Journey to the Edge of Texas, A Memoir by Carlton Leatherwood: Chapter 8: Going to Trial

Going to Trial

AFTER A QUARTER CENTURY OF EMPLOYMENT, I lost my job in the turmoil of manic depression. I fought desperately to return to the workplace, filing a health discrimination suit that would go to trial in 1993.
In this precedent to the Americans With Disabilities Act, one of my lawyers, a former investigative reporter in television named Steve Petrou, was trying his first case, endowed with idealistic zeal for this journalist.
A star witness for the defense had been a valued friend socially for years, but loyalty was tattered by my manic conduct in the newsroom and he had fired me.
Others among the mentally ill were rooting for me to strengthen their case with employers, less than wary of a possible determination that the employer might have been pushed beyond the limits of its patience by an ugly sickness.

THE   TRIAL,  a sizable undertaking in federal district court, was Carlton E. Leatherwood, Jr. (plaintiff) vs. The Houston Post Co. (defendant). Teams of lawyers would present the case to an eight-person jury in a proceeding presided over by the Honorable Hugh Gibson.
The small maverick Houston law firm of Coane and Associates had drawn up the suit, and my parents helped foot the cost. I do not know the thousands of dollars spent because these parties were always quiet about finances. But I do know that after four years of preparation, lengthened by illnesses on my part, we went to federal court on the strength of a Texas statute.
The case made it on the Galveston docket a few days before Thanksgiving in 1993, and my family settled in a hotel built on a pier jutting into die Gulf of Mexico.
Court was called into session.
A jury of five men and three women was seated.
"The attorneys will be given an opportunity to make an opening statement," Judge Gibson told the jury. "The purpose of the statement is to set forth from each of their standpoints what the issues in this case are, and to provide evidence that they expect will develop in support of their positions."
"Now for the plaintiff, Mr. Steven Petrou." Petrou strode forward. "Thank you, Your Honor," he said. "Ladies and gentlemen, this case is about a gentleman who for twenty-two years devoted himself to one newspaper, The Houston Post. But the evidence will show that when that newspaper changed ownership, it disowned this loyal journalist and cut him loose simply because he was ill.
"It is a privilege for me today to represent Carlton Leatherwood, Jr. Some of you may have seen his bylines in The Houston Post, because in addition to being an editor, which was his main job, he was also a writer. He wrote features for the Sunday magazine of The Post on subjects ranging from the environment to museums to the Rio Grande River. He also wrote travel stories, going all the way to Italy to cover some resorts, and you'll find out he wrote more than two dozen editorials.
"Mr. Leatherwood was fired from The Houston Port in July, 1989. He's coming to you now, a jury of his peers, because he believes he was wrongfully terminated.
"In Texas, an employer, you'll find out, can fire an employee for almost any reason. This is known as an 'employment at will state.' But the legislature and Congress, they have passed laws that say you cannot fire employees for some reasons. You cannot fire employees just because of their race. You can't fire an employee just because of their sex. You can't fire an employee because you feel they're too old. You can't fire because of their national origin. And they have said you cannot fire an employee because of their disability if that employee can reasonably be accommodated. We're going to prove to you, ladies and gentlemen, that Mr. Leatherwood was fired because of a disability, a health disability, and specifically a mental health disability.
"When I say mental health, I hope this doesn't frighten you or conjure up negative images in you, because some of the experts who will testify in this trial will tell you some very well-known people such as actress Patty Duke and golfer Bert Yancy have experienced the very same mental health illness as Carl Leatherwood, and those people have been able to lead productive lives. In fact, Patty Duke was in an NEC movie just two weeks ago called 'A Matter of Justice.'
"You will hear evidence that Carl Leatherwood has battled this illness for many, many years, and he's always been able to get treatment and return to work until July 1989. And before I tell you The Post forced Carl Leatherwood to prematurely end his career, I'll tell you a little more about how it began.
"Mr. Leatherwood was born in a small town in West Texas, and he moved with his family around, followed the oil patch until they reached Beaumont. He was a high school journalist, and then he became a college journalist. You'll find out he won awards as a writer in high school and in college. And by the mid-1960s, he found himself here in Galveston as an editor for the Galveston Daily News. You'll learn that he was an idealistic journalist who believed that his work allowed him to serve the public by better informing them of the world around them.
"He was lured away from the Galveston Daily News and went to The Houston Post in 1967. He started out as a copy editor for The Post. Later he worked on the wire desk where he gathered international, national and local stories, and later he worked on the business desk. As I mentioned earlier, he also throughout his tenure there contributed articles for magazine features and editorials.
"Before Media News and Dean Singleton took over this paper, it was owned for a few years by a Canadian group. And for many years before that, it was owned by the Hobby family, Oveta Gulp Hobby. The evidence will be that the previous owners accommodated Carl's illness and rewarded his loyalty with pay raises and praise. You will learn that the old management cared about the welfare of their employees long before there were any laws that protected workers from losing their jobs because of their disability. But you'll find out that the new owners were good at reporting our laws—about our laws against disability discrimination. They were good at reporting but not following them.
"The Texas Commission of Human Rights act was passed to prevent employers from discriminating against employees who are disabled and who have handicaps. Mr. Leatherwood is here asking you, a jury of his peers, to listen to all the evidence and at the end to give him the justice that he was denied."

FOR THE DEFENSE, the court calls Ms. Cherry Bounds." "Ladies and gentlemen, good morning,'' Bounds said as she took Petrou's place before the jury.
"The issue in this case regards handicapped discrimination. As you might have surmised, The Houston Post has a difference of opinion than Mr. Leatherwood does as to whether or not we discriminated against him because of his disability. We don't believe we discriminated against him because of his disability.
"We believe the evidence will show you that Mr. Leatherwood was with us for over twenty years, and that during that twenty-year period, the possession and control of The Houston Post changed three different times. But the philosophy was still the same, and the philosophy, unfortunately, was of business to make money. And whether or not those changes in management brought about a more businesslike and professional atmosphere than had been experienced under Mrs. Hobby's leadership, so be it.
"The bottom line is The Post is in business for several reasons, the number one being to make money, but most importantly they're in business to put out a newspaper. They have an obligation to the public, to you and me, to put that paper out in the most efficient, most effective, and most correct manner.
"Car! Leatherwood was a copy editor. He started with The Post as a copy editor in the 1960s. For a period of time his position changed, and you'll hear testimony that his position became a general wire editor. After he was having some problems, his supervisors decided, and they will testify, that it was in the best interest of Carl and the newspaper to move him from that general wire editor position to a business wire editor position. There were reasons for that. The bottom line is they were accommodating Carl's mental health, and they were always accommodating the needs of The Post. They needed someone they could rely on to do that job.
"Carl continued to have episodes, and his illness continued to get worse. The employees, his coworkers, his supervisors did everything they could as individuals. Yes, The Post is a company, but the company is made up of individual people. Those people know Carl. You'll see them testify. You'll hear them talk about Carl, and you'll hear them say that they like Carl. They enjoyed being around Carl most of the time, but the bottom line is those people, those individuals including Carl, had a higher obligation to their employer, The Post, and that was to see that that newspaper that we get on our front porches every day gets out and gets out accurately.
"A point was reached with Carl where he could not be trusted. One of the greatest attributes of a person as a copy editor or any kind of editing position at a newspaper, and specifically The Houston Port, they will testify, is your confidence in their ability to do their job. The Post 's position is that Carl's ability to do the job finally reached a point that they could no longer accommodate. In the last year or so, he couldn't do the job most of time.
"Thank you."
"Is the plaintiff ready to proceed?" Gibson inquired.
"Yes, Your Honor, we are," Petrou answered.
"Who will be your first witness? the judge asked.
"Mr. Leatherwood."
I was sworn in and Petrou began the questioning:
"Did you do some writing while you were at The Houston Post?"
"Yes, I did."
"What kind of writing did you do?"
"I wrote magazine articles, twenty-two magazine articles in about three years.
"Did you also write travel articles?"
"I wrote three prominent travel articles during that time."
"Did you also write editorials?"
"I wrote 20 editorials prior to that."
"Mr. Leatherwood, let me just get an understanding of what you understood your job to be at The Houston Post. What did your job consist of?"
"I was a—for 20 years, I was a general wire editor and then a business wire editor. And I was given the freedom to write and photograph during that time."
"Did you express an interest to a management person that you wanted to be a full-time writer?"
Yes. Martha Liebrum, editor of the magazine, knew of my devout interest in writing, thought I would be best traveling about Texas obtaining stories on people, and she tried to accomplish this fact with Peter O'Sullivan, editor-in-chief at the time the Canadians owned the paper."
"In your own life, was writing an important part of your job at The Port?"
Bounds objected, "He's leading the witness."
"Overrule the objection," the judge said.
"It was an important part, if I may say, for avoiding stress on the job," I said. "For some of these people I know that have been in a job for ten or fifteen years, there is burnout and there is stress, and stress is an ugly component of my illness. And so this relieved that stress, and that was the reason I sought a job other than editing the past twenty years."
Petrou continued his line of questioning. "Did you get some compliments from management on your writing?" he asked.
"Martha, who is one the executives now, said two words that I appreciated very much. They were on a story two newspaper pages long and with pictures partially shot in Galveston. She said: 'Lovely writing.'"
Petrou turned toward the judge. "May I approach the bench, Your Honor?"
"All right."
"Couldn't we look at some samples?" Petrou asked. "I'll not go into the whole thing, just some flavor. This man did more than just edit at The Post."
"What year are we talking about?"
"Some were written in 1986, '87. 1 think the position is he testified that he saw part of his job as writing. He asked to be a permanent writer, and that's the issue of accommodation."
"If you would select a few sample items. I'll consider admitting them."
"There's a sample, Your Honor. It shows his photography and feature writing."
"Was he a photographer also?"
"Yes, he was a photographer also, Your Honor. Then this one here, then two editorials that he wrote."
"That's enough. I'll tell you why I'm going to admit it, if you cannot guess. He claims that his skills included his ability to write. And the issue is, was he discharged because of incompetence or not. The thing of it is that the jury must take into consideration all of his skills in making the determination as to whether they can reasonably accommodate whatever disability he claims he has, and I think it does have that relevancy."
Petrou resumed questioning the plaintiff.
"What is the name of this article, Mr. Leatherwood?"

