“Once upon a time in the real American West, which might have been anyplace people were uprooted, undefined or emotionally underfed, there was seldom heard a word of any kind. Even now, survivors dwell on that experience . . . remembered for its intolerable loneliness and the absence of all but the most basic human inputs,” Brammer wrote in 1973, recalling how arid Oak Cliff had seemed to him as a child before he discovered the “miracle of radio transmission.”
“We talked many times about how dependent he was on listening to radio,” said his daughter Sidney. “He was absolutely fascinated by the many different things one could hear. He was obsessively familiar with radio preachers, advertisements, politicians, hillbilly and R & B artists, and even western swing fiddlers and Mexican orquestras. Like many bored teenagers, he listened almost constantly.”
The best part for him, as one of those isolated folks “out there on the wretched edge of Western Civilization,” he wrote, was that the ether was “turbulent with the babble and burble and atmospheric hiss of much of the Republic’s long suppressed derangements: mental, emotional, musical, or mercantile.”
The first radio station west of the Mississippi River to broadcast from its own studio was Dallas’s WRR, licensed in 1921. It was stronger than ever during Brammer’s teenage years, as were KERA, Oak Cliff’s KLIF, and WFAA, airing live music each weekend from the Adolphus Hotel downtown. On these and the bellicose stations located just across the Mexican border from Del Rio, Eagle Pass, and McAllen, anchored there in order to flout the regulations of the Federal Communications Commission and swamp the signals of any station operating on channels within fifty kilocycles of their wavelengths, Brammer heard imprecations to the spirit: “But stop right there, hallelujah brothers, for I’m bringing you the message that will unseat Satan!”; balm for the body: “A man is as old as his glands. All energy is sex energy . . . Who wants to be made young again?”; and political theory from the likes of the anti-Semitic Charles Coughlin, once an FDR supporter but now a social reformer passionately certain that Jewish bankers were colluding to conquer the world.
From the radio, Brammer got the news: a Mexican man in Oak Cliff, crazed from smoking marijuana, had knifed five innocent victims, all white; President Roosevelt had visited the State Fair, proclaiming, “I salute the Empire of Texas”—a fair that in 1923 declared a Ku Klux Klan Day and celebrated it with large parades; and by the way, did listeners know that Dallas’s first presidential visit ended with an assassination threat in 1843, when Sam Houston, president of the Republic of Texas, arrived to smoke a peace pipe with the leaders of the Kiowas and Comanches? The tribal chiefs suspected Houston planned to poison their tobacco, and so backed out of the summit.
From the radio, Brammer learned American entrepreneurial techniques, otherwise known as hucksterism—order now, a year’s supply of diet pills, absolutely harmless, guaranteed to trim those troublesome thighs—from XER, a 75,000-watt station in Villa Acuña—“Mexico’s radio outlaw . . . bootlegger of the air”—a man named Doc Brinkley, whose professional credentials consisted of a mail-order diploma from the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City, Missouri, offered listeners a libido-enhancing treatment called “goat gland transplantation.” It involved “taking the goat testicle and putting it in the man’s testicle,” Brinkley explained. “The man is renewed in his physical and mental vigor.”
Most of all, from the radio Brammer heard the musical rhythms of the future emerging from the mixed rhythms of the past, the lonesome-cowboy yodels of Dust Bowl Okies combined with complex talking drumbeats imported from West Africa by southern slaves. On WFAA’s live-music show Saturday Night Shindig, Brammer caught the first widespread airing of Dallas’s homegrown African American laments tricked up as a country-and-western song, “The Deep Ellum Blues” (about a traditionally black neighborhood known as Frogtown, a red light district northwest of a Trinity floodplain); the melody had been appropriated and recorded by a hillbilly band called the Shelton Brothers. WFAA also played songs by Marvin Montgomery and Dick Reinhart, who would later join Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. These players learned blues licks in Deep Ellum clubs and slipped them into their fiddle reels. Such cross-fertilization made the “Texas country tradition” the “bluesiest of the regional variations of country music,” says Kevin Pask, a cultural historian. Brammer would witness a full flowering of these seeds in Austin, many years later, at bars like Threadgill’s, where Janis Joplin sang folk songs alongside Stetsoned crooners, and in clubs like the Vulcan Gas Company, where some of Texas’s first integrated psychedelic rock bands smoothed the way for “Cosmic Cowboys.”
