Tell Me, What Was It Like?

By Roger Rosenblatt

An essayist offers a personal look at doings in Dallas

What should have looked ridiculous turned out to be strange. What should have been moving was eerie. What should have felt impressive was irritating; irritating impressive; dead alive, and vice versa. From Saturday on, nothing came off quite as a visitor expected. Dallas tooted and bubbled, awaiting the arrival of him whose political philosophy justified Dallas' existence. Yet it seemed that Ronald Reagan would enhance Dallas no more than Dallas would enhance him, and that he was coming to confer his blessing on the place he wished America to be.

Yes, yes. But what about the hats? Weren't there any funny hats?

Oh, sure. Plenty. Cowboy hats, sun hats, a couple of tricornes, several cardboard crowns, a red-white-and-blue beret. California wore black Zorro hats, and a delegate from New Jersey had an elephant head on his head--if that counts as a hat. One woman at the convention wore a straw skimmer with an elephant on top, which also wore a hat, an Uncle Sam. She was holding a Cabbage Patch doll, which wore another skimmer, on which stood another elephant.

And parties? There must have been some crazy parties.

Modified crazy. Sunday night there was a party thrown by a woman who claims to have built the world's largest closet, leading to the world's largest bathroom. I inspected both and could recall none larger. The night before, I went to a charity ball attended by hundreds of handsome people in gowns and tails and by an elephant, a tiger and a leopard, also in tails. The cats appeared to have been doped. The evening's highlight was an auction that raised $30,000 in ten minutes and offered a trip to Europe (which for some reason included Egypt) and a necklace worn by a good-looking brunette named Kimberly. After the necklace went, they auctioned off Kimberly's dress. Before any more parts of Kimberly could be sold, everybody danced.

Anything weird about the people?

No weirder than people at a formal party anywhere, except perhaps the faces of the women, which looked as if they had been worked on for days. Couples glanced furtively at other couples, flashed grins, hugged decorously, waved modestly, hailed one another not too loudly. They paid only scant attention to the animals in whose presence they chatted vigorously. The elephant looked lost in thought. It was more sophisticated than the baby elephant seen in Neiman-Marcus later in the week, over whom shoppers gooed. If I had arrived earlier at the closet lady's party, I would have seen yet another elephant which played the harmonica and waved the American flag. But I missed that.

You mean you didn't see any real Texas characters?

Well, there was the Texas Kid, or Willard Watson, as he calls himself when he isn't working on his folk art. The Kid is 63, the grandson of a slave, been shot at nine times and married seven, once on a $100 bet. The Kid exhibits his art work on his front lawn. ("I used to have such a beautiful yard," said the wistful Mrs. Watson, who also used to have a nice piece of white rug before the Kid turned it into a hat:) The Kid makes found art. An aluminum shark, a tin cow, a pair of pants on sticks, originally meant to be a sculpture of John Henry but never finished, thus called Half of John Henry. The Kid makes suits out of Naugahyde.

The Kid seemed wholly removed from Dallas and the Republicans, but he had Dallas' self-assurance: "I finish what nature starts." You want to know what the week was like? It was like Hank Slikker, the gentle fellow who drove me in from the airport and who talked with equal enthusiasm about his Bible college and about "opportunity" and "space to spare" in Dallas. Dallas did not seem as thoughtful as Hank, but it appeared to live somewhere between the church and the bank. Saturday afternoon I walked among the gray and silver office buildings downtown, each showing off another in the tall sheets of reflecting glass, like dark vertical lakes. Buildings going up and up. One, as yet unfinished, had windows only part of the way up the structure, like a woman pulling on a stocking. Sex was somewhere in this mix. The air was filled with heat, jackhammers, and church bells playing How Great Thou Art.

That was what the week was like. Above or below all the concrete political speculations and the normal nonsense connected with conventions ran an attitude--not a trickle of an attitude like Dallas' Trinity River, but a Mississippi, a Missouri. The attitude involved money only indirectly. Money seemed but a natural consequence of a way of life that called out, as did Paul Laxalt on Wednesday night, for "growth, growth and more growth." The pessimism of the Democrats, which Vice President Bush decried, that was not for Dallas. Caution, timidity, they were not for Dallas. Why, don't people say that Trammell Crow, the warehouse king, added a $160 million wing to the Loews Anatole Hotel just to get Reagan to stay there? And didn't Reagan exult upon arriving, "I've always felt I carried some of that Texas spirit with me 365 days a year"?

I could have found no better spokesman for Texas spirit than former Republican Governor Bill Clements, "born and raised in Dallas," and a serious historian of the state. He had much to do with bringing the Republicans to Dallas.

So you did meet a wild and woolly Texan, after all. Wasn't Clements the one who asked Governor Jerry Brown a question at dinner, and when Brown said he'd like to consider his answer, asked, "Can't you think and eat at the same time?"

Clements wasn't ornery when we talked in his office. He looked like a scholar surrounded by his books, like a scholar who had known action somewhere; a Harry Truman or John Wooden. "Free spirit, high energy, risk taking, the strength of one's convictions--that's what Dallas is all about," said Clements. "All these marvelous buildings." He gestured toward downtown. "These buildings only exist because of entrepreneurs."

He called Dallas a frontier. He talked about the 1820s, when his people first came to Texas. Land was grabbed up at 10-c- an acre. Now the new entrepreneurs occupy office buildings instead of ranges. But there is more than that to Dallas. People are taken at face value here, he said, "as long as they pull their own oar." Clements pulled his own oar. He built up an oil-drilling business called Sedco. The Sedco building is not a shiny tower but a set of refurbished woody offices housed in the shell of the first brick school in Dallas. The books that surrounded him were part of an 8,000-volume library of Texan history and lore that Clements has been collecting since the 1940s.

