GIVE YOUR BEST TO TEXAS
Paul D. Carrington
On first meeting, Roy was not attractive. Nor, actually, on second meeting either. Among his manifest deficiencies were unwarranted arrogance and pathetic sexual insecurity, a combination making him the model private school graduate enrolling as a freshman in a large public university. The only fraternities willing to accept him in 1948 were those in which his father and maternal grandfather had once held membership.
As a Deke pledge, he was quickly alerted to the photograph of Nolte McElroy hanging on the wall of the fraternity house living room. Nolte, it was explained, had accidentally been electrocuted during hazing in 1923. Roy anticipated that, given his social deficiencies, he was destined to be hazed a lot. But hopefully not electrocuted.
As a pledge, he ate eleven meals a week at the Deke house. It was a condition of doing so that he was required upon the command of any brother present to stand on his bench and recite an original quatrain about someone present. If he had no poem, or if for any reason a brother disapproved of his poetry, or of him, he was required to take his plate and finish his meal under the table. Roy always had a poem, but he ate under the table several times a week. And on one occasion he was required to wash his mouth with soap for comparing Joe Young to a pile of dung.
And there were the “rallies.” These were held on Sundays at 1 AM. This hour was chosen because all maidens enrolled in the University of Texas were required to be in their abodes by 12:45 on Saturday (11 on week nights) and the brothers were therefore free at that hour to engage in a little hazing. These were mainly calisthentic events. Many brothers were veterans returning from military service who were especially unimpressed by Roy. They required him to do push ups and sit ups, to his limit and beyond, prodding him with humbling metaphors they had learned in basic infantry training. Sometimes presiding over his efforts was Bootowl, a former Marine, who was then in his first year in law school. On one occasion, Roy was an object of the attention of brother Tom, then an All-American blocking back who would become the legendary head coach of the Dallas Cowboys. After calisthentics, the pledges were driven ten miles or so into the hills west or south of Austin, and told to walk home together.
Another former Marine, known to his brothers as Mother, presided over the beer drinking at the Schoonerville Café. It was said that Mother had been a West Texas prohibitionist until he was assigned duty as bartender to Admiral Nimitz. The guy who cleared the empties off Mother’s table was Killhiminaminute. Killhiminaminute spoke some words that might have been Italian, but the only English words he knew were those that provided his name. It was said that Killhiminaminute had been in the Italian army; when marched into Ethiopia, he had surrendered to the defending forces of King Haile Silasse, escaped, and walked across Africa, somehow then to find his way to Austin and his employment at Schoonerville.
Somewhat to his surprise, the Deke war veterans could tolerate Roy’s presence at the Schoonerville table. By their attentions, they distracted the waitress, Wanda, who might otherwise have noticed that he was four years short of the age entitling him to be served. His senior companions taught him the hard way to hold his beer so that he could consume a dozen and a half bottles a night. But it was hard then to get to class. Especially the required PE class.
But Roy did try to compete in intramural athletics. In the interfraternity competition, he played handball, soccer, basketball, softball, and tennis, and he swam on a relay team. In none of these endeavors did he excel, and he was generally assigned to the minor league or Class B divisions.
And Roy attended all the Longhorn football games he could. He learned to scorn Texas Aggies as uncouth Spartans unworthy of association with the noble Athenians who inhabited his University. Longhorns had resolved that Aggies were never to be allowed to score in Memorial Stadium in Austin. Aggies demonstrated their lack of class by cutting down East Texas telephone poles to build bonfires for their pep rallies. A major achievement of 1948 was that of two University undergraduates who flew a small plane over the Aggies’ stacked telephone poles and dropped a homemade incendiary bomb on them, thus causing a premature bonfire. But, alas, the Aggies that year scored in Austin for the first time in many years.
