DEAR READER

My first experience with journalism came under Jack Merriman, veteran of the Bataan Death march and editor of the (then) "Port Isabel Press." I wrote an interview column called "Youth/Adults Want to Know." Payment was publication. A PIHS student would ask a question of the parent generation, and get four responses. Then a member of the parent generation would do the same and get the same.

When I tried out the Youth Question, "What do your think about Anglos dating Latins" on the Adults, I learned what "Off the Record" means.

Here are some stories, published and unpublished, about growing up in Port Isabel & Rio Grande valley. I hope you enjoy them.

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(From "Texas Toys and Games," a Texas Folklore Society" annual)

When I turned ten, my folks and I were living in a trailer on the west bank of the channel that made Port Isabel, Texas "technically an island rather than a peninsula," so my Dad told me. Dad also told me the reason you couldn't catch mangrove snapper or flounder in the channel any more, just hardhead and sailtop cat-fish, had to do with waste from the boats and fisheries around the bend to the south of us in what they called the shrimp basin; the industry was growing and there were more people.

Our school building was a barracks hastily put up to house the unexpected influx of children begotten near the beginning of World War II, and our playground was dirt, packed hard by endless games of freeform football, tag, and tackle-the-big-kids. To the big kids, eighth and ninth graders, we must have seemed like tenacious kittens, easy to toss about, and when two or three of us managed to dump one, we whooped our victory. But mostly we chased one another across a football field whose end zones were sidewalks and whose boundaries were school buildings.

"You're gonna catch it now."

"Huh? Whyzat?"

"You tackled Rucho. Nobody tackles Rucho."

It turned out Rucho didn't mind--maybe he figured a skinny kid with glasses wasn't worth the trouble--and by the eighth grade Rucho was gone and Jose with him, to work on the boats; and by the ninth, Jaime and Francisco, and Maria, rumored to be pregnant; and by the tenth Lupe, her virginity spattered, It was said, all over the interior of Jesus' brother's car.

But before that we played Pico.

The object of the game was to bust open one of the 15-cent tops (blue, red, or forest green) spinning or--God forbid!--dead on its side in the ring. The ring never exceeded 3 feet in diameter and could go as small as two and a half feet; it was scratched into the dirt with a top pico, then as many as five players would slam their tops into the ring, pretty much simultaneously, with vigorous overhand hurls ending with a sharp snap-back of the cord designed to bounce the top out of the ring still spinning and safe. If you could manage that and scoop the spinning top onto your palm, you got Dropsies, that is, you could play bombardier onto someone else's top--or start over if you didn't want to risk becoming a target yourself.

It was understood that everyone would have filed the harmless half-inch of store-bought toptip to needle sharpness, if not replaced it with a nail ground to a murderous beak up to one inch in length. In this last case, I am thinking of an innovator by the name of Bill Morgan. This same probable-descendant-of-the-pirate Morgan also ended our gang's mild interest in marbles forever with an inch-and-a-half steel ball bearing. But I digress.

The pico player was expected to have two tops, if not three. The more battered, gouged and chipped one would be thrown first as a decoy to lure the newer weapons into play. I even recall seeing a three-fourths remainder from some previous battle hurled whirring into the ring to sputter still and face Its final demolition, while its owner brought forth the gleaming means to his revenge, already spiraled to the hilt with new cord.

This was serious business: the top that gyrated from the ring showing raw wood was a wounded ego, and a battered one with no paint on its pico was a loser's life in the making. Eight years from then, the eye that surveyed, the brain that estimated, the wrist that measured its own flexion, might be engaged in a state tennis championship--I believe that was so in one case--and five years past the top-playing stage, I shocked myself by ending a lizard's life with an arrow, drawn and loosed almost absentmindedly, that clipped off its head exact.

We graduated from pico to a knife-throwing game called Splits. (The ability to slap a knife into a nearby target, incidentally, was not the sole property of adolescents. I saw this demonstrated by a young shrimp house employee whose skill with a palmed pocketknife was such that the blurred whip of his arm could bury it half-blade deep in a wall ten yards behind him.) Mumbledypeg required a three-bladed knife; besides, it was too tame. Splits demanded trust, trust in your own invulnerability or in the other player's knack for planting the knife--any stickable knife would do--in the earth near your foot or between your legs.