In 1938, the year young Brammer became aware of Lyndon Johnson’s rural electrification efforts, Johnson gave a passionate radio address, broadcast the length and breadth of Texas, forecasting the war he would later declare on poverty: “Last Christmas, when all over the world people were celebrating the birth of the Christ child, I took a walk here in Austin—a short walk, just a few short blocks from Congress Avenue, and there I found people living in such squalor that Christmas Day was to them just one more day of filth and misery,” Johnson said. “[They] were so poor they could not even at night use the electricity that is to be generated by our great river.”
He did not mention that because of his attention to REA funding, his friend and campaign donor Herman Brown was reaping federal money for construction projects along the great rivers of Texas, but he did declare: “I am unwilling to close my eyes to needless suffering and deprivation . . . a cancerous blight on the whole community . . . the community O. Henry gave the appellation ‘The City of the Violet Crown’” (after the year-round purple twilights shading the hills of Austin above the Colorado River). The O. Henry remark indicated that LBJ was already employing literary men to write his speeches for him, despite his lifelong disdain for book people, and it was guaranteed to kindle the sensibility of a budding literary figure like Billy Lee Brammer. Many years later, the opening pages of Brammer’s novel featured a poor migrant family huddled within spitting distance of the Capitol in Austin.
Like the goat-gland salesman on the Mexican border, Johnson understood that America’s future would be shaped and defined by the electronic airwaves. In 1943, he convinced his wife to invest her family money in a then-sleepy little radio station in Austin, KTBC. At the time, the Federal Communications Commission, which set the rules for broadcasting and broadcasting transfers, was on the verge of being abolished by the federal government. As soon as Lady Bird wrote her $17,500 check for the station, Johnson used his growing political muscle to strengthen the FCC. Almost immediately, KTBC, formerly a sunrise-to-sunset station, received permission to broadcast twenty-four hours a day. It was allowed to move to 590 AM, at an uncluttered end of the radio dial, where it could be picked up in thirty-eight counties across the state. Two years later, the FCC approved the station’s request to quintuple its power, which allowed its signal to reach sixty-three counties. Local businessmen grasped that they could curry Johnson’s considerable favor by advertising exclusively on KTBC. In time, he parlayed his wife’s modest investment into a multimedia empire worth millions of dollars. This was one of the many paradoxes of Lyndon Johnson, one that the Oak Cliff boy listening desperately to the radio for signs of life, any life, beyond the one he knew, would never, perhaps, despite his later acuity, quite come to terms with: how such a self-serving man could be genuinely anguished over the plight of poor people who couldn’t afford to turn on a light.
Whenever Kate or H. L. told Brammer it was time to turn off the radio, he would read. At the age of twelve he taught himself to type on his mother’s machine by laboriously copying paragraphs from his brother’s Tarzan books and his father’s gardening manuals. Grover Lewis didn’t know Brammer then, but when they met years later in Austin, he “recognized him at once as another solitary schoolboy who’d stayed home to read, forging out of the common language a voice purely his own,” Lewis said.
A few blocks from Brammer’s house, the Carnegie Library became a refuge. Gray brick and concrete on the outside, it featured soothing green and cream interiors. Best of all, the basement, where the children’s and young readers’ books were kept, was so much cooler than the rest of the building in the summertime—the upper floors lacked air-conditioning. The basement windows loomed high above the floor, just at street level outside, letting in slivers of light. After spending a day in the stacks, poring over books, he would pop outside into the sunshine, sip water from the triple-headed bubbling fountain on the street corner (the spigots marked “White Adults,” “White Children,” and “Colored”), and head for the Tamale Man’s cart. A few pennies would buy a steaming fresh tamale wrapped in newspaper.
