Lights Out: Big Tex

BBC Radio 4, Monday November 12th 2018 @ 11pm

Presented by Julia Barton


Produced by Alan Hall and Hannah Dean
With additional research by Paula Bosse

A Falling Tree Production

Duration 27’30’’
SYNOPSIS

Lights Out is a new space on BBC Radio 4 for documentary adventures that encourage you
to take a closer listen.

Dallas is a city built on creeks and streams and, in the 1970s, the children of Dallas often
roamed a secret landscape of culverts, waterways and tunnels. Meanwhile, above ground,
adults in the city were reckoning with a local court order to desegregate the city's schools.
Almost twenty years after Brown v Board of Education ruled that racial segregation
violated the US Constitution, Dallas began bussing minority students into majority-white
schools.

The change brought conflict and strife, but also opened up new worlds for children in a
city isolated by race. In classrooms and playgrounds, an osmosis of experience,
perspective and rumours took place. Julia Barton, who is white, heard a murky legend of a
tunnel to Fair Park, home of the bombastic and beloved State Fair of Texas. Much later
(and buttressed by a local basketball star's biography), Julia's black classmate Sam
Franklin helps her track the legend down.

But the children of Dallas have a new legend now. The story of desegregation itself has
become a distant myth as white families fled the city's schools, leaving new patterns of
isolation in their wake. Only the Fair's iconic Big Tex - a 55-foot tall, talking statue of a
cowboy - seems to stay the same in Dallas from year to year. But even he may be more
changeable than locals want to admit. With Julia's classmate Nikki Benson, former teenage
tunneller Melvin Qualls, local historian Donald Payton, retired teacher Leonard Davis and
Sixth Graders from Alex Sanger Elementary School.
CHILD 1 Let’s go!

CHILD 2 Wait. Are we going all the way to the other end?

JULIA Well…

CHILD 2 It’s all dirty and mushy.

JULIA Look there’s a sign here, what does it say, Arvie?

CHILD 2 Umm…

CHILD 1 Danger!

CHILD 2 Danger!

MELVIN You ever been in a cave? A real pitch black cave, kinda’ cold?

JULIA We have a lot of storm drains in Dallas.

MELVIN You really can’t see. You feel stuff on the wall but you don’t know
what is. You don’t know whether it’s slime or whatever, you know…

JULIA The storm drains are a place that looms large in my imagination
from childhood.

MELVIN To me it was like being in a dark cave just feeling your way.

SFX

JULIA They were everywhere, they were scary and they were irresistible.

SAM I think it’s the first or second street here. We would… (Get a little
background in here. Gosh I hope he’s chained up)…

JULIA Sam Franklin was a year ahead of me in High School and he was really
cool.

SAM We were kids coming from grade school, we were latch-key kids…

JULIA His nickname was ‘Divo’.

SAM We had to walk in groups so you learned how to deal with bullies, you
learned how to deal with things like drugs and suspect characters
very, very young and you became aware of your environment. The
perimeter of our world was railroad tracks.

PIANO MUSIC
JULIA So this is a treasure box that was my mum’s makeup case - you can
see. Let’s see - I’ve saved this newsletter from my elementary school,
Alex Sanger. ‘Sanger News: Alex Sanger PTA Newsletter, November 9th
1979, Open House. Tues, 7.30, November 13th, busses leaving Feeder
schools at 7 o’clock. Ahhh, that’s interesting….

ARCHIVE In the field of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal
has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

NIKKI I had been bussed to school since I was…

JULIA Nikki Benson was a classmate at mine in High School

NIKKI … 11 years old.

JULIA And I always thought she had this miraculous was of using her voice.

NIKKI … an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, a commute. It

was hard.

ARCHIVE On April 6th this year the federal court decision became final that
some degree of desegregation must, by law begin in Dallas, in the
schools this fall.

JULIA So I started in the early seventies, right, 1975 Mom? We lived here in
this neighbourhood and that was the neighbourhood school, Alex
Sanger Elementary. And this neighbourhood is predominantly white
and when I started school the school was mostly white and then in
second grade we came back to school and there was like a whole new
group of kids there, and they rode the bus in and they were almost
all black.

MOM Uh huh, yeah

JULIA I can’t remember - there was something else in here…

NIKKI And it was ’we are the world, we are the children…’

SAM It was the 80’s, it was United Colours of Benetton and here we are in
Texas and we’re taken in, we’re the MTV age, we’re Gen X and we’re
thinking it’s all good. But our instructors and our teachers and our
administrators, y’know, they were old school.

