The Night The Moon Shone Over Ballinger, Texas
File this under Scrapes with Johnny Law. Mostly involving automobiles and other people’s bad decisions.
My family had a green and white Covair Greenbrier SportsVan. It was really big, and slow, but could carry 11 high school football players of the Mighty Winters Blizzards. At least 11.
Very, very slowly.
One Friday night, after we had whipped up on our county rivals, the Ballinger Bearcats, in a home game, we decided to drive the 17 miles over to Ballinger to rub it in a little. I was driving, and doing what I could to hold the grossly overloaded “Dooley Bug” on the road at full throttle, about 52 mph.
Downhill.
My boys in the back were somewhat agitativo. Never quite sure how many were riding with me, as every time I stopped, kids would jump out of the van and run around screaming, then get back in with me, or maybe get in a different car in our caravan of maybe seven or eight vehicles, including cars, pickups, and a couple Cushman Eagle motor scooters.
The caravan had looped through Winters a few times, from the drive in near the high school on the west side of town to Nita’s hamburgers across from the drive-in movie outside of town on the east side. We decided to go over to Ballinger for a celebration in the heart of our vanquished foes.
We had to stop fairly often for boys to pee, but also for ******, D******, and ****** Jr. to puke. After the ball game, ****** Jr.’s older brother had given the boys a bottle of sloe gin. They’d downed most of it. Very briefly, as it turned out.
In case you don’t remember, Ballinger is the county seat of Runnels County. It has a lovely old stone courthouse in the middle of the town square. It was probably after 10 PM when we got there.
The ride over had been eventful and harrowing. The Corvair van had many weaknesses, but the radio was not one of them. It had a very powerful AM receiver–the antenna would extend more than 5 feet over the roof of the van. KLIF in Dallas, XERF in Ciudad Acuña, KOMA in Oklahoma City? No problem.
The radio was cranked, the boys were cranked. We sped onwards toward our fate with the van rocking nearly overboard as the boys swung hard from side to side with the beat of the music.
We drove slowly around the courthouse.
By then, we were getting fairly subdued. We were exhausted by the ball game and the victory celebration in Winters. Most of us had Saturday jobs which would begin in just a few hours.
About half way through our second loop of the courthouse, the County Sheriff stepped in front of the van and mentioned for me to stop, and directed me to pull into a parking lot across the street, in front of the Sheriff’s Office.
I stopped, but before I could park, I heard the back doors of the van ease open, and *****, Jerry *****, Cletus *****, and his little brother all snuck out and went to hide in the bushes by the courthouse.
I was left to face the music with only the 6 other boys who had not managed to sneak off.
…
Johnny Walker was the Runnels County Sheriff in those days. About 6’6″, lean and muscular, decorated veteran of the “Korean Conflict,” prematurely white hair and mustache…
He was nearly in tears as he confronted us boys in his office. Speaking directly to me, he said, “Freddy, your mama was me and my sisters’ teacher during the depression, and she never let us leave the school hungry. Your daddy taught me history and wood shop and coached my high school baseball team, and he never let any of us play on an empty stomach.
“It’s breaking my heart that I got to call ’em up and tell ’em you been driving around town in that little green can with boys’ naked butts stuck up all against the side windows.
“And the back windows, too.”
…
“I’m innocent! With God as my witness, I didn’t know they were doing that!”
I guess I should have caught a clue on the road to Ballinger when Jeanie C., Jeanie D., Just Jeanie, and even a few non-Jeanies passed us several times in Jeanie’s Mama’s blue and white (Winters School Colors, might I add!) ’61 Sedan de Ville.
They kept stopping on the side of the road, then passing us again, and again, whooping and honking and hollering and pointing and whomping the sides of the Cadillac, occasionally shouting “@#$^ moon.”
I genuinely thought they were just entranced by the sight of us manly man 15 year old football players.