A precocious reader, Brammer discovered, early, the hardened clarity of Hemingway’s prose, snapping up For Whom the Bell Tolls the moment it appeared on the library shelves; he worked his way through the allusive imagery of Virginia Woolf and Nathanael West. But it was Scott Fitzgerald’s “softly undulating sentences . . . [that] awakened his urge to write,” according to Al Reinert. Brammer was five when Fitzgerald published Tender is the Night. Reinert remembered that, thirty-five years after Brammer had first read the novel as a child, “Billy could still quote favorite passages.”
An urge to write doesn’t automatically translate into the confidence to do so. It wasn’t until he had read J. Frank Dobie, one of Texas’s first leading men of letters, that he envisioned the possibility of a literary life. Dobie was a professor at the University of Texas in Austin who never precisely fit the institutional mold. He didn’t consort comfortably with his colleagues in the English Department; in his view, they spent too much time studying European literature and American writers from New England and the South. Where were the novels and poems of Texas experience, and the scholars promoting them, he wanted to know. His colleagues felt he had “too much of the cowboy in him.” He proclaimed himself “exiled from [his] own birthright.” He assumed directorship of the Texas Folklore Society, an outfit founded years earlier by John Lomax, a collector of cowboy songs, early blues, spirituals, and other folk tunes. To these ballads, and the rich stock of Texana, Dobie added vaquero tales, Native superstitions, and family stories told around campfires on wearying cattle drives. It was this rural lore, collected in books with titles such as Coffee in the Gourd, that Brammer read. The stories themselves didn’t impress him as much as the revelation that it was possible to chronicle local experience and shape it into lyrical expression. The literary wasn’t just out there somewhere; it could be anywhere. “It never occurred to me—ever—until I read J. Frank Dobie that I could be a writer,” Brammer said. “There simply were no writers in Texas.”
Dobie said that folklore must be written as the “original teller should have told it.” From this tenet, Brammer understood that the language of one’s experience, one’s neighborhood, one’s region, combined with the elements of craft and style learned from published works of literature, could be forged—like the mix of country and blues—to form a unique voice.
In the mid-1940s, while Brammer was a high school student reading Dobie and Fitzgerald, Dobie got caught in a fight over academic freedom at the University of Texas, a school that “has never been wholly comfortable with the notion of robust speech,” in the opinion of Dave Richards, a labor and civil rights lawyer who would become one of Brammer’s close friends. The campus battle presaged future troubles for Brammer over issues of free expression, and marked the “first postwar manifestation of liberalism in Texas,” said Richards. The liberal movement would consume much of the lives of Brammer and his friends in the coming decades.
Two consecutive, strictly conservative Texas governors, W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel and Coke Stevenson, both increasingly upset with New Deal liberalism (and FDR’s man on the ground, Congressman Lyndon Johnson), moved to restrict the dissemination of dangerous thinking at the university, a stone’s throw from the Capitol. They appointed like-minded men to the school’s board of regents, who then, in Dobie’s words, “tried to build a Maginot line around the institution to keep ideas out.” Regularly, they called for the ouster of “radical” professors. At one point, they reprimanded an instructor who had assigned John Dos Passos’s “immoral” trilogy USA. They demanded he be fired. The university’s president, Homer Rainey, refused to bow to the regents’ pressure, so the board fired him. Dobie came to Rainey’s defense, haranguing the regents as a bunch of “homemade fascists.” He was dismissed from the university.
Rainey decided to run for governor, emphasizing free expression in his challenge to the conservative candidate, Beauford Jester, in the Democratic primary. Rainey’s campaign exposed a left-right schism within the Texas Democratic Party. Jester, who had once had ties to the KKK, won the contest by tarring Rainey as a “nigger-lover” and a communist.
Brammer followed the primary battle on the radio and in the newspapers. He was too young to articulate a coherent political ideology, but he responded to words—how could a man’s character be any good if his talk was sloppy and mean?—and he responded to wit, as in the published political cartoons of men like Bob Eckhardt (who would become Brammer’s friend one day as well as the second husband of Brammer’s first wife). In one Eckhardt cartoon, lampooning Beauford Jester’s wealthy donors, figures representing oil and sulfur steal away with the state of Texas tucked tightly under their arms. Behind them on a table sits a stack of Dos Passos’s trilogy, arranged as a public distraction from the real immorality of their thievery.