The Dixie Dude Ranch has been the scene of some happy days dating back to the early 40's.  In those days, many cadets from the Lackland and Randolph Air Force Bases visited and are remembered for their wild horseback riding. Today, however, insurance requirements say guests must ride single file behind a wrangler.

"The Dudes of Dixie."
"Tell us a little bit about it."
"It's about the first dude ranch in that part of Texas, Central Texas."
"Who was this lady whose picture you have here in the article?"

Rose Crowell, owner of the Dixie Dude Ranch

"Rose Crowell."
"Who was Ms. Crowell?"
"She was the owner. She was the daughter of the owner who founded it in 1939, and she helped her father."
"Did you interview her for the article?"
"Yes, I did."
"And when was this article published?"
"1986."
"Did you take all the pictures for this article?"
"Yes, I did."

I WELL   REMEMBER rounding up ranches in the Hill Country, not Central Texas as I had testified. It's a time to paddle forward, to take a reflective break from the courtroom. Rose "Billie" Crowell, owner of one of the oldest guest ranches in Texas, sat down in the dining room of the Dixie Dude Ranch to tell about the time the dinner bell rang in midafternoon and horses came running, mounted with Air Force cadets on weekend passes from training bases at nearby San Antonio. The day was Dec. 7, 1941. Japanese planes had bombed Pearl Harbor.
"We had around forty military people here, men mostly," she said. "We had twenty-eight horses at that time, and we would let the boys ride back in the hills. We would try to keep them from killing themselves, but some of them rode like they were flying a plane."
She laughs at the memory. "They were all alerted to report back in the event something happened. Somebody called me over the party line and told me that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. So do you see that big old dinner bell? That was off of a locomotive. We went immediately and rang it. Horses and riders came in here from every direction.
"In no time at all the cadets were in their uniforms and checked out—handed me their money and were on their way back to Lackland and Randolph Air Force bases. During the war we heard from many of those people. Every once in a while we would get a letter back saying address unknown or deceased. Those were sad days, and lots of happy days, too, during the war."
Crowell rose and removed a small framed picture of a young officer from the wall. She spoke softly, pensively. The former guest in uniform had been killed in a plane crash. A cadet in another picture, however, had recently returned to the ranch as a much older man, and she had visited his home in Florida.
As Crowell noted the visits with other guests in their homes from Houston to England and the hundreds of Christmas cards exchanged, I began to understand the real attraction of dude ranches. They are extended families. If you don't have a relative or friend to visit in the Hill Country, they are the next best thing. Crowell agreed and laughed again. "Some of the people that we have had are better than relatives," she said.
"We have one family who has come here every year for forty-six years," she said. "One lady that was a baby in the Galveston flood [1900] has come twice a year all these years. She has grandchildren coming. We have some that have great grandchildren coming."
The Dixie Dude near Bandera opened to the public with a barbecue for about one-hundred neighbors and friends on July 3, 1937, before electricity arrived in that rural district. Crowell's father, William Wallace Whitley, had bought and worked the land since 1901. His daughter was born on it in 1904.
Today, horses graze serenely beneath the oaks in evening. Insurance requirements no longer permit the carefree horseriding the cadets enjoyed, and guests ride horses single file behind a wrangler.  On thirty miles of trails visitors may spot wild turkeys, redbarked trees called Texas madrones, and sotol. Sotol, more plentiful further west, was once fed to cattle during severe droughts.
"We've always had a jukebox," Crowell said. "A boy broke into one by the pool one night. There were seven of us around that table playing cards, and the children were down at the pool. The father of the boy was a psychiatrist out of Houston. The doctor jumped up right away, put his cards down, and made a beeline for the pool. Another father said, 'I think I'll go down and see how a psychiatrist can handle the situation.'
"The boy came back as a grown man not long ago and said, 'Boy, I was mean, wasn't I?'"
It happens in the best of families.

A SILVER PEUGOET TRAILED DUST under a brilliant autumn sun as the driver headed down a caliche ranch road in the Hill Country. The rough road tamed the speed of his exquisite machine to little more than a horse trot.
If he wanted to savor the Old West, he had no complaint. He was looking at it in his rear-view mirror. In the 1800s push of civilization through Texas to the Pacific, dust was a constant reminder of the rugged and uncomfortable conditions. Men kicked it up as they walked the streets of frontier towns. Their horses and wagons, and the wind, churned it into clouds. And it came to rest in layers on clothes and store goods.
A breed of driver different from the Peugoet pilot had swirled the dust of this ranchland with the hooves of cattle a century ago. And as I too churned up earth's powder, I was happy to find another element of realism in the successful conclusion of a search for a touch of the West in Texas. During that hunt for a treasured past I had heard others ask, "Where can I visit a working ranch?" The answer was the YO Ranch.

And after my first visit, its hospitality expanded to a hotel, the YO Ranch Hilton in Kerrville, thirty-five miles to the east. The hotel's grand opening in 1984 brought together some 2,500 celebrants including western movie and television actors.

Actor Ben Johnson rides at the front of the grand opening parade.

Dust had figured in the finishing touches at the hotel. An argument ensued over the authenticity of the dusty, aged display cases moved into the gift shop. The shop clerk fussed over the situation, said she didn't want that much realism in the place, and won out.
Such concessions to the modern way, however, have not subdued the western flavor of the luxuriously appointed hotel or the diversified working ranch, which also welcomes overnight guests. Five chandeliers, made of more than 350 Chisolm Trail era branding irons, light a massive lobby filled with mounted moose, deer, and bear of class. Leather and longhorn hides cover hand-carved sofas and chairs, some placed near a fireplace. A red metal roof covers the native limestone walls of the sprawling 200-room hotel. At the ranch you may sleep in restored nineteenth-century cabins, which served such needs as stagecoach stop and schoolhouse.

The YO Ranch Hilton's Dining Room features exotic game on the menu

The Charles Schreiner family, owner of the YO Ranch, threw a four-day party for the opening of their new venture. During the event Charlie Three, the patriarch of the Schreiners, led an eight-mile parade of horsemen, longhorns, and wagons.

Given the opportunity to act the boastful Texan, he shunned the role. "It's beautiful," he replied with restrained pride when asked what he thought of his hotel.

Across the lobby, the youngest of Charlie Three's four sons talked about his dad's diversification of the YO. "Yeah, he started the long-horns [on a comeback off a government refuge] about 1964," Louis said. "Now there are about 10,000 registered Longhorns in the United States. But then nobody had 'em. They were unwanted."
I asked the breed's purpose.
"They are for the commercial breeder," Louis said. "Calving ease is a desirable characteristic. When a lot of our breeds have their first calves, the rancher has to stay up night and day with them—almost be there to give birth like a doctor would. Longhorns, you just turn them out. We sell our bulls to people to use on their first-calf heifers (Angus, Hereford, etc.). The breeders also want to get a certain percentage of longhorn in their herd to get that characteristic hardiness and fertility.''
The Longhorn was the first Old West animal I sighted on the YO Ranch. About 900 of the breed (cows, bulls, and calves) roamed its 50,000 acres. Former Texas Ranger Charles Schreiner began the ranch with longhorns over a century ago, in 1880. "The Texas long-horn made more history than any other breed of cattle the civilized world has known," folklorist J. Frank Dobie wrote in The Longhorns. "As an animal in the realm of natural history, he was the peer of bison or grizzly bear. As a social factor, his influence on men was extraordinary. An economic agent in determining the character and occupation of a territory continental in its vastness, he moved elementally with drought, grass, blizzards out of the Arctic and the wind from the south. However supplanted or however disparaged by evolving standards and generations, he will remain the bedrock on which the history of the cow country of America is founded."