Sam Houston, Santa Anna, the Civil War, Reconstruction; he is fluent in such things. I wondered why most Texans, for all their free anti-Government spirit, are Democrats. Because a Republican Governor was foisted on the people during Reconstruction, he said, and Texans don't forget. "I was the first elected Republican Governor of Texas." Texas stayed Democratic with Roosevelt, because "Roosevelt was the Moses of the 1930s." Is Reagan the Moses of the 1980s? "Texans relate to him. He says the right things. He looks the right way. His manner is Texas."

Where does religion fit in all this? He couldn't say exactly where, but he knew it was around. Businessmen regularly start the day with Bible-study breakfasts. Dallas contains the largest Southern Baptist congregation in the country, he told me, and some of the largest Methodist, Episcopal and Presbyterian churches. And 59.2% of Dallas County voted for Reagan in 1980.

"There's a message here," said Clements. "It has to do with the work ethic. We believe in hard work. Dallasites are very generous, give millions to every charity you can name. But they don't believe in the dole." I told Clements about a Texas delegate from Woodville who said she turned Republican after the people she hired for her hotel quit on her because they could earn more on welfare. Clements nodded: "She was saying to you: 'These people have no pride!' "

Sunday evening I went to a church service. Pentecostal; the kind of church the more sedate denominations seem to look down on. But the Pentecostalists explicitly advocate the hard work Clements was talking about. And most Pentecostalists are likely to vote Republican. Besides, they can really sing.

A revival meeting?

Not exactly, although there were similarities. The church was in Richardson, a Dallas suburb, and the congregation (the place was packed) was white, black, Mexican, Oriental, well dressed and not. Small children stretched out on the benches and worked on coloring books. The women wore only faint touches of makeup. At 6 p.m., the temperature was still 108DEG. "I know it's hot in here," said the minister, standing before a huge gold cross, "but let's just worship the Lord and forget about it."

The church was white and simple, like a Quaker meetinghouse, but there were no moments of silence. To the minister's right, a piano and an electric organ; to his back, the choir; to his left, a traps set the size of a pile of boulders. One black soloist was so good she brought tears to your eyes. Bodies swayed and shook, hands clapped, people danced in the aisles, one girl barefoot. On individual impulses, members raised both arms aloft: "Hallelujah!" Deep murmurs of "Amen" and "Sweet Jesus," while the songs built and built, ending only after the last drop of passion was spent. Then the congregation applauded, as if giving God a hand. Immediately, another song would start, and the fervor would build all over again. A dapper young man in a white linen jacket shut his eyes in prayer. A young couple came forward to sing a hymn in staggered verses, like Johnny Cash and June Carter. "All things are possible," said the minister. "Ask! Ask! Ask!"

At the convention, the delegates looked like the Pentecostalists. Instead of raising hands to God, they waved little American flags at things in the speeches that pleased them. Instead of singing, they whooped and cheered. Many were inattentive to what were, to my ears, some of the worst convention speeches ever given. But just as many were lost in ecstatic glazes. In church a woman with swollen legs stood in her pew at the laying-on of hands and approached the altar for a cure. In the Convention Center a woman in a wheelchair rose up on her cast to shout for Jeane Kirkpatrick.

Aren't you making a bit much of this?

Probably. But that was the feeling.

And there was almost nothing in the week that counteracted it. The Tent City of the anti-Reagan demonstrators sat on low and steamy land in the Trinity River bottom, overlooked by the new county jail. The demonstrators were spirited, happy to have registered new Democratic voters. But they seemed out of place in Dallas. So did the Dead Kennedys, a punk rock group that might be out of place anywhere. They performed across from the Convention Center Tuesday night in an open lot that looked like street theater of the 1960s: painted faces, trash, a kid with his hair stuck up like a rooster's comb, wearing what appeared to be a dog collar. A cruel sign was drawn on the back of a sleeveless T shirt: GIVE HINCKLEY A SECOND CHANCE.

But these were sideshows. At the site of John Kennedy's assassination, a fellow who looked like a hippie of 20 years ago leaned on a wall and contemplated the Hall of Records near the former Texas School Book Depository. Tattooed, shirtless, his blond hair tied in back, he told me he was staring at the Hall of Records because that was where the fatal shots had to have come from. He was a second-grader in Wichita Falls when Kennedy was killed, but he is convinced that the country was lied to. Another museum piece. If a cop had seen him, he would have been told to move on and out. Vagrants were not tolerated during convention week.

Did you have a good time?

Sort of. The Dallasites were open, cordial, if not quite as celebrative as one thought they would be. I had the feeling that Dallas was straining to enjoy itself, but that's to be expected if you pin such extravagant high hopes on enjoying yourself. To tell the truth, it was hard to see Dallas for the convention, and while the city seemed the apotheosis of Republicanism as long as Republicans were stomping about, it might look much different in quieter times. An obscure and special soul lies behind the reflecting towers and the crape myrtles and the still, pink mansions on Lakeside Drive. It wasn't open to the visiting public. There was no reason it should have been.

Mornings from my hotel room, I would watch the city get in gear before sunrise, the office buildings still lit from the night, while chains of cars rolled quickly along the curving highway with their headlights shining. You do feel the confidence. I'll tell you my strongest memory, though. One morning at Market Hall, where the convention had its gift bazaar, a man mistook a glass wall for an open door and crashed straight into it. The window exploded all over him. I held his face to assess the damage, but he got off lucky: shaken up, with a scratch on his nose. He was sure he had been heading for a door because the space looked so clear. --By Roger Rosenblatt