Essays & Stories
Tell Laura I Love Her
Crossroads in America
by Rex Weyler
We rolled past Rattlesnake Raceway into the West Texas town of Midland, and the memories rose in waves with the hot air currents from the red earth. The crossed destinies of 37 years pressed on the windows of Gregg Hurt’s white Chevrolet Trailblazer. Outside on the mesquite plains: pumpjacks, the unofficial logos of the oil fields arrayed like a civilization of giant, black mosquitoes probing the earth for its black fluids. In Midland, everything is connected to oil.
Midland, Texas takes its name from the honor of being midway between Fort Worth and El Paso. The dusty town is the executive center for the Permian Basin oil and gas region, comprising one-fifth of America’s petroleum reserves. My father, a petroleum engineer, worked in one of the office towers overlooking the desert plateau. For Gregg and me it was nothing more than our old hometown, where we went to high school, kissed our first girlfriends, and drove our first cars. Gregg was the pole-vaulter on our school track team. I ran the mile. We road together on buses to Pecos and Abilene and won medals for our exploits. We were the Robert E. Lee Rebels. In the summers, he worked in his father’s grocery store, and I work in these oil fields, laying pipeline past anthills and horned toads.
Gregg had convinced me to come to this multi-year high school reunion themed “Celebrating America.” When I graduated in 1966, I left for college in California and had not returned in thirty-seven years. I feared that my old classmates would resent me. Not only did I leave Texas, but I dodged the draft, became an anti-war activist, took illicit drugs in exotic lands, and fled to Canada. In the ultra-patriotic atmosphere of America, 2003, I thought I’d be an anomaly, seen as a libertarian traitor.
Gregg, who earned a service medal in Vietnam, didn’t hold any of this against me. “I’m apolitical,” he told me in the car as we drove across the Texas plains. “All I did in Vietnam was shuttle dignitaries like Bob Hope and Gerald Ford around in a Saberliner.” After his stint in the Air Force, Hurt went to work for Continental Airlines. He now flew the world’s most sophisticated commercial airliner, the high-tech Boeing 777. We drove into Midland on the southeast side of town past the El Zarape bar with green paint peeling in the sun. Gregg pointed out his old pole vault pit as we rolled past San Jacinto Junior High School, where George Walker Bush played baseball and first met Laura Welch.
By the time we were in high school, the future president was off to Phillips Academy in Andover, Maryland, but Laura was our classmate at Robert E. Lee High. She was a friend of Gregg’s older sister, Betsy. The Welch’s were a modest but successful family in Midland. Laura’s father was a residential home contractor. Laura was genteel, cute, and popular. She loved to dance to the Drifters at her home on Humble Avenue, named after the oil company. Laura Welch was a top student, on the yearbook staff, on the Student Council, and a homecoming queen nominee. She liked to drive around with her friends in her family’s brand new 1963 Chevrolet Impala.
Laura’s idyllic teenage life, however, was shattered two days after her seventeenth birthday, when she ran a stop sign and hit a car driven by her classmate Michael Douglas. The accident occurred just after 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday night, November 6, 1963. According to friends, Laura left in the car, upset about something that had happened at home, and picked up her friend Judy Dykes a few blocks away. They drove north out of town and turned east on Farm Road 868, which we called “The Loop,” the road to the good parking spots among the mesquite bushes. At the corner of Big Springs, the highway that continues north to Lubbock, Laura ran the stop sign and slammed into the right front of Michael’s southbound 1962 Corvair. The police filed a report but issued no citation.
Laura sat stunned, being treated for minor injuries at Midland Memorial Hospital, when she heard that Michael had died at the scene from a broken neck. She was devastated. At school, students talked of a relationship between Laura and Michael. Stories circulated that Douglas was Laura Welch’s “fiancé” or her “boyfriend,” but these secrets remained unknown to any but Laura’s closest friends, who had the grace to never confirm the stories. Years later, Regan Gammon, Laura’s confidant since they were young girls, would only say that Michael was “a very close friend of Laura’s.”
