out toward Elm Creek, a great trip in the car because South Seventh climbed a nice little hill as it rose across Sayles to top off a block or so later, I would stare with childish awe at that attractive church, rather Spanishy looking to me, like houses in Los Angeles looked, with a bell tower and all, a cross on top the bell tower. And always either a man or a woman dressed in their various habits would appear...the nuns wore wings in those days, full wings, and they looked mysterious to a "Christian" boy like me. How ironic that only a few years later after my grandmother married an old coot from New York City named Harry A. Tileston and he died...damned if he wasn't Catholic and damned if he wasn't sent home to Jesus in Sacred Heart Church...I was there...but that was a huge number of kids' years later in this story.

I was 5 going on 6 when we moved back to Abilene from Enid. I was learning faster than there was time...I loved learning about everything and I pestered as many adults as I could to teach me about everything..."Why are there stars?" "Why is there a sun?" "Point to where God lives..." "How come I can't have a hot Coke?" My Uncle Aubrey Green worked at the Coca Cola plant in Abilene and when I would go to his house, the original Green home in Abilene, by the way, built by my grandfather, George Madison Green, a carpenter, like Jesus's dad; remember, he helped build the first Abilene High School.

Back in Abilene, A.C. enrolled in Abilene Christian College, the second largest college of Abilene's three colleges, Hardin Simmons out north of town being the largest, a Baptist college, ACC being a Church of Christ college, and the other one, McMurry, the smallest, being a Methodist college.

At ACC, A.C. was quite memorable, as a questioner, as an arguer, as a kid since he started college when he was 16, having been double promoted in grade school, a bright, witty, sort of too wise kind of guy you couldn't help but like. Besides being the smartest kid around, he was also funny, full of that superb wit common to immediate members of our Greenes...my dad the leader, though he was more a comedian than he was a wit, though there was a lot of wit in his comedy. Our grandmother was very wise but not a wit, a storyteller par excellence, but not a wit like my dad. My mother...at best was tolerant of her witty men, she was just plain smart in a systematic way. A.C. and I got our smartness from her family (the Coles and Cragheads) and our wit and great sense of humor from daddy's troop...certainly not a dumb man, but not one to hold you near with his learned wisdom, but certainly clever when it came to holding you near with his fun and funniness...his favorite reading matter "the funnies." A.C. and I were very particular about our funnies, but not Carl...he chuckled at 'em all, though he guffawed when it came to his very favorite, the one he saved until last, Major Hoople. The Major, just like Carl Greene, was a pundit of rather charming asides, always on the wittily funny side, leaving you feeling dumb when all along you thought the Major was the dumb one.

It was really tough times when A.C. was born, the winter of 1923, in Abilene, Texas, in a small structure on the South Side called the Abilene Emergency Hospital. As told earlier, he was so blue when he came out of the womb, the doctor, Doctor Red Burditt, was sure A.C. was born dead and "pitched him," my grandmother's words, over on a pile of newspapers (remember, newspapers were always considered sterile if you needed something sterile, like catching a baby coming out of a womb). And that's the day Mibby saved A.C.'s life. Mibby was as close to a saint as I will ever get. She was much more of a saint than Mother Teresa who got to sainthood with only one miracle. Mibby racked up more miracles than Mother Teresa could buy...why Mibby could speak with flowers and animals just like Mother Nature...she had a pet sparrow named Petey who knew his (or her) name and would come to her call and she would feed Petey sugar and suet with an eyedropper through the screen door of her apartment and when she was out in the backyard among her famous peonies, Petey would follow her around, lighting on the telephone and electrical wires above her or on the limb of a bush right by her...that's a miracle to me.

At ACC, A.C. was involved in an on-campus incident that embarrassed the college because of the nature of its implication and especially the device used to make the jest. A.C., who was a nightwatchman on the Hill at the time to pay his way through school, heard a commotion, checked it out and found a pair of women's panties had been hoisted up the Holy Hump flagpole that usually flapped Old Glory's proudness daily in the stiff West Texas breezes and, according to law, was then lowered every evening at sundown and put away until the next morning.

A.C. was helpless to get the panties down because the culprits, bright college boys, had cut the raising/lowering ropes leaving them out of reach of even the highest ladders they had on the Hill. So, A.C. called the fire department. His reporter instincts already beginning to blossom, A.C. brought along his trusty Brownie camera to the event, as the ladder truck was backed up to the pole and one of the firemen climbed up the extended ladder and hauled the panties down. That little photograph was a family memento for many years. I have no idea what happened to it, unless it went to Texas University at Arlington where A.C.'s personal papers, writings, and personal effects are archived.

At this same time, another event would leave A.C. almost a cripple for life. Again while going about his nightwatchman duties, he was coming around the corner of Bennett Gymnasium, there was a game going on, and just as A.C. got halfway along a wall of the gym, a schoolbus, one of those big yellow ones, parked there, slipped out of gear, rolled forward, and pinned poor old A.C. against the side of the gym. In spite of his caterwauling, he stayed pinned until the game broke up and the bus driver came out. A.C.'s leg was badly bruised and his knee was twisted to where he was on crutches for a couple of weeks. For most of the rest of his life he complained about his "bad leg," though near the end of his life when I was talking to him on the phone and he mentioned his leg hurting him, when I asked him if it was the leg he injured at ACC, he said, "Oh, hell, that hasn't bothered me in years."

I was 3 years old when I found out about war, living in Oklahoma, outside all of Enid covered in several feet of grand old prairie snow, while snugly inside, I was anticipating with bated breath and exhilerated hope another gloriously goofy Christmas with my family. But on December 7th of that year, as we all sat around the family radio perched on its pedestal in the tiny livingroom, as I was sternly told to hush, we heard about Pearl Harbor...that's what they called it, just "Pearl Harbor." I had no idea what or where Pearl Harbor was. "Way out in the Pacific Ocean," A.C. said. The what? But I knew what we were listening to was very serious. Yes, a "day of infamy," which is what fine ole Franklin Delano Roosevelt said it was, and that was good enough for me. Mother, dad, and A.C. began talking very seriously. Questions. What is going to happen? We are at war? Is that what the President said...we are at war...oh, gosh, what does this mean?" My mother and my grandmother were securely harnessed to their "worry wagons." The questions were in wails, moans laced with strict orders to God to put a halt to this immediately. The Japanese? Who were they? All we knew about them was they were small, wore Coke bottle glasses, grinned a lot, said "'Scuse please" a lot, and were the most cunning, devious, and treacherously evil people on earth. Worse that Hitler? OH GOD, my mother moaned, WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN? She wasn't staunchly Christian enough then to connect this world turmoil to the return of the Lord [Jesus Christ...the Messiah...the Prince of Peace]. No, she was still secular humanist enough to being able to forecast natural doom, forget the supernatural.