Years later, Brammer structured his political novel as a trilogy of stories. Gore Vidal compared him to John Dos Passos, and in an irony he could not have foreseen as a high school student, a powerful Texas politician did his damnedest to banish the book from sight and to prevent its author from spreading any more ideas.
As an adolescent boy in “Cracker Eden”—Grover Lewis’s term for Oak Cliff—if you didn’t run in the approved social circles, and especially if you weren’t a jock, “you were forever defined as being far down the food chain.” In the workingmen’s districts, “where a lot of [poor] families got blown to smithereens,” local sports teams offered shards of glory to talented kids. The “football fraternity tended to be arrogant, bullying swine,” Lewis said. Small and spry, Brammer could hold his own with many of the athletes at Greiner middle school and at Sunset High, doing one-armed push-ups all morning in the gym, winning medals for swimming and diving, and chasing pop flies with easy grace in the infield.
The grammar teachers tended to be “stiff old biddies,” in Lewis’s memory, obsessed with Latin conjugations and sentence diagramming. They believed in homework the way ascetics believed in wearing hair shirts. After school, groups of teens took streetcars to the Skillern’s Drugstore on Edgefield for the free shakes offered there along with every one-dollar purchase of school supplies. On weekends, they pooled their allowance and part-time work money to gather at Kelly’s Skating Rink or the Pig Stand on Chalk Hill Road, or to hold hands under the false stars of the Texas Theatre. Gone with the Wind, Snow White, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The war in Europe was always the leadoff: the kids cheered the newsreels every time a German plane burst into flames on the screen. As the war widened and engulfed America—Brammer was riveted to the radio on December 7, 1941, when President Roosevelt declared a “day of infamy”—weekly routines changed in and around school. Blackout drills, raising blankets over the windows, became a regular part of the daily lesson plan. Students saved and donated aluminum chewing gum wrappers to the conservation effort. They collected nickels and dimes for war bonds: little girls wearing army caps, pleated skirts, and ballet slippers for their after-school dance classes went door-to-door in the old neighborhoods, carrying fat tin cans.
In 1942, Brammer’s brother, Jim, got his draft notice. He received flight training at the Air Force Navigation School in San Marcos, near San Antonio, and subsequently trained as part of the 505th Bombardment Group at the Harvard Army Airfield in Nebraska. In November 1944, he and his troop mates shipped out of Seattle on the USS Sea Star. They made stops in Pearl Harbor and Eniwetok (a future atomic bomb test site) before heading to Tinian, a flat semitropical island in the Marianas. From there, the bomb group flew several B-29 sorties against the Japanese Empire, destroying military targets, transportation hubs, and industrial sites.
While movie-house newsreels presented overseas military campaigns as unqualified successes and troop morale as unshakable, Brammer knew otherwise from reading his brother’s letters. Jim was careful about what he revealed, but it was clear that life in a Pacific Theater Quonset hut was not a night out at the Pig Stand. On a Special Services radio receiver arranged on a stack of empty packing crates in the midst of the squadron’s pup tents, the American flyers heard songs from home—“California, Here I Come,” “Back Home Again in Indiana”—before Tokyo Rose came on the air and suggested the GIs enjoy the music before being annihilated by the Japanese Royal Navy and the Imperial Air Force.
The international conflict touched Texas when the government established a German prisoner-of-war camp at a railroad spur near the town of Trinity. Newsreel footage of the prisoners goose-stepping as they came off the trains chilled Brammer and his friends. Edward R. Murrow interrupted Bob Hope and Ellery Queen on the radio to bring listeners news of the bombardment of London. The Brammer house was sadder without Jim’s saxophone playing—before leaving home, he had taken up the instrument in order to emulate his favorite jazz artist, Stan Kenton. Rose continued to be gone most of the time, but even when she came around now, Brammer barely knew her: she had met a new boyfriend, who took her deer hunting almost every weekend, and that was all she would talk about, though clearly she didn’t enjoy hunting and Brammer certainly didn’t want to hear about it.
