Generations and Other True Stories (7 page)

The Parks Foundation already had begun its search for an artist. After conferring with galleries and collectors of western art, it had put together a list of some twenty sculptors who had done monumental bronze pieces. “We were committed to hiring an area artist,” Ms. Peters says. “We went in person to look at the works of eight artists, and finally narrowed it down to two.” Robert Summers, whose monumental works include a statue of Byron Nelson at Las Colinas and one of John Wayne at the Orange County Airport in California, kept coming up on everybody's list, she says.

The foundation also hired historian A.C. Greene to write a report on the early history of Dallas, with emphasis on the trails that ran through the town in its early days. The gist of Mr. Greene's report was that Dallas became an important town because it stood at the junction of several trails that carried settlers, freight, and cattle to and fro in all directions across the Texas frontier.

John Neely Bryan, Dallas' first settler, had reached his new home on the east bank of the Trinity via an old north-south Indian trail called Coffee's Bend Road. An east-west trail called the Kickapoo Trace ran along what is now Commerce Street. Another north-south route called the Preston Trail ran along what is now Preston Road and brought thousands of settlers across the Red River into North Texas.

But the foundation was less interested in the trails that brought settlers into Dallas than in the Shawnee Trail, a trace that South Texas drovers used to herd cattle to markets in Missouri before the Civil War. The Shawnee originated in Brownsville, came north through Austin and Waco, crossed the Trinity near the present Hyatt Regency, went through downtown Dallas, and continued northward along Preston Road to the Red. The first herds moved along the trail in the 1850s, and until the opening of the war, it was the only route to the northern cattle markets.

But its fame was brief, and its role in the history of the West—and the history of Dallas—was minor. Cattle raisers in Missouri, whose more expensive livestock had to compete with the cheap Texas cattle on the market, claimed that the longhorns were infecting their cattle with Texas fever, a disease carried by ticks, which apparently didn't affect the wild longhorns but was fatal to more domestic stock. After a number of armed confrontations between Texas drovers and Missouri farmers, the Missouri markets were all but closed to Texas cattle.

Furthermore, the Texas cowboy hadn't yet become a folk hero. It wasn't until after the Confederate surrender, when war-impoverished Texans began moving cattle up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, Dodge City, and the other Kansas railheads, that the cowboy grew in the American imagination into a romantic knight of the prairie.

“Dallas had a cattle trail before Fort Worth did,” Mr. Greene says, “but by the time the Chisholm Trail opened in 1867, all the cattle and everything else had moved west. That's why Fort Worth, and not Dallas, became Cowtown.”

Instead, Dallas became the mercantile and financial center for cotton-farming East Texas and, later, the burgeoning Texas oil business.

So when a cousin called Robert Summers in Glen Rose and told him that Dallas was about to commission a trail drive sculpture for downtown, his reaction was: “Are you sure it's
Dallas?”
And when his cousin sent him an August 1992 newspaper article describing the project, he said: “This must be a misprint. Three horses and riders and
seventy
longhorns?”

Not long after the article appeared, Jack Morris of the Altermann & Morris Art Gallery in Dallas, which represents Mr. Summers, called and asked him if he would be interested in the job. He said, “Sure.” And last fall, Mr. Morris and his partner, Tony Altermann, landed the commission for their client.

“When I went to Trammell Crow's office, an architect had designed a scale model of the plot,” Mr. Summers remembers. “They already had a bunch of little half-inch steers arranged on it like an army marching across a flat field. They asked me, ‘What do you think of this?'

“And I said, ‘That's probably the most uninteresting thing I've ever seen.'

“And they said, ‘Well, what would
you
do?'

“They had some buckets of sand there, so I dumped one of them on the desk and started making a hill out of it. We spent two hours playing with the sand and the steers, and they took pictures of it, and that was it.”

Mr. Summers went home to Glen Rose to start work on his maquettes. He says he would prefer not to have to assemble the steers from interchangeable parts, but the cost of seventy individually sculpted steers would be prohibitive.

