Lamar burst through the front door and didn’t stop to take in the view. He headed straight through the vestibule and up the staircase, at a six-year-old boy’s sprint, trailing closely after Herbert and Bunker.
His brothers had seen the house back in December, and returned to Tyler with breathless stories of the “secret” chute that led all the way to the basement. On moving day, that was all Lamar wanted to see.
“The first time there we rushed to the laundry chute,” he’d say later. “There were the older brothers showing me this neat thing. We didn’t care how many rooms it had or how many square feet or how good the kitchen was, the ten acres, the lake. No. The laundry chute.” The boys spent much of that first day experimenting to see what could safely be dropped down the chute from the second floor to the basement laundry basket.
When he stopped long enough to take in the view, he discovered a house of outsized dreams. The home into which the Hunts moved at the beginning of 1938 was called Mount Vernon, and it was modeled after George Washington’s Mount Vernon (but at roughly twice the scale), with six grand white columns lining the front porch and a graceful, glass-lined cupola at its apex.
The house stood on Lawther Drive, just to the west of White Rock Lake, a reservoir built by the city of Dallas that at one time had been the city’s main source for water. Development in the area had begun shortly after 1917, when fishing became legal on the lake. By the time the Hunts arrived in 1938, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps had begun building docks and other improvements around the lake, and it had become a popular picnic and recreation spot for Dallasites.
H. L. had paid $69,000 in cash to purchase the home from Thomas Y. Pickett, a tax appraiser who by 1938 had run out of money and into trouble with the Internal Revenue Service. The house had been commissioned by Pickett and built by John F. Staub, the residential architect renowned for his work in the stately homes in the River Oaks neighborhood of Houston in the ’20s.
The deed of sale, signed December 22, 1937, included the house and the ten acres overlooking the still unpaved Lawther Drive, as well as “two peacocks and all chickens . . . one cow, and a calf.” Lyda noted that she’d never had a cow in her life, but now, upon moving to the big city, she would finally have one.
By mid-January, they had mostly unpacked, and H. L. had set up his office in downtown Dallas, resuming his frequent travels. The changes to the house began almost immediately, with the paving of the long semi-circular drive that came up to the front of the house. Soon, Lyda had a pair of live oak trees planted on either side of the driveway. On one side of the house, she installed a rose garden, having imported the ideal sandy loam from Tyler.
It had been six years since the Lindbergh kidnapping, but the wealthy still lived in fear. After hearing the details of a nearby robbery, H. L. insisted that the house’s five safes be locked in the open position, so any potential intruders wouldn’t think he was hiding something of value in them. Lyda used the basement safe for her canned preserves. Lamar used the safe under the front stairs to store his football, baseball, bat, and glove.
Very soon, H. L. built a fenced-in area in the back for the six deer he brought onto the land. The enterprising young Herbert took over the chicken coop and began selling eggs to his parents. H. L. would sometimes walk through the backyard, visiting his deer, pulling pecans off the trees, and cracking the shells to eat them. H. L. was neither an athlete nor a fan of extended socializing—a four-hour round of golf would have been torture to him—but he did occasionally take a pitching wedge out in the front yard and hit a few golf balls.
Lamar was not yet seven in the summer of 1939, when the men from the Paddock Pool Company came from California to build the second private swimming pool in all of Dallas. Playing outside, he would watch the workers, who camped outside during the duration of the project, using their mule team to excavate the tract for the pool. On the day the men poured the cement, they took a break just long enough for Bunker, Herbert, and Lamar to slide through the fresh mix. Lyda was apologetic to the workers and, as always, discreet. “She never told on the kids to daddy,” said Caroline. “My parents never did tell on us.”
Perhaps it was the recollection of his father throwing Willie the dog into the lake back in Tyler, but Lamar was initially frightened of the pool. When H. L. came home from work in the afternoons, Lamar would hide in the upstairs bathroom, trying to avoid his daily swimming lesson. But he would be located, June would don his swimming trunks, and the two would head out to the pool. By the summer of 1940, Lamar was a serviceable swimmer.