LEONARD It’s like, one social studies teacher and he’s just a good old country
boy and he used to say, ‘you can take a spoonful of chicken droppings
and stir them in a gallon of ice-cream and it won’t hurt them chicken
droppings one bit’.
ARCHIVE Change is not always easy. As we change the face of Dallas it is our
responsibility to see that it has changed for the better. For what we
have created, we can also destroy

MUSIC

LEONARD I am Leonard Davis. I was actually born in East Dallas on Ross Avenue
which is just a couple of miles from here in 1947 and I came to work
for Dallas ISD in the fall of 1971 which was the first year of court
order desegregation and everything got turned upside-down.

MUSIC Well it’s flooding down in Texas…

JULIA Dallas waited so long to integrate and held off and waited until a
judge ordered it several times.

ARCHIVE Television would be…

JULIA They wanted to have TV connect classrooms so the children wouldn’t

be in physical contact.

ARCHIVE Not only video but audio

MELVIN There was just so much going on at that time, you know.

MUSIC All of the telephone lines are down…

MELVIN You could see big boulders come at us…

JULIA Oh people were throwing rocks at the busses?

MELVIN Bottles, rocks…

JULIA Why? Wait, so it was the white folks throwing the rocks?

MELVIN Hmm all I know is that, wow there was so much fighting, so
much….just too much, you know.

JULIA But the fear was that the white parents would all pull their kids of
school. And they did.

MOM They did!

TEACHER 5,6,7,8

KIDS Hey now you’re an all-star, get your game on, go play.

Hey now you’re a rock-star the show on, get paid.

All that glitters is gold.

Only shooting stars break the mould.

TEACHER Good job [Clapping]

LEONARD So the district put together, rather hurriedly this term they called
‘confluence of cultures’ and it was all about acclimatising teachers to
the idea that they were going to be moved into a different part of
town, into a different ethnic culture and everybody was just paranoid

MUSIC

MELVIN One day they asked us if we’d ever seen a play called The Nutcracker.
We said, no. So they called us into the auditorium, locked all the
doors and made us sit there and watch this thing. To me it was like
six hours long, it was the longest, it was the longest…well I didn’t
understand not one thing of it and all I know is they said it was called
The Nutcracker. It was something about, you know we were being
taught culture.

JULIA White culture?

MELVIN Well, I guess so you know. When we got there they locked us in, when
we got in they locked all the doors, we couldn’t get out. Well, they
had people outside the door where you couldn’t use the restrooms,
you couldn’t do nothing - you had to sit there and watch this play.

KIDS A.S.M!

LEONARD And then there was ‘white flight’.

JULIA So. all of you guys hablas español?

KIDS [Talking] I don’t speak Spanish…

LEONARD A lot of people saw this artificial, imposed, social engineering and
when they realised they couldn’t fight it they moved out of town. It
wasn’t good but it was understandable.

JULIA Ok so what do you think desegregation is?

OLIVER It was the process of racially integrating the schools.

JULIA Did you learn about it in school?

OLIVER No I did not.

JULIA How did you find out about it?

OLIVER My dad. He was bussed and then I’d look it up online. They were
actually supposed to segregate, I forgot the exact year but in the
50’s…

JULIA Desegregate?

OLIVER Desegregate, in ‘54, I think, with Brown vs Board of Education.

LEONARD Schools were not desegregating, right. In the summer of 76’ a second
federal Supreme Court order came out.

JULIA I am so impressed with that answer, you just gave the best…what’s
your name?

OLIVER My name’s Oliver.

JULIA Oh nice Oliver, thank you for, yeah! But then there’s something else.
There’s another side to the story which is about the state fair. We had
a legend at Alex Sanger. Do you wanna hear the legend?

KIDS Yeah…

JULIA I can’t believe I’m telling you guys.

SFX

JULIA I grew up in East Dallas…

MELVIN Ok

JULIA …and I heard the legend, a friend of mine told that there was a
tunnel to the state fair but I didn’t believe her.

MELVIN You didn’t?

JULIA I didn’t because all she showed me was a man-hole cover and she
said ‘here’s where you come out’. I was like…

MELVIN Ok …

JULIA … so I just thought she was making it up until I read Dennis Rodman’s
thing.
[PHONE RINGS]

MELVIN Hello?