Douglas was on the track team, but I remembered him as a member of the “Rebel Brigade,” the coolest studs in the school, the boys who drove the jeep with the huge Confederate flag at football games. Douglas was a leader among the leaders, smart, handsome, and kind to everyone.
The tragic accident overwhelmed Laura. She did not return to school until after Christmas. When she did return to complete her senior year, she never mentioned the accident, even among her friends, and no one brought it up in her presence.
Breakfast in America
Gregg and I stayed at his parents’ home near our old high school. We had breakfast around the kitchen table with his parents Roger and Roberta Hurt. Some of my fears about being a liberal outcast were assuaged by Mrs. Hurt, who thumbed the morning paper and complained about the mayor in Hempstead, Texas, who had refused to celebrate emancipation day for Texas blacks, June 19, the day in 1865, when Union General George Granger arrived in Galveston and read President Lincoln’s proclamation. Roger and Roberta Hurt, I soon realized, were a living example of domestic political tolerance, he a Republican, she a Democrat. Their political preferences, however, did not tarnish their marital devotion.
“In 1959,” Mrs. Hurt told me, “Gregg won a basketball shooting contest and had his picture taken by the newspaper with the other winners, but the picture didn’t appear. I called the Midland Reporter-Telegram to ask why. The editor told me straight out it was because a black kid was in the picture.”
“Here we go,” said Mr. Hurt.
“They didn’t run pictures of the black brides either,” said Mrs. Hurt. When Gregg and I were in high school in the 1960s, Midland remained strictly segregated. The blacks went to George Washington Carver High School south of the train tracks. Even now, in 2003, the Carver students had not been invited to “Celebrate America” along with the two white high schools.
A CNN newscast that morning featured stories of American troop casualties in Iraq. Mrs. Hurt considered the president “and his henchmen,” to be scoundrels, and the war to be a grab for the oil fields. Mr. Hurt believed George Bush stood up for the conservative values of America. Old friends in Midland remember young George Bush as an average baseball player, but clever at trading baseball cards. The future president wrote to famous players, got autographs on the cards, and sold them at high prices to his friends. “The values Midland holds near to its heart,” Bush once told reporters – hard work, faith, and optimism – “are the same ones I hold near to my heart.”
The family with an international banking fortune relocated from New Haven to Texas in 1947, where George H.W.’s offshore drilling business boomed. By 1959, they had moved from Midland to Houston. Young George W. got into Yale with dismal SAT scores, avoided Vietnam by signing up for the Texas Air National Guard, but went AWOL and failed to complete the last two years of his commitment. He returned to Midland in 1977, and leveraged a $17,000 investment from his trust fund into an $848,560 stock deal a few weeks before his company, Harken Energy Corporation, announced a $23.2 million quarterly loss, and the stock crashed, a scenario very similar to the later Enron scandal. After G.H.W. Bush deregulated the banks, George’s brothers – Neil in Denver and Jeb in Florida – socked away millions in defaulted loans. The Savings and Loan debacle of the 1980s was the largest theft in the history of the world: $1.4 trillion, still being paid for by the American taxpayers.
Someone who did embody the hard-working spirit of Midland, however, was Tommy Franks, who led the US military mission in Iraq. Tommy Ray, the only child of a construction worker and seamstress, was an inconspicuous lineman on the Lee High School football team. Classmates recall that Tommy “went about his business and never bothered anyone.” He liked to work on his Chevelle, listen to Elvis, and hunt doves. Mary Ann Ross, now Ryerson, a friend of Gregg’s sister, remembered Franks as “quiet, hard-working, and serious. He wasn’t dumb. Tommy always got a good mark.” After high school, he attended the University of Texas but dropped out and joined the army. He earned three Purple Hearts in Vietnam and entered an officer’s degree program at the University of Texas. It was Franks who epitomized the diligent Midlander who made something extraordinary from a modest beginning.