The two players would face one another about four feet apart. If the first throw of the knife was not ceded by either player, one side of the blade would be dampened with spit and the knife flipped like a coin; the player not in control of the knife was to "call it in the air." The first throw that left the knife sticking in the ground near your opponent required him to "do the splits" until his foot touched the knife. Then he would pluck it from the ground and try his best to put you in a similar position. After that, any failure to stick the knife would free the intended victim to return to his starting stance.

If the knife could not be reached at a single stretch, the player was to pivot on the foot nearest the knife to bring the far foot in contact with it, so that his back was turned, and he would have to throw the knife behind him. To force your opponent into such a position was not always good strategy: the further away your opponent, the further away he might plant the knife, and a "stick" unreachable by a single stretch and pivot was an automatic win. Better to chunk it into the ground between his legs and far enough behind him that he could not reach it.

This would require him to turn his back and place his feet together, the most awkward position to throw from.

We played other games, more common ones: foot-to-foot handshake battles called Indian Wrestling and the inevitable game of tackle anywhere we could run a football--and more serious combats that were not games at all: I recall a friend's face twisted into denial of any intended offense against the calm-voiced boy who pointed four inches of stainless blade into his belly, and another face smashed bleeding and purple by a large lad who finally cried out, "For God's sake, stop him, he's crazy! Stop him before I have to kill him!" This before any of us showed even peach fuzz. And a knock-down hair-pulling match between two eighth-grade girls ended any illusions I might have had about demure femininity.

I do not mean to over-dramatize. Doubtless every playground reverberates with contained savagery; still, my memories of the Gulf coast town where I grew up are filled with images of easy violence. When you catch a sand shark, for instance, you saw through the cartilaginous jaw and keep ripping that simple gut

til your bait is free, keep ripping to the vent, then throw the thing back and watch it swim away, trailing its own innards. The very smell of the sea is not so much salt as decay from myriad deaths.

Three of us high-schoolers got into a clod fight once. We'd gone out after varmints or birds with .22 rifles, but there was nothing to shoot, and we'd fanned out around a stock tank and rested a bit, and one of us chunked a clod. Soon we were back to fifth grade, laughing and throwing and ducking. I got Ronnie a good one on the hip, and he was still laughing as he picked up his semi-automatic and, making spitting gun noises, sprayed a half dozen rounds across the bank I stood on.

We stopped playing then.

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Shortly after my parents and I moved to Port Isabel in the 1950s, we learned that a former Baptist preacher had written the town's memoir, filled with spicy anecdotes about prominent citizens. Mom bought a copy and we read it avidly. Dr. Hockaday (Chapter XIII) was still delivering babies, though he had replaced Burney Burnell (Chapter VIII) as mayor; and the red-haired baby who had kicked up a fuss in Leonard King's congregation (Chapter XI) had grown into the most sought-after girl in the fifth grade.

At that time the only signs of development were the excavated basement of what was to have been a resort hotel near the lighthouse downtown and a sandblasted, disused bath house on Padre Island, both relics of attempts to make the area into "another Miami Beach" - prior to the '29 stock market crash and the '33 hurricane. But Preacher King was sanguine about the future:

"A causeway, which is now under consideration, will someday span Laguna Madre, connecting the waterfront of Port Isabel with Padre Island. This will make Padre Island the most famous beach in the world. Here is one hundred miles or more of unbroken beachline composed of pure white sand, packed firm and hard by the Gulf of Mexico's laughing waves. The not too distant future will see a great summer resort spring up on Padre Island within sight of Port Isabel. Here, in this mildest climate in the United States, the nation will come to play and to angle for the gamest game fish that swim the seven seas."

The driving of the first piling for the causeway was a major event; almost as many town folk attended it as usually attended the midsummer blessing of the shrimp boats--that is to say, nearly everybody--though the words of the speeches were lost in the winds of a norther, and there was something dismal in the jarring clanks of the pile-driver pounding beam into mud.