ROBERT Hello.

MELVIN Hey Robert, you know that lady I told you about, she wanna know
about the Three Man Tunnel?

ROBERT Yeah.

MELVIN She’s here and she’d like to talk to you, if you wanna talk to her.

ROBERT Ok, you just get my number from Melvin and then give me a call and
I’ll tell you how to get here.

JULIA Ok, thank you.

ROBERT Alright, you’re welcome.

JULIA Bye bye.

MELVIN It’s a real story!

MUSIC Our state fair is a great state fair.

Don’t miss it, don’t even be late…

JULIA One of the people I turn to when I want to understand the world I
grew up in is Donald Payton. He’s a local historian.

DONALD You wanna talk about the great state fair of Texas?

JULIA Yes Sir!

MUSIC Our State Fair is a great State Fair ….

DONALD The centennial was 1936 and my dad and my uncles, they all got to
go. That one day: Negro Day. And it was so odd because one of our
community leaders, a guy called A. Masio Smith went out and talked
with Mayor Thornton, (R.L Thornton) and he asked Thornton about
putting in the contribution of the Negro in Texas. And Thornton
laughed and said ‘what the hell y’all ever did where you think you
deserve recognition at the great State Fair of Texas? We’ve invited
the world leaders, we’ve invited Mussolini and we’ve invited this
 great guy called Adolf Hitler and you think we’re gonna invite you?’ 


JULIA So all of this was built in the 1930’s for this centennial of Texas’s
independence as a nation - not just a state, you know. It was a
chance to celebrate your state identity. But Texas has to do
everything bigger right?

LEONARD And all the major cities in Texas vied and competed for the privilege
of hosting it because it meant tons and tons of money for their city
right. The movers and the shakers of the business community in
Dallas literally bought it.

DONALD So Masio went up to Washington DC and got federal money to build

the Negro building for the 1936 centennial and it had art, it had
agriculture and then after, of course, the first building they bulldozed
down was the ‘negro building’.

MUSIC Our state fair is a great state fair.

Don’t miss it, don’t even be late…

JULIA So, Texas has just got a big ego and big egos demand big buildings,
right? But it’s sort of like archeologically preserved here, this sort of
bombast and pride and arrogance.

SFX

MELVIN Wow, this has to be like 73’, 74’, somewhere like that. We grew up in
Frasier Court, in the projects, and we used to just walk down through
the …I guess you call it a channel or something and one day we came
up on this Three Man Tunnel and we were curious about it, so… we all
just decided which one we’re going through, because there’s three of
them, so we decided to go through the middle one. So we went
through the middle one and we’d come out at the Fair Park.

Well we couldn’t hear nothing down there. Only way we knew was
that when you come out from the bottom to the top and take the
man-hole over off of it, you could hear everything.

SFX
MUSIC Stars at night are big and bright,

Deep in the heart of Texas…

JULIA One of the most notorious basketball players who grew up in Dallas
was Dennis Rodman, and one day I picked up an autobiography he
wrote, ‘Bad as I Wanna Be’. Right at the start of the second chapter
he talks about going to the State Fair through a tunnel. ‘This tunnel
was legendary among kids,’ he writes. ‘I wonder about the first guy
who went through there and found out where it came out. What the
hell was he thinking?’

MUSIC (ACTUALITY)

MELVIN Like I said, it was going on, everything was lit up, lights were flying,
rides were going and we were excited so… we just went in. We did
whatever, we rode rides and everything. We never paid to get into
the Fair, but that was our way in every year.

JULIA How did word of the tunnel spread to my neighbourhood? It must

have been desegregation and it was my friend Sam who helped me
figure it out.

SAM So this is the actual entrance into the tunnel and there is a chain link
fence that we’re standing next to now and there are several openings
along the fence. We’re standing at the top of a water way, maybe
30-40 yards across. We’re probably 30-40 feet from the bottom of the
waterway and to our right is almost like a big aqueduct opening,
three openings.