When Mr. Beckman presented the maquettes to the Public Art Committee, the steerhockey hit the fan.

“The first reason was safety,” says Sharon Leeber, a Dallas art consultant and a member of the Public Art Committee. “They said they would blunt the horns of the steers so people won't be impaled on them, but the sculpture is certainly going to cause a safety problem. You can have massive internal injuries from falling on anything blunt. The other thing is people falling off of them. What are they going to fall onto? Prairie grass? Mud? First, they said the steers were going to be a storybook thing, with kids climbing all over them and getting their pictures taken. Then they said, ‘No, nobody is going to be allowed to climb on them.' Well, who's going to enforce that? And if, during some Texas-OU weekend, a drunk falls off of one of those steers and breaks his neck, who's going to be liable?

“The second reason was the maintenance cost,” she says. “The Dallas Parks Foundation was predicting between five thousand dollars and ten thousand dollars, basically for washing and waxing the steers twice a year. That didn't include any repair or any other maintenance that might have to be done. So nobody knows what the maintenance really will be. And the money has to come out of the Convention Center budget.”

She's talking about why the Public Art Committee voted not to recommend the project to the Cultural Affairs Commission. “We also had some questions about the manner in which they chose the artist and the landscape architect, Slaney Santana. We found difficulty with quite a bit of what they were proposing. Prairie grass and some of the other things they were proposing were not in keeping with the overall view of the space. We felt they didn't fit an urban space.

“And fourth,” she says, “the project didn't meet the aesthetic standards that had been set for Dallas. We saw a maquette. I can't remember which one it was. It was not a good maquette. I think it was a steer we saw. I've blocked it out of my mind very successfully. The man basically is not a good sculptor. I've seen his John Wayne piece in Orange County, and half the town considers it a laughingstock. Why do we need seventy steers? If it's really good art, we don't need seventy of anything. A good artist would be capable of making a statement with seventeen or twenty or whatever.”

Finally, she says, “This is not Dallas' history. Steers have nothing to do with Dallas. If Mr. Crow wants something like this to happen in Dallas, none of us is opposed to him buying a space downtown and putting that project on it. But from my standpoint as a citizen of Dallas, it's not a good thing to put in front of the Convention Center. I don't think this is what Dallas really
wants
as its image. Years ago, Dallas
fought
this image. Immense energy was dedicated to keeping Fort Worth Fort Worth and Dallas Dallas. There was a huge effort to make sure you knew where you were.”

So the Public Art Committee was surprised and dismayed when its parent body, the Cultural Affairs Commission, voted on March 18 to recommend that the City Council approve the Pioneer Plaza project, cowboys, steers, and all. “If my memory is correct, that's the first time we've been overturned during my five years on the committee,” says Carl Lewis.

The Public Art Committee is a subcommittee of the Cultural Affairs Commission. Both are advisory. The City Council isn't required to follow their recommendations. Says Phil Jones, director of the Office of Cultural Affairs, “A city ordinance provides that the two bodies will review and make recommendations regarding any proposed donations of artwork to the city. In essence, that's what happened. The project was reviewed. The Public Art Committee had concerns about it. The Cultural Affairs Commission reviewed the recommendations of the committee, looked at a couple of maquettes, heard city staff address other concerns that had been raised, and then voted to recommend approval. This process fulfilled the foundation's responsibility to confer with the two bodies. Pioneer Plaza is the responsibility of the Parks Foundation now.”

In any case, Mr. Jones says, Pioneer Plaza already was a “done deal.” The contract had been signed before either advisory body could vote on the art proposal. A negative vote by the Cultural Affairs Commission wouldn't have affected its validity.

Dallas sculptor Greg Metz doesn't buy that argument. He and two other artists, Rowena Elkin and Harrison Evans, filed a lawsuit in Denton County in June, claiming that the city “illegally implemented the Pioneer Plaza Public Art Donation Project… by failing to initiate the project through the Public Art Committee and to secure its approval for location, design, and commission of the artist.”