Today, the causeway completed in 1954 is "the old causeway," used as a fishing pier. A four-lane concrete span now takes off from what was once a fishing village and lands in a nest of gleaming high-rise hotels and condominiums; Doc Hockaday and Burney Burnell are long since, as Preacher King might have phrased it, "under the sod," and the Doctor's son, Don Hockaday, now serves as Educational Assistant for Pan American University's Coastal Studies Laboratory. And is engaged in a long, grinding battle with developers Porche Grady and the Playa Del Rio Group, who want to do unto Boca Chica as others have done unto South Padre Island. Another Miami Beach.

The Boca Chica area between the south jetty of the Brownsville/Port Isabel ship channel and the mouth of the Rio Grande has been protected from development by its inaccessibility. To get there from Port Isabel requires an end run around Port Brownsville, about a 35-mile drive, but well worth it, if you don't care for jams of drunken college brats drumming the ground with their car stereos as they cruise P-100 looking for all that fun they're supposed to be having.

Application for the Playa Del Rio project began some time ago, back before its primary lender, Rio Grande Savings and Loan, went belly up and was put back on its feet. Texas Monthly narrated the initial furor and hearings a year or few ago, but the process drones on. When I talked to Don Hockaday in March, he estimated that the Corps of Engineers would be delivered of its initial Environmental Impact Statement sometime within the next six months, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife people had yet to state their opinion on endangered species. The Texas Water Quality Board and the Fish and Game Commission must also submit statements, and the Corps of Engineers' environmental impact study will be followed by another public hearing and another impact study, and eventually a final yes or no to the developers. The permit application process, my fellow PIHS grad informed me, will take about seven years all told--then be followed by a lawsuit regardless of the outcome: If the applicant loses, the applicant will sue; if the applicant wins, the Sierra Club will sue.

Don Hockaday has had his say in a 40-page formal analysis of the region's plant and animal life and the development's potential effects on them, which he distilled for me as follows: The 1972 provisions of the Clean Water Act were designed to prevent exactly this sort of development, a dredge-and-fill operation that will wipe out the area's wetlands. Such lands are necessary to the survival of 90 percent of aquatic life species. Wetlands also serve as the last stage of sewage treatment for coastal communities, breaking down the offal from treatment plants and removing the toxins. The consequences of Playa Del Rio, then, would be fewer fish, mollusks, and shrimp in local waters--and more poison. "The gamiest game fish in the seven seas," I am tempted to say, "when you can find them."

On their side, the developers have the lure of more money and jobs brought into the area, a particularly provocative "mating call," as Hockaday phrases it, because the local economy has been badly hurt by devaluation of the peso, as well as by the snowballing S&L/Bank disaster. "I think [the proposed development] is terrible," Hockaday quoted one local businessman as saying, "but it's good for my business to support it." Promoters of an $8 billion project can, of course, outspend environmentalists. They may not have reason on their side, but they have full-color glossies of their megabuck dreams.

A few years ago Port Isabel High School decided to hold a summer reunion for all graduating classes (the town is small, and few or none were showing up at homecomings). It was good to return and watch the tourists, intent as always on losing their inhibitions along with their money; it was good to hear that both sons of the butcher who used to work at Fritz's grocery were doing well as a result of tourism, too. But it was very good indeed to get away to Boca Chica, away from the people who had fled city life in order to conglomerate into something far more crowded and noisy.

I remember a shrimper talking to my dad, a science teacher then at the local high school: "Shrimper, he don't care about 'balance of nature.' All he care about is, every shrimp he see, he sees a dime." Developer, he don't care about environmental impact--though he is forced by law into a pretense of caring; nor does he care whether his trade at last resembles the sculpture atop a tourist souvenir shop: a 17-foot tall purple octopus molded of plastic with a cerulean bikini, and with the white, blank grin of a horror.

P.S.

"Developers’ Paradise" appeared in the Texas Observer in 1998. According to Don, the Playa del Rio project "fell of its own weight" shortly thereafter.