Mount Vernon was a wealthy house in Texas in the first half of the twentieth century, which is to say that the Hunts employed several black domestic workers, and that both parties observed the racial customs of the day. H. L. Hunt was hardly a progressive, but he had stayed clear of racist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, and he had developed a reputation as an honest, even kind, employer. There was a sense of familiarity and affection among the house staff. One April Fool’s Day, Pandora Waters made a beautiful chocolate pie for the family, with a crisp flaky crust and meringue top, all of which perfectly concealed a center consisting entirely of mud. After the boys tried the fateful first bites, Pandora was laughing along with the rest of the family when she produced the real pie, with a chocolate filling.
Another of the family’s servants, Armstead B. Smith, was a part-time cook who had played football in college, and whose mother was the beloved cook at Camp Waldemar for girls (where Margaret and Caroline had spent parts of their summers). Smith would arrive in the afternoons from his day job, about the time the boys would come home from school, and often agreed to play football with Lamar and Herbert, provided Herbert helped him later in the kitchen. Armstead taught Lamar the finer points of tackling and helped him master his grip around the laces of a football. The half-hour games would end in time for Smith to go to the servants’ quarters and take a quick bath, then return to make dinner, served in the dining room at 6 p.m. sharp.
Smith also cooked at the family’s parties and outdoor barbecues, making enormous hot sweet rolls that the brothers adored. “We called them ‘stomach-breakers,’” Lamar said. “Bunker, Herbert, and I would eat until we couldn’t manage another bite, and then we’d lie down on the floor gasping.”
Because of the lingering kidnapping fears, H. L. declared that the children needed to ride to school, usually with one of the house staff driving them. Caroline was soon enough driving herself, while Lamar was driven to the Dallas Country Day school and, later, Lipscomb Elementary. After quickly thanking Armstead for the ride, he would get out of the car, flushed with embarrassment, and hurry up the schoolhouse steps. Though he could not articulate the feeling for decades, the experience—to have Armstead, a man he liked and admired, chauffeuring him to school—made Lamar sheepish. “It wasn’t a limousine or anything, it was just a normal car,” he remembered, “but it still felt odd.”
There were few houses in the neighborhood, and even fewer children. But right next door to the Hunts was a stockbroker named Dallas Gordon Rupe II. His son, Dallas III, was known to everyone as Buddy. Lamar and Buddy became best friends almost instantly. When they met, Lamar was six years old, Buddy was four, both were the youngest children in their families, and both had already fallen in love with sports. It would be the first of many relationships in which Lamar’s natural reticence would be complemented by a friend who was more outgoing. “Lamar was a very quiet boy at the time,” said Rupe. “It was very tough to get a smile out of him. I think the problem and reason for it was that Lamar was simply very shy.”
Before long, Lamar started calling Buddy “Root,” and Buddy called Lamar “Sap.” They would take turns sleeping over at each other’s house every other weekend, join each other’s families for dinner, even go away to summer camp together. The Rupes, like the Hunts, sent their children to summer camp in Hunt, Texas (Camp Stewart for the boys was not far from Camp Waldemar), about 100 miles west of Austin.
“I can remember, I’d get a letter from home and I was tremendously homesick,” said Rupe. “And Lamar would read it to me, as I would cry and he would cry.”
Lamar and Buddy loved football most of all. There’s a photograph from early in the Dallas years, of a scene in the Rupes’ backyard. Herbert, with a football, is running to daylight, while little Buddy, dressed in a full football uniform save the helmet, is in pursuit. Moving in for the tackle is Buddy’s older sister, Paula (“she was a hard tackler,” remembered Herbert). Chasing the runner, in a striped shirt and sporting Buddy’s snug-fitting leather helmet was Lamar, intent, smiling, closing in to make the play.
In their enduring friendship, Lamar and Buddy learned to turn everything into a game or contest of some sort. They held all manner of competitions: races through the house at Mount Vernon on inclement days, football games and contests out in the yard when it was nice. They would race to see who could pick the most pecans off the trees in 15 minutes (with Buddy getting the benefit of a longer fishing pole). In the middle of summer, beset with chigger bites, they’d even count who had the most.
But best of all, they were their own football heroes. In the Hunts’ backyard, the grove of pecan trees would yield piles of leaves each fall. Lamar and Buddy would rake up the leaves, and then use the pile as the defenders in their games. When they were playing on the same team, pretending to be the Southern Methodist University Mustangs, the leaves were the defenders. Lining up in a virtual single wing, they would call intricate plays, Lamar spinning the ball to himself to simulate the snap before sprinting into action and then pitching to Buddy. When they played one-on-one games against each other, the leaves were where they would make their tackles.
