Thursday, November 22, 2007

Archer City Road Trip


If you know Texas literature, you know Archer City. Home of Larry McMurtry, model for The Last Picture Show, icon of "the same small town in each of us."

Teresa and I visited Archer City last weekend: her suggestion. I have recently gotten on a collecting jag and decided I would try to get a copy of every McMurtry book published, preferably first edition, preferably signed. There are 40 or 41 books (depends if you include Daughters of the Tejas, credited to Ophelia Ray, but ghostwritten by Larry McMurtry). I currently have 32 first editions, 17 of them signed, and one 2nd edition signed (Texasville, which I bought in Lincoln, Nebraska when McMurtry was speaking there and had it signed to me - the only one in my collection expressly signed for me).



Teresa was pretty sure we would see McMurtry, because she works with a woman who used to live in Archer City who said he was often at the Dairy Queen. Turns out that he now spends most of his time in Tuscon, and only occasionally returns to Archer City. When he does, he doesn't stay in his large house by the golf course (see picture) but instead stays at the Lonesome Dove Inn on Main Street, where we stayed, in the Terms of Endearment room. We did get to see the Golden Globe and Oscar he and Diana Ossana won for the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. They sit on the mantle at the Lonseome Dove Inn.

The main attraction in Archer City is Booked Up!, McMurtry's famous bookstore. It is located in four buildings around the town square. In each, there are literally thousands of books (somewhere around 150,000 in total). T and I found it overwhelming to even take such collections on. We browsed for a few hours, but it was literally tiring. I think we wound up buying 7 or 8 books (including a Jospeh Heller first/first that was signed and a Review Copy of Issac Bashevis Singer's Lonely in America).



At the Lonseome Dove Inn, we met the retired diganostician and now full-time innkeeper, Mary Webb. Mary is the sister of Ceil Cleveland, a high school classmate of McMurtry's and thought to be the model for his character, Jacy Farrow, in The Last Picture Show. Turns out that while Jacy flaunted the patriarchy of the small Texas town by being promiscuous (or as promiscuous as you could get in the 1950's), Ceil flaunted it by being intellectual, free thinking, and ambitious beyond the confines of Archer City. Apparently, she and McMurtry were friendly rivals for the label "smartest kid in school."



It was fun to see places that a McMurtry-phile like me would recognize. We found out the pool hall where Sam the Lion held court was gone, but the ruins of the old theatre were still there.

The Dairy Queen, the local spot where McMurtry muses on aging in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, one of his later books, was hopping, and Teresa had a large dipped cone, a DQ special treat.

Turns out that everywhere in town except Sonic and DQ closes at 5 p.m. on Saturday, so we had to go to Wichita Falls for dinner. McBride's Land and Cattle, where we had good steaks and a passable Shiraz.

One of the more interesting turns of events was the sleeping arrangement. We had one room at the Inn, and supposedly a band, who was playing a dance at the VFW hall that evening, was taking the rest. It turns out they only used two. We met Anna Marie, who is a singer that has some relation to (or at least knows of) Mae Axton, mother of Hoyt Axton and famous composer of Heartbreak Hotel. She was very excited to know that I knew of Mae Axton. This girl was brimming with enthusiasm: her dreams were out there for all to see and she didn't care a lick. She was singing with Dean Anderson (aka Dylan Dean), a newly found country talent who just signed with BMI. In 30 minutes, we felt like we had known her for a long time, learning of her adventures as a teeenager at the Four Seasons in Las Colinas.

When we came down from our room Sunday morning, her boots and Dean's boots were side by side in the stting room, with his cowboy hat on top. How cute.

We did go through Windthorst, an old German settlement that was the closest town to the McMurtry ranch where Larry grew up. In his book, Roads, he talks about riding on a horse with his Grandpa 9 miles in to get the mail in Windthorst. Travel was a slow process then. He also talked about the German immigrant approach to the world, sort of hyperresponsible. In his book, he tells the story of a farmer who killed himself (the prairies are very wide open and the wind blows all the time: it can be haunting), but not before he got up and milked the cow that morning.

As always, there is no such thing as a bad road trip. If you ever get the chance to drop in on Archer City, say "hello" to Mary.