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I began buying books from the paperback stand in Fritz’ Grocery at age fifteen, in the summer of 1956. After a steamy novel about juvenile delinquents, came a book on practical jokes. The author answered a question that had always bothered me, explaining that "practical" in this sense derived from Greek praxis, meaning 'action,' to distinguish such jokes from verbal ones. It did not mean sane and sensible; it meant messing with folks' minds, and I was in favor of that, especially grown up folks.

My favorite story in the book told of a gent who decided to enliven his half hour in a receiving line, gussied up a la white tie and tux, by murmuring through his smile, "My grandmother died this morning." For a long time, no one appeared to notice. The man had almost concluded that the guests were too busy rehearsing their own banalities to listen to anyone else's, when an elderly fellow responded to the news with a cheery murmur of his own: "She had it coming."

That joke was practical in both senses of the word: It required no special equipment and very little effort. Almost as elegant in its simplicity was the stunt invented by an airline passenger who, finding a long black thread on his lapel, covertly inserted most of it into his mouth, leaving the tail to dangle like a misplaced participle. Eventually his seat-mate found a way to pose the obvious question, which the joker answered with some borderline plausabilities about a rare ailment that required him to test the contents of his stomach every four hours by drawing up the tiny silver bucket waiting on the other end of the thread: an event the patsy anticipated for quite a while.

At the time I read the book, I was already familiar with the Halloween prank. A roadblock set just downhill from a railroad crossing will almost certainly get an unwary driver's attention, especially when his headlights hit a 4 X 8 sheet of corrugated tin, leaning against a saw horse to which a goat has been tied. A nylon tow-rope will accomplish the same purpose, when it is rubbed with mud to darken it, pulled taut, and stoutly knotted to the bumpers of two cars parked end-to-end. And if the differentials of both cars have blocks under them to keep the drive wheels a millimeter or so above the pavement...

An unofficial gift bequeathed by some members of the Class of 1960 to the principal of one Texas high school during that era of switchblade and ducktail was a paperweight sculpted by an all-too-human sphincter and left on his desk within easy reach. Then came some chicanery involving the stale, flat, and unprofitable corpse of an owl, the details of which I cannot at this moment recall.

My first two years in college, I roomed with a physics major whose ability to apply theory to everyday problems delighted many residents of Mood Hall, Crude Mood as It was called. His invention of a jump wire for bypassing the dorm phones’ expectation of coin was as practical as it was marketable. His subsequent tap into the phone line that ran by our window, permitting installation of an instrument surreptitiously borrowed from the physics department, proved even more practical. But we soon heard that the school authorities, the phone company, and the federal government could not bring themselves to consider such activities jokes.

"Hooks," as we called him, understood primitive mechanics as well as electronics. When the laundromat installed new coin boxes that would snip the scotch tape handle right off a dime, he employed Archimedean as well as Newtonian principles to heist a dozen or so boxes of soap and avenge the inconvenience. Then there was the obnoxious freshman who thrust open his dorm room door one afternoon to the accompanying crash of twenty-eight cola bottles pyramided behind it. That was after the lady at the grocery became suspicious of attempts to redeem the bottles taken from beside the dorm Coke machine every Saturday morning. But I am getting ahead of myself. The most dedicated batch of adolescent pranksters to which I ever belonged was the staff of a boy scout camp.

Beneath a moon-laden canopy of sky fringed by branches of mesquite and pin oak that the summer breeze stirs gently from time to time, few sounds can satisfy a boy more than the muted blhwoomp which signals that the can of baked beans dropped amid embers of a neighboring campfire during a diversionary raid has finally passed the point of detonation. Lord Baden-Powell himself could scarcely have enjoyed the outdoors more than he who hears the curse of a distant scoutmaster.

How the founder of scouting would have responded to the Camp Perry staff song, I'd rather not hazard:

"Hidey-ditey, Christ a'mighty

Who in the hell are we?

Vim-vam, God-damn

The staff of Camp Perree!"