MELVIN We got back the next morning and we were telling people about it,
but we weren’t showing no one where it was ‘cos we didn’t want
nobody to mess up our little way into the Fair Park so…

BIG TEX Hola! Our State Fair of Texas

SAM I was walking in pairs with my cousins because whenever we walked

when we were with my great-grandmother we’d have to walk in pairs
and we would have a buddy - and ultimately we walked upon this big,
gigantic image of this Anglo man and these red, white and blue boots
with these jeans on and he had one hand here and he had one hand
out like here. I never understood the hand to the chest and other
hand extended out and I remember walking up to it and looking and
my grandmother saying, ‘that’s Big Tex’ and we all went ‘oooo’
LEONARD: ‘Howdy folks, my name is Big Tex’

JULIA It’s so disturbing…

LEONARD I mean this is like 55ft tall right. I mean, just a monster. It’s an icon.

BIG TEX Howdy Folks, this is Big Tex. Welcome to the State Fair of Texas.

SAM ‘Howdy, this is Big Tex’. I remember he would always start off with
‘Howdy’…

JULIA Oh my God! His hand is moving, he’s waving at us and he’s turning
his head! It’s so creepy!

SAM … ‘Welcome to the state fair of Texas’ and then he’d say the year.

ARCHIVE/

MUSIC This is your city: Dallas.

JULIA The signature dish of the fair is the corny dog – corn batter wrapped
around a hotdog and then dipped in fat and then you put it on a
stick. So you get that in your stomach, then you go on rides.

ARCHIVE/

SFX

Dallas is a manmade town and every man has the opportunity to

make this life whatever he wants. We call our town ‘Big D’
because it is big hearted, open-handed, both friendly and
progressive...

DONALD You see they had a very popular game out there because you could
hit this little lever that was out on the dunking tank and the guy
would fall in the water. I can remember a guy called Red who used to
work in the dunking tank and he could agitate them white men, he
could agitate them and they would be buying baskets of balls, a line
of them. ‘Hit that trigger and dunk that nigger’.

MUSIC This bitter earth, well what a fruit it bears…

SAM In every project home there was a picture of Martin Luther King, John
F Kennedy and a picture of white Jesus on the cross. In every one of
our homes. And so when we went to the fair I didn’t look at it as
‘that’s a big white man’, I didn’t look at it as ‘Oh that’s a symbol of
oppression to our people’ …

MUSIC … and if my life is like the dust…

SAM I looked at it as ‘I’m a Texan and he’s a Texan’. It was a source of
pride because it was Big Tex, it was Big Texas.

SFX

DONALD You know, in this country you always gotta have something that
makes one group of people feel superior to another group. You know,
America’s inspired by fear. So you always got to have a bogey-man in
the closet or under the bed in America, you got to always have an
Obama and so the State Fair of Texas fed into that.

MUSIC Well dark clouds are rolling, man and I’m standing out in the rain…

LEONARD We recently went through this thing about denying history and
erasing all memory of the confederacy. Don’t even get me started!

MUSIC Well dark clouds are rolling, man and I’m standing out in the rain…

LEONARD It’s one thing to take down Robert E Lee’s statue, which is another
icon in the city, but what are you gonna do about Fair Park? You can’t
touch Fair Park and, jeez, you wouldn’t believe the countless hours
and dollars that’ve been spent by this city to comply with the
emotional, knee-jerk reaction of both sides of the argument. For
now, everything here is safe.

DONALD I had one professor, he told our class that he loved his Grandpa and
his Grandpa had told him that when the slaves were freed America
went to hell in a handbasket and has never recovered. Now I’m
counting on this guy to teach me and this guy’s still fighting the Civil
War - he’s still thinking that the wrong side won! You see, and now I
understand, because education is the great equalizer.

SAM So, we lived in this second unit here and we had a balcony and at the
time this old railway was the only thing that was here so we were
literally this side of the tracks. 


And all 14 of my cousins, we all lived in various apartments in this

complex and we could sit on the balcony here during the Fair,
because we couldn’t afford to go, and we’d watch the fireworks right
over there.

SFX

LEONARD In 2012 an electrical short caused a fire on the last Friday of the Fair.
DONALD We were there the night Big Tex burned.

LEONARD It was the 60 years of Big Tex.

DONALD ` ‘Donald, Donald, come here! His pants are on fire, he’s burning. Big
Tex is burning.’

ARCHIVE ‘Agent 6 out. Big Tex on Fire’. ‘Howdy folks it’s hot’

DONALD And I thought ‘liar liar, your pants are on fire…’

ARCHIVE ‘777 out. Got a rather tall cowboy with all his clothes burned off at
10:31’

DONALD And they put a new Big Tex up. They made Big Tex too dark and the
people complained about it.