An estimated ten million head moved up the trails of Texas between 1866 and 1890. Capt. Schreiner, himself, drove more than 150,000 to Kansas on the Chisholm Trail. The cattle brought the state financial recovery from the Civil War far ahead of other Confederate states. And it was the Longhorn herd and the addition of exotic game that also brought the YO Ranch recovery from a devastating drought in the 1950s. Diversification through a Hilton hotel franchise was but another gallop away from the hardship of natural disaster. Conrad Hilton, incidentally, started his chain in Texas, at Cisco.
The Elm Water Hole was the coziest place to get a drink at the Kerrville hotel. Blackbuck antelope and axis deer hides covered stools at the antique bar. The Sam Houston dining room served up those ranch-grown animals at dinner.

The scenic route to the YO Ranch passes the prestigious summer camps on the headwaters of the Guadalupe River. Surface water, however, is another luxury the 100-square-mile YO doesn't possess. Its more than 10,000 animals depend on windmills. One stands sentinel at the entrance. Thirty-two species of exotic game share the spread, but on a winter visit I told foreman Ed Howell I wanted more to see an old-line working ranch. He woke me early the next morning so I could see him run head after head of cattle through a chute. He trapped them momentarily to doctor their ears.
The exotic animals stimulate income from hunting and photography. Tours of their habitat go with ranch visits. Blackbuck antelope, giraffes, zebras, and axis deer are among the imports roaming the hills, which an African chief once compared to his homeland. But the exotics may sometimes produce an incongruous sight for the Texan. I saw an ostrich chase an armadillo one trip. Louis Schreiner said the drought got so bad in the '50s his dad shipped his cattle to Montana. "He tried to figure out some way to supplement income and came up with exotic game. We had started commercial hunting of white-tailed deer, but that's only six weeks out of the year. So we brought these exotics in, turned them loose, and began hunting them five years later. Now we've got thousands."
The shadow of western superstar John Wayne literally hung over the grand opening celebration of the YO Ranch Hilton. So many of the film stars there remembered their work with him. And then I drove to the Cowboy Artists of America Museum in Kerrville where I found his bronze statue under a spotlight.
The museum houses the work of professional artists who focus on the cowboy and related subjects. In the galleries around a courtyard you may find the paintings and sculptures of such artists as John Clymer, who produced some eighty covers for the old Saturday Evening Post, and Mehl Lawson, who got a degree in animal husbandry and for fifteen years bought, sold, trained, rode, and showed horses. CAA artists follow in the footsteps of Frederic Remington and Charles Marion Russell whose art, like film, helped secure a romantic thirst for the West.
And with reason. "Of the twenty-nine eventful decades since the Mayflower ... only one American period produced a unique, enduring symbol of universal recognition ... America's Everyman is ... the cowboy," wrote Southwest author Don Dedera.
Griffiths C. Games, director of the museum, said, "One of its main purposes is to get the art where the public can enjoy it. We had a lot of people say, 'where has this art been? I didn't even know it existed.'"
The Cowboy Artists of America association settled on locating its museum in Texas because of support, meaning money, and in Kerrville because of local interest. The locale, of course, has a heritage of many of the elements in western art.
The building was the last public one bearing direct influence by Texas architect O'Neil Ford, credited with setting forth the principles of southwestern regional style. The ten-acre site crossed by limestone ledges and shaded by oaks and cedars is representative of the Hill Country.
Hand-carved oak doors open into the gallery. The ceiling, a series of brick domes, was constructed by craftsmen from Guanajusto and San Miguel de Ajente, Mexico, using rare and ancient skills. The floor was made of mesquite, a very dense wood found in the area as well as other parts of Texas.
Fritz White, a sculptor from Loveland, Colorado, was teaching a class when I visited. The students came from five states. "The CAA artists have all been very successful," Carnes said, "and they wanted to put something back in with young, serious art students. So in setting this museum up, they insisted as part of the agreement that they teach these classes at no charge. They come here at their own expense."
The museum also is accumulating the records on everything ever done by CAA members. "We want to make this for scholars, dealers, and collectors to research and authenticate art," Carnes said. "Heretofore, there has been that time lag. An artist dies and maybe it is thirty years later before somebody says, hey, he was pretty good, and starts accumulating all this data. In the meantime, phonies show up and people get hurt. They are getting hurt surprisingly enough with forged contemporary art.
"About a year ago a woman in Dallas called a friend of the museum and said, 'I just got the neatest Melvin Warren print you ever saw for $10.' The other woman said, 'There aren't any Melvin Warren prints for $10.' The caller said, 'I got one.' Come to find out it came from a flea market in Garland. And the guy had stacks of them. They were all done in Hong Kong." With records at the museum people can authenticate a work.
"The real United States starts west of the Mississippi," Carnes said. "Everything east emulated Europe. What was west of the Mississippi, the things unique to this country, stands us separate and apart from the rest of the world."
The cowboy was a part of the distinctive cattle industry and the fur trade. A statue of a bucking cowboy on the Capitol grounds in Austin refers to Texas as his native home. Dobie backs this up, saying the cowboy was cradled in South Texas, the product of the coming together of the Anglo-American, the herd-owning Spanish caballero, the Spanish vaquero—a mounted worker with cows—and the open range.
In the roundup of ranches, I encountered an anachronism of sound at the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park where I paid a visit to the working LBJ Ranch of the thirty-sixth president of the United States. Taped remarks of Johnson welcomed visitors to the Hill Country as a tour bus crossed the Pedernales River and passed his one-room school and his grave on the way to the home and fields where he entertained international dignitaries. His widow still lived there. Some 200 head of Hereford cattle roamed the premises.
After the tour I took a short walk to Sauer-Beckman Farmstead for a portrayal of life in the early 1900s. "We raise our own pigs and our own beef," John Matthews, who served as our living history guide, said in a gentle bass voice.
"Yes, sir, we have a smokehouse," Matthews said. "I grew up like this. My folks put up their own meat. In the spring, when the weather starts getting warm, we take a lot of the meat and pack it in lard. I can show you right here. We take the bacon and ham out of the smokehouse, trim it, slice it, and put it in jars and pour lard over it. The lard just keeps the air away from it."
Vegetables from a garden are put up, too, and stored on shelves in a long cabin. I saw cabbage, tomatoes, pole beans, blackeyed peas, and carrots. And canning includes wild grape jelly from an abundance of mustang grapes in this area. The food is prepared on a wood stove in the kitchen of a stone house for park personnel. "The long part is getting the fire going," said guide Denise Abendschein. "Once the stove gets hot enough, it's not bad cooking."
The John Sauers reared their ten children in the house. They built the log cabin first, about 1869, and progressively added the stone house and an attached Victorian one. Today, there are more sounds of the past—a crowing rooster and a creaking windmill.

