I spent every summer at Granddaddy and MawMaw’s until 1963, when I enrolled at East Texas State, which at the time was the cheapest college in Texas. By that time, girls, their pursuit, and eventual capture were pretty much the center of my universe. But the little college my family could afford was stocked mainly with farm girls. By contrast, my buddy Scoot Cheney and I had heard that Texas Christian University, ninety miles west in Fort Worth, was slopping over with Rich Girls. And while I’d grown up nearby, I’d never been on the campus.
In our fantasies, Rich Girls would jet around town in dent-free, late-model sports cars, belong to country clubs, and live in houses that didn’t have wheels on them. We were certain they would also be miles better looking than farm girls.
Though I never met one, I had etched in my mind an image of what Rich Girls looked like. When we were about ten and twelve, my brother, John, and I had a favorite game we played that went something like the card game slapjack. We’d sit on MawMaw’s porch, slowly turn the pages in the Sears catalog, and try to be first to smack a hand down on the prettiest girl on each page, who would then become the imaginary girlfriend of whoever slapped her first. Later, I was sure the girls at TCU would look like the girls in the Sears catalog.
As it turned out, that was pretty close to the truth. But my first encounter with such a delicious creature fell victim to a wardrobe disaster.
My dear mama, Tommye, had always made all our clothes, so when I packed my bags for college, they were full of shirts she had carefully and lovingly sewn from feed sacks. But when I got to East Texas State, I noticed that most of the boys wore khaki pants and madras shirts, the kind made with that natural dye from India. Feed sacks, apparently, were out.
Worried, I called my mama. “Everybody here is dressed different than me. They’re all wearing madras shirts.”
“What’s madras?” she asked.
I fumbled around for an explanation. “Well, it’s kind of like plaid.”
Now, Mama meant well, but to her plaid was plaid. She drove down to Hancock’s Fabric Store and bought several yards of it, and whipped me up a matching shirt-and-shorts set.
In the meantime, Scoot and I landed our first blind dates with TCU girls, a pair of Tri Delta pledges. We were taking them to Amon Carter Stadium to root on the TCU football team, the mighty Horned Frogs, before a sellout home crowd. The friend who fixed us up told me that my date, Karen McDaniel, looked like Natalie Wood.
Well, a date like that called for a new outfit, so on the way in from East Texas State, Scoot and I detoured by my house so I could pick up the one my mama had just finished. She beamed with pride when she handed it over, a pair of longish shorts and a short-sleeved, button-up shirt, both blue with black and green stripes as wide as highway centerlines. I knew it wasn’t madras, but I figured it was better than a feed sack. When I modeled it for Mama, she bragged about how handsome I looked.
Then Scoot and I headed over to the TCU freshman girls’ dorm.
“A movie star,” is what I thought when Karen McDaniel stepped out onto the dorm’s front porch: She had teased-up dark hair and big blue eyes that batted like strobe lights. I had never seen anybody who looked like that in Haltom City. As it turned out, Karen had never seen anybody who looked like me. Ever.
I had finished off the shorts set Mama made me with knee-high black socks and a pair of brogan-style, lace-up shoes. As I headed up the crowded dorm steps to introduce myself, another adorable brunette walked out of the dorm onto the porch. But when she saw my clothes, she screeched to a halt so fast it looked like she’d dropped a two-ton anchor. “Well, lookee here!” she blared, causing every head within fifty yards to turn my way. “It’s Bobby Brooks, dyed to match!”
She turned out to be Jill, Scoot’s date, a pixyish Tri Delt with eyes like Bambi. Having pronounced judgment on my mama’s handiwork, she then looked down at my shoes and wrinkled her perfectly upturned nose as though examining roadkill. “What kind of shoes are those?”
I shrugged, sweat beading up on my reddening face. “I don’t know . . . just shoes, I guess.”
“Well, the boys at TCU wear Weejuns,” Jill said.
Scoot thought that sounded mighty exotic. “What are ‘Weejuns’?” he asked me, leaning in close.
“I don’t know,” I said skeptically. “I think they’re those pointy-toed things the queers wear.”
“They are not!” the girls protested in unison, scandalized. “They’re penny loafers!”
We walked the two blocks to the stadium, and while most couples were holding hands, Karen maintained a mortified distance. Inside the stadium, the whole student body seemed to ogle me as if I were the victim of a fraternity prank. I don’t remember who won or lost that football game, or even the name of the opposing team. I only remember feeling as if Bozo the Clown had died and I’d inherited his clothes.