Roy also came to admire the elite students who shared the playing field with the athletes. One elegant group had custody of the mascot Longhorn. Even more admirable to Roy were the Texas Cowboys dressed in black hats, leather chaps, high-heeled boots, and orange kerchiefs. They, with others, assigned themselves the duty of greeting the Longhorns as they came out of the dressing room on to the field. And they carried the torches at the pep rallies.
Alas, nothing the war veterans taught Roy made him attractive to coeds. He fell in love with a classmate, but there was no reciprocity. In the hope of shedding his snottiness, he tried to practice an accent from the Texas hills, paying special attention to the dialect of a classmate from Lampasas. But speaking Lampasan did him no good with the girls. One maiden even brutally declared her total rejection of him. He took it hard, but the next morning he discovered that he had, while in her company, ripped the right rear fender off his old Pontiac without knowing he had done so. Maybe she scorned him because he did not hold his beer as well as he had thought.
The university tuition of the time was $25 a semester, and the military veterans were on the GI Bill of Rights. But some of the brothers needed to earn a little money. “Sundown” rented a vacant lot on which to sell used cars. Roy tried to help but flunked Salesmanship 101 when he warned a buyer that one of a car’s doors would not lock. And one night he went with Wayne to help him repossess an automobile on which the loan company employing Wayne held a mortgage securing an unpaid loan. They found the car to be repossessed in the debtor’s garage. At 2 AM, they hitched it to Wayne’s car and drove off. As they pulled away, the debtor discharged a weapon of some kind. Although he was paid five dollars for his services, Roy decided not to join Wayne on his later adventures.
That spring, Sterling, one of the Deke brothers and a veteran of the Italian campaign, ran for student body president. Roy campaigned hard, scrawling Sterling’s name on the sidewalk, or wherever. Sterling won the endorsement of The Clique, a political organization consisting of representatives of the fraternities. Its purpose was to assure that all student government offices would be held exclusively by members of fraternities. Somehow, Roy noted with puzzlement, the support of the sororities was assumed. In 1949, the “independents,” i.e., those of lesser social status, made a big push. And despite the efforts of Roy and others, Sterling lost a close race.
Not long thereafter, Roy was initiated into the fraternity. One requirement was a short walk on the electrified bedspring that was said to have killed poor Nolte. Otherwise, the less said about initiation, the better. But its survival was the major accomplishment of his freshman year.
Unless one counts as an accomplishment his membership, along with Sterling, in the group that founded an NAACP chapter to lobby the University’s Regents to admit Heman Sweatt, a postman, to the University’s law school. The chapter got thousands of students to sign a petition, but to no avail.
Roy’s sophomore year was in comparison uneventful. He lived in the fraternity house. He drank a lot of beer, but with more grace. He offered his affections to numerous maidens, none of whom cared to receive them. There were one or two who offered him their affections, but, alas, none whose affections he desired. He had occasion to notice that one coed to whom he had offered his attentions had shown a preference for those of a Cowboy. He could not blame her for that. He still missed a lot of classes, especially PE. Four credits in PE were required to graduate; after two years, he still had none.
Toward the end of his second year, the fraternity noticed that most of its more luminous brothers were about to graduate. Who would recruit their replacements? No other brother was willing to assume that responsibility, so Roy was designated as Rush Captain for 1950.
For some reason, Roy took the job seriously. His summer job was only part-time, so he had time to travel over much of Texas visiting brothers and looking for promising recruits. He organized social events in fifteen Texas cities. One was at the San Jacinto battlefield. The evening concluded with those present throwing beer bottles at the battleship Texas anchored there. It was said that she (the battleship) had accidentally fired on brother Tom, who was there to attest that the ship had fired on him while he was as a military aviator chasing a Japanese Zero at the Battle of Java Sea. And we ought not, Roy explained to those present, tolerate that kind of a mistreatment of a brother, even by a battleship, and even one bearing the state’s name.