He skipped many of his classes at Sunset High School. They bored him. Eventually, he graduated ninety-fourth in a class of ninety-six students. Kate was working as a secretary now to bring in extra money; she and H. L. were too busy to know that their boy was often home alone, listening to the radio, reading, or catching crawdads down at the riverbank. He missed almost an entire semester of his senior year. Boys and girls gathered at his house in the afternoons for petting parties. He would talk older kids into buying beer for the group with money his father had given him without ever asking what he wanted it for. H. L. could never say no to his baby boy, especially after the two older kids had left the house.
When Brammer did show up at school, it was to swim, to visit his fellow journalism students, to lay out the latest issue of the Sunset Stampede, or to talk to his favorite teacher, Nelson Hutto. Mr. Hutto had gotten his master’s degree at Columbia and worked for a while at the New York Times. Now he wrote sports stories and pulp fiction. A short fellow with a square jaw and heavy black glasses, he always seemed wary around his students. Brammer recognized a natural affinity with the man: both of them would rather be home writing and reading than spending time at school. Between lessons, Mr. Hutto turned his back on the class and doodled Disney figures on the blackboard, one of Brammer’s classmates remembered. From Mr. Hutto, Brammer learned about Horace McCoy, best known for his novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? but important to local writers because he had slipped a vivid fictional portrait of Oak Cliff into his crime novel No Pockets in a Shroud (1937). His example reinforced Dobie’s conviction that literature, popular, pulp, or otherwise, could be made from Texas experience. Brammer felt a gleeful thrill of recognition when he read, in McCoy’s novel, about the “faint sucking noises of the water and the dull traffic noises of the city” or about the smell of the furniture factories in middle-class neighborhoods “when you crossed the viaduct and started down the hill to the reclaimed flatlands.”
Despite the wartime economy, which limited the availability of building materials, the local landscape was changing, and it was getting harder to recognize the old and familiar. A real estate developer named Angus Wynne, whose son would become a major rock and roll promoter in Texas, and a pal of Brammer’s, was paving the way for strip malls and shopping centers in Oak Cliff, attracting national chain stores to the area. He encouraged local entrepreneurs to invest in an exotic cuisine called Tex-Mex, supporting families who had taken their mothers’ recipes out of the small steamy kitchens of shotgun houses and into neighborhood restaurants. The energy behind these developments reflected an optimism that the war would soon end and a period of prosperity and celebration would follow. (In the 1960s, Wynne opened Six Flags over Texas, an amusement park modeled after Disneyland, themed around Texas’s wars and turning the state’s past into one big roller-coaster ride.)
Brammer was as buoyed by this optimism as any young person, but his euphoria was balanced by spooky undercurrents. His brother, Jim, had been shot down over Iwo Jima. Jim survived: as the plane’s navigator, he had made an instantaneous life-or-death decision—do we try to land and risk becoming prisoners of war, or do we ditch? Luckily, he chose to land, and the crew was rescued before the Japanese found them. Jim returned to the States wearing a medal for bravery.
The liberation of the German death camps was cause for cheer, but Brammer could not stop staring in horror at the pictures in the May 7, 1945, issue of Life magazine: the living corpses of Buchenwald, the stacks of skeletal bodies, the stark evidence of a complete absence of human spirit.
A month earlier, he could not stop staring at pictures of Franklin Roosevelt, who had shocked the nation by dying in office.
From the radio, Brammer learned that Governor Jester and Lieutenant Governor Allan Shivers, working with a self-proclaimed Christian leader named Vance Muse, had enacted the nation’s first right-to-work laws in Texas, attacking labor unions for allowing black and white men to mingle in meetings, against the laws of God and nature. Brammer’s political convictions were still inchoate, but the difference in the governor’s harsh tone and the tone of Lyndon Johnson’s speech about the poor was striking to him. He was more certain than ever that clarity of thought and principle was not just expressed by language, but also embodied by it.