Willie Nelson Read Free Page B

money, you could buy essentials at Buie Hardware, Hillsboro Dry Goods, Martin-McDonald, or Laura’s Bargain Store, watch a picture show at the Ritz or the Texas, or sit in a booth and eat fried chicken at Jiggs, the Kai Kai Coffee Shop, or the Kre-Mee Cafe. If you didn’t have money, you could at least stare at the new Philco radios in the window of Goodman Company or wish for a piano at Walter Piano.
    “The Crossroads of Texas” had its own airport, called the Bryant Sky Ranch, several car dealerships, the Hotel Newcomb, alternately identified as “Hillsboro’s Modern Fireproof Hotel” and “Hillsboro’s Only Steam-Heated Hotel,” a radio station, KHBR, which broadcast at 1560 kilohertz on the radio dial from sunrise to sunset, three grocery stores, four tourist courts, a dominoes parlor, a junior college, and pretty much everything you couldn’t get in Abbott.
    West was different. It wasn’t much bigger than Abbott, but it was nothing like it. West was where the Czechs lived. They were largely Catholic, they enjoyed their music differently, and they drank alcohol, a pastime made easier when Prohibition was repealed a little more than eight months after Willie Hugh was born. In those Central Texas counties that went “wet,” Czech families typically gathered at the SPJST Hall to socialize, sing, dance, and drink their beers. SPJST, or the Slavonic Benevolent Order of the State of Texas, was a Czech organization that sold insurance, ran a rest home, and harbored social clubs; its motto was “Texans for Texans.” The Czechs enjoyed their beer, but good Baptists and Methodists in Abbott and adjacent dry counties had to sneak around to indulge in such activities, which is why several beer joints were clustered across the county line on the highway to West. True Baptists, rooted in the Primitive Church and able to quote Scripture at the drop of the good book, believed dancing was sinful and pagan, nothing more than a vertical substitute for copulation.
    Czechs in general were considered sinful and then some for those reasons. The Ruzickas, the first Czech family to move into Abbott in 1925, were treated like dirt when they came to town, even though Leo and Jerry Frank’s daddy ran one of the three cotton gins in Abbott, a position of considerable importance.
    “We were treated as outcasts,” Leo Ruzicka said. “Real bad, worse than Spanish people, as bad as black. I couldn’t look at a white girl.” Fran Pope faced similar prejudice. “They called us Bohemians at school to make fun of us, I guess because we could speak Czech,” she said. “We were always laughed at. I’d call them ‘biscuit eaters.’ We didn’t have to eat biscuits. We had homemade bread.”
    “Spanish” was polite reference to the handful of Mexican immigrant families who’d wandered up from across the Rio Grande and settled on the edge of town, pretty much keeping to themselves except when it came to working in the fields. The Spanish were treated as foreigners and second-class citizens, evidenced by the lower pay offered for the same labor and the “No dogs or Mexicans” signs posted in front of more than one café. However low they were regarded by the whites in town, “meskins” didn’t have it as bad as African Americans—“niggers”—the descendants of slaves brought into Texas to work the fields and do the menial labor no one else would do.
    Black and Mexican children were not allowed to go to the white school. Colored children attended classes in the one-room school at the Negro church. Black and Mexican adults were not allowed to use public toilets or water fountains, or to ride in the train cars reserved for whites. If they were lucky, they could ride in the back of the train, sit in the balcony of the movie theater, and eat around the back in a café. Those who ignored the rules or, worse, intentionally violated them, such as a black man even talking to a white woman, faced harsh punishment. But the young Booger