“Rush Week” was preliminary to fall enrollment. Among his duties as Rush Captain, Roy presided over meetings at which the decisions were made as to who might be invited. And he designated individual brothers to be responsible for befriending specific rushees and extending invitations to those selected. For whatever reasons, the Dekes enjoyed a spectacularly successful recruiting season. Of the 41 persons invited to pledge, 33 accepted. The group included some notable talents -- athletic, academic, social and political. (One became an all-Conference lineman; one made out with Miss Texas; two became doctors; one wrote books on ornithology; two became architects; one would win the Conference golf championship; one would later be the publisher of a major newspaper; one would be convicted of homicide; one would be court-martialed for flying a Navy plan under the San Francisco Bay Bridge, one would acquire great wealth; and one would become an astronaut and go to the moon!)
This success elevated Roy in the regard of his brothers. To reward his effort, Bootowl took it upon himself to cause Roy to be elected to the Texas Cowboys. This was an astonishing reversal of the conditions of his life. Guys who had disdained him no longer did. Maidens seemed no longer to scorn him. Somehow he started getting to class on time.
And there was even a moment of reward drawn from his indolent past. Late one Saturday evening, he found himself at an alien fraternity house in the company of Greer. But there was no beer. It was proposed to buy beer at the Schoonerville back door. But, Roy observed, it is after hours and they can’t sell. “They’ll sell to me anytime,” Greer said. Dubious, Roy went along to see. Wanda was still there to close up. She did, after the legal hour, sell Greer a case of twenty-four bottles of beer. Greer then, to make his point, asked her whether she would similarly have bootlegged a case to Roy. “The only reason I am selling to you,” Wanda responded with a sneer and pointing at Roy, “is that you are with him. I trust him.” To be graceful, Roy drank one of Greer’s beers, and then went home more than a little satisfied with himself.
There was a Cowboy initiation that fall. More hazing, but milder and briefer. It concluded with a presentation of leather chaps to wear on ceremonial occasions and a certificate of membership. On the certificate was a slogan: “Give your best to Texas and the best will come back to you.”
There were occasional Cowboy meetings. These were, Roy noted, different from those of the fraternity. Fraternity meetings were indeed like family gatherings. The brothers were homogeneous and shared concerns about their status, their competition with other fraternities, and about their relationships with the maidens who were their chief preoccupation. The Cowboys in contrast included Jewish and Hispanic members, and some who were “independents,” i.e. members of no brotherhood. Some were even working to pay for room and board. Cowboys enjoyed their status but were unconcerned about it. They proclaimed themselves to be a service organization, and they actually sometimes talked about what was best for the University and what might be done to achieve it. Not that there was either deep understanding or creative imagination voiced. To the contrary, the Cowboys were pretty short on ideas. But their reason for being was not overt self-advancement, and that was a difference. Roy was maybe even a little inspired by their tone. And it made him restless with the fraternity.
An event of the spring of his junior year marked a change in Roy. The fraternity faced a grave crisis in the initiation of the cohort of new members whom Roy had been responsible for recruiting as Rush Captain. Initiation was a three-day period of hazing, both physical and emotional. On the third day of the process, it was suddenly realized that an error had been made in calculating the grade point average of two of the pledges being initiated. Their initiation would be a violation of the University rules. Such an evil deed would surely be detected and the fraternity would be punished with probation prohibiting social events and the recruitment of new members. Worse, Oppie, the alumnus in charge of the ceremony, refused to go forward with the event. “This chapter,” Oppie proclaimed, “plays by the rules!!”
But the idea of breaking off the initiation process at that late stage was intolerable. There was much tearing of hair. Somehow inspired, Roy solved the problem. He proposed that the illegal deed be done, but with a commitment to confess it to authority as soon as it was done. He offered himself to go to the Dean’s office early Monday morning and inform the Dean of their sin and submit to appropriate punishment. He predicted that the Dean would not under those circumstances impose a heavy penalty. Even Oppie thought that this would be honorable and might work. And so it was done. As Roy foretold, the Dean was so struck by the confession that he merely forbade the Dekes to have a formal dance for the remainder of the academic year. Since none was planned, this penalty was easily borne. For the first time, Roy considered the possibility that he might have a knack for dispute resolution. Maybe he should think about law school.
