Folklore hung in the trees of Oak Cliff, on the troubled side of the Trinity River in Dallas. The trouble differed from block to block. In neighborhoods where empty blue Milk of Magnesia bottles topped the branches of sycamores and elms, the trouble was haints, and the lore spoke of healing and fear. “There could be a spell put in trees,” Eudora Welty wrote in a story called “Livvie,” about a practice common throughout the American South, learned probably from Creole slaves harking back to their West African ancestors. “Bottle trees kept evil spirits from coming into the house,” Welty explained. The spirits were drawn to bright colors, the blue and green glass of containers whose slender lips had been slipped over the tips of bare limbs, shining, milky, in moonlight. Once the spirits were caught inside the bottles, they would burn to nothing in the morning sunshine. Wind whistling through the bottles at night bolstered these beliefs, as did the crash of shattering glass—like “cries of outrage,” in Welty’s evocation—when an Oak Cliff boy, bored on a summer afternoon, cracked the brittle spirit-traps by hurling rocks into the trees.
The spirits’ lost companions, scattered body remains, posed other troubles, enflaming the listless boy’s imagination. Trouble stories here often started with the river: frequently, oversaturated ground, muddy, smelling of ancient mule dung and bristling with bits of arrowheads, purged human bones in the neglected back acres of the Oak Cliff Cemetery, where, according to neighborhood lore, slaves had been buried before the Civil War.
But at least they had been buried. More recent tales suggested that evanescent figures existing between body and spirit, unable to rest in peace, floated all over Oak Cliff, in the river, in secret watery passageways underground. By the time Billie Lee Brammer was born, on April 21, 1929, Dallas’s Ku Klux Klan Number 66, once the largest Klan chapter in the nation, had closed its headquarters. It no longer powerfully influenced city government and local law enforcement, but its narrative still echoed loudly in Oak Cliff, an area southwest of downtown Dallas and across the river from it. There, people “lived in a world defined more by the past than the present, more toward the country than the city, more Southern than Southwest,” said Brammer’s friend Grover Lewis, another Oak Cliff boy. As Horace McCoy, the first novelist to successfully describe the place, saw it in 1937, “This is an overgrown country town, filled with narrow-minded people, bigots—and they’ll resent anybody who makes an effort to change conditions.”
Reportedly, throughout the 1930s, the Klan continued to drop black bodies, some tortured, some half alive, halfway to haint, in the Trinity River Bottoms, a series of dirt levees littered with the tar-paper shacks of cotton-picking squatters driven by rural drought into the city. Stories abounded of “old lady seers” who would ask a person grieving for a missing family member to row them out in a boat or canoe to the middle of the river. Into the water they would toss a lost man’s shirt. Wherever the shirt stopped floating was where the body would be discovered. The spirit was already dissipating in the evening fog creeping along the levees, toasted by the squatters raising bottles of homemade Choctaw beer.
The squatters had their own lore, a cache of stories about heroes and villains embellished each night under gnarled oaks twisting out of the limestone cliffs that shaded their burlap tents, their cooking pots, the quarries and lagoons they huddled among beside the river, lighted only by nearby oil refineries or dim bulbs attached to paper mill smokestacks. These people had been “coughed up by the dust storms of the 1930s and were among the first generation of Texas boys to grow up without the idea of the American West beckoning them to fortunes untold. By their time, America was ‘all took up,’” said Grover Lewis. “The world beyond the horizon was nothing but dust and rumor.” They longed to go “on the scout . . . running them old hard roads” like Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, young bank robbers and killers who had nevertheless (according to the lore) come from “decent working families [and who] weren’t half as sorry as ‘the laws’ sent out to chase them”—or as contemptible as “respectable” gangsters like Oak Cliff’s Herbert “the Cat” Noble. Along with Benny “the Cowboy” Binion, Noble controlled most of Dallas’s gambling interests and paid around $250,000 in bribe money each year to Dallas cops while freely murdering competitors’ lackeys and throwing their corpses into the Trinity.
Lewis’s grandfather, a “Snopesy little-jackleg-of-all-trades,” Lewis recalled, was Bonnie and Clyde’s “favorite bootlegger.” Every Oak Cliff boy heard lurid stories about neighborhood characters like him. Tales of Bonnie and Clyde’s escapades and the lawmen who tracked them—single-minded loners like Will Fritz and Texas Ranger Frank Hamer—were some of the first newspaper pieces Brammer read. He taught himself to read, for the most part, with occasional help from his parents, driven by restlessness, boredom, and an early hunger for stories. By the time he entered elementary school, he was already accomplished enough with language to know that, in Texas, he darn well better spell his name “Billy” rather than “Billie,” as his folks had written on his birth certificate.
