The River Road

By John Norris

In Mercedes, Texas, tensions are high during the summer of 1963. When Alton Bakers father accepts a job in Brownsville that comes with a long daily commute, he invites Alton to share the ride, allowing him to change schools. Alton, an intelligent, friendly high school sophomore, accepts the challenge, and it is not long before the commute brings father and son closer together.

As Alton acclimates to the new school, he secretly decides to try out for the track teama decision that eventually leads him to befriend the only Negro high school student in town. After his interest shifts to long-distance running, a retired coach assists him, encouraging him to end his daily commute with a long run along a river road. Mid-spring in great running shape, Alton shows up at track tryouts with his Negro friend, where they must compete for respect and acceptance on the team.

The River Road creates a vivid picture of small town life in south Texas in the 1960s, as a teenager establishes a loving bond with his father and marks the beginning of his journey to becoming a real person with independent ideas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Sep 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781480802711

John Norris

John Norris is a freelance military historian who writes regular monthly columns for several specialist titles, ranging from vehicle profiles to reenactment events. He has written fifteen books on various military historical subjects, most recently Fix Bayonets! (due to be published by Pen & Sword).

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Copyright © 2013 John M. Norris.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-0270-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-0271-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013916675

Archway Publishing rev. date: 9/26/2013

Contents

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Afterword

Dedication

The River Road was written as a memorial to the author’s father, Clayborn Norris, a tough but loving and fair disciplinarian who guided the author through the intricacies involved with becoming a man. Although fictional, the story is based on several real events that occurred during the author’s high school years as he and Clayborn undertook a commute from their home in Brownsville to the city of Mercedes.

The writing of the story was made possible by the support and understanding of the author’s beautiful wife of 32 years. Of those 32 years, 18 were spent living apart due to occupational realities. Having the support and encouragement to return home and take up semi-retirement after 46 years in the education profession allowed the author the luxury of unfettered think time which is necessary in any creative endeavor. Without such time, the story would still be just a day dream.

Chapter 1

O n a pleasant, clear with bright blue skies, shirt-sleeve kind of an afternoon in April of 1991, the kind of delicious day that is common to Deep South Texas in the spring, I pulled my rental car into the driveway of my old family home in Mercedes where my mother and father had lived together up until the day before. I carefully maneuvered the car to one side so that I did not block my mom’s car in case she needed to run an errand. Earlier that afternoon, I had flown into Harlingen, the closest regional airport, and picked up a rental car for the twenty mile drive up the valley to Mercedes. Mom had called last night to my home in Oklahoma to tell me that my father had passed away that afternoon from a massive heart attack and my presence in Mercedes was sorely needed.

As the only son of Clay Baker, I, Alton Baker, also known as Brodie around the house, was now considered to be the man of the family and was looked to for support, guidance and assistance at this time of crisis. This was primarily due to my mom’s old fashioned beliefs in the roles of men and women, where the husband is the head of the family and the wife is subservient, although there were times in her and dad’s relationship when she was assertive and anything but subservient. Growing up, I didn’t always agree with those defined roles but with my tendency to keep quiet, I didn’t make too many waves. My two older sisters had also been notified of dad’s passing, and they would arrive later that evening. Either of them could have taken over as the man of the family and that is meant as a compliment. They were both very capable of handling life events as they had each proven repeatedly through dealing with crises in their own families.

After greeting mom with a tight hug and briefly sitting with her on the old sofa while we talked about dad’s last living day on earth, she apologized to me and told me that she was going to have to leave the house for a bit because she had managed to get a hair appointment that afternoon with her current stylist so that she would look decent at dad’s funeral scheduled for later in the week. I was not particularly surprised at her priorities. As she was leaving the house, she said to me, You’ll want to go into your father’s office where he has been working on a surprise for you. He really seemed to enjoy the time he spent creating and designing it. I’ll be back soon. The girls will arrive later this evening, but for the next few hours, you’ll have the house to yourself. Starting tomorrow, we’ll have large numbers of relatives and friends dropping by to pay their respects, so enjoy the quiet while you can. And then she was out the door leaving me alone in a very quiet house, a house that was full of dad’s presence and deep memories of my times with him as we negotiated life’s byways.

Earlier that spring, I and my wife, Amy, along with our two kids had driven down to be with dad as he celebrated his eighty-second birthday. At that visit, it was obvious that he was slowing down but also obvious that he was enjoying his retirement after 50 years of work in the education profession. Mom was in her late seventies and was in relatively good health although frequently she said to me and my sisters, Now I know that you think I’m healthy, but I’m not. I’ve got problems that you don’t know about. When she would say that, we would often just roll our eyes and move on. Unfortunately for both mom and dad, my sisters and I had recently begun to see signs of dementia that we hoped was attributable to nothing but old age.

Due to our earlier visit with dad on his birthday, Amy and the kids elected not to return for the funeral which I knew would not set well with my mom. But Amy was a school teacher at our home in Enid, Oklahoma. Being close to the end of the school year, both she and the kids felt they couldn’t afford the time away from school which they knew dad would have agreed with.

After a few moments of sitting there and thinking about dad, I made my way down the hall and back to his office to see if I could figure out the surprise. Turning on the ceiling light, I immediately noticed three framed shadow boxes made of polished walnut and hung on the wall in front of his desk. I sat down in his old wooden office chair and smiled as his surprise became evident. Each shadow box was roughly fourteen inches by eighteen inches. It was obvious that a lot of care had gone into the creation of the boxes so that they were perfect or at least as perfect as an amateur woodworker could make them. I was not surprised at the quality of the framing, as this is something that dad had mastered in the years after his retirement.