I believe we staffers were more than ordinarily dedicated to the cause of personal vandalism. It is adequate fun to short-sheet a fellow's bed, but it is a far, far better thing to add a layer of shaving cream and corn flakes to the shorted sheet and balance the springs on a single slat. And then think to reverse the batteries in his flashlight. Those little extra touches make the difference. Had Danny and Sammy returned to their tent to find beds, dressers, shoes, and all else exactly reversed, as was our original plan, they would doubtless have felt we'd given them enough recognition; but when, instead, they found their tent entirely emptied of its contents and the contents flown into the rafters of the bath house, they really knew we cared.

Mistrust of the adult world is not innate; it is learned, as any veteran of a snipe hunt or search for the left-handed monkey wrench will testify. I can recall hanging onto the handle of an ice cream freezer for a long time, lest it unwind and the contents unfreeze. Danny, the staff leader, often proved his ability to look a group of trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent kids in the eye, and lie to them with compelling sincerity. For one thing, it was part of his job.

The Order of the Arrow, nicknamed O.A. or The Crimson Shaft, was an honorary organization whose members wore a white sash emblazoned with a red arrow. The climax of the campers' week was the tapping-out ceremony, when they stood ringed around a bonfire watching scouts garbed as Indians conduct ritual dances. In the last one two "braves" ran at one another with torches, one jumping and swinging high, the other ducking and swinging low; breathtaking stuff and carefully rehearsed. During this, some campers would be slapped on the shoulder by other painted savages, taken aside and told to come back after camp season for initiation.

As a lead-in to that event, earlier in the week a special assembly would be called after nightfall, and the campers would gather in the amphitheater that fronted on the Arroyo Colorado. There Danny the spell-binder would tell them that Indian ghosts had been seen on such nights as this. After a few tales clarifying what even the ghost of a former warrior could accomplish, the amphitheater lights would go suddenly dark, and several hundred yards away on the far bank a kerosene-inspired blaze would roar up to reveal a brave thumping a tom-tom and a war-bonneted chief crying "hai-hai-hai." After a minute or so, the blaze would die down, the lights would come up, and Danny would warn the campers to return to their campsites in strict silence. Indians, you know, respect a kid who can keep his mouth shut.

The plan to steal the canoe by which those two bogus Comanches achieved the far shore, and strand them there, was hatched by two members of the waterfront staff: Buddy, a six-foot-four basketball letterman, who could tread water so powerfully that he appeared to be seated on its surface; and Johnny, whose Model A 'street rod' served as centerpiece for the staff area. Only God knows why they decided to enlist the crew-cut rifle range instructor, or why he agreed to participate.

The Indians, Eddie and Milton, were expected to believe their canoe had somehow been set adrift, perhaps by the bow wave of a passing motorboat, then muck about a while trying to find it, and, failing that, hike three miles to the nearest town and telephone. In feathers and war-paint, of course. Meanwhile, both the O.A. canoe and the one we used to steal it would be drying in their racks, and we would be chuckling in ours. That was the plan.

Things might have gone better if we had found the canoe, which was not only solidly beached but moored as well, about a minute earlier; before the amphitheatre lamps relit the world and the Indians could be heard crunching their way down the bluff. As it was, we were only about twenty yards out, Buddy and I paddling furiously backwards as Johnny quickly distanced us in the O.A. canoe, when Eddie and Milton began flashing a hand spot around and halooing the opposite bank. About the time the dock lights came on, Buddy decided that, rather than turn the canoe about, he would turn about in it, and I discovered that a tipped canoe swamps instantly.

Once Johnny was hailed back, he and Buddy righted the canoe with expert rapidity: twisting it bottom up, levering an end into the air and sliding it across the other canoe to the balance point, then flipping it upright and gliding it back onto the water, all in one graceful, balletic flow of desperation. It was then a simple matter for Buddy and me to position ourselves on opposite sides of the canoe and, on the count of three, hoist our-selves back aboard. In fact, the number of lanterns and spotlights trained on us by that time made it almost impossible to fail.