Brammer’s father, Herbert Leslie, known to friends and family as H. L. or Les, was born in Missouri in 1893. Kate, Brammer’s mother, was born in Texas in 1889 to a family named Coorpender. Brammer always referred to himself as a “menopause baby.” As the child of older parents, he was doted on and left alone in almost equal measure. Hence, his frequent boredom.
His half sister Rosa was nearly eighteen when he was born, still living at home but spending most of her days out of the house, working full-time at a Sears, Roebuck store after getting her high school diploma. She was the child of Kate’s brief first marriage to a man she never named or spoke about to her family; H. L. was the only father Rosa had ever known. Brammer’s brother, Herbert Leslie Junior, had arrived in 1923. To avoid confusion with his father, the family settled on “Jim” as a workable nickname for him. Like his folks, whenever Jim was home he rarely left his baby brother’s side, but he was often down the block playing with friends.
Brammer cherished the area folklore, but no figures haunting the ghost stories and crime tales peopled his immediate neighborhood. His parents’ house, at 922 South Windomere, was part of a formerly middle-class, now workingman’s, enclave, promoted before Oak Cliff’s annexation in 1903 as Dallas’s ideal suburb. Real estate brochures touted lovely Prairie School bungalows, Victorian and Tudor homes, and provided grandiose descriptions of amenities such as the steam-powered train connecting Oak Cliff to Dallas. It ran on the South’s “first elevated railway,” claimed the brochures—altogether untrue. And the track was elevated only briefly, when it crossed the river.
South Windomere was flat as a board. The house, a small three-bedroom with a single bath, sat by a vacant lot and a winding little creek, long dry. A large backyard spread behind it, brightened by the azaleas and rosebushes that H. L. tended with such pride. He built a screened-in porch out back, where he kept an extra fridge stocked with soda pop. He was a plain fool for Hydrox and Dr Peppers. He collected petrified wood. The rooms of the house were bracketed with his prize displays, along with Kate’s antique furniture and scattered sewing supplies. In the evenings, the couple liked to play bridge with friends once they had put their boy to bed.
The greatest excitement in the neighborhood was to watch for the Oak Farms milk truck making its morning deliveries or to walk with Kate to Johnny Green’s Ice House and plop forty cents on the counter for a hundred-pound block of ice to be brought to the house or to go to Elmer’s to stare at the ceiling fans shaped like airplane propellers and watch the sparkling Sprite syrup trickling over ice chips in the ICEE machine. Many years later, Brammer recalled with shame how sometimes he and his friends threw rotten tomatoes at black kids they saw on the streets or in the alleys. Occasionally, neighbors gathered turkeys and hay bales in front of the nearby Methodist hospital for fund-raisers to keep the hospital running—such scenes replayed almost weekly when the Depression years threatened to close area clinics and stores. Local parks didn’t stay open each day as long as they used to. Some of the public water fountains, both the “Whites” side and the “Coloreds” side, went dry. It was a miracle when the Texas Theatre opened, the first movie salon in Dallas built especially for the talkies, with a Burton organ, a water-cooled ventilation system, and a night-sky tableau on the ceiling featuring projected clouds and winking-light stars. Oak Cliff’s universe had expanded, even if most folks’ wallets were too thin to transport them there.
H. L. worked as a lineman for the Texas Power and Light Company at a time when vast stretches of rural Texas still lived in the dark. Dallas itself, second only to New York City in its swift embrace of electrical modernization, had not completely adjusted to its bright new path. In the 1880s, when the city made the wholesale switch from gas street lighting to arc lamps, local papers quoted Robert Louis Stevenson’s sentiment that this was “nightmare light . . . such lighting should shine forth only on murders and public crime, or along the corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror.”
In spite of the insect swarms drawn seasonally to arc lamps, Dallas business leaders believed the community’s way forward ran on a line of electric current: “The lightning that [Benjamin] Franklin captured from the thunder clouds and imprisoned in a bottle is now made to order,” declared the Dallas City Directory. To help convince the public, Mayer’s Garden, a downtown saloon and one of the first leading establishments to install electricity, served free beer the night the lights went on. “Dallas must have the best of everything,” the Dallas Times-Herald editorialized, repeating the city council’s conviction that “electricity has superseded gas, as the mowing machine superseded the scythe. That is all there is to the question.”
Plenty of skeptics remained. It seemed to some observers that thundershower activity had spiked dangerously in recent years and that it must be due to the copious amounts of electricity generated by dynamos along the river. Linemen were treated as a species apart, with a mixture of fear and awe. During the Trinity River flood of 1908, H. L. first admired the workers he would one day join. An electric plant on Flynn Street took on nine feet of water and stayed shut for nine days. Newspapers ran stories about linemen risking their lives to swim around the plant floor and salvage equipment. Afterward, many of the workers embellished their reputations as supermen by standing near plants’ leather machine belts during public tours and absorbing static electricity. They told visitors that lightning coursed through their blood. They shook hands with the tourists, giving them a mild shock. The astonished victims spread tales about human torches roaming the flickering city.
