Generations and Other True Stories (6 page)

But while our bus moved slowly through the mountains toward Alpine, where the Browns were going to play the Pirates, it was Satchel Paige we talked of, Satchel Paige we wanted to see. His was the only familiar name on the pitiful Browns' roster. And the Pirates, except for Kiner, were almost as bad.

Because our high school coach played for the Alpine Cowboys, our seats were on the first base line, not far from the Browns' dugout, and before the game we crowded there, getting autographs from anyone who would sign our programs. “Is Satchel here?” we asked. “Did he come?”

And the white guys would grin and reply, “Oh, he'll be along. Old Satch, he's so old it takes him a long time to get dressed.”

Then he appeared: A very tall, very dark man who seemed to be all arms and legs, greeting us with the kindest, gentlest smile I had ever seen on a man. He didn't look old. He looked…wonderful. He stood by the fence, signing our programs, talking softly, patiently, making sure he didn't miss anybody. Then, while the National Anthem was playing, he disappeared into the dugout.

I don't remember much about the game except Kiner dropping that fly and us hollering, “We want Satchel! Let Satchel pitch!” Then, late in the game, the announcer told us: Satchel Paige was coming in for St. Louis.

He was driven from the dugout to the mound on a golf cart—Bill Veeck's way of showing us how old Paige was. Everybody laughed. He threw a few warmup pitches, using an awkward, old-fashioned windmill windup that exaggerated his lankiness and made us laugh more.

Then he faced his first batter, and struck him out. Suddenly, I realized that when Paige finished that crazy windmill motion and let the ball go, I didn't see it again until it hit the catcher's mitt. He quickly struck out the side.

The golf cart moved to the mound and carried him back to the dugout. And, because we yelled for more, it took him back to the mound for another inning, and he struck out the side again.

This time, as the cart was bringing him from the mound, several of the Browns lifted a huge, upholstered chaise longue out of the dugout and set it on the grass near the fence, then lifted Paige from the cart and laid him on the chair, as if he were too old and tired to move.

Paige was smiling, going along with the gag. But I was close enough to see that he hadn't broken a sweat. He could have pitched all afternoon and not one of those Pirates, except maybe Kiner, could have touched the ball.

I knew then that I was looking at a great man. And it was a great day for me when, in 1971, the first real hero I had ever seen was named to the Hall of Fame.

December 1992

For many years, Dallas pretended it was part of the sophisticated East, not rough-around-the-edges Texas. Then, in the 1970s, cowboy boots and big hats became a fad in the East, and being Texan was perceived as a good thing. So always-fashionable Dallas started wearing boots and big hats, too. It even imported a small herd of longhorns to stroll along the Trinity riverbank during the Republican National Convention in 1984
.

Then the fad passed, and Dallas was left confused. Some of its citizens wanted to remain part of Texas, some wanted to be sophisticated easterners again, and some started talking about Big D becoming an “international city,” whatever that is
.

The following piece reflects that confusion
.

Incidentally, the lawsuit filed against the city went nowhere, and the bronze steers are very popular with the tourists
.

The Art Snobs Meet Frankensteer

A few years ago, Tex Schramm was reminiscing about the coming of professional football to Dallas. One of his duties as general manager of the team was to give it a name: “So I said, ‘Damn it, what's the first thing people think of when they think of Texas? Cowboys!' So I called them the Cowboys.”

But the team hadn't come to Texas. It had come to Dallas. To Mr. Schramm's surprise, dozens of Dallasites took pen or phone in hand to express dismay. “Dallas was where the East ended!” he remembered them telling him. “It was cosmopolitan, for God's sake! Fort Worth was the West! And they were saying, ‘Cowboys? Jesus! That's not Neiman Marcus!'”

That was thirty-three years ago. A few months ago, bulldozers began tearing up a parking lot in front of the Dallas Convention Center and building a hill of dirt. The lot is about to be transformed into a four-acre park called Pioneer Plaza, in honor of the early settlers of Dallas, some of whom are buried in the adjacent cemetery.