As our ears were being swabbed with hydrogen peroxide, the camp administrator chewed us to the point of on-the-spot dismissal, growled that he would let the matter go with the understanding that exemplary behavior was henceforth expected, and exited while he could still keep his face straight.

The practical joke that soured me on practical jokes, though, was not our failed attempt to steal the O.A. canoe. Nor was it Danny's leading forty or so campers on a postprandial wilderness hike to view the alligator gar so big he'd had to chain it to the bank; from which they returned broiled in sun and basted in mud and stung by nettles and torn by briars, having seen only a broken chain--there’s a snipe-hunter born every minute. Nor was it the application of a can of shoe polish to the face and torso of the kid who refused to stay out of the staff area: He had it coming. But the pearl-divers didn't have it coming, they deserved far better than what we gave them.

The two lads from a recently formed negro troop, hired onto the staff as dish washers (hence "pearl-divers"), didn't fit in well for reasons other than race, though the rarity of black people in South Texas did set them apart. They were younger than the rest of the staff, junior high schoolers rather than juniors in high school, and their schedule was almost the reverse of ours: their leisure time came during our work hours, and vice-versa. And they isolated themselves, keeping their tent walls down despite the heat. Perhaps that was why it was decided, late one evening, that they needed to be initiated.

They were flattered by the attentions of the group that gathered at the entry to their tent, and when the silver-tongued Danny arrived, they were thrilled. Danny felt obliged to warn them just how dangerous was the wilderness they now inhabited. When a few tales of rattlesnakes longer than a man was tall and bigger around than his arm had inspired one of them to run to the kitchen for salt to scatter around their tent to keep such monsters away, Danny took Johnny aside to say that he was about to start talking about pumas, and that there should be a mounted head of one in the camp meeting hall.

Johnny sped off into the darkness and returned in the midst of the story of a puma gutting the Brahma bull it had felled and snapping its rib cage like so many twigs--but he held the stuffed head of a javelins, not that of a mountain lion, which he told those of us on the edge of the group he had been unable to find.

"Danny," someone said, "what about...javelinas?"

"Oh, absolutely," responded the blue-eyed devil. "There are only two things by nature more vicious than a puma, and one is a woman scorned and the other is a javelina. The tusks of a javelina boar grow to the size of a man's fingers, and they are razor sharp. These beasts have been known to attack an unarmed man, slashing by instinct at his Achilles tendons, and when they bring him down, they trample him to death... Say, what's that!"

From the skirt of the tent, just next to the bed where the two mesmerized youths were perched, came snuffling and scraping noises. Something brushed the tent wall...then a thunderous snort, and the javelina head thrust into view, yellow tusks gleaming, glass eyes blazing. Shouting our alarm to the skies, we all raced headlong into the darkness. But two of us were driven by real terror and did not return for a long while, and then only to spend the night and leave the next morning with no intention of coming back. Ever.

My dictionary claims the intent of a practical joke is to cause "embarrassment or indignity," but I don’t think that says it all. I believe its more basic purpose is integrative. We meant to bring those two fellows into our community, not drive them from it; not to unman them, but to introduce them to manhood, at least our peculiarly raw version of it. None of us was happy with the outcome, nor were we sensitive enough, in the summer of 1958, to see that our act, racist in intent or not, was so in effect.

The snipe hunt is a rite of passage. So is the case of orange Jell-O dissolved in the honeymoon suite bathtub five hours before the wedding. So, in an odd fashion, are the thousand acts of minor vandalism by which teenagers inform the adult world of their reluctance to join it.

A good half dozen years after one of my classmates placed his organic sculpture on the principal's desk, one Halloween night in the West Texas town where I was teaching high school English, a student who was chaperoning some trick-or-treaters suggested I might want to check the dry-bed behind my house; he had the impression I was about to receive some unwanted visitors. Since the house had already been egged once that evening, I followed his advice, touring the edge of the gully with a flashlight. There were whispers, the thump of something dropped, and a great deal of scrambling toward a pickup truck parked on the bridge.

Next morning I went to investigate what those youngsters had been at such pains to deliver to my back door. It was the stale, flat, and unprofitable corpse of a calf.