I MOVE THAT THIS  EXHIBIT be admitted," Petrou said, awakening me to further questioning. "Mr. Leather-wood, did you also write editorials?" "Yes, I did." "I want to show you what's been premarked as Exhibit 7-G."
"It is an editorial that was considered the best of the day's. At the top of the page it's entitled 'A System Failed.'"
"And what was this editorial about?"
"It was about the way we as a community in Houston treated mental illness and the people that had it."
"Can you read us the first two paragraphs of that editorial, please?"
"In the shadow of downtown, behind the supermarket, the hungry scavenge what the store doesn't want to sell. And as they claim food for themselves, they break bread with the birds, strewing pieces along a parking lot fence. It is a compassionate city.
"Sometimes, however, compassion here rests behind fences, as it did when Eddie Lee Johnson lost his life in an ugly Christmas story. You may remember. Police gunned down the mentally ill young man in self-defense during the 1981 holiday season. This tragic tale is resurrected now because some details deserve reexamination and because it should not die without forging in heart and soul the will to strengthen this community."
"Okay. Mr. Leatherwood, did anybody approve these editorials?"
"Oveta Gulp Hobby and George Fuerman, the editorial page editor, approved them for publication."
"Just remind the jury, who was Oveta Gulp Hobby again?"
"She was the chairman of the board of The Houston Post [Company]."
"Now let's move on to your illness. Did you call anyone at The Post and ask about your job while you were hospitalized in December 1988?"
"I called Ernie Williamson."
"And what was his response when you asked him about your job?"
"Objection, Your Honor," Bounds spoke up, "This is hearsay."
"What's the exception to the rule?" Gibson asked.
"Admission by a party opponent, Your Honor," Petrou answered.
"Proceed."
I continued: "He said, what are you going to do, and I said, well, I need to work another month or two. I had made the statement when I was manic on the night of the 3rd of December that The Post was racist and therefore I was resigning."
"Did you mean that?"
"I not only didn't mean it, it had never entered my thoughts in the previous twenty-two years or twenty-one years, and Ernie certainly had not been approached on it or anybody else in management. And so I thought, still weak that, well, maybe I did resign myself. I later approached Ernie and I said, what am I being terminated for? And he says, the effects of illness."
"I want to go back and talk about the type of treatment you received by the different owners of The Post as a result of your health condition.
"First of all, do you still suffer from manic depressive illness or bipolar disorder?"
"Yes, I do."
"In the twenty-two years that you worked for The Post, how often did you have to be hospitalized because of your manic depressive condition?"
"Eight episodes."
"After your treatment and after you were stabilized during those eight episodes between 1976 and December of 1988, seven episodes—after each of those seven episodes between 1976 and 1988, were you able to go back and do the work that you did before you were hospitalized?"
"Yes, I was."
"Did you know a writer at The Post by the name of DJ. Wilson?"
"Yes, I did."
"What did Mr. Wilson cover?"
"He covered the medical beat."
"Did you ever talk to Mr. Wilson about your condition or your behavior?"
"Yes. I apologized for sending him a crazy message. He said, well, it was no crazier than what others at The Post had sent him."
"Your mental illness began in '76. In that year you got a raise; isn't that correct?"
"Yes."
"So from 1976 when you were first diagnosed as mentally ill to 1989 when you were terminated, you still kept getting raises all this time; is that correct?"
"That is correct."
"Did your salary more than double from 1976 when you were first diagnosed until you were terminated?"
"Yes, it did."
Bounds took over the questioning of me on the stand: "The reason that you were at The Post in the eight hours daily was to edit copy and write headlines and write cutlines for pictures; isn't that correct?"
"Correct."
"So you weren't employed as a column writer or an editorial writer, were you?"
"No."
"If you did that, it was done on your own time; is that correct?"
"Right."
"Your responsibilities as a business wire editor were to sit and review the wire, the stories coming over the various wires; isn't that correct?"
"Right."
"And it was your judgment and decision to choose which of those stories might be of interest or should go in The Post; isn't that correct?"
"Right."
"Have you been hospitalized since this June 1989 episode, when you were terminated?"
"Yes, I have."
"You were in fact hospitalized in October of 1989, were you not?"
Petrou: "Objection, Your Honor. At this point I would like to approach the bench."
"All right."
"Okay, Your Honor. I object on the basis that this is irrelevant. It's going into—"
"Why is it irrelevant?"
"After his termination—I think it's going to be prejudicial."
"This is a continuation of an ongoing condition that started back in 1976. If that's your objection, it's overruled. Let's proceed."
Bounds continues: "Mr. Leatherwood, you were in fact hospitalized in October of 1989 as well, were you not?"
"Yes."
"You were hospitalized again in December of 1991, weren't you?"
"Right."
"And again in May 1992?"
"Right."
"And again in December of 1992?"
"December of '92?"
"Yes, sir."
"I don't think so."
"We'll look at some records. You were again hospitalized from April through June of 1993; isn't that correct?"
"Right."
"And you were hospitalized again in October of 1993, were you not?"
"Right."
"Was the 1988 hospitalization voluntary?"
"No, it wasn't."
"It was an involuntary commitment to the hospital, wasn't it?"
"Right."
"Was that the first time that you've ever been involuntarily committed to the hospital?"
"Yes, it was."
"Do you know when that particular episode began in 1988?"
"I know when there were hints of it, and that was in late September with paranoia."
"So in fact that particular episode began in September and lasted through almost the end of December? Would that be correct?"
"Right."
"And I believe that when you were in the midst of these episodes, your behavior is irrational?"
"Yes."
"Since that episode in 1988, have you been involuntarily committed to the hospital?"
"Yes, several times."
Judge: "We're going to recess for the day."

Journey to the Edge of Texas Chapter 9

Expert Testimony

"WE HAVE A WITNESS," Steve Petrou announced, "that is being called out of order this morning."
"Call the witness," Judge Gibson said.
"We call Kuyk Logan."
Petrou turns to his witness.
"Did you at one time work for The Houston Post?"
"Yes."
"And when did you start at The Post?"
"In July of 1969 and was there until the day it was sold on December 1, 1983."
"And who hired you, Mr. Logan, to work at The Post?"
"The Hobby family."
"What position did you last hold at the paper?"
"In May of 1976,1 was promoted to managing editor, and I stayed as managing editor until I left the paper in December of '83."

Now,   I'D   LIKE  TO  TURN  your attention to the plaintiff in this case, Mr. Carl Leatherwood. Have you come to know Mr. Leatherwood?" "Yes."
"Did you ever supervise Mr. Leatherwood's work?" "Yes. I was in charge of the whole shooting match. Everything. All reporters, all the editors."
"Were you all working pretty closely together in that newsroom?" "Very close."
"If somebody made a big disturbance, would you be able to notice it?" "Yes."
"Can you tell us—describe the performance of Carl Leatherwood as an editor?"
Raymond Kalmans, attorney for the defense, objects to the line of questioning, saying, "The witness testified he left in December of 1983. Mr. Leatherwood was terminated six years later in 1988."
The court: "I understand. The jury can keep that in mind. Proceed with your question."
Petrou continues: "Tell me about the Carl Leatherwood that you knew while you were the supervisor. What kind of a job did he do?"
"Carl was an extremely accurate, thorough, and dependable editor."
"Did he always do his job?"
"Yes."
"From your experience as a newspaper man, which job is under greater deadline pressure, a feature writer or a wire editor?"
"A wire editor. Because a wire editor is responsible for making decisions on the international and world news that goes into the paper, and this is a decision that sometimes is made just right up to deadline time. There's a tremendous amount of tension and pressure."
"While you were managing editor, did you ever switch employees from one position to another position?"
"Oh, yes, yes."
"As a person in the management of The Houston Post under the Hobby family, what was your approach to working with staff members who had health problems?"
"The Hobbys were a benevolent family and if somebody was sick, their main concern was that they get well and get back to work. We had a loose policy of a sick policy. If somebody was sick, they could be off until they got well."
"Did Mrs. Hobby personally approve some of the raises?"
"Every raise."
"Thank you, Mr. Logan," Gibson said. "The witness is excused. You will resume now with Mr. Leatherwood's testimony."

BOUNDS   ADDRESSED   THE   WITNESS. "Didn't you show up at The Post one day with your dog to report to work?"
  "Yes, I did."
"Is spending money a problem?"
"Spending sprees, yes. It is with me and with a lot of manic depressives."
"In fact, each time you have an episode of this manic nature, you spend most, if not all, of your money, don't you?"
"No, ma'am. Not each time."
"How much money did you spend during your manic episode in the fall of 1988?"
"I don't know because I was using credit cards and I had redecorated my living quarters on those credit cards. Several thousand dollars."
"Could you be a little more specific about what exactly you did?"
"Paint, carpet, flooring."
"For your whole apartment?"
"Yeah."
"And you put that all on credit cards?"
"Yes."
"Mr. Leatherwood, I've handed you what's been marked as Exhibit No. 3. Would you read the cover of that and tell the jury what it is that we're going to be looking at?"
"Medical records on Carlton E. Leatherwood, Jr."
"From whom?"
"From Adriana Nuncio, custodian of medical records for Dr. Archie Blackburn."
"Did you resist the constables when they tried to take you to the hospital in 1988?"
"In my home, I resisted. I did not perpetrate violence. I resisted the constables because I didn't think they could come into my private home and get me. My watch has a little piece on it that they can't fix and my hand came up and cut my lip. It's not a head injury. It is a cut lip."
"Okay. I apologize for the confusion. So we're in agreement then that you did offer resistance to the constables."
"To a degree because I had called 911 to ask if they could come into my home and get me, and I was waiting on the results of that call."
"Would you look down on page 77 where it's underlined 'physical examination.' Would you read that paragraph, please?"
"Patient had resisted the constables who brought him to the hospital. He was initially angry and puzzled. He accepted continued use of lithium carbonate, 1200 milligrams per day, as had been his custom over recent months. Court commitment initially recommended on grounds of likelihood of deterioration to dangerousness if not treated."
"Would you now flip to page 57 in that same record?"
"The date of admission is November 16, 1989."
"This was less than a year after the other report. Down under physical exam, would you read those sentences, please?"
"The initial assessment was remarkable only for superficial abrasion on the forehead. Persisting combativeness requiring restraints and limited the extent of the initial assessment."
"Thank you, Mr. Leatherwood.
"These reports from the doctor regarding your admissions in 1988 specifically, then again in 1989, do tend to indicate a tendency towards violence, don't they?"
"I don't read it as perpetration of violence."
Petrou had a final two questions.
"Is allowing you to be a full-time writer part of the accommodations that you are seeking from The Post for your disability?"
"Yes."
"And how would allowing you to be a full-time writer have accommodated your mental condition?"
"It would have been a less stressful position than wire editor, one, because there are not as many deadlines and, two, a change of pace, change from a burnout situation, can be less stressful."
Petrou: "The plaintiff calls Rebecca Bibens. Ms. Bibens, what was your job when you started out at The Post?"
"I was a copy editor, but I have worked in several positions during my eight and a half years at The Post. A lot of the time I was a rim editor, which means you just read the stories and write the headlines. Occasionally I would do a little bit of layout. Sometimes I would be a slot person. That's the person who reads the stories after the rimmers edit the stories. You're checking other people's stuff. Sometimes I would work a little bit in the back shop where they put the pages together and just try to make sure everything fits and looks right.
"Did copy editors sometimes make mistakes?"
"Yes."
"What kind of mistakes would they make?"
"Well, grammar mistakes, spelling mistakes. It's not always that they made mistakes, it's that sometimes they didn't catch the mistakes. That was, you know, our job, but when you read so much, you can always, you know, read over something and miss something."
"Did you sometimes edit business copy?"
"Sometimes, yes."
"And when you edited business copy, did you come to know the plaintiff in this case, Mr. Carl Leatherwood, here?"
"Yes."
"When you edited business copy, about how close were you to Mr. Leatherwood?"
"Well, it varied. Sometimes I would be right next to him, and then sometimes I would be a few people away."
"When you were sitting near Carl, were you able to observe him working?"
"Yes."
"How was his conduct on the job?"
"He was always fine I thought."
"From your observation, was Mr. Leatherwood serious about his work?"
"Yes."
"From your observation, did Mr. Leatherwood meet his deadlines?"
"As far as I know, yes."
"Did Carl Leatherwood seem to care about the quality of his work?"
"Yes."
"Were there occasions when as slot editor you had to review Carl's work?"
"Yes."
"When you reviewed his work, did he make a lot more mistakes than other editors?"
"No, I would not say he made more mistakes than other people."
"Did Carl ever disrupt you from doing your work?"
"No."
"Did he ever cause chaos in the newsroom?"
"Not when I was there, no."
Kalmans came forward for the defense.
"Ms. Bibens, were you working at The Post on the day that Mr. Leatherwood brought his dog up into the newsroom?"
"No."
"And isn't it true that Mr. Leatherwood frequently had—didn't— forgot how to work the computer?"
"I don't know."
"Now, didn't he move around a lot? He wasn't just seated at his desk, was he?"
"You mean like did he get out of his seat a lot?"
"Yes."
"Not that I know of."