By 1939, when he ventured to his first Cotton Bowl, Lamar had fallen in love with the idea of spectator sports, and the visions of crowded stadium scenes—Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden, Soldier Field—were the grand datelines of his early imagination. “I was always interested in the attendance at sporting events,” he said. “I would open the newspaper and go to the box scores, and one of the first things I would look at would be attendance. The Phillies drew 7,211. Or 30,228 saw the Indians sweep a doubleheader.”
On Sundays came the double helping of newspapers, the fat Dallas Morning News and the Sunday Times Herald, with acres of coverage in the usually tight sports sections. And since both H. L. and Lyda received a copy of each, there was always a sports section for Lamar to examine, save, and clip out. He would look at the quarter-by-quarter score and the scoring summaries at college football games around the country, and see what the writers had to say about the games he’d listened to on the radio the day before.
From his earliest days, Lamar was a planet orbiting the sun of his mother. From Buddy Rupe’s perspective, there was only one head of the household at Mount Vernon. “Lamar’s mother was the leader of the Hunt clan, and I just adored her,” he said. “Mr. Hunt was very interesting, but he wasn’t around that much.”
While H. L. traveled extensively, Lamar gravitated to another male figure. An auditor named Al G. Hill had begun courting Margaret early in 1938, and the young Lamar found in Hill a warm, affable presence. Hill was a calmly assured man with a cherubic face and a level head. By the second week of his visits to Margaret at Mount Vernon, Lamar would end his nights by curling up in Al’s lap and falling asleep. During much of Al and Margaret’s courtship, Lamar tagged along, joining them while boating on White Rock Lake, or going to the movies at the Lakewood Theater.
Al and Margaret were married at Mount Vernon in October 1938, with Lamar sitting on the piano bench in the front room, swinging his legs and smiling happily. As they were waiting for their own house to be built, Al and Margaret moved into the poolhouse next to the house at Mount Vernon, and Lamar visited them frequently—partly because he revered Al, but also because he could go into their small refrigerator and pinch bottles of Coke, which weren’t available in the main house.
In his youth, he dressed as most children around him did. Dungarees, slacks on Sunday, short-sleeved collared shirts, and the same tightly cropped crew cut that was standard issue for most boys in Texas in the middle of the twentieth century. The severity of the haircut accentuated his smallish, close-set eyes, and his prominent chin. But what most struck those who knew him was the degree to which he stood apart—in demeanor and attitude—from the men in his family. The rest of the Hunts, from H. L. down to Bunker and Herbert, strode headlong into life. Lamar, however, did not. He was not exactly meek but somewhat withdrawn. He smiled easily, daydreamed often. And his disposition was more restrained. It was not just politesse—a lot of his peers were well-mannered. There was something more . . . he was at once playful and modest, and he lacked the air of malevolence and entitlement that sometimes infected rich boys of privilege. He was, in the nomenclature of a different time, a gentle soul.
•
Summer Saturday mornings. Sun coming through the gauze curtains. Chickens pecking in the backyard. Lamar would wake up and get dressed, then head downstairs to breakfast, with Pandora preparing pancakes and eggs. He would thank her, then ask Lyda for a dollar to go to the Lakewood shopping center.
Out the side door and down the back driveway, he would head out of Mount Vernon and walk across Fisher Drive, the sun coming up high on the lake, and the distinctive sound of the green parrots in the trees. There was little development in the area, so Lamar could move almost as the crow flew. He’d skirt the edge of the Sanford property, home to Cotton Bowl director Curtis Sanford, across a creek and over a set of railroad tracks, then cross the bridge above the creek into which Caroline had once driven her car. From there he’d wind his way down to Lakewood Drive, and the end of the Lakewood Bus line, where he’d catch the bus into Lakewood, getting off at the intersection of Lakewood and Abrams Road. Back on foot, he could see the art deco tower of the Lakewood Theater, which opened the year the Hunts moved to Dallas, the hub of a bustling new shopping district.
Lamar often went early, so he could stop up the street at Harrell’s Pharmacy and buy a comic book or a sports magazine—Bill Stern’s Sports Stories was his favorite—and have a strawberry milkshake at the counter, quietly reading while sipping from the white paper straw with the red swirls.
