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J.
Frank Dobie had an opinion on just about anything.
In 1941, the noted Texas storyteller and University of Texas faculty
member pondered the literature of two distinctly Texan industries
– cattle and oil. “Compared with the literature and art reflective
of cattle, cowboys, trail driving, horses and other factors of life
on the range,” Dobie wrote in his weekly newspaper column, “the literature
and art reflective of the oil business…are slender.”
For the most part, that’s held up, at least in terms of fiction. The
trail driving era has Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lonesome
Dove,” but the Texas oil patch has yet to be the setting for any novel
likely to become a classic.
Not that writers have not recognized the romantic in the muddy, greasy,
stinky world of oil production. Three years before Dobie lamented
the literary dry hole of the energy industry, a weekly newspaper in
South Texas was peddling a little book of oil field verse called “Bell-Bottoms
to Boots” by a sailor-turned-roughneck named Joe “Blackie” Wilson.
Dobie liked poetry, but likely would have dismissed Wilson’s effort
as so much doggerel. Still, the poems have a ring of truth.
In
rhyme, Wilson tried to distill life in and around the Duval County
town of Freer, the state’s last truly wild and wooly oil boom town.
The first boom came in the late 1920s, but a second boom that began
in 1932 for all practical purposes suspended the Great Depression
in that part of the state.
C.L. Day started a weekly newspaper, the Freer Enterprise, as the
second boom gathered momentum in 1933. At some point, “Blackie” Wilson
came to the area to work in the fields. Soon he began submitting poems
to the newspaper.
The poems proved to be a popular and Day decided to capitalize on
that.
“Hundreds of subscribers,” he wrote, “have been so well pleased with
‘Rod Tailin’ Blackie’s’ poems that they have preserved them in scrap
books. In order to gratify your desire for a book of poems by your
favorite author, we have gone to considerable trouble and expense
to publish Bell-Bottoms to Boots so that you may be able to secure
your favorite poems bound in a beautiful book, without extra cost.”
Of course, a person did have to pay $2 for a subscription to the Enterprise
to obtain a “free” copy.
From this distant perspective, it’s hard to imagine that the oil patch
workers spent much time pondering poetry. But they couldn’t work and
raise hell all the time. Nor could the boom that lured them to South
Texas last.
Freer is still on the map, but the boom finally played out. As Wilson
wrote: |
“Well, boys, the boom is over—they’re throwing
drunks in jail
“The dealers and the dolls are on the lam.
“If you do any serious drinking be sure to arrange for bail.
“Or you’ll face the morning after in a jam.
“Freer is on her good behavior and will never be the same.
“Remember Borger and Mexia
before the rangers came?
“O somewhere surely there’s another rag town booming
“Where it’s no crime for roughnecks to throw a jag.” |
The
Freer Enterprise went out of business in 1972 and these days Wilson’s
book of poetry is as scarce as sissies on a drilling rig.
So what was Wilson’s story? As the title of his book suggests, Wilson
had been a sailor. One of his poems offers strong evidence he was
born and raised around Normangee in Leon County.
“There is something about an oilfield that always calls you back,/And
you can say the same thing of the sea,” he wrote. “I guess I should
be sorry that I listened to their calls,/For the two of them have
made a tramp of me.”
The book contains no author’s blurb, but the author hints at further
autobiography in “The Chronic Urge.”
Wilson wrote: “Life gave me a sledge [hammer] when I wanted a pen/And
rock when I looked for a rose./I slaved a while, got drunk on gin/And
wrote verses of my woes.”
The booze overrode the muse until, “I begged of Life for a place in
the shade/That I might write./—And she put me to work with a pick
and spade/And gave me a Baptist wife.”
That apparently cured Blackie’s boozing as sure as big-hatted rangers
tamed Freer and the other boom towns. |
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