THE NEXT WITNESS , who had just rushed into the courtroom wearing a white medical coat, was called. Petrou went to work.
"Good afternoon, Dr. [Robert] Hirschfeld. And what do you do for a living?"
"I am the professor and chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Texas here in Galveston. It's about a thousand-bed university hospital. In effect, it's the oldest university medical center west of the Mississippi." "And you also teach psychiatry?"
"I teach psychiatry there. I provide psychiatric practice to patients, provide service, and also we train people to become psychiatrists and medical students."
"And how long have you been teaching psychiatry?"
"I would guess twenty years, something like that."
"Do you have an area of specialty in the field of psychiatry?"
"Depression, depressive illnesses, bipolar illness, anxiety disorders."
"Is part of that area manic depressive illness?"
"Well, that's really an old term, manic depressive illness. The more modern term is bipolar illness in which patients have episodes both of highs, which we call mania, and lows, which are episodes of depression."
"Are you on a national committee regarding bipolar disorders?"
"Yes. I've been very concerned about the rights of patients with psychiatric illnesses and have served as a consultant to several organizations that advocate for the rights of patients and destigmatization. One of them is a group called the National Depressive and Manic Depressive Association. It's a group of about 35,000 members in the United States, patients and family members of patients, and I'm privileged to serve as the chair of their scientific advisory board."
"Dr. Hirschfeld, can you tell us what is bipolar disorder or what used to be called manic depressive illness?"
"Certainly. It is a medical illness in which people have episodes of highs, that is, where they often feel on top of the world. They feel that there's nothing that they can't do. Sometimes they think of themselves as being very important. They tend to have a real lot of energy. They have much less need for sleep. A lot of times we sleep less than we would like to, but when people are actually manic, they have less need for sleep. They can sleep only three hours a night. They just have a real lot of energy.
"And they often do things that later turn out to be very embarrassing or devastating to themselves and their family. They spend a lot of money. They may go out and be very promiscuous when they're not at all promiscuous kind of people. They may do things that are very risky. They certainly may go out and abuse substances, drink too much, and things like that. So that's what happens when they get high.
"Then they're completely opposite with the lows or the depressions in which they feel like they're at the bottom of the barrel. They feel that they're just as low as they can be. They feel terrible. Their self-esteem is poor. They have no energy instead of having all this energy. They can't concentrate. They lose their appetite. They lose their interest in things. And it's really striking to see the difference.
"And that's very different from the kind of experience that most of us have when we're disappointed. And we've all had times when something hasn't worked out for us or we've lost our job or a love relationship hasn't worked out, when we feel pretty badly for a few days. But this is unremitting and you just can't move and some people who are very severely depressed don't even get out of bed. They just don't have the energy to do that.
"Are there some patients who are more manic than they are depressed?"
"Almost all combinations that you can imagine."
"And when these people act in this embarrassing manner that you describe, do they know at the time what they're doing?"
"They usually don't and one of the problems that we have as clinicians is to try to catch the episode early to get the patient's cooperation. Because usually when they get it full blown, the patient has no realization that they're doing something wrong or wild or reckless and are not cooperative."
"Can employers be involved?"
"One of the things I try to do when I work with a patient with bipolar illness is to get as many people involved as possible."
"You mentioned spending sprees. Tell us a little more about that. Why do some people who are in mania go into these spending sprees?"
"It's part of the illness. They just think that there's nothing they can't do and nothing that they can't have and so they will buy expensive cars, they will buy jewelry, they will take airplane trips around the world. I mean, it can sound very entertaining and sometimes even can be funny until it all comes—you end up having to pay the piper, and people's life savings have been squandered in a week.
"It can happen that quick?"
"Oh, yes. Oh, yes."
"When people are in mania, they sometimes do lose touch with reality; isn't that true?"
Kalmans: "Objection, Your Honor. He's leading."
Petrou: "Your Honor, what's your ruling?"
The court: "What's your question?"
Petrou: "Do some people lose touch with reality?"
The court: "Overrule the objection. This is an expert."
Petrou: "Yes, go ahead, Dr. Hirschfeld."
"In the more severe forms of bipolar illness, people can become what we call psychotic, which means they do lose touch with reality and they may hallucinate or see things that aren't there, hear voices, believe things that are clearly not true. Not everybody who has bipolar will do that."
"Do some manic patients become irritable?"
"Irritability is very characteristic. And often if someone who is manic is frustrated, if you tell him or her they can't do this or that, they will become frustrated and very irritable and may become quite combative."
"Do some of the people who have mania become disabled from working for periods of time?"
"Bipolar illness tends to be episodic, and people can function at very normal—many people can function at very normal levels between episodes. There are some people who become chronically ill or
chronically depressed and can't work at all, but a significant portion of people do very well, especially if they're maintained on maintenance medication between episodes.
"I forgot to ask you at the very beginning when you were introducing this kind of mental illness about how many people in the United States suffer from this general illness that was called mania or depression?"
"One percent of the population has bipolar disorder, or in the range of 2 million people."
"How can this illness be controlled?"
"Well, the wonder drug is lithium carbonate. There have in the last ten years now been a number of other medications that are also very useful in the treatment of bipolar illness.
"When patients with bipolar illness get depressed, there are a number of antidepressive medications such as Prozac, which has received a lot of press. Also it's very important for patients with bipolar illness to get psychotherapy and psychological management, because as you can imagine, the kinds of things that occur when they're manic really need—can have devastating effects on families, relationships, and jobs. So dealing with that in psychotherapy is very important."
"Okay. Are there times when people with bipolar disease become disabled despite taking medication?"
"There are people who do not respond to one treatment and they may respond to another treatment and they may end up not responding to any treatment."
"Can workers who are disabled by bipolar illness or disorder be stabilized and return to their jobs?"
"Often they can. There are certainly people who are unable to work or are completely disabled. Between 80 and 90 percent of the people can do very well. It's that last 10 to 20 percent where the variability is—and this is quite rough, but I would expect that perhaps 5 percent of patients with bipolar illness would be completely disabled. But I would say the majority of the patients can lead productive and satisfying lives.
"I want to read to you a quote by Vincent van Gogh, the Dutch artist, and tell me what it means in today's terms."
Kalmans: "Objection, Your Honor. This doesn't have any bearing on this case."
The court: "Can you come up here? Can't you just ask him questions that go to his expertise? We don't have to worry about quoting van Gogh."
Petrou changed tack:
"How do you compare someone who has mental illness such as
bipolar disease with someone who has a physical illness such as heart disease?"
"I don't make the distinction. Both types of illnesses have genetic aspects, biological aspects, psychological aspects, and behavioral aspects."
Kalmans: "Your Honor, we would object to the narrative. There's no pending question at this time."
The court: "Overrule the objection. Proceed."
"Please go on with your explanation," Petrou said.
"For example, with hypertension, high blood pressure, you can reduce your blood pressure by behavioral ways, changing life-style. So no one would say that hypertension is not a physical illness and that you can do a lot to treat it in a psychological way."
"Can people who have bipolar disease be accommodated in similar ways that people who have these other physical diseases such as heart conditions?"
Kalmans: "Your Honor, we would object. There's no evidence that this doctor has any knowledge of this particular work place environment, and we would object to this question."
The court: "Overrule the objection."
"The question was: Can people who have bipolar disease be accommodated perhaps like people who have other physical diseases?"
"Well, my understanding is that this currently is something that would be covered in the Americans With Disabilities Act. Now, maybe that's not specifically answering the question that you asked, but certainly people with psychiatric illnesses including bipolar illness can be very productive and can perform responsible jobs."
"Dr. Hirschfeld, can the termination of employment cause the condition of a person with bipolar disorder to deteriorate?"
"Sure. Any very significant distressing event can have a negative affect on any health condition, certainly including a psychiatric one."
"Do you have an opinion as to what employees can do to help people with bipolar disorder lead a productive life?"
I think that it's important to treat people with any illness as normally as possible, but to be sensitive, with someone who has bipolar illness, to the early signs of an impending episode and to try to warn the person, the family, and perhaps the employer as things begin to deteriorate. I think that's how you would be most helpful.
Petrou: "I appreciate your answers, Doctor. I have no further questions."