If time permitted, he would head around the corner to the Abrams Road Pharmacy and its pinball machine. “He always had a competitive fever,” said his friend Bob Chilton, who knew Lamar around the neighborhood and would wind up attending college with him a decade later. “There was this pinball machine at the drugstore, and he used to play it all the time. One time, I was watching him, and I left to go out and get on my bike. As I was leaving, I brushed the machine. He followed me outside and threatened to beat me up if I ever messed with the pinball machine again.”
One morning, Buddy accompanied Lamar to the Abrams Road Pharmacy, and the two were playing the pinball machine. Buddy was just recovering from a particularly strong case of poison ivy, and much of his face was covered in calamine lotion. When another boy, standing by the pinball machine, made a remark about Buddy’s appearance, Buddy turned away, ignoring the slight, then turned back when he heard the commotion—Lamar stepping up and threatening to pummel the boy for teasing his friend.
The Lakewood Theater double feature would begin at noon and on summer Saturdays Lamar would arrive in time for the serials and both movies. Then it was a late afternoon bus to the edge of White Rock Lake and the walk back home. “Nothing better than on a Saturday morning getting up and seeing The Lone Ranger serials,” he said. “They would have fifteen, so you’d have to come back every week and see what happened.”
Back home in the evenings, Lamar gravitated to the library, where he’d sit by the large radio, pet the new dog, Whiskers, and listen for his favorite shows: On Friday nights, it was Bill Stern’s Colgate Sports Reel, the 15-minute assemblage of legend and lore. On Saturday nights, Lamar would bring a Big Chief tablet into the library and mark down the top ten songs in Your Hit Parade, comparing it to his own predictions. On Sunday nights, it was NBC’s powerhouse lineup of Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. With Pandora off for the day, H. L. sometimes did the cooking, often frying up scrambled eggs for dinner, along with fried chicken leftovers that remained from the week.
Autumn weekends were different. Sometimes Lamar and Buddy would journey over to a vacant lot near the lake with friends and play touch football in the morning. But before noon, Lamar would be back in the library, lying on his stomach in front of the radio, listening to five solid hours of football. On a good week, Bill Stern would be calling a game from South Bend or Ann Arbor or Minneapolis, with an 11:30 a.m. kickoff. Then, at 2 p.m., it was the Humble Oil Southwest Conference Game of the Week (“Go to the Games with Humble”), and the inimitable call of announcer Kern Tips.
From Austin or College Station, or sometimes nearby in Dallas or Fort Worth, Tips would spice his play-by-play with a tangy blend of gridiron colloquialisms (“We’ve got a good, old-fashioned family squabble ahead of us today . . .”), a direct cousin to the purple prose of sportswriting that Lamar had already grown to love. When a running back fumbled a handoff from a quarterback, Tips announced there had been “a malfunction at the junction.” A kicker converting an extra point was “making sevens out of sixes.” A quarterback tackled behind the line of scrimmage “had to peel it and eat it this time.”
As he grew older, Lamar was allowed to borrow the family’s tape recorder, and he and Buddy would sit up on the third floor of Mount Vernon, beneath the cupola, playing games and imitating their favorite announcers: Lamar managed a passable imitation of loquacious boxing announcer Harry Balogh (“and now ladies and gentlemen, may the better man emerge victorious”), as well as the flat intonations of Graham McNamee, and, inevitably, the arch yet folksy Tips. “He’s a rolling bundle of butcher knives down there on the field,” Lamar would mimic, “that’s TCU’s Bounding Jimmy Lawrence.” The sound of these voices, the hushed gravity in a pre-game introduction—these things connoted big events for Lamar, and entry into the world to which he’d witnessed only a few firsthand glimpses.
Lamar soon surmised that his father’s interest in football wasn’t solely a sporting one. While Lamar pored over his Street & Smith’s Football Pictorial Yearbook, H. L. was often heard in his study on gameday mornings, talking to his personal bookie, querying contacts around the country for inside dope, and talking to his nephew, Tom Hunt, who was charged with monitoring the latest weather reports at the venues where H. L. was considering placing bets.
Though H. L. would, in later years, become infamous for the vast sums he bet on football games, Lamar developed a slightly different perspective on his father’s fandom. “He was more of a baseball fan than a football fan,” he said. “He was a fan of football, certainly. But he didn’t go to school—he didn’t go to high school and college, so he didn’t have the connection, and he never played football.”
