In Search!

As long as I can remember, my father often commented every 2 to 3 years that you can never go back. We can reflect, remember fondly, look to where we have been to see where we are going, but we can never go back. Oh, how true that statement really was. One minute ago it was history. Unfortunately my father never took his own advice. Mother and he were looking for something from the past that gave them a remember of “wonderful encounters”; this is why we often moved about every 2 to 3 years from
Houston, Texas back to Mississippi or Alabama--in search of “something.” [Fast forward to 2011] I moved to Houston, Texas from ten years in North Carolina because (a) I was financially broke and in financial trouble, and (b) to further my education. Houston is and will always be a town to revitalize in as far as I was concerned. One day I went in search of Mickey.

Houston was where I grew up at. Although, I attended high school for three years at my mother’s alma mater, Murphy High School, in Mobile, Alabama, my impressionable years were in Houston, Texas. At the very beginning, of my senior year, my father decided he was not making enough money to support his family and moved the three of us, mother, himself, and me.  My two (much okder) brothers were own their own. I was not a happy camper about this and just recently (in the last 10 years) forgave my deceased father on this issue.  

Did I make an emotional mistake? Yes and no but I learned that I am a dinosaur and no longer fit in this town. Within two weeks, I had my daughter drive me down Airline Drive. Hundreds of ghost came up out of the streets. The first thing that I recognized was Cunningham’s pharmacy. In the past 90 days, I finally worked up the nerve to stop and go inside to take a look. Clyde was no longer the pharmacists; the restaurant was gone—the owners turned ½ the pharmacy into a doctor’s office.  All the wonderful “find everything” stock was no longer. There wasn’t a front counter. The original Pac-Man video machine was gone. I turned and walked away. Sitting in the car with my daughter, the Burkhalter brothers were scattered to the wind, the police no longer had their mid-night snack, and I felt as if I was in another time and Joe deceased. We all moved on.  

The next stop was to look at Peg O’Neal’s service station on the west corner of Little York and Airline. If Walls Could Talk there would have been many interesting stories that could have been told, including but not limited to– Virgie Hart and about her wild daughter (Anna Nicole Smith), Master Bates, practical jokes that of the early 80s police officers out of the North Shepherd Sub-station played on many, as well as some of my own secrets, not to mention my very best friends of the time--gone. If you have ever seen the Cheshire cat’s grin or the character, Deputy Dog – then you have seen Peg O’Neal. In 1980, many a criminal thought about robbing his gas station, but they thought again because of the .38 he kept under his jacket not to mention, Mr. O’Neal had the county contract to issue the sheriff’s office gas.

Grand-mother Auippa lived a block away from Peg O’Neal’s station. She was my best friend’s grand- mother. Pure Italian married to an Italian who had a nice Italian boy married to a “spit fire” Irish red-head who had my best friend and partner in crime. From another union of Daddy Roy’s he had a son. What attracted me so much to this family is their flavor—their zest for living a country/city life and being a rare “native” of Houston. For anyone who was anyone and lived in Houston in 1981, knew it was rare to find a native Houstonian due to a rash of in flux from the northern states—many industries has closed up north and people were looking for work. Along with this influx, came a mixture of undesirables as well with felony warrants circling their heads to make it a band writer’s paradise. I will tell you this about Grand-mother Auippa, when she said jump-- you asked how high and she had the “coolest” black and white photographs of men with machine guns, cars with running boards, and would always answer when asked,

 “Who are these men?”

“They are relations of my late husband. They all lived in Chicago.”

To this day, going to her house and walking through it, is like going back in time. The architectural structure and the 40-50s décor -- very priceless!

 I finally realized that life is forever changing. People will always be people, but the change is with ourselves and the evolution of the features in which we see. About a week or so later, I found myself with my daughter on Spencer Highway, in Pasadena, Texas. Before the Urban Cowboy, there was a really colorful honky tonk called “Gilley’s.” Down the road from it was “Johnnie Lee’s.” Over off of Interstate – 10 (on the north side of the east bound lanes), a way down past Uvalde on the out skirts of the city limits was a smaller place called “Charlie’s.” (It was more upper scale.) Those memories will always haunt me of fun. Fun, fun—fun, fun, fun! On February 4^th, we went in search of Gilley’s. As I was driving down Spencer Highway toward the east, I couldn’t find anything remotely resembling Johnnie Lee’s or Gilley’s. Of course Charlie’s is gone to the wind as well.

The Tele-Wink is still in my town—still thriving with old home cooking; the “old” Hobby Airport, the town of the delicate cock-tail, oil production, mink stoles, extreme high fashion and southern haughtiness is as gone as Lutheran High School on Winkler, Broadway Baptist School and the Gulf Gate Mall itself and many more.  I have been in search of Gilley who grew older and the building has been gone for more than 20 years. Try driving down Spencer Highway and asking, “Where is Johnnie Lee’s?”

The answer would be Johnnie Who? There are school buses on Sherwood Cryer’s dance floor. The image in my head is receiving a $20 bill bet for running through the dance floor, climbing on the stage and kissing the soft, sweet smelling, and smiling cheek of Mickey Gilley.