Journey to the Edge of Texas, A Memoir by Carlton Leatherwood, Chapter 7 - Out West

Out West

THE ODYSSEY HAD GAINED STEAM. An adventure travel business was incorporated, following its route, and stories about it appeared in The Houston Post's Sunday magazine. "You reach more readers this way than with a book," my dad said, pleased.
The van travel venture produced, if not a profit, satisfied customers. One wrote me recently, after all these years. "We still say thank you, Carl, for the wonderful trip you planned in '87," said Mrs. Andrew Korinda of Boonton, N.J. "I recently read two books about Texas. The Gates of the Alamo by Stephen Harrigan and The Borderland by Edwin Shrake. I was so glad you had introduced us to so many of the places in both books."
The first tour, in two vans, filled up immediately thanks to a picture of Longhorns publicizing it in The New York Times. Some 200 readers phoned for information, including the Korindas, who were on the tour the next year.

The OTHER SIDE OF TEXAS business had been the joint brainchild of Nancy Landau, whose reputation in the field would grow as her trips spread worldwide, and yours truly. We were returning from the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, near the headwaters of the Rio Grande, and we conjured a route through the Hill Country and western Texas.
A travel writer paying his way on that first trip thought we should have limited it to western Texas. He had a point.
Man and beast have roamed the Chihuahuan Desert for centuries. Normally, they coexist peacefully, but after a mountain lion mauled an eight-year-old boy in the Chisos Mountains, I tracked down Doug Waid, a doctoral student conducting a study of lions in Big Bend National Park for his thesis. News accounts had said it was the first such attack recorded in the park's forty-year history.
"Well, there are a few other instances where lions interacted with people," Waid said as we sipped a beer in his desert headquarters below the mountains. "I know of one case where a lion is reported to have bitten the cuff of the trousers of a ranger at the park, and that lion was dispatched."
The encounter between boy and beast was, of course, more sobering. If the stepfather had not intervened, it could have been a fatal tragedy. Later, the attack lion was tracked and captured with aircraft and dogs. Hair found in the large intestine confirmed its offense.
Waid had done the necropsy on the lion, the equivalent of an autopsy on a human. He raised the specter that that lion was not born and raised in the park. "Looking at the pads on the feet, it did appear to me that this lion hadn't spent that much rime in rugged country," he said. "The pads ... were in excellent condition. A twenty- to twenty-four-month-old lion can't walk around this rough country and have feet that are brand new."
By comparison, the feet of a year-old male he had caught were callused and the pads flattened. He noted the worn feet of other adult lions, but said this one's pads were clean, black, and very full. Also, except for a small hole on one foot where it might have stepped on a thorn, this lion showed no callus buildup or scarring.
"I have no proof that this was not a park lion," Waid said. "Maybe this is a lion that learned how to walk on grass."
Is the theory that someone released his pet in the park more realistic? I asked. "That's a theory. It's a good theory, but that's all it stands as," he emphasized. "I would speculate that there is a good possibility that that's the case."
Why had it attacked? "I have no idea," Waid said. "It certainly wasn't hungry. It had fed on a deer. A quarter mile from the attack site, we found a white-tailed doe about eight years old. The kill ... was a real mess. This suggests to me that it was done by an inexperienced cat."
In the course of Waid's studies, a mother lion and her male cub had been captured briefly for collars to be attached. He and I had gone into the mountains earlier that afternoon to monitor by radio the different frequencies the collars transmitted. The lions, also known as cougars and panthers, normally are reclusive and stay away from humans. I wondered at our chances for seeing one.
"Well, we saw one yesterday," Waid said, as he and an assistant, Mike Davin, cut off the man-made trail. "We were real clever. We got pictures of her while she was sleeping down in a wash. We watched her for about twenty minutes. Usually, we don't get to see them. They are the same color as everything."
The radio produced a tock, tock, tock. "It sounds like their signal is coming from over the top of the hill," Waid said. "He was in here yesterday and she left. Now she has come back and is still in the same area. It suggests that they have a kill in here, or it is a very good hunting place, and they are anticipating a kill."
Tock, tock, tock. "I think we will go ahead and move up a little higher. It seems like they are both on that hill. To really get in on them we will have to go up behind that ridge and drop down."
The terrain was rocky and covered with the spiny desert plant lechuguilla as well as trees and brush. It was indeed hard to believe the cat that attacked the boy could have been in the area long.
We moved up intently.
Tock, tock, tock. "Up on the other side of this ridge," Waid said in a hushed voice. "Get on top and do a radio check down. It being a nice warm day, they may be taking advantage of the sun."
The cub's signal came strong and continuous. "It suggests he is stationary-right out in the open where the land or vegetation doesn't interfere with the signal. There's enough relief that it would be broken if he were moving." For all the intensity and suspense, however, we could not see the big cats that day.

THE  PARK PRESENTS plenty of space for both lions and man to roam. Its 708,118 acres furnish a habitat for 1,000 kinds of plants, 62 of mammals (most of them nocturnal and not observed by visitors), 55 reptiles and, as mentioned earlier, 395 species of birds. About 350,000 people crowd in with the wildlife annually, although crowd in hardly applies where that figures out to two persons an acre spread over the year.
Naturalists hold interpretive programs at amphitheaters in the peak-rimmed, 5,400-foot Chisos Mountains Basin and on river lowlands of the Rio Grande. Overnight facilities include campgrounds near the theaters and Chisos Mountains Lodge, which faces spectacular changes of colors as the sun sets in the break in the peaks called the Window.
Spring arrives early with a slow succession of cacti blooms beginning in late February and lasting throughout the year. "This picture of giant dagger yuccas was taken last spring at Dagger Flat," a
volunteer naturalist said one evening during a slide show accompanied by a guitarist. "One of the flower stalks can weigh as much as 70 pounds and have as many as 1,000 flowers. And these flowers are the size of lilies."
A small health resort operated on a Rio Grande river bank here before it was parkland. Beginning in 1909, J. O. Langford welcomed guests to hot baths. The Mexican Revolution interrupted his enterprise, but he returned in 1927 to build a motel and general store. Texans and Mexicans came from as far as one hundred miles to trade and pick up mail. The springs of 105-degree mineral water were advertised as the fountain of youth that Ponce de Leon failed to find. It was thought to cure rheumatism, indigestion, diabetes, alcoholism, and liver troubles. Maggy Smith ran the store after Langford sold out in 1942. She also delivered babies, lent money, and married couples. The store was closed and the output of the springs is less, but people still come to soak.

Rex and Bill Ivy bought Terlingua, another Big Bend haunt

REX IVEY, sitting before a mesquite fire in his home, was telling about how he got the Lajitas Trading Post at Lajitas. He hadn't wanted the store, he said, but won it in a wax war.
As Ivey tells it, a competitor in the buying of candelilla wax tried to force him out of business by raising the price paid Mexicans who brought the wax across the border at Lajitas. The man wanted to monopolize the trade and was willing to pay the same amount as he collected for the wax in New York. This would keep Ivey from making a profit, too, since the Mexicans would sell only for the top market price. The man planned to outlast Ivey.
"It made me mad," Ivey said. "In about a week I went to Chihuahua. I leased 2,000 acres in Mexico across the river from Lajitas and put up iron gates with locks on them. Wax trucks couldn't go to Lajitas then."
The trucks had to travel upriver to Ivey property, where he bought practically all the wax. "When we weighed and paid for it, we weighed it right and paid them (the Mexican producers) right," he said. "The other fellow had been robbing them on scales, and they found that out by trading with us. They told him they thought it would be a whole lot better for his health if he didn't spend any more nights down there at Lajitas. And scared the hell out of the old fellow."
Ivey ran into his competition in Alpine and struck a deal on the street. He would buy eight sections at Lajitas and sell the other man five of them. "He signed it. I kept all the sections on the river and let him have the dry country. He didn't have one drop of water on the river."
The candililla trade was Ivey's then, after 1948, as far as Mexico was concerned. And so was the Lajitas Trading Post. "I paid one Mexican a little over $33,000 in American money," he said, noting a deal struck at Pantera in Big Bend park. "He bought a $1.98 handbag that we sold, put all the money in the bag with his .45, and went back across the river."
Ivey's son Bill, who grew up in Lajitas when it was owned by his father, was leasing the adobe store when we talked. He believed it was built about 1915. "It's kind of a childhood dream, really," Bill Ivey said. "Ever since I could reach the candy counter, I wanted to work in the store. I do enjoy it down here. It's 300 percent more work than I thought it was."
People come across the river to shop and mingle. Bill, who earned a degree in finance and economics from Texas A&M, recorded credit in an antiquated revolving file. He sold everything from nonprescription drugs to wash tubs and piñatas. "I'm using that degree," he said. "Along with the store, I found I'm not just the storekeeper. I get called on for medical services, veterinarian services, legal services. I'm postmaster half the time. You name it. I do some of it along with the banking. There's no bank. The nearest bank is Presidio."
An oddity penned outside pushed up its own beer tab. Clay Henry, a 130-pound black mountain goat, liked to guzzle longnecks. He came with the store," Bill said.
Bill leased from Walter Mischer of Houston, who has developed Lajitas as a combination small-scale resort and movie set. The little town boasted a flat, virtually treeless nine-hole golf course with thick grass greens on the river bank and a commendable desert museum with dioramas of animal life, an arboretum identifying desert plants, and historical and geological exhibits. New storefronts on a dusty main street housed a drug store, mercantile, hotel, restaurant and saloon, and accommodated the shooting of western films. Restorations included the Opry House, once a school and now an exhibition center for artists; an inexact likeness of the old church; and the Calvary Post Motel on the foundation of an Army camp.
Lajitas bustled with U.S. troops and cattle traders after the Mexican Revolution exploded in 1911. The soldiers were stationed in response to guerrilla bands on the border who raised concern in Texas when they attacked Ojinaga, Mexico-upstream from at least twenty vulnerable Big Bend ranches. Doroteo Aranga, better known as Francisco (Pancho) "Villa, received much of the blame as the bloody raids continued on small Mexican towns and extended to the ranches.