The three are asking a Denton County judge to declare the Pioneer Plaza contract null and void. They filed the suit in Denton, Mr. Metz says, hoping it might be concluded there more quickly than in a Dallas County court. Since a tiny portion of the city is in Denton County, a court there may have jurisdiction in the case.

Mr. Metz also is collecting signatures on a petition demanding that the City Council terminate the Pioneer Plaza project.

Although Mr. Metz is the one who dubbed the project “Frankensteer,” he says his objections have nothing to do with Mr. Summers. “Artists believe that every artist should get his due,” he says. “We believe that every artist is entitled to create what he wants to create. But I and anyone else who wants to give artworks to the city have to go through the process. When you go before the Public Art Committee, you have to have a model, you have to have specifics, you have to have letters of recommendation for the artist, you have to have the funding, you have to have all kinds of stuff. But Trammell Crow didn't. The process was abused. And when you abuse what little advocacy the visual arts have with this city, you abuse every artist in town, because you disempower them. It sends a message that if you have enough money and you want to do something that might not get past the Public Art Committee, you can do it another way.”

Jack Beckman acknowledges that the path his steers took through City Hall may have been a bit off the beaten trail, but he makes no apologies.

“There are people appointed who appoint other people who sort of sit around and listen to other arts groups,” he says. “I call them artsy-fartsies. And we sort of bypassed the artsy-fartsies. Probably at first we didn't do it deliberately. But this thing went on for a year before anybody from the arts groups said anything. Then I went and visited with the Public Art Committee and they were ticked off because we didn't consult with them. But the City Council approved it. We've got an absolutely ironclad contract. We did it in open meeting. I don't know what the artsy-fartsies are squawking about.”

Then he adds: “The longhorn cattle drive was a fact of our past. I don't know why anybody would be ashamed of it. I don't think most of the people of Dallas are. I'll bet you that when the thing is installed, all those people who are against it now will run and hide. Or they'll jump on the bandwagon and say, ‘Oh, yeah, I was for this all along.' ”

Well, it worked for Tex Schramm.

August 1993

I was pretty familiar with the musical career of Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys back when they were playing at the Lone Star Cafe in New York and recording their songs. Many of the songs were funny, but they were never
merely
funny. They always had a satirical bite to them
.

The same is true of Kinky's mystery novels. I've read them all because they're fun to read. They're perfect airplane books—books that are entertaining and make time pass quickly and don't tax the brain much. But Kinky's books have an edge to them, too, which puts them above most airplane books
.

I had wanted to meet the Kinkster for a long time. Finally I did
.

Kinky in Character

The Kinkster deplanes at D/FW holding the remains of a used Honduran cigar that he has been holding since Chicago. He greets me with a handshake that might be the secret sign of recognition of the Odd Fellows or the Knights of Pythias. It requires the clasping of hands as in the classic soul handshake, but with Kinky somehow snapping thumb and middle finger together at the same time, an impressive feat of digital dexterity that duplicates the sound of knuckles cracking.

“That's the Kinkster's good-luck handshake,” he says.

Then he gives me a guitar pick with his name on it. “It's a Kinkster good-luck plectrum,” he says. “That particular one was used by Roger Miller when he was writing
England Swings
. You may expect your good luck to begin within forty-eight hours.”

So this is Kinky Friedman, legendary band leader, singer, composer, author, amateur sleuth of uncanny skills, appreciator of cats….

The Kinkster's dressed in black jeans, black boots, a black belt heavy with silver conchos, a black tuxedo jacket, a purple shirt, and a black cowboy hat adorned with a silver band and several feathers. One of the feathers, he points out, looks like two feathers that have sprouted from the same quill. “The feather of the emu,” he says, “the only bird that can do that.”

We saunter to the baggage carousel in company with Lenore Markowitz, who calls herself an “author escort.” She has been hired to ferry Kinky about the Dallas area in her Suburban during his tornado-like tour of local media and bookstores, flogging his new mystery novel,
Armadillos and Old Lace
.