The background matt in each shadow box was made of lustrous, golden velvet. A brass plate on the front of each of the boxes bore my name, Alton Baker, and a school year’s designation, 1963-64, 1964-65, and 1965-66. Across the top of each matt in an arc was a dark brown banner with Brownsville High School Golden Eagles, Track and Field printed in white. Each box displayed three medallions suspended from ribbons. Beneath each medallion was a small brass plate identifying the track meet where the medallion had been won. For each year, the District 10A meet was on the left, the South Texas Regional meet was in the center and the Texas State meet was on the right. These were all medals that I had been awarded for the one mile run during my high school years. I then noticed that in the shadow box on the left, 1963-64, the three medallions included district and regional but instead of a medal for the state, there hung by a ribbon the hood ornament from a 1948 Plymouth Belvedere.

As I sat there in the quiet solitude of dad’s office and thought of him working on the shadow boxes, tears began to slowly trickle down my cheeks. Each of the medals represented a major achievement by me, but I knew that even though it was me who was awarded the medal, it could never have happened without the support of dad. Of all of the medals, the 1948 Plymouth hood ornament was the most significant and meaningful to me. It represented the 1963-64 school year, the pivotal year in my ascendency to adulthood. Prior to that year, I had just existed and gone through the motions, but in that year I began to find out who I was and that laid the foundation that guided me for the rest of my life.

I allowed myself the indulgence of a good cry as I embraced the reality that he was gone. When I was able to get my emotions in check and the tears stopped, my thoughts and memories drifted back to the summer of 1963 when all of this had its beginning…..

As a fifteen year old adolescent, I and my family lived in Mercedes, a town of about 15,000 people, located in the middle of the Magic Valley, that area of South Texas close to the Gulf of Mexico and bordering the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. That part of Texas which we called home was separated from Mexico only by the meandering Rio Grande River that slowly makes its way south and east to its mouth where it flows into the Gulf of Mexico. Through elementary school, I learned that the Valley was the designation for the rich, alluvial plain that encompasses both sides of the river starting about a hundred miles upriver from the Gulf. As children we were taught to sing …Yes we love our valley home, way down upon the Rio Grande; land of yours and land of mine; land of the palm trees and the bright sunshine…

We were taught that the delta of the Rio Grande was formed over eons of time as rich silt from upriver was carried downriver and eventually deposited onto the adjacent lands by the annual spring floods. This siltation resulted in some of the finest farm lands in that part of the world and formed the basis for most of the economy of the Valley and the livelihood of most of my friend’s families. The rich soil, when coupled with the very mild winters that rarely recorded freezes, made it possible for the creation of extensive farm lands on both sides of the river that were used then and now to grow a variety of vegetables (tomatoes, onions, lettuce and melons), citrus fruits (oranges, lemons and grapefruit) and vast acreages of cotton. Most of the vegetables were packed into refrigerated trucks and driven north for grocery chains and food processing plants. The high quality cotton was ginned and compressed into bales and shipped out of Port Brownsville on large ships bound for fabric mills in the north and overseas markets.

I had become acquainted with all of the towns of the valley through visiting relatives and the occasional trip to find some special piece of merchandise that mom or dad just had to have. Mercedes was in the middle of a string of small farming communities that sprang up along the ninety miles or so of the Valley starting with Mission at the upper west and ending with Brownsville about twenty miles from the coast. Across the river from Brownsville was the large city of Matamoros.

One of the required classes for all Texas school children was the history of Texas where some of my teachers really got into teaching us about our heritage. We learned that the Valley played an important role in the Civil War, primarily through the production of cotton. We studied about one city, the Port of Baghdad, which was located at the mouth of the Rio Grande, downriver from Brownsville, and in its heyday was a thriving community of about 15,000. It boasted of a bustling port, a railroad line, saloons and bordellos that rivaled the party houses of Galveston, and hot baths and barbers to take care of the multitude of sailors who made short stops at the port. Baghdad’s importance came from the cotton that was a major contributor to the financing of the confederacy. Following the Civil War, the port city declined along with the demand for cotton and eventually was completely destroyed by a hurricane in 1889 and never rebuilt. In my teen years, my friends and I used to search for the remains of plantations that could be found at various sites along the river. We also used to search for bullets, buttons and other metal objects that were left over from the final battle of the Civil War that was fought near Brownsville.

As far back as I can remember, my family had lived in the same small, World War II vintage home on the south side of Mercedes. Mom (Irene) and dad (Clay) had moved to the valley in 1941 to be closer to mom’s parents in Weslaco and her sisters who were scattered up and down the Valley. Dad was raised in Mississippi and had family there, but also had a sister in Mission and a distant cousin in Alamo. Mom had trained to be a nurse at Scott and White Hospital in Temple and upon settling in the valley, was hired as a Hidalgo County nurse working primarily with migrant farm families who moved through the county following the growing season of the crops. Dad was a life-long educator, who, following his initial job of teaching Sociology at the local high school, had for several years served as the principal of the Mercedes Junior High School. He was also well known as a gifted choir director and had gained a strong following of singers from his time as the high school choir director and the choral leader for the Mercedes First Methodist Church.

In the summer of 1963, my oldest sister Marilyn was living at home but would soon be returning to Southwestern University in Georgetown where she was a Junior. Because of our age difference, Marilyn and I were not close, at least not as close as we became later when we both grew up and figured out who we were. I was however, quite close to Rick, Marilyn’s long-time boyfriend who in many respects took over the role of the older brother whom I did not have, but always wanted. He also became my first brother-in-law when he and Marilyn got married shortly after they finished college. Rick was studying to be a preacher and Marilyn wanted to be a teacher. Rick grew up in Mercedes and loved to fish which I believe was the main reason that he and I got to