Kilgore, Texas

My first job after I graduated from college was as “society editor” of the Kilgore News-Herald. 
Kilgore, an hour and a half east of Dallas, called itself “the city of skyscrapers” because of the many oil derricks in the center of the little town. 

In the 1930's Kilgore was the center of the East Texas oil boom.  There were no restrictions on how close wells could be to each other.  In Kilgore derricks were set up next to each other, like rows of small Eiffel towers, right against the foundations of buildings.  A couple of blocks from the newspaper office where I worked was the abandoned little brick building which had been First Presbyterian Church.  Oil derricks completely surrounded the structure.  The Presbyterians now worshiped in a handsome large new church surrounded by grassy lawns a half-mile outside the “oil dome” in the center of town. 

During the Great Depression, when throughout the rest of the U.S. people were starving, some families in Kilgore became fabulously rich.  

When I arrived in 1949, the boom days were over.  Many of the town’s residents were poor and lived in little frame houses hastily built during the boom.  As I walked home from work, I passed a row of “shot-gun” houses – a single-room wide, three or four rooms deep – in one of which lived Marie, the young woman who read proof for the paper.  A few blocks further I walked by the large, two-story brick mansion owned by one of the town’s “oil” families. 

As “society editor” I reported on women’s activities.  Every day I had to fill a full page in the paper with accounts of club meetings and other chit-chat.  Big news was a wedding at First Baptist Church with a reception at the home of the bride’s parents, where the refreshments were cake and non-alcoholic punch.  If a child had a birthday, I would print the names of every little child who attended the party.

Then there was the music teacher.  A big, matronly woman, in her cotton dresses printed with pastel flowers, she looked like a typical small town housewife, very different from the sophisticated “oil” wives who drove to Dallas to buy clothes at Nieman-Marcus.  She bustled in every month with a “report” of a little club she had for her piano pupils.  I duly took her list of the names of each attendee.  . 

One day, as she handed me the usual monthly report, she said, “You know Kilgore is the most musical town in East Texas.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You won’t believe the musical authority who told me so.”

“Who was that?”

“I really shouldn’t tell you.  He assured me that there was no other town in East Texas with as much music as Kilgore.”

I imagined the “musical authority” must be the music critic for the Dallas Morning News.

Then she told me.  Her “musical authority” was the organist at Kilgore’s First Presbyterian Church.  As she explained, “You know he lives in Longview.”   That was the next town, 15 miles northeast. 

One day I stopped by her house, twice the size of a “shot-gun” house but still a small frame house.  A baby-grand piano almost filled the living room.  Her son was practicing when I came in.  A lanky, baby-faced kid with wild blonde hair, at 14 he was already over 6-feet tall with hands and feet twice the size of mine.  He turned on the piano bench and sat quietly facing me while his mother told me about the latest activities of her little club.  She told me proudly that her boy was going to become a famous concert pianist.

Remembering her “musical authority”, I doubted this.  I thought I was being ironic when I said, “Yes, Mrs. Cliburn, I am sure you are right.”