THE TOWN

Louella Bryson was walking down Main Street when she bumped into her young friend, Darrell Royal, coming out of the barbershop where he had just finished holding forth at his shoeshine stand. The two visited a few minutes before Maydean Broaddus brushed past the two of them without speaking. Behavior like that was a cardinal sin in Hollis, Oklahoma. Louella leaned over close to Darrell's ear and whispered, "That old bag hasn't spoken to me since she got that high-falutin' job down at J.C. Penney." Of course, there might have been an additional reason why Maydean wasn't acknowledging Louella. Louella was, after all, the town bootlegger.

By 1938, Hollis was surviving the double whammy of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression as Okies do — with steel resolve and a prayer for rain. The town had lost, however, about a third of its local population; many had little choice but to pack up and head west to California. Farm foreclosures, joblessness, and respiratory ailments from inhaling dust were the root causes of despair. Louella and Darrell were largely unaffected by these tragic circumstances.

Louella had all she needed, thanks to her twice-weekly trips across the Red River into Texas, where she would "invest" in as much cheap whiskey as she could pack into the trunk of her DeSoto. Such an enterprising woman would also acquire moonshine when it was available from some of the farmers in Old Greer County. Inventory and demand were both very good.

Darrell had never known a life of plenty, thus doing without came naturally. He was only fourteen years old, yet everyone from all over town knew him as a budding star on the athletic fields of Hollis and the surrounding towns.

Louella knew everything there was to know about Burley Ray Royal, the widower, his four boys, and the wives who paraded through his bedroom, but not his kitchen. John Steinbeck would publish his novel, The Grapes of Wrath, in 1939, telling its iconic story of struggle and sacrifice through the eyes of the members of the Joad family of Oklahoma. The Joads could just as easily have been the Royals. Darrell, at age fourteen, was much like Steinbeck's character, Winfield Joad, the youngest male of the family — "kid-wild and coltish."

Burley Ray Royal had married a local girl, Katie Harmon. They started a family and made do on the various short-term employment opportunities Burley found across town. Burley was an industrious sort, believing in the Christian work ethic of an honest day's work for a full day's pay. Depending upon the times, he was an automobile mechanic, a carpenter, a fence-builder, a hay-baler, and a jailer at the county jail. Burley had to be resourceful. But then, everyone in Harmon County had to be. He had been born in Indian Territory in 1888, a full nineteen years before Oklahoma became a state. Katie Harmon was born a year later, ironically, in what would become Harmon County, Oklahoma.

Burley and Katie produced two daughters, Mahota and Ruby, and four sons. In order of age, they were Ray, Don, Glenn, and Darrell. All were outstanding high-school athletes. It was no surprise, then, that the "Royal boys" were known and embraced by nearly every one of Hollis's 2,400 townspeople. Ray would later become a mechanic in town. Don, a fine high-school football player, would graduate from college and settle down the road at Tipton, Oklahoma, where he would become a coach and teacher. Glenn, a left-handed football passer and baseball pitcher, would also attend college and become a teacher. Thirty years later, when the administration of the University of Texas at Austin took the provocative step of awarding academic tenure to its head football coach, Darrell defended the decision from intense faculty criticism by declaring, "I'm a teacher too, just like the classroom teachers!" In light of his family's background, Darrell must have been speaking with conviction.

The first of Darrell's family tragedies occurred when his mother, Katie, passed away within weeks of his birth. Because Darrell would never know his mother, the family added the letter K to his name. Not an initial. No period. "K" to carry with him the rest of his days.

Burley Ray Royal was a man who had to have a woman in the house. He felt compelled to reconcile this need with his religious nature, which included leading the singing at the Church of Christ. Burley insisted that the new woman in the house, whomever she might be, be married to him. Perhaps. But there was a regrettable thread of consistency to the women passing through the Royal home. They were, more often than not, suffering from a wide variety of illnesses, which left them unable to tend to the household chores. One of Darrell's lifelong friends, Donnie Fox, later remembered visiting the Royal home when Burley called Darrell into the kitchen for a private conversation. The news amounted to yet another announcement of impending marriage. Donnie heard Darrell wail, "Please, Daddy, don't marry another one that's sick!"

Burley's marriages, believed to total five, were so numerous that names, places, and durations had been largely lost to history. Records reflect one other wife, Winnie Wooley Royal, who, fairly or not, is remembered as a hypochondriac who rarely left her bed.

Many often said, "The town raised Darrell Royal." Burley was gone from sunup to sundown, working or looking for work. While working as a jailer, a prisoner grabbed him through the cell bars, whereupon Burley drew his pistol and shot the man in the leg. This surely constituted one of the few times a jailed prisoner has been shot while inside his cell. Because there was little enthusiasm on the part of Burley's wives for cooking and cleaning, the Royal boys were assigned these chores. Louella Bryson felt sorry enough for Darrell that she would occasionally come over to the house to wash the sinkful of dirty dishes while she ordered Darrell outside to play. It was on fall Saturday afternoons in the mid-1930s when, according to Darrell, he would move the RCA Victor radio near the living-room window so he could listen to Oklahoma Sooners' football games while he re-enacted the game in the yard. Years later, he recalled hearing the OU band play "Boomer Sooner" and dreaming the band was playing just for him.

As Darrell matured, so did his remarkable athletic talent. Despite being a shade under five foot ten and weighing 150 pounds, he was muscular, lacking a single ounce of fat. His jet-black hair and broad grin suggested a future as a charismatic adult. He could play any sport with skill and confidence.

A tall water tower stood squarely in the middle of town. It provided water pressure for the town's citizens, but it also served as an informal line of demarcation between east and west Hollis. When Darrell was in the eighth grade, he played little league baseball for the east team, sponsored by the Kiwanis Club. Donnie Fox played for the west team, sponsored by the Rotary Club. Donnie later recalled one particularly intense game between the cross-town rivals...