But H. L. loved to move, and he loved to gamble, so football trips became common. On the Saturday morning after Thanksgiving in 1939, Lamar and Herbert traveled with their parents on a special train out of Dallas’s Union Station bound for College Station, Texas. It was the annual Texas A&M–Texas game, and it carried a special significance as the Aggies were unbeaten and in contention for a mythical national championship. There would be higher-toned “specials” on the rails for TCU or SMU road games, but what the seven-year-old Lamar remembered best was following his brother to the dining car, which was a converted boxcar with men selling snacks and beverages on crates. One car back was the men’s toilet car, which was a series of holes cut in the bottom of the boxcar, into which a boy could urinate while watching the trestles rushing along below.
For a seven-year-old sports fan, College Station could appear altogether exotic. In the midst of a Kyle Field crowd of rapturous Aggie Cadets, Lamar looked on in wonder to see if star fullback Jarrin’ John Kimbrough could keep A&M undefeated for its Sugar Bowl date with Tulane. Earlier in the fall in Austin, UT’s Jack Crain had transformed the Longhorns with his open-field running in a 14–13 upset of Arkansas. But on this day, Crain and Texas were no match for the bigger, deeper Aggies. Lamar returned to Dallas having determined his first true football hero.
Though relatives had given him the starter-sets for stamp and coin collections, he had instead gravitated to scrapbooking, and by the summer of 1940, as he was turning eight, it had become his favorite hobby. Sitting on his bed in the evenings, he would borrow his mother’s scissors and paste pot and construct highly detailed, elaborate scrapbooks. He’d gotten a black embossed leather cover, with “Scrap Book” in a jazz-age gold print on the front. Inside, on the first page, he pasted a picture of the 1939 All-America football teams as selected by Grantland Rice, United Press, and the Associated Press, along with a picture of Kimbrough, “the pigskin pulverizer of the Plains,” in the words of UPI sportswriter Henry McLemore.
The Aggies’ agronomy major was the star of the first book, as Lamar carefully clipped out the photo of a letter-jacketed Kimbrough standing next to a steer in a Life magazine publicity photo, and following Kimbrough’s signing of a pro contract with the New York Yanks of the ill-fated American Football League.
By the summer of his ninth birthday, Lamar began a new section, which he titled “Texas A+M in 1941,” carefully lettering the headline with red pencil and outlining it in blue, over a publicity photo showing A&M’s two returning starters lining up in formation with nine empty pairs of shoes, to dramatize, as the headline put it, “Nine Men Who Weren’t There,” Kimbrough and his eight Aggie teammates whose eligibility had run out.
When his brothers were gone, or Buddy was away, Lamar always found solace in his books and games. “I played a lot alone,” he said. “My older brothers were like three and six years older than I was, so it wasn’t that big a difference, but there were times when they were away at school, or whatever, and I do remember playing a lot in the yard by myself. I’d go out in the front yard, and I’d throw the ball up and play like I was in Yankee Stadium, and be hitting the ball in the imaginary field there, and then I’d run, chase the ball, and hit it back the other way. Or football, you know, the same type of thing: throw myself passes and catch them.” Siblings would remember him playing football in the backyard, lining up Whiskers’ litter—three black puppies, three spotted—into opposing teams, then running plays while the puppies happily chased after him.
He also loved to invent new games. “I’d take a ball and bounce it off a wall and then scratch out a little court with my foot, and there’d be scoring,” he said. One of the nicknames given to him around this time was “Games.” His family never called him that—“I never knew he ever had that nickname until much later,” said Herbert, and Caroline said she’d never heard him called that—but Lamar enjoyed the moniker, and as an adult would mention it frequently when discussing his childhood.
Lamar was a keen student, a good reader, and strong in his studies. In January of 1940, he wrote a letter to Caroline, off at college. In an unusually neat hand for a seven-year-old boy, he wrote, “Pan[dora] is with us while Mother has gone over to Margaret’s to fit some clothes. We like the stamps you sent. We saw Gulliver’s Travels and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Sind[sic], Lamar.”