Left:  Clay Henry, a beer guzzling mountain goat "came with the store" said Rex Ivy.
Right: The Lajitas Trading Post owners learned the Post (Circa 1915) also provides the town's medical, veterinarian, legal, postal and banking services.

Villa's men may have patronized the Trading Post. It's possible, too, that the rebels moved a half million head of stolen cattle across the Rio Grande in exchange for gold to buy arms and ammunition. They dealt with speculators who saw a cheap avenue into the cattle business. Trades often occurred on a neutral island in the middle of the river at Lajitas, says Virginia Madison in The Big Bend Country of Texas.
"Some of the strangest and largest cattle trades in history took place on that island," she writes, "with Texas traders squatted on bootheels opposite mustachioed Mexican revolutionists or
bandits, a handkerchief spread between them, its corners weighted with rocks. Thousands of head of cattle waited on the island while the traders stacked gold coins in the handkerchief and drove the best bargains they could. The Mexicans were fighting for a cause and they were desperate for money. The Texans had the money; their position was protected by guns (the bluffs on the Texas side overlooking the river were lined with nests of machine guns and rifles); and no one doubts that they drove shrewd bargains."


It is doubtful that Gen. John J. (Blackjack) Pershing and his lieutenant, George S. Patton, were stationed at the cavalry post, as some claim, to put down Villa and his gang. The history books say Pershing chased after Villa from El Paso by way of Columbus, N.M., and penetrated deeply southward into Mexico in the Punitive Expedition of 1916. U.S. troops in the Big Bend during the revolutionary unrest did headquarter at Camp Lajitas, a subpost of Camp Marfa. The community had achieved designation as a port of entry substation and as a fourth-class post office. But with peace, it reverted to a collection of families farming irrigated plots along the river and running milk goats in the hills. By 1940 the census was 10.
It was the small population and wildlife that store boss Rex Ivey came west for in the first place, in 1929. "I've been here and on the river ever since," he said. "I liked the country because it is big and open, and then there wasn't anybody living down on the river much. It was a wide open world." He kept a doctor's appointment in Houston a half-century later, but his heart stayed in the Big Bend. "Too many goddamn idiots that will run over you, in a hurry and don't know you, and don't want to know you," he said of Houston. "Hell, I'm a country boy. And a fellow that's raised out in this big country will get run over and killed in that damn place, and why die in Houston? I'd rather be dead on a mountain than be dead in Houston."
Ivey built a rock house on a hill by the river after he moved to Lajitas. "All down there was solid beavers," he said. "You could hear them playing and jumping in that water all the time ... I came as a fur buyer. One of the things you could make a little money on was beaver."
The Iveys bought a favorite haunt of mine, the ghost town of Terlingua, in 1984. Thirteen miles east of Lajitas toward the national park, it was once a quicksilver (mercury) mining community. One may slip back to that time while watching a full moon from the porch of the 1908 mining store, or by walking through adobe ruins to the cemetery.
Howard E. Perry, a yachtsman from Chicago and later Portland, Maine, collected millions from this quicksilver mine as an absentee owner during World War I. The liquid metal was extracted from cinnabar, a red ore. It went primarily into the production of blasting caps for explosives. The mine became the second largest producer in the nation behind one in California. As many as 3,000 people lived in adobe huts next to the shafts. Adobe and rock huts sprawled in the hills around a chapel, school, dance hall, theater, a mansion for Perry's rare visits and the store.
During the mining years, Robert Cardedge, general manager, served as justice of the peace for Precinct 4 in Brewster County. When I first visited Terlingua in 1982, Sadi Jo McKinney upheld tradition and dispensed justice from the general manager's office. Her husband, Billy Pat, wore the badge of constable, and the McKinney family ran the town. "We have about the same problems they have anywhere else," Pat said, slapping at a fly with a swatter. "But we don't have as many of them. We don't have as many people." He estimated 150 residents for the area. During one of our conversations, a woman dressed in shorts and hiking boots entered with a small boy and a complaint. Neighbors' goats were eating her fruit trees.
As was the case when the mine was active, suspects in felonies, such as drug smuggling, ended up in a one-room jail to await transport to Alpine, eighty-two miles to the north. Other than felons have Stayed there. Cartledge reportedly pondered the case of a young couple who threatened to elope if he did not marry them. The prospective bride's parents pleaded with him to prevent the elopement. He took action calculated to satisfy both parties: He stopped the eloping couple and locked them together overnight in the jail.
Kenneth B. Ragsdale tells of the past in Quicksilver, Terlingua and the Chisos Mining Company and quotes one oldtimer as saying, "We had a good life. We made our fun."
Residents continued to make their fun into the '80s. Fromholtz, the Austin singer, with some help from his Terlingua friends, cooked up a little spoof of the Chili Cookoff started there and named it the Cookie Chilloff. The annual winter event featured refrigerated cookies and storytellers. Most dished out tall tales, but not Hallie Stillwell, the owner of a ranch east of the park. Her marvelous stories recounted the truth of bygone days as she remembered it.

Hallie Stillwell addresses the crowd at the 3rd Cookie ChillOff

"One of my favorite stories," she said, "is about a car race that happened in Marathon in the early teens. My husband Roy had bought a Hudson Super 6, and he thought it was about the finest car going, and it was. That's the reason I married him.
"Cecil Adams, one of the other ranchers there, had bought a Buick," Stillwell said. "So they got into an argument about which car could run the fastest. They were the closest of friends, and there was no bloodshed. They decided to run a race in Marathon and picked a day. They would just make a straight beeline from the west end of town over to a factory-good straight road by the shipping pens, no stickers or brush.
"They got up early that morning. The favorite bootlegger had come to town with a supply of tequila and sotol. They had to keep this bootlegger going, so they began to imbibe on these good drinks.
And they were making bets. Gambling went on all day long.
"It was getting late in the evening. They decided they had better start the race. In the meantime, a medicine show had come to town. The medicine man set up in the road by the stock pens. Well, here came the two automobiles in the race, everybody trailing along behind. They were going so fast they didn't see the tent with all the medicine. They couldn't go around so they went through tent and all, scattering medicine and pots and pans (all items for sale).
"The old man came out. He was mad. He was raving. He said, I'm going to sue you.' My husband said. 'Just calm down, I'm the sheriff here.' And Adams said, 'And yeah, I'm the county attorney.' They said, 'Here, take a drink of this sotol. You'll feel a little bit better about this.'
"He took a drink. He said, 'I've just got to have some law here.' Ike Gerley said, 'Well, I'm the county judge here, have another drink.* That went on for quite some time.
"The racing crowd decided they would just have to fix all the stuff back. So they put the tent back, and the medicine on the shelves, and hung up the pots and pans. After a little bit, the medicine man said, 'Give me another drink of sotol. Back up and run through her again.'"

To A TEXAN, the mere idea of something called "The Art Museum of the Pecos" sounds like a contradiction in terms. But it is by no means a joke. This is serious business, conducted by serious folks.
But on this sunny afternoon in Marfa, a visit to the museum still leaves me chuckling about the riddle this place will provide anthropologists of the future. The Society of Antiquaries of London surely had the proverbial picnic at Stonehenge compared to what future excavators of this museum at the upper limits of the desert will encounter.