So Roy stayed in school through the summer in part to make up the PE credits he needed because of his past failings, and he became an earnest student. By the end of the fall, he had changed the face of his academic record and looked forward to law study.
But Rioy’s experience as a Cowboy left him with an ambition to make a mark on the University before he left college. As a senior, he set his sights on The Clique as an unwholesomely class-ridden organization. He persuaded the Dekes to leave the organization. That was not too hard since no Deke planned to run for office that year. And they left it to him to go to The Clique meeting to move its dissolution. He went, making his motion of dissolution and a five-minute speech on the merits of social democracy among University students. No one supported the motion, so Roy walked out of the meeting alone, amid cries of treason against class, and hisses of ridicule. However, another fraternity came forward with a candidate, Rush, who was willing to run for Student Association President against The Clique. Roy had no formal role in Rush’s campaign, but he did enlist the support of several groups, most notably the Arabian and Iranian students who were enrolled in petroleum engineering and who were accustomed to voting as a block in student elections. They may have provided the margin of Rush’s sweet victory over The Clique. An additional but delayed return on Roy’s effort in the campaign was the election the next year (after his graduation) of Jerry, a Deke who also ran successfully against The Clique, causing it to subside for at least a time. Did it matter? Who can say? At best, not much.
But being an agent of The Clique’s defeat was not Roy’s most memorable senior moment. One weeknight in April, he dropped off his date at 11, as the University required, and returned to the fraternity house. As he walked past the upstairs phone, it rang. He picked up the receiver to hear a male voice shriek, “Pantie Raid! Tonight! Be in front of the Main Building at 11:30! Tell your brothers!” and then a click as the voice moved on to call others. Roy did not tell his brothers, but quickly called six Texas Cowboys, all of whom agreed that a pantie raid would not be a good thing for Texas, especially coming while the legislature was in session and considering university appropriations. They shared this view even though pantie raids were at the time in vogue on other campuses.
So, seven Cowboys were on the steps of the Main building as a couple hundred pantie raiders gathered. The best known of the Cowboys, Wales, the current student body president stood on the wall above the top step to announce that there would be no pantie raid. The aspiring raiders milled and mumbled and grumbled. After a few moments, a voice in the back of the crowd yelled, “To SRD!” That would be the Scottish Rite Dormitory, perhaps the one housing the largest number of coeds. The crowd started rushing in that direction.
But the Cowboys moved faster. As the mob regathered in front of the dorm, the seven Cowboys appeared on the front steps. Then, protruding out a third floor window was the bare butt of one of the residents. The mob cheered and moved forward. But one of the Cowboys, Joe, the center on the University basketball team, stepped forward and in a loud, firm voice, announced, “I guess you guys are going in, but the first guy who does will get my fist in his face.” The crowd again milled and mumbled and grumbled.
“To the Chi Omega house!,” someone cried. It was a short distance away. The Cowboys did not get there quickly enough to prevent a few raiders from testing doors and windows. But a hand on the collar of a raider proved to be an adequate deterrent in every case. Roy found one raider in a window well trying to jimmy open a basement window. He reached down and touched the kid on the shoulder. The kid fled. And so did the others. There would be no panty raid. There would never even be a news report of a failed raid.
It will never be known whether the University’s appropriations would have been reduced if the raiders had entered SRD, even perhaps if one of them had experienced the pleasure of stroking that bare butt projected out the third story window. But seven Cowboys, Roy included, had the satisfaction of thinking that they had given their best to Texas that night. Whether the best came back to them, also cannot, in the nature of things, be known. We can only guess. In any case, Roy thought he had learned some things that it might be useful for a lawyer to know.