Before Texas Changed: A Fort Worth Boyhood

Chapter 1

I. Fathers aren’t supposed to die. At least not mine. But there he was, lying peacefully in a casket, this man who, through many ups and downs and changes of life, had been my father. His hands, touching at the fingertips, looked a lot like mine. So did his face, that face I had seen in so many expressions and from which had often come one of the world’s best laughs. Now he was still. So still. “Doesn’t he look good?” said my mother. “He looks so handsome .” She always thought that. “No doubt about whose father he was,” someone said over my shoulder. Two days earlier, breaking several speed limits, I had raced to a Cleburne hospital, run through the emergency room door, and announced to a nurse: “I’m here to see Rupert Murph.” She looked at me for a few seconds and then asked: “Are you his son?” “Yes.” “I’m sorry.” That’s all she said. “I’m sorry.” Anyone who had not known him had missed something. When he entered the world in 1918, the guns of the Civil War had been silent for a little more than fifty years, but those of World War I were blazing in Europe. He was given quite a name—Rupert Quentin Murph. His mother said a hog salesman named Rupert came to the house one day, and she liked the name so much she gave it to her next-born son. He, in turn, passed it to me as a middle name. His story was the story of the early Texas oil fields. His father, Richard 1 Rudolph, was a driller in the days of the wooden rigs when wells were drilled so close together that the derrick legs sometimes overlapped and when, to fire someone, you had to be prepared to whip him physically. On more than one occasion he had done just that. In some ways Richard Rudolph Murph was a visitor from another world. He carried with him ancestors who had come from Europe in the eighteenth century, who had fought in the Revolutionary War and then cleared and plowed their way westward . He brought with him hills and trails and songs and stories. Somewhere inside him lived not only the people he had met along the way, but also those who ran in his blood and even many adventurous spirits about whom he had heard. They were all there: fighters , preachers, farmers, hunters, clerks. Early America was rowdily represented in Grandpa Murph. His fortunes went up and down, mainly down. That way of life took its toll. By the time I knew him he had lost an eye in an accident , wore a glass one in its place, and walked with a limp. But I remember him as some kind of giant. He and my grandmother lived in a small, weather-beaten frame house outside of Gladewater where he had a job as a watchman for an adjacent oil field. The derricks were long gone, and the field was full of pumps that rocked up and down around the clock. Memories of sleeping there are memories of lying in an old double bed next to an open window, hearing the pumps clicking all night. Richard Rudolph Murph was six-foot-four, rawboned, had high, prominent cheekbones, and seemed to love life. The tales about him were many. One day during lunch break, so the story goes, a fellow oil-field worker dropped a lizard down the back of his shirt. My grandfather chased the poor fellow up a tree, got an axe, and chopped the tree down with him still in it. I never heard whether the culprit survived or in what condition. I was also told that one night someone approached Grandpa Murph in a car and would not dim the headlights, so he made a U-turn, chased down the driver, pulled b e f o r e t e x a s c h a n g e d 2 him out of the car, and punched him. Something about cars and drivers got to him. Apparently, on more than one occasion, when someone behind him honked a horn, wanting him to move after the light turned green, he stopped his engine, got out of his car, approached the honker, and asked, “Now, what was it you wanted?” While Grandpa Murph’s world was rough, boisterous...