In his memory and in fact, he felt sheltered and nurtured, safe and secure inside his family. But the family’s preoccupations, to a great extent, were not his own. Lamar was by now allowed to sit at the adults’ table, but he often daydreamed while the adults spoke of business and politics. “There was lots of discussion at the dinner table, and lots of important political people,” Lamar remembered. “But I never had much interest in politics.” Sundays were often a time when H. L. would drive his family out in the country, surveying the varied elements of his kingdom. “We’d go look at the cows and steers in the field and Dad thought it was the most marvelous thing in the world,” said Lamar. “To me it was the most boring.”
On Sunday, December 7, 1941, the Hunt family was out in Denton, Texas, testing a well, when the news broke of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Margaret, who had traveled to Pearl Harbor with Al on their honeymoon two years earlier, was perhaps the most shocked. “When the news came over the radio,” said Lamar, “just hearing it—a Japanese attack! On Pearl Harbor!—of course to me it all sounded very exciting, war and airplanes. But I can remember Margaret’s reaction to it best. She just bolted up. She was aghast.”
H. L. knew well the implications. Within days, Hassie had enlisted in the military, and the fifteen-year-old Bunker was angling for an early entry. H. L.’s oil reserves would be crucial to the war effort, and he knew it. Before Christmas, he had a large flagpole erected in front of Mount Vernon, with the Stars-and-Stripes flying throughout the day.
The details of the days changed—even the Hunts were affected by gas rationing and the other sacrifices of wartime—but the tenor did not. Armstead and Pandora still served dinner at 6 p.m. sharp, but now a small radio was brought into the dining room, so that the family could hear the news of the day—Paul Harvey, Gabriel Heatter, William L. Shirer reporting on the war effort.
“We thought the war was romantic,” remembered the writer Dan Jenkins, “because we didn’t have to fight in it.” So it was with Lamar. His primary focus remained on sports, but he also became more cognizant of the massive war effort. He became a plane-spotter, learning to identify the distinctive characteristics of the Japanese Zeros. The prospect of the war’s conclusion was enough, by 1944, to prompt him to begin a scrapbook devoted to the D-Day Invasion.
By then a student at J. L. Long Middle School, Lamar had grown more serious about sports. He didn’t simply play games on vacant lots but had started actively training for a time when he would get his first experience of organized team sports.
Remembering her childhood, Caroline Hunt said, “I never saw my mother lose her temper.” H. L., absorbed in his own world, also was slow to anger. Both Caroline and Lamar would remember receiving but a single spanking in their childhood, each of them from their father for what Lamar would describe as “being impertinent at the dinner table.”
Some of his siblings suspected Lamar received the benefit of being the baby of the family. “I think she was probably very lenient,” Lamar said of his mother. “I was the last child and my mother and dad used to kiddingly say that the only reason I didn’t get spanked was ’cause they were all spanked out. My mother was a real soft touch, I’m sure.”
But there was more to it than birth order. H. L. and Lyda—without consulting any parenting tracts—offered absolute authority over major areas (“when he said something, that was it,” recalled Caroline) and gentle guidance, if not benign neglect, in others. “I don’t ever remember being reprimanded about anything,” Caroline said later.
It was in this environment that Lamar learned manners. Lyda remained chipper through her private torments, through the fear and anguish of having two sons in the military. At Mount Vernon, voices were rarely raised. It was a splendid way to raise a child to show kindness and equanimity and respect. But it left Lamar ill-equipped for instances that elicited genuine sorrow and grief.
One night during the war, the Hunts were awakened by screams of distress from the backyard, and awoke to see the servants’ quarters above the garage ablaze. The people and cars were safely rescued, but the bedrooms burned to the ground. Standing out in the darkness, under the light of the dying flames, the clang of the fire department’s belated arrival in the distance, Lamar watched one of the male servants weeping openly, as all of his possessions were lost. “It touched me considerably,” he would recall decades later. “The memory is still sad to this day.”
That wouldn’t be the only calamity. One spring morning in 1945, Lyda woke Herbert and Lamar with a worried shout, and told them to get down to the lake fast.
Bounding down the stairs, still in their pajamas, the boys rushed out the door and ran down to the bottom of the hill, scurrying across Lawther Drive to the lakeside where a young man in his late twenties was in a state of hysterical despair.
“My father!” he shouted. “He’s down there somewhere! And I can’t swim!” It took a while for the boys to make sense of the man’s rambling, but it became clear that out on the lake that morning, the man and his father had capsized while checking on a trout line. The man made it to shore, but his father had been wearing hip waders, and when the water filled his boots, he sank to the bottom.
