Simmonsville Waltz

Killeen

I have spent a good deal of time in Austin, but I was born in Shreveport and actually grew up in Killeen, Texas. There was this little section on town called Simmonsville. Simmonsville was started by an old man named Simmons. I think it was the city dump for a while, in fact I’m sure of it because we used to play in the old dump site. I don’t think it was actually a town, but I don’t know.  There was this old Alamo looking thing that someone told me was the old Simmonsville City Hall, and it DID have jail house cells in the back, but who knows.

Growing up in Killeen was unique. Killeen is diversified. It started out as a rail head. The cattle would be loaded onto freight cars for the Santa Fe rail road and shipped up north. US 190 and I35 supposedly were the Chisolm Trail and the Good Night Loving Trail, but don’t quote me on that. You know how we Texans lie. It was originally called Palo Alto, or something like that, but a break man from the rail road named Frank Killeen got the dubious honor of having the little cow town renamed after him.

From about 1888 until the 1940’s absolutely NOTHING newsworthy ever happened in Killeen. Bonnie and Clyde didn’t even rob the bank there. They ran over to Temple and robbed there. Killeen was about as “PoDunk” as you could get. Then came Fort Hood. Fort Hood introduced something that Killeen never had. . . money! It seems that the land northwest of town was perfect for tank target practice, what with the large expanses of flat land, and the huge mesas that dotted the landscape. You could sit up there and pop rounds all day and all night and get fairly good at it. I remember when I was a little boy the sound of cannon fire was so common we took no notice of it. All but Miss Avery, my eighth grade home room teacher; she had a nervous breakdown.

By some miracle I made it through high school. I was never any good in school. The only thing I did well was write, but even that was looked down upon by my English teacher. I could never figure out why we had to take English in the first place. I mean, we already SPOKE English! Anyway, she told me I would never be able to communicate in the language of civilized people.  I never forgot that. It really stuck with me, so I began to write a book a year. Not a real book. I’d just buy one of those two hundred page spiral notebooks you get at Gibson’s, and fill up the pages with what I thought was a story. The last one I wrote was in my senior year. It was a masterpiece! I concocted this idea about a bomb at school. Now, bear in mind this is 1969. We had no mass shootings, no riots, no ISIS, nothing like that, but I had to come up with this story about a ticked off kid who set up a bomb to go off in the lunch room at straight up noon. The book was supposed to be half pre-blast, and half post-blast. Kids would pass my book around to the whole school, and by and by my little masterpiece found its way to the principle’s office.

Charles Patterson was the principle back then. I got called to the office and he started chewing on me about my book. Then, here came Charlie Mitchell, police chief, and two hundred pounds of pure Democrat. You see, the main problem with my book was the fact that my bomb would WORK! Being born in Louisiana, I knew all about blasting caps, dynamite, you know, things like that. And it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you connected wires to a lantern battery, and ran them to a blasting cap, set an old alarm clock to noon, with one wire on the striker, and the other on the bell, when the alarm went off the explosive would go off. Elementary! Well, to make a long story short, they took my book and beat my butt. Oh, forgot to tell you that. That’s WHY we never had riots, or mass shootings, or gangs. The teachers would beat you up.  Simple formula.

I never had a girl friend in school. Jody Tucker would sit with me at lunch, and I could never figure why, but I actually never went on a date. I did kiss Storm Stewart a couple times, but I didn’t know what to do after that, and she found someone who did. All the girls had to wear dresses, and all Texas girls were skinny. All but the Mexican girls. They looked pretty good, but there wasn’t any of that racial mix stuff going on so that was the end of that.

When we went to the drive in on Saturday night there was occasionally beer, but mostly chocolate milk and cookies. When there WAS a girl it was always a fight. That’s because it would be one girl and five or six of us boys. I just ate my cookies and kept my mouth shut. I think I was the only one who actually watched the movie. Oh, and by the way, we usually had ONE car. Our car belonged to Danny Mitchell. It was a ‘57 Chevy. But, you know, it seems there was a lot of room back then. Bench seats front and back. EVERYBODY smoked, well everybody buy Danny. We’d go tooling down the road with the windows down (air conditioning? Get a life!) and look like a Cheech and Chong movie.

Killeen evolved over the years. As much as I’ve traveled, and picked up on other towns around the country I still know where the best wings are in Killeen. That, and gizzards and livers. Seems everything we ate was full of grease, and would harden your arteries by the time you were fifty or so, and that’s nice ‘cause nothing else seems to get hard anymore. I wonder why that is? I mean, you arteries are hard, but. . . I digress.

I never see anyone I knew in high school. That’s fine with me because that way they’re forever young. Vicki Roberts is still on the student council taking up for Mr. Patterson, and Jody Tucker is still sharing her lunch with a poor kid from Simmonsville. As a songwriter, years later I wrote a song about those days. I never published it. Too personal. That way I keep all those things with me, forever. They never died. They never went to Vietnam. They never got divorced, and the drive in always looked the other way when they KNEW the trunk was full of kids.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmzW3mAEk-A