Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (6 page)

"There's twelve hundred boys in Permian High School. You divide that
by three and there's four hundred in every class. You guys are a very
special breed. There are guys back there that are every bit as good as
you are. But they were not able to stick it out for whatever reason. Football'S not for everybody. But you guys are special.

"We want you all to carry the torch in the eight-eight season. It's
got to mean somethin' really special to you. You guys have dreamt about
this /or many years, to be a part of this team, some of you since you were
knee-high. Work hard, guys, and pay the price. Be proud you're a part
of this program. Keep up the tradition that was started many years ago.

That tradition was enshrined on a wall of the field house,
where virtually every player who had made All-State during the
past twenty-nine years was carefully immortalized within the
dimensions of a four-by-six-inch picture frame. It was enshrined in the proclamation from the city council that hung on
a bulletin board, honoring one of Permian's state championship
teams. It was enshrined in the black carpet, and the black-andwhite cabinets, and the black rug in the shape of a panther. It
was enshrined in the county library, where the 235-page history
that had been written about Permian football was more detailed
than any of the histories about the town itself.

Of all the legends of Odessa, that of high school football was the most enduring. It had a deep and abiding sense of place
and history, so unlike the town, where not even the origin of
the name itself could be vouched for with any confidence.

Odessa ...

There had been no reason for its original existence. It owed
its beginnings to a fine blend of Yankee ingenuity and hucksterism, its selling the first primordial example of the Home
Shopping Network.

It was invented in the 1880s by a group of men from Zanesville, Ohio, who saw a great opportunity to make money if only
they could figure out some way to get people there, to somehow
induce them into thinking that the land bore bountiful secrets,
this gaping land that filled the heart with far more sorrow than
it ever did encouragement, stretching without a curve except
for the undulating trough off the caprock where the once-great
herds of buffalo had grazed for water. What Odessa lacked,
and one look informed the most charitable eve that it lacked a
fantastic amount, the speculators from Ohio would make up
for on the strength of their own imagination. With fourteen
thousand arid acres to sell, truth in advertising was not something to dwell over.

The Zanesville syndicate looked at all the best natural qualities of the country and decided to attribute them to Odessa
whether they were there or not. Through brochures and pamphlets it conjured tip a place with weather as wonderful as
Southern California's and soil as fertile as that of the finest acre
of farmland in Kansas or Iowa.

"Splendid cities will spring up all along the railroads that
traverse the plains, and immense fortunes will be made there
in a few years, in land business ventures, you will see the most
remarkable emigration to that section that has occurred since
the days when the discovery of gold sent wealth-seekers by
thousands into Colorado," Henry Thatcher boldly forecast in
the Chillicothe Leader in 1886.

If that wasn't enough to make someone leave southern Ohio, Odessa was also promoted as a utopian health spa with a
$12,000 college and a public library, and a ban on alcohol.
Those suffering from consumption, bronchitis, malaria, kidney, bladder, or prostate problems, asthma, or rheumatism
would be welcomed with open arms, according to a promotional pamphlet.

'Those who were failures, near death, didn't like working,
bad with money, or cheap politicians were specifically not welcome, the same pamphlet said. The statement appeared to
exclude many of the people who might have been interested in
such a place.

The great Odessa land auction took place on May 19, 1886.
The Zanesvile boys, careful to the last drop, actually held it 350
miles to the east, in Dallas. Historical accounts of Odessa do not
accurately indicate how many settlers bought lots. But about
ten families, German Methodists from western Pennsylvania
around Pittsburgh, hoping to realize the utopian community so
grandly talked about, did arrive.

They tried to fit in with the ranchers and cowboys who were
already there, but it was not a good match. The Methodists
found the ranchers and the cowboys beyond saving. The ranchers and the cowboys found that the Methodists did nothing but
yell at them all the time.