When Bush assumed the presidency, he handpicked many of his aides from his Midland friends. Dennis Grubb, a folk musician during his days at Lee High School, became known as “The Minister of Music” around the White House when he produced Bush’s Inaugural events. Grubb’s son, Darren, worked for Bush’s Commerce Secretary Donald Evans, a former drilling engineer in Midland and Bush drinking buddy, who raised a record $100 million for George Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. Susi Marinis from Midland married Evans and did George Bush’s laundry. Midland, a dusty town in the West Texas desert, is the regime’s home base, a sort of Tikrit of America.
My fears of being an outsider were eased at lunch with my graduating class of 1966. No one wanted to discuss politics, argue the merits of the war, or dissect points of view about “Celebrating America.” Everyone just wanted to reminisce and show pictures of their grandchildren. We heard heroic narratives of disastrous marriages, addictions, and surviving cancer. Briefly, we moved below the surface, to the parts of our lives we ignore in polite chatter, the interesting grudges and love affairs, contradictions and remorse. And the dreams: “I want to write a book.” “I want to take a group of kids to Europe.”
People wanted to know why I lived in Canada. This was a polite way of inquiring whether or not I was a draft resister, but most of my friends already knew my politics. A member of the football team mentioned that he sent a letter to the reunion organizers asking if anyone had invited the black students from Carver High. They hadn’t. I learned that in 1990, the Lee High School retired the Confederate flag in favor of multicultural sensitivity, although some said, “Sacrificed to political correctness.”
The Crossroads
The main event was held at the Midland Country Club. To get there, Gregg and I drove through the fateful intersection, State Highway 349 and Farm Road 868, now a four-lane highway that carried traffic around the north side of town. New suburban homes had swallowed up the old lovers lane. An IHOP pancake house stood off to the east. The crossroads was now an overpass. From the top, we looked north into the great Llano Estacado, the “staked plain” that extends 400 miles into Colorado. Here, at this intersection, in the arid Pecos River valley, I imagined, world history was altered.
During the 2000 presidential election, pundits claimed there had been a cover-up, that dark forces had protected Laura after her accident, but this was partisan rumour. In 1963, Laura had been just an innocent girl who made a mistake. Normally, however, if you break a highway law and someone is killed you would get cited. There could have been a manslaughter charge. Judy Dykes, who was in the car with Laura, told the Dallas Morning News. “It is not worth digging into. It was an accident, a horrible, horrible accident years ago.”
After high school, Laura went to Southern Methodist University and, according to friends, showed little interest in getting married. Laura Welch earned a Masters degree in library science from the University of Texas, taught elementary school, and returned to Midland in 1977. At that time, George Bush had received a Master of Business Administration from Harvard, and made out well in the oil business, albeit without actually producing any oil. Laura Bush later told Ann Gerhart of the Washington Post that when she first met George in his drinking days, “I thought he was very fun. I also thought he was really cute. George is very fun. He’s also slightly outrageous once in a while in a very funny and fun way and I found that a lot of fun.” At 31, she was “very happy to find someone to marry.” Gregg and I swept over the crossroads and headed north to the Country Club. In the end, Laura found happiness, married into a successful family, and became the First Lady of America. But there seemed to linger some unspeakable grief.
I imagined our lives shaped by twists of fate. The crossroad itself seemed like a dream quickly patched up upon waking. What if Laura hadn’t hit Mike’s car, or if Mike had not died? Would the world be different? I had my first traffic accident only a few blocks from this crossroads, only a month after Laura’s accident. I too drove my family’s 1963 Chevy Impala, ran a stop sign, and hit another car. No one died, but I got a ticket. Was I lucky? What if I had killed someone and Laura had sailed through the intersection unscathed and carried on and had a normal high school graduation and married her sweetheart, perhaps even married Michael Douglas? What then? Who would George Bush have married? Perhaps he never would have overcome his manic drinking or become president.