Lamar and Herbert, by now both gifted swimmers, dove in and spent 20 minutes trawling under the surface to search for the body, to no avail. When they came ashore finally, breathless and exhausted, Herbert dejectedly walked up to the house to take a shower and change. But Lamar stayed on the shore with the man.
“When the fire department finally came and pulled the dead man out of the water,” said Herbert, “that was something that had an effect on Lamar for months.”
Or perhaps longer. It was nothing that the family talked about. Open sorrow, like affection, was frowned on.
Neither did they discuss the plight of Hassie. After returning from his military service, he became increasingly irrational and irritable; at one point, he threw a grapefruit at his mother. H. L., desperate to act, to make it better, declared Hassie should go in for a prefrontal lobotomy and electroshock therapy. The cure, in this event, was at least as bad as the disease—it muted Hassie’s personality, and he became an often vacant, listless presence, losing all interest in his previous oil and gas pursuits. If anything, it changed H. L. Hunt even more, as he spent years haunted by doubts about whether he’d done the right thing.
But nothing was said. What Lamar observed, from watching his mother and father, was to soldier on.
•
In the summer of 1945, near the war’s end, the family put the twelve-year-old Lamar on a train in Dallas, and he traveled alone to Brunswick, Maine, to visit Caroline and her new husband, Lloyd Sands, stationed by the Brunswick Naval Base. Lamar traveled with his name, address, and phone number on a sheet of paper safety-pinned inside a pants pocket. Meek and quiet, carrying a single small suitcase, he successfully managed to change trains in St. Louis, taking another Pullman sleeper all the way to New York and then a connection up into Maine. While Caroline was indifferent to sports, she knew her “favorite sibling” loved them, so during his three-week stay, Lloyd and Caroline brought him down to Boston, where he watched the Braves in action at Braves Field, and even went to a harness-racing meet, where they slipped him a few dollars to bet on the races. Lamar was back in time for V-J Day.
He was filling out a bit by now, drinking milkshakes every day at Harrell’s to put on weight for his first organized football experience. He’d been playing the game for nearly a decade—with his brothers, with Buddy, with Armstead, and by himself in the backyard at Mount Vernon. But he had yet to prove himself in any organized competition (though there had been a gymnasium at J. L. Long Junior High School, for physical education and pick-up basketball games, Lamar had yet to experience being on formal sports teams, with uniforms, practices, and officiated games). That would change soon enough. Working harder than ever before at his pass-catching and ball-handling technique, he’d added a regimen of exercises, counting his daily jumping jacks, push-ups, and still-dips. He’d taken to doing sprints up either side of the semi-circle driveway at Mount Vernon, and was continually frustrated by his inability to match the time on the east side as he had on the west. Finally, after more than a week of consternation, he measured the distance of each and discovered that the west side was five yards longer than the east.
In early September 1946, he got on another train, with Herbert, traveling to Pottstown, Pennsylvania, to The Hill School, a preparatory boarding school for boys. He brought along a new wardrobe of clothes—The Hill had a dress code requiring coats and ties six days a week—and a scant handful of personal possessions: large kitchen shears, so he could continue his scrapbooking, a football, a baseball mitt and ball, and a copy of Ring Lardner’s You Know Me Al. Lyda sent off her two youngest boys with a cheerful goodbye. They were used to this by now. “Mother and Dad never went with us,” said Herbert. “It was strictly put you on the train at the Highland Park Train Station.”
Prior to September of 1946, Lamar’s journeys had consisted of a few carefully guided vacations with his mother, heavy on museum visits, and some brief excursions to summer camps, at the Culver Military Academy one summer in Indiana and at least two summers at the Stewart School for Boys in Texas. Each time, Lamar was constantly accompanied by his older brother Herbert or his close friend Buddy Rupe, to ward off homesickness.
This time would be different. After they changed trains in St. Louis, Herbert and Lamar took a Pullman car to Philadelphia, then boarded the Reading Railroad out to Pottstown, Pennsylvania, about 35 miles to the northwest.
Lamar was going into a new and thoroughly different environment, one about which he was pensive and anxious. But as he would throughout the rest of his life, he would find his solace, sense of confidence, and friendships in the world of sports.