As part of its commitment, the syndicate went ahead and
built a college for the Methodists. It was constructed around
1889 but burned mysteriously three years later. Some said the
college was set afire by cowboys who disliked being told by the
Methodists that they could not drink, particularly in a place
that cried out daily for alcohol. Others said it was burned by a
contingent of jealous citizens from Midland because the Odessa
college was competing with a similar institution that the sister
city had built. Finally, there were those who said the college was
burned down simply because it was something the damn Yankees had built the natives of the city when no one had asked for
it. Given the later attitudes of Odessa, all these theories are probably true. A hospital was also built, but most settlers ignored it and instead relied on such tried-and-true home remedies as cactus juice and a wrap of cabbage leaves for the chills,
a plaster made out of fresh cow manure for sprains, and buzzard grease for measles.

Contrary to all the boasts of the land's fertility, it was virtually
impossible to farm anything because of the difficulty of getting
water. Instead, Odessa eked out a living from the livestock
trade, all dreams of utopia gone forever when the town's first
sheriff, Elias Dawson, decided that the ban on alcohol constituted cruel and unusual punishment and became the proprietor, along with his brother, of the town's first saloon.

The first murder in Odessa occurred late in the nineteenth
century when a cowboy rode into a water-drilling camp one
afternoon and demanded something to eat from the cook.
The cook, described as a "chinanian," refused, so the cowboy
promptly shot him. He was taken to San Angelo and put on
trial, but the judge freed him on the grounds that there were
no laws on the books making it illegal to kill a Chinaman.

For more casual entertainment, a couple of cowboys gathered up all the cats they could find one day, tied sacks of dried
beans to their tails, and then set them loose downtown to scare
the daylights out of the horses and the citizens milling about.
In later times it was hard not to get caught up in the frivolity of
those great practical jokers, the Wilson brothers, whose professional standing as doctors didn't mean they were above grabbing unsuspecting townsfolk into the barbershop and shaving
their heads.

By 1900, Odessa had only 381 residents. By 1910 the population had increased to 1,178. Most of those inhabitants depended
on ranching, but various droughts made survival almost impossible because of the lack of grazing land for cattle. The ranchers
became so poor they could not afford to buy feed, and many
cattle were just rounded up and shot to death so the stronger
ones could have what little grass was left.

Nothing about living in Odessa was easy. Finding a scrubby
tree that could barely serve as a Christmas tree took two days.
Even dealings with cattle rustlers and horse thieves had to be
compromised; they were shot instead of hanged because there
weren't any trees tall enough from which to let them swing.

A flu epidemic hit in 1919, filling up the only funeral home
in town, which was part of' the hardware store. It so severely
overran the town that there weren't enough men well enough
to dig the graves of those who had died. Medical care was at
best a kind of potluck affair. The one doctor who settled in
Odessa during this period, Emmet V. Headlee, used the dining
room of his home as an operating room. He performed the
operations while his wife administered the anesthetic.

By 1920 the population had dropped back down to 760, and
it was hard to believe that Odessa would survive. But ironically, the Zanesville elite was right in its fanciful prediction that
Odessa was bubbling with a bounty of riches.

Unknown to anyone when it was founded, the town was sitting in the midst of the Permian Basin, a geologic formation so
lush it would ultimately produce roughly 20 percent of the nation's oil and gas. With major oil discoveries in West Texas in
the early and mid-twenties, the boom was on, and Odessa was
only too eager to embrace the characteristics that distinguished
other Texas boom towns of the period: wild overcrowding, lawlessness, prostitution, chronic diarrhea, bad water, streets that
were so deep in mud that teams of oxen had to be called in to
pull the oil field machinery, and a rat problem so severe that
the local theater put out a rat bounty and would let you in free
if you produced twelve rat tails.

Odessa established itself as a distribution point for oil field
equipment and experienced more growth in a month than it
had in ten years, inundated by men who were called simply
boomers. They came into town once a week, their skin scummy
and stinking and blackened from oil and caked-on dirt, to get
a bath and a shave at the barbershop. Young children ogled at them when they appeared because it was unimaginable, even
by the standards of children, to find anyone as dirty as these
men were.