The finished park will feature a twelve-foot waterfall over a limestone cliff, a rushing stream, a reflecting pool at the corner of Young and Griffin streets, trees, seats for tired tourists, a plaque about the history of Dallas, and a miniature prairie planted in buffalo grass.

But the centerpiece of Pioneer Plaza, its
raison d'etre
, if you will, is to be…cowboys. Three of them. One white, one black, one Hispanic. In bronze. Ten and a half feet tall in the saddle. And…cows. Well, steers. In bronze. Seventy of them. About six feet tall at the shoulder. Driven by the three cowboys, the steers will appear to be meandering down the new hill, through Pioneer Plaza on their way to market. Just a few blocks from Neiman Marcus.

The whole project is supposed to cost about nine million dollars—about five million dollars for the land, provided by the city, and about four million dollars for the landscaping and the sculpture, to be provided by the Dallas Parks Foundation.

The sculpture, the first pieces of which are now being cast at the Eagle Bronze foundry in Lander, Wyoming, is the brainchild of the foundation, a private, nonprofit organization that raises money from private sources to help out the city of Dallas in such projects as developing parks and planting trees on public lands.

Or, more precisely, it's the brainchild of real estate developer Trammell Crow, chairman of the foundation's board of directors, who with a single application of political clout may be turning eastward-looking, sophisticated, cosmopolitan Dallas into Cowtown East.

At least that's the view of the Public Art Committee, an adjunct of the city Cultural Affairs Commission, whose job it is to look artistic gift horses in the mouth and advise the City Council whether to accept them. In this case, the committee's recommendation was a resounding no, on grounds that the sculpture is bad art, bad history, and a possible hazard to the public safety. But the Cultural Affairs Commission overruled the committee and recommended that the City Council approve the project, which it did.

Agreeing with the Public Art Committee is a group of Dallas artists who believe the shortcut path that the Dallas Parks Foundation took through the City Hall bureaucracy was an illegal one. They've filed a lawsuit against the city to halt the project.

They also condemn the Parks Foundation's image of Dallas and its past as historically incorrect. And, because of the way the sculptor is planning to create the animals—by making an assortment of steer horns, tails, and hooves and attaching them in various combinations to ten basic steer bodies, instead of sculpting each beast individually—they refer to the project as “Frankensteer.”

On the other hand, the member organizations of the city's tourist business establishment—the Central Dallas Association, the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Greater Dallas Chamber of Commerce, and the Hotel/Motel Association of Greater Dallas—all have issued statements in praise of the project. Les Tanaka, executive vice president of the Hotel/Motel Association, went so far as to declare that because of Pioneer Plaza, we Dallasites already “have become the envy of everyone in the tourism industry, throughout the country.”

And those most intimately involved in the project—Jack Beckman, president of the Mesquite Arena, home of the Mesquite Championship Rodeo, who is co-chairing the project for the Dallas Parks Foundation, and Robert Summers, the Glen Rose artist who is creating the steers and their herders—say it's time for Dallas to dismount its cultural high horse and admit at last that, yes, it's part of Texas.

“Dallas has always tried to be the New York City of the West, the most sophisticated city in the West, and there's nothing wrong with that,” Mr. Summers says. “But it's a mind set. It's a facade. When we were kids we called it ‘play like.' The fact remains that Texas was started on cattle. And Dallas is part of Texas. What hurts me more than anything people are saying about the art is that people don't want to admit their heritage. And this
is
the heritage of Dallas, whether they like it or not.”

Besides, adds Mr. Beckman, Pioneer Plaza isn't really about art anyway. “This isn't just a piece of art, sitting out there for people to see its artistic value,” he says. “This is supposed to look like a real cattle drive, not something somebody made up. Those cows are supposed to look like damned old longhorn cows or steers or whatever. You can call it art or you can call it crap. Either way, that's just your opinion. To me, it's sort of a ghost of our past, telling where we came from. And it'll be at the front door of the Convention Center, where many, many people from all over the world are coming to visit.”