Where the Antelope Play - They're part of the art at the West Texas Museum

Here, in a field populated by a herd of forty antelope, are clusters of concrete boxes strung out for more than half a mile in mathematical sequence from north to south. If those future anthropologists do their work well, they will discover fifteen such groupings of boxes, all made of preformed concrete, all 2.5 meters high and 5 meters wide. Each grouping is considered a piece of sculpture and contains from two to six boxes. The sculptor was Don Judd.
"Don Judd's work is principally involved with the surface qualities of objects-angles, end relationships-so these pieces change over the course of the day. The light and the shadows on them change," curator Suzan Campbell explained. "George Cisneros [the San Antonio-based composer of experimental New Music] told me he has composed music using Don's work as an inspiration because of the intervals and the rhythms and the patterns. That's one way to look at this kind of work. Look at it more musically."
Even if the anthropologists figure out that this was sculpture for an art museum, not a temple aligned for earth worship, they may still miss the fact that civilization compromised with nature here. Seventeen pieces were planned. "But there is a bump down at that end of the field," Campbell said, "and we didn't want to take the bump down."

Susan Campbell supervises the careful placement of the concrete boxes

Campbell, who was showing me around the institution before its planned 1986 opening, referred to Judd as a minimalist. Since I had read Judd's commentary in Art in America magazine, in which he wrote that the label "minimal" is meaningless in all ways, I questioned the use of the word on his home base. "He doesn't like the term," Campbell said, "but he doesn't get to decide, does he, any more than Monet decides he doesn't want to be called an impressionist? What would he want to be called? An artist. But twentieth-century art, in addition to being interested in art, is interested in ideas. This century gave birth to the series of isms that we all know and hate so much. But you have to have some kind of vocabulary to talk about it, you have to have a way to categorize art historically."
Judd's most significant work, his trademark, is his boxes. They sit on the ground or floor without the pedestals of traditional sculpture. Wrote Michael Ennis in Texas Monthly magazine: "Judd always opened up the boxes by leaving off the top or sides or using Plexiglas. Instead of hiding an inert core, as a traditional bronze or marble sculpture did, the interior volume of the box became an integral part of the piece. The boxes concealed nothing. Here was the absolute culmination of modernism, an art object that represented only what it was-form, volume, color."
So there I was in a field where the antelope play discussing Minimalism with the curator of an art museum. And somehow, in the barren reaches of West Texas, Minimalism didn't seem so out of place.
Campbell explained that the museum actually houses another one hundred of Judd's aluminum boxes in two buildings elsewhere in the area. It would be marvel enough that Judd, a former New Yorker, had selected an abandoned West Texas Calvary post and a former warehouse in downtown Marfa to display art work. But he also included exhibits of three other celebrated and influential artists of the last quarter century-John Chamberlain's crushed auto-body sculptures, Dan Flavin's fluorescent light sculptures, and abstract expressionist Barnett Newman's prints.
"The frequent question I am asked is, 'Why Marfa? It's nowhere,'" Campbell said. "Well, New York City is nowhere if you live in Texas, because the hopes of most of these folks ever getting to New York City to do the galleries scene is one in a million. I don't think you should have to be lucky enough or wealthy enough to live in New York City to enjoy original art. Reproductions aren't art. I believe that in the United States we are seeing a dispersion of art throughout the country."
That notwithstanding, Marfa (pop. 2,466) represents a considerable extreme. Road miles between this town and the state's cultural centers of Houston and Dallas number about the same as those between San Francisco and Boise, Salt Lake City and Phoenix, Chicago and Little Rock, New York and Cincinnati.
"This is not a community museum in the strict sense because it is the work of internationally known artists, and the purpose of the museum is collection in depth and support facilities to allow serious scholarship," Campbell said. "We don't draw our audiences locally, necessarily, but we're not against that at all.
"I like to compare it to the McDonald Observatory up at Fort Davis [about an hour's drive away]," Campbell said. "It is a serious installation that has a rather esoteric purpose. Not a lot of people understand astrophysics. But I love to go to the observatory and listen to their talks and be amazed by the size of the telescope. I love to be there even though I don't know anything about it.
"This place, even though it is intended for serious scholarship, should offer something for everyone," she said. "We're never going to be a survey museum where we have one Picasso, and one this and that. Other museums in Texas do that very well, including Dominique de Menil's new museum in Houston. That's an amazing collection. But we have a significant collection of art, and we will have enough interpretation and education that people should be able to get something out of it."
Interestingly, this museum was being funded by the Dia Art Foundation, which is run by Heiner Friedrich of New York and his wife, Philippa de Menil, the daughter of Dominique and John de Menil.
Millennia from now, when the museum has long been a puzzle void of human care, one creature will no doubt survive: the antelope. The species has lived as a native of North America for a million years, grazing in vast numbers alongside bison at the dawn of the continent's exploration. And though their numbers have declined sharply because of overhunting, the antelopes have rebounded through conservation to acceptability as game animals. It is more accurate to call these animals pronghorns since their species, Antilocapra americana, differs from the antelope of Africa and Asia and is truly a survivor, outlasting by thousands of years other pronghorn species. It is the only species within its genus, which is the only genus within the family Antikcapridae.
Frankly, the museum's pronghorns were the first I had got much of a look at. Others roam widely in the grasslands above the desert floor around Marfa, but they are fast, the fastest animals in the nation.
Residents in the area had pointed them out to me, and they had sprinted away at speeds up to forty-five miles an hour. The young are able to outrun a man by the time they are four days old.
Curiously, prong-horns refuse - or lack the ability - to jump fences as low as three feet, which is about the height of the one confining them at the museum.
As for esoteric art on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, generally speaking there is nothing new under the West Texas sun. To the east, near Del Rio, ancient Indians painted pictographs and chipped petroglyphs into the natural rock shelters that they inhabited. Pecos River culture existed from around 8,000 years ago - near the end of the Pleistocene ice age - to 600 A.D., long before the Comanches and Apaches.

Rock art appears in some form on every continent. It preceded the development of a genuine alphabetic system of writing. The most distinctive, probably the earliest, and surely the longest continued tradition of rock painting in Texas, and perhaps in the New World, centered around the junction of the Pecos River with the Rio Grande, says W. W. Newcomb, Jr. in Rock Art of Texas Indians. Newcomb, director of the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin, viewed petroglyphs and pictographs as irreplaceable and relatively rare human documents that "reveal much about the ways of ancient men ... illustrate how a vanished, nameless people perceived of themselves and their world, their relation to God and to each other, and their fantasies and fears."
Seminole Canyon State Historical Park offers a guided walking tour of this Indian art in the Fate Bell Shelter. The rock depictions include many shamans - priests or medicine men - whose followers believed they alone could influence good and evil spirits. Another painting, this one only accessible by water and under a rock overhang near the mouth of Seminole Canyon, gives prominence to a cougar.
The atlatl, a weapon used before the bow and arrow, is frequently depicted on the walls. The weapon consisted of a dart and a two foot stick for throwing the dart. Upon impact, the main dart shaft
would fall away from the hardwood foreshaft and stone point, leaving the victim unable to pull the dart out.
The artwork at Seminole Canyon is colorful, with red dominating. It shows up in 51 percent of the murals, black in 25 percent, according to the pioneer work of the archaeologist A.T. Jackson, Picture-Writing of 'Texas Indians. Orange, yellow, white, and green complete the color range. Minerals most often supplied the paints. Red came from hematite or ocher, and sometimes cinnabar; black from a manganese compound; white from kaolin, gypsum, or barite; yellow from ocher or limonite; and green from copper oxide.
I also took a boat up seventy-eight-mile-long Lake Amistad to visit other sites. Amistad, a beautiful international reservoir often swept by high winds, engulfs the confluences of the Pecos and Devils rivers with the Rio Grande. Jackson notes that a quarter of the state's pictographs appear in Val Verde County, site of Lake Amistad.
Forrest Kirkland, an artist whose copies of rock paintings appear with Newcomb's text, says the effort involved in the Indians' painting of the murals "is proof enough of their serious purpose."
The pictures in almost every cave in Val Verde County extend far above the reach of a man standing on the floor, he notes, so a ladder of some kind must have been required. In a few cases they were
painted flat on a ceiling more than ten feet high, requiring the use of what we would call scaffolding. Grinding, mixing, and applying the paint took considerable labor since certain figures are nine or more feet tall, solid color on rough surfaces, and finished in three shades.
The shamans "are the focal points of virtually all paintings, dominate most by their size, and frequently overwhelm the viewer by sheer numbers," Newcomb says. He favors the hypothesis that they were part of an early mescal bean cult. The mountain laurel, a beautiful purple-flowering shrub, bears the mescal beans, which are hard red seeds with a narcotic property. Archeologists have not only found the seeds in eight digs, Newcomb says, but mescal cults of more recent Indian tribes also engage in practices characteristic of the pictographs. He theorizes that shamans took the beans during dances to induce visionary experiences, which they later described to onlookers. Newcomb says animals, dances with weapons, pelts, feathers, rattles, and other items important to medicine men in a modern mescal-bean fraternity have their representation in Pecos River pictographs. "It is difficult not to interpret almost every element in the pictographs in these terms," the museum director says. Thus, the red dots associated with shamans in pictographs become mescal beans.
His hypothesis may well explain the fact that many pictographs have been painted over earlier pictographs. Shamans apparently held their rituals where previous supernatural communication of earlier significance occurred, Newcomb feels, and would overlay with their own the earlier illustrations of experiences and gained powers.
The edge of the Chihuahuan Desert may be far from the minds of cultured Texans, but it is home to art--and has been for millennia.