If H. L. didn’t have the cocky temperament to project himself as a superman, he nevertheless cut an impressive figure when he left the house in the morning, carrying his gaffs and arrayed in his spud belt, felt hat, and knee braces. His sons and daughter watched him proudly. Brammer grasped early that his father was a major agent of change, waving his wrenches and harnessing the power that brought the world, shouting, into the boy’s room through the Crosley radio. As Brammer was learning to speak, his family listened each Sunday evening to Texans, Let’s Talk Texans, a radio show sponsored by Texas Power and Light and broadcast on WFAA. The program played popular versions of classical music and proselytized the glories of conversion. Like a cripple commanded to walk, the Lone Star State would rise from its rural inertia with a burst of urban energy. “The city is coming to the farm!” the announcer proclaimed. From the turn of the century to the early 1930s, the number of kilowatt-hours generated statewide rose from half a million to nearly three billion. The darkness had been banished. No turning back.
As Brammer grew, voices and music riding hot night currents enticed him more and more. Knowledge filled the air from far away, he told his pals, penetrating people’s minds with invisible revelations; every day, men like his dad refined the lines of communication, making more things possible than had ever been dreamed.
“We were ten years old and he knew ‘everything,’” said his buddy Marjorie Stallard, whose father also worked for Texas Power and Light. “[He knew] that the poppies in the field across the street were used to make opium . . . that grammar was the most important subject in school . . . that he was going to be a journalist and see exciting things . . . that electricity was going to change farmers’ lives.”
He also knew from his father’s suppertime talk that his father’s bosses weren’t thrilled when Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act in 1935. They feared that the federal government was trying to control their private business and would force them to build transmission lines in towns and on isolated homesteads, where it was not financially feasible to do so.
In 1938, Billy Lee Brammer first heard the name Lyndon Johnson. He didn’t understand all the particulars of his dad’s stories, but he sensed that Johnson had done something important. The congressman had interceded directly with President Franklin Roosevelt to get some action in his home district, reportedly telling the president one day in the Oval Office, “Water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink! Power, power everywhere, but not in a home on the banks of these rural rivers!” Exasperated, Roosevelt snapped, “Now, Lyndon, now what in the hell do you want?” Johnson explained that the voters in his district were strong FDR supporters and glad for the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), but they weren’t getting the benefits of electricity because Texas Power and Light wouldn’t relinquish its monopoly. He regaled Roosevelt with stories of how he and his brother, Sam Houston, had, as kids, toted water from a well far from their mother’s house and heated it over a wood fire so their mother could do the wash by the light of a kerosene lantern. Touched, Roosevelt phoned the head of the REA. By the end of the year, Texas’s Pedernales Coop had received a substantial REA loan and awarded Johnson’s contractor buddy Herman Brown an $800,000 transmission line contract. Almost overnight, Texas Power and Light moved two hundred men into Central Texas and started building parallel lines. Johnson crowed that farm women could “set aside their corrugated washboards and let their red hot cook-stoves cool off while they iron on a hot August afternoon. The farmer who has been dragging water out of a well with a bucket all his life can . . . get himself an electric pump to do the work.”
In the midst of the power company’s activity, Brammer heard his father mention the “Milk Missionaries,” marketing strategists who visited remote farmers to teach them the advantages of linking to the TP&L grid. The farmers, suspicious that these city boys had come to steal their freedom and spread macadam across their big green fields, often greeted the energy representatives with hefty loads of buckshot. Still, the sales campaigns succeeded in making country families dependent on electric coolers, ranges, irons, percolators, batteries, and lighting fixtures. No clearer record of the city’s encroachment on the farm exists than the inventory list of an East Texas store that notes “one bird dog” was taken “as a trade-in allowance on a refrigerator sale.” The residents of Hood County, southwest of Fort Worth, held a jubilee on November 13, 1936, to “junk [their] oil-burners for electric power.” Over two hundred of “every type of kerosene-burning illuminators” had been discarded, according to the local paper; county officials awarded prizes to the “most ancient” lamps relinquished that day.
Families became so swiftly accustomed to modern conveniences that the slightest disruption along a transmission line became a cause for righteous anger: Fix it pronto! I have laundry to clean! I have a cake in the oven! The sight of linemen circling a dead pole and waiting cautiously for their work orders incensed citizens eager for their power to return. They wrote letters to the company, deploring the men’s laziness. They had no clue how dangerous the wires could be, how much careful planning a repair required. In Texas in the early 1930s, one of every two linemen died on the job.