From 1926 on, Odessa became forever enmeshed in the cycles
of the boom-and-bust oil town. It made for a unique kind of
schizophrenia, the highs of the boom years like a drug-induced
euphoria followed by the lows of the bust and the realization
that everything you had made during the boom had just been
lost, followed again by the euphoria of boom years, followed
again by the depression of another bust, followed by another
boom and yet another bust, followed by a special prayer to the
Lord, which eventually showed up on bumper stickers of pickups in the eighties, for one more boom with a vow "not to piss
this one away."

There was a small nucleus of people who settled here and
worked here and cared about the future of the town, who
thought about convention centers and pleasant downtown shopping and all the other traditional American mainstays. But basically it became a transient town, a place to come to and make
money when the boom was on and then get as far away from as
possible with the inevitable setting in of the bust. If a man or
woman wasn't making money, there wasn't much reason to stay.

Hub Heap, who came out here in 1939 and later started a
successful oil field supply company, remembered well the single
event that embodied his early days in Odessa. It was a torrent
of sand, looking like a rain cloud, that came in from the northwest and turned the place so dark in the afternoon light that
the street lamps suddenly started glowing. Nothing escaped the
hideousness of that sand. It crept in everywhere, underneath
the rafters, inside the walls, like an endless army of tiny ants,
covering him, suffocating him, pushing down into his lungs,
blinding his eyes, and that night he had no choice but to sleep
with a wet towel over his face just so he could breathe.

Odessa also became tough and quick-fisted, filled with men who hardly needed a high school diploma, much less a college
one, to become roughnecks and tool pushers on an oil rig. They
spent a lot of time in trucks traveling to remote corners of the
earth to put in a string of drill pipe, and when they went home
to Odessa to unwind they did not believe in leisurely drinking
or witty repartee. More often than not, they did not believe
in conversation, their dispositions reflecting the rough, atonal
quality of the land, which after the droughts consisted mostly
of the gnarled limbs of low-lying mesquite bushes. Outside of
the oil business, the weather (which almost never changed), and
high school football, there wasn't a hell of 'a lot to talk about.

J. D. Cone, when he came here from Oklahoma in 1948 to
become a family practitioner, went on house calls with a thirtyeight pistol stuck into his belt after the sheriff told him it was
always a good idea to he armed in case someone got a little
ornery or disagreed with the diagnosis. Right after he arrived,
he went with a friend to the notorious Ace of Clubs. Everything
was fine until mid-evening, Cone remembers, when it was time
for the nightly revue and beer bottles started flying through the
air. No one except Cone thought much about it. It did reinforce for him his initial impression of Odessa, when all he could
see as he drove into town the first time was the red cast of the
clouds from a winter storm. At night there was the equally eerie
sight of the gas flares, huge fissures of fire corning from the oil
rigs where natural gas, an unwanted burden back then, was
being burned off.

"This must not be planet earth," Cone told his partner. "This
must be hell."

But it wasn't. It was just Odessa.

During the next boom period in the seventies and eighties,
Odessa made a telltale leap into the twentieth century. A
branch of the University of Texas was built and a new suburban-style mall opened, but the hearty, hair-trigger temperament of the place still remained intact. Differences of opinion
were still sometimes settled by vengeful retribution, resulting in the kinds of brutal, visceral crimes that were supposed to
take place in cities of several million, not in one of barely over
a hundred thousand. Not surprisingly, most of these grisly killings occurred during the height of the boom, when money and
madness overran much of the town.

In 1982, the thirty-seven murders that took place inside
Ector County gave Odessa the distinction of having the highest
murder rate in the country. Most agreed that was a pretty high
number, but mention of gun control was as popular as a suggestion to change the Ten Commandments.