Or what if, instead of fleeing to California, I had not broken my leg before the state track meet and had received my scholarship to Rice University in Houston and never seen the Grateful Dead in Golden Gate Park. What would have happened had I not read the magazine story about Joan Baez, who said “meditate for 15 minutes each day”? What then? What if I had not defended Sue’s honor at the Pizza Hut, and I had taken some other girl to the Monahan sand dunes, and I had kissed her? Maybe instead of going to Amsterdam I would have gone to Vietnam and come back wounded or a war hero, all because Laura didn’t hit Mike Douglas and he lived and the world was different. Or maybe the world wouldn’t be different at all. Maybe only the players in the roles would change, a new First Lady, a new President, a different radical activist. Maybe the personalities don’t matter. Maybe they do matter, and tiny decisions set great events in motion.
At the Midland Country Club, the “Celebrate America” theme was virtually invisible. There were no banners. No flags. Just six hundred 55-60-year-olds sipping drinks and dancing to a live cover of Louie Louie. The men wore casual cotton shirts. Hawaiian style appeared prominent. The women wore more elegant dress. Turquoise was the jewellery of choice. Gregg gasped to see someone with a cane. “What are we doing here,” he said, “with all these old people?”
No one expected the political celebrities to be there. Gregg wanted to see old classmates and girlfriends, but at the top of his list were his sports heroes, the older stars, who seemed like Greek gods to us. “There’s Terry Schreiner,” said Gregg as if he had just seen Michael Jordan. Gregg disappeared into the crowd. I sat at a table with old friends thumbing through a yearbook. We talked about who married their high school sweethearts, those killed in Vietnam, a mysterious classmate who reportedly worked for the CIA, and tragic tales of alcohol and drugs. We heard a particularly ominous story of the boy in our class, once Athlete of the Year, a basketball star at Nebraska, now homeless. Several observers groused about the classmate who was now “a big shot in television,” living in Hollywood, and “too good” to come back and consort with the rest of us. The conversations about ourselves remained superficial, not probing the heartaches like we had at lunch. One old classmate reported that he was “Doing an oil deal in Dallas.” Another leaned over and whispered in my ear, “You know what it means when someone tells you he’s doin’ an oil deal in Dallas?” No, I conceded, I didn’t know. “It means he ain’t doin’ shit.”
The band ran through Walking The Dog, Hard Days Night, and Love Potion Number Nine. The boys in the yearbook had football crewcuts or Elvis ducktails. The girls wore enough hairspray to destroy the ozone layer. Laura Welch wore a Jackie flip, had pronounced high cheekbones, and an endearing smile. “She was quiet and smart,” said Mary Ann Ryerson. “Everyone liked her. She never gossiped about anyone, so she didn’t have enemies.”
Gregg returned. Some of his heroes were dead and one “looks dead,” he told me. “But I got to tell Terry Schreiner and Dick McFarland how much they meant to me. I shook Terry Schreiner’s hand, man. It was great.” Gregg disappeared again and returned half an hour later, beaming with excitement. “I kissed Linda Mills.” He paused for me to lodge the weight of this. “On the lips.” Mills was the beautiful head cheerleader, in Laura’s class, one of the more popular girls in the school. “That’s the highlight for me,” Gregg said.
I requested the band play Tell Laura I love Her, but it didn’t happen. When they struck up Wilson Pickett’s In the Midnight Hour, Gregg and I left. We had breakfast the next morning at the IHOP pancake house with our close friends, exchanged more stories and email addresses. It was heartbreaking that we had to fly apart, now that we had grown so close to each other again. Gregg Hurt and I headed back out of town in his Chevy Trailblazer. We stopped at a Town and Country gas station that advertised “Celebrate America” 44-ounce ice drinks. Inside, I admired a display for the “$9.99 American Pride Tailgater Set,” four plastic cups and a thermos decorated with stars and stripes. Back in the SUV, we cranked the air conditioner, roared across the plains, and sipped our huge “Celebrate America” slushies.
If anyone embodied the best values of Midland, I thought, it was Laura Welch. I was glad things worked out for her.
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This article first appeared in Dragonfly Media publications and was reprinted at Tyee online magazine.