An article in the Corsicana Semi-Weekly Light in January 1947 detailed the kind of work H. L. had been increasingly called on to perform in the previous decade: “Although rough winter weather has cut deeply into a mile-a-day work schedule, the Texas Power and Light Company is prolonging construction of its new 132,000-volt high line from Trinidad to Hillsboro . . . H. L. Brammer of Dallas is construction superintendent [overseeing] 100 crewmen and truckers [and 100 men] engaged in clearing the right-of-way . . . cost of the project is expected to run into six figures.”
Often, Brammer witnessed his father’s heroics. Marjorie Stallard said her dad and H. L. took the kids with them on several projects. “[We] followed the electric lines and brought new life to rural Texas,” she recalled. “The crews became ‘family’ and there was always drama and comedy and small towns to explore. We were in front row seats and didn’t realize it . . . the world we knew would never exist again.”
The crew would set up camp, usually near a railroad spur on the edge of a town, pitch tents and unfold army cots, or maybe construct a makeshift bunkhouse from cheap lumber. They would hang pulleys and clamps on steel hooks in the walls beside heavy leather belts. At the end of the week, an armored car would pull off the road and park among the tents. Two men with shotguns would get out to guard a fellow sitting at a table in the field and distributing pay envelopes to the linemen, sixty bucks here, eighty there, always in cash. The men would stash their scratch and suit up again, shouldering lines of copper wire or bags of assembly insulators, round porcelain discs resembling button mushrooms. Sometimes the men carried flashlights in their mouths.
Brammer, small and swarthy, easy in the sun, and naturally athletic, bragged to Marjorie that he could clamber up the poles as quickly as any of these skilled young fellows. As he watched them from the ground, he envied the dizzy tension he imagined they experienced between lightness and gravity, floating and falling. From up there, they could see the horizon in every direction. The skeletal H-frames, stark silver against the shallow blue of the sky, shivered and shook. Wind, whistling through gaps in the steel, razored the men’s unshaven faces. It blew cigarettes from their fingers. Between the poles, in a chill breeze, you could almost see the sagging copper lines draw up like fiddle strings.
“You know what T, P, and L stands for?” Brammer would tease Marjorie. “Tug, pull, and lift.”
The kids loved to watch the linemen in their off hours practice rope tricks, knots, and hitches (the scaffold, the cat’s paw), and bowlines (the three-ring, the Spanish, the double). As part of their work, the men had to learn to throw a rope with such precision over towers and poles that men above them could catch it. This skill was also good for cowpunching; several of the men participated in county fairs in the small towns bound together by the new power lines. “They rodeoed on weekends and ‘clum some’ during the week,” said Marjorie Stallard. She recalled listening to lonesome-cowboy singers warble at fairgrounds, gaunt men with thin guitars; and going with Brammer to the Fourth of July rodeo in Belton, Texas, to watch “Shirttail Johnny”—a part-time deputy sheriff, part-time calf roper named John Bailey Mellon—herd steers with his cotton shirt whipping up dust all around him.
For both cowboys and linemen, preparation was the key to survival. It didn’t always work out. Marjorie recalled watching, with Brammer, a “father/son pair who were climbers and the son got into hot wires and his dad went up and carried his body down.”
Brammer told his friend that someday he would write about all this. In addition to the world-changing quality of the work, he was quietly drawn to what another novelist, William Wister Haines, saw as fundamental to the occupation: “Just as sailors disdain what seems to them the uneventful life of the landsman, so do the majority of construction linemen disdain the security and bondage of the permanent job,” Haines wrote. “The natures that thrive on the powerful daily narcotic of danger and excitement so intrinsic in line work seem to require also the freedom to travel where the work permits.”
So it was always a letdown for Brammer to return with his father to Oak Cliff after a jaunt along the lines. Back to Elmer’s to see the ceiling fans go round. Or he could stand outside the Oak Cliff Broom Factory, on the corner of Bishop and Seventh, and watch the blind boys who wove the brooms come and go—their vacant stares reminded him of the dead eyes of the linemen who had been seared by sudden flares. Or he could walk down to the ball field by the river, Steer Stadium, where, said local lore, the first night baseball game in Dallas had been played, just a year after Brammer’s birth, a game between the Kansas City Monarchs and the Dallas Black Giants, two teams from the Negro Leagues. Newspaper accounts of the game—pieces Brammer studied years later as he prepared to become a sportswriter—spoke in amazement of the size of the crowd, an estimated seven thousand spirited fans; of the impressive portable lighting equipment illuminating home plate; and of the most stunning vision of all, the thrill of joyous black bodies running free across a big green field.