According to the Parks Foundation, that's why Dallas—the part of it in front of the Convention Center, anyway—is suddenly shucking its snooty cosmopolitan pose and becoming part of cowboy Texas: because Texas is what the tourists who come to Dallas want to see.

In 1990, says Paula Peters, executive director of the Parks Foundation, the Convention Center and the Convention and Visitors Bureau conducted a survey of just about everybody who attended a convention in Dallas. “It was something like two million people,” she says, “and they asked them some questions about Dallas: What did you come here to see? What did you expect to see? What didn't you like? What did you expect to see that you didn't see? What would you like to see more of?

“The overwhelming response they got was: Where is the West? Not only Where is the West? but Where is Dallas history? Did the city spring fullblown as a twentieth-century city? Was it constructed in 1960? Where are the historic sites? Where's the story of how Dallas came into being? And that was the seed of Pioneer Plaza.”

A few years earlier, the City Council had hoped to lease the parking lot as the site for a new convention hotel. But when the oil bust came and the Dallas economy took a dive, the city's negotiations with developer Vance Miller and the Marriott Corp. fell apart. So when the master plan for expansion of the Convention Center was completed in 1989, the four-acre plot was designated a green space.

Some critics of Pioneer Plaza have claimed that Mr. Crow and the Dallas Parks Foundation offered to develop the site as a means of preventing a hotel being built there in the future—a hotel that would compete with the Loews Anatole, partly owned by Mr. Crow's family, and with the Hyatt Regency, which is owned by the Woodbine Development Corp., whose president is John Scovell, whose wife, Diane Scovell, is co-chair, with Jack Beckman, of the Pioneer Plaza project.

Mr. Crow (who was in Russia and unavailable for comment) has denied this. “There should be a beautiful entry to the Convention Center,” he told reporters last May, after a briefing at which the City Council thanked him officially for developing Pioneer Plaza. “That's what started us putting a sculpture out there.”

Ms. Peters denies it, too. “The city turned to the Parks Foundation and asked if we would help them develop that green space,” she says. “The hotel-motel tax is being used to retire the indebtedness of the Convention Center expansion, but there was no money available for any improvements to that site. They needed us to come up with some private funding.”

In 1991, during the early discussion with city bureaucrats and politicians about just how the plaza was going to be developed, apparently little was said about sculpture, and nothing about cowboys or steers. “The original proposal did not include an art project associated with it,” says A.C. Gonzalez, the assistant city manager in charge of the Convention Center. “The first concept drawings had to do with landscaping work, a water project, and at the time of the actual presentation before the council for the contract, there was some thought about it being an art project, a sculpture or what-not, but nothing had really been decided.”

However, Carl Lewis, a member of the Public Art Committee, says Ms. Peters broached the idea of a cattle drive sculpture to the group around January 1992, before the contract was signed. “We all chimed in,” he says, “and our response was that there are already a number of projects that have to do with cattle in other cities. Besides, the history of Dallas is not one of cattle.

“It came past us again later in the form of a proposal.” he says. “We asked to see a maquette (a small model), and we asked to see a resume of the artist and other things. There was a certain amount of information that we needed in order to make an appropriate assessment as to whether this was a viable project. The Parks Foundation kept promising they would have a maquette soon, but they kept putting us off. Then we read in the newspaper and in the Parks Foundation newsletter that the contract with the city had been signed (by the city manager's office) and the landscaping was under way. I said, ‘Wait a minute. How can you have a contract if the project hasn't gone through the appropriate review process?' ”

The contract that the city signed with the Dallas Parks Foundation on March 26, 1992, says Mr. Gonzalez, “was simply to develop that site. There were no details in it about what kind of development Pioneer Plaza was going to be, and no specific mention of any artwork.

“For that reason, there really wasn't anything to take before the Public Art Committee or the Cultural Affairs Commission,” he says. “The contract anticipated, however, that if there was going to be some art feature, that feature would be coordinated with the Public Art Committee and the Cultural Affairs Commission.”