ARCHIVE The secret is out at the State Fair of Texas as the new Big Tex was
unveiled early …

DONALD When was this, 3 years ago, 4 years ago? And they said ‘oh no, he
looks Hispanic almost.’

ARCHIVE … Tammy Eldridge Parsons says ‘wow, what a strange change. I don’t
like it.’

DONALD And they took Tex down, they lightened old Tex up, man. They
weren’t gonna have Big Tex being no Mexican and certainly were
gonna take him down a shade. [laughs]

MUSIC

MELVIN And this used to be a railway track right behind our house where we
used to stay and we used to go up there on that track and take things
out the box cars and stuff. And…we had a little friend called Marcus.
Somebody killed him but they found him in the middle of the
stadium, undressed with a hole in the back of his head. Marcus had to
be about, like, 13. He was the youngest one. I think that’s why we
took it so hard, you know, because he was the youngest one. And we
don’t really know what happened. And his mother she, she took it
real hard …I aint’ gonna say she blamed us, but she felt like that if he
hadn’t been with us it wouldn’t have happened to him so…after that
we just kinda like went our separate ways. We just stopped going
through the Three Man Tunnel.
ARCHIVE As your mayor and speaking for your city council. We pledge out
assistance in this program and earnestly hope to have yours.
Together, we will show America the Dallas way.

NIKKI Record this. ‘We are the world, we are the children…’

JULIA [Laughs] Yeah we really were the children, like we were the
children…

NIKKI Yeah we were the children of Aquarius so we knew there was a better
way, but we knew there was a bad way behind us. We were kind of
caught in between, right? Yeah girl.

MELVIN I never had a science class where you have to dissect frogs and use
bunsen burners and all this was kinda new, so you can’t ask too many
questions because if you gonna ask too many questions then all of a
sudden you get labelled as…I don’t know, stupid? Not knowing
something, you know. So I wouldn’t ask questions even if I couldn’t
understand a lot of things. But it’s just enough to make you kinda just
draw back you know, I don’t know…

SAM So this is where the Book Mobile would actually come down and park
on Grove Wood right in front of my cousins’ house. And err, that was
my exit out of this environment and it was reading. It was reading
and my absolute favourite in the world was the Peanuts. I was
flipping through the pages and there was a kid that Charlie Brown
met and he called him, and it was a black kid and his name was
Franklin and when I saw Franklin - and Charles Schulz actually chosen
my name as the character - I thought God had just reached down and
talked to Charles Schulz and told him about me. And I wanted to be
in that world and that was my escape from Dixon Circle.

JULIA Mine was the only generation in Dallas that got this gift of
desegregation. And by the time we graduated, the experiment was
almost over.

NIKKI My son did not get the same choices because they said ‘you go here’.

JULIA So his schools were majority black the whole time?

NIKKI Yeah, they were. They were. Because by that time they said ‘ok well,
you guys don’t have to do it anymore,’ so we stopped and it’s bad for
 us, it’s bad for our children. We know the world itself is so much
broader and it seems like Dallas is so much smaller. It may as well be
1975 all over again. Hispanic people and black people in Dallas all
over again.

JULIA What happened to all the white people?

NIKKI Girl, they gone!

PIANO MUSIC

JULIA The gift that desegregation gave to me as a white person was that it
revealed the dimensions of my own ignorance. It didn’t solve my
ignorance, it didn’t solve all of our problems, but it changed my life.

ARVIE I think we’re in a sewer Mom!

JULIA And now our story is a legend …

ARVIE Shall I make an echo?

JULIA … to the children who followed. …Echo!

MUSIC

MELVIN Actually I work at the Fair.

JULIA Where?

MELVIN Gate 8. I sit at a gate and…I mean, it’s a little easy job, you know…
I’ve been doing it for 4 years now, you know so…

JULIA Shall I get tickets ahead of time or should I just get…

MELVIN Get tickets at the beginning? I can get you into the Fair just come out
there.

JULIA No, come on!

MELVIN Yeah, I’ll get you into the Fair, yeah.

JULIA I’m gonna take my niece …

MELVIN OK, call me and I’m gonna tell you where to meet me and I’m gonna
get you into the Fair. You, your niece and everybody else you bringing
too. Ok? Ok.

JULIA That was Melvin. He’s such a good guy.