Leroy, Part II by JR Hightower
Leroy was born in Manitou, southwest Oklahoma, on January 24, 1918. He grew up in the area and went to school in Frederick. His dad, J. T. Hightower, known to the family as Pop, mother, Gertrude, and sons Harold and Leroy, lost the house they lived in early in the Depression. They all moved into an oil lease shack. It was built for a drilling crew when they were excavating for oil. The shed was deserted and rent-free.
Gertrude cleaned up the place, took rolled up newspaper to fill the cracks between the shrunken boards of the walls, then papered over the walls and rolled up chinking with more newsprint, a paintbrush and a paste of flour, salt and water. Harold and Leroy slept in one bed; some winter mornings they would wake up and find the bed covered with a dusting of snow that had blown in through the cracks in the shack walls where the newspaper didn’t hold. Pop said, “There was nothing between them and the North Pole but a barbed wire fence.”
The Hightowers fared better than many of their neighbors because they had a milk cow so they had plenty of milk and butter. They also had a few domestic chickens so the family also had eggs. With a bag of beans, a sack of flour, and an occasional side of bacon, they could eat well on a pot of pinto beans, eggs, biscuits with butter, and all the milk they could drink. They also hunted to add protein to their diets.
After the hard times in Oklahoma, Leroy would not eat rabbit. He said he ate so much rabbit during the Depression that he swore he would never go rabbiting again. At that time, a box of fifty 22 caliber short shells cost about a quarter. Pop’s rule was one shell, one critter. Leroy became an accurate sharp shooter. Leroy’s oldest sibling was Mary. She was married to Gordon Herrell and had her own family. Leroy went to live with her and Gordon for a while and always spoke fondly of his time with “Sister.”
As the Great Depression raged on, Pop was happy to get a job working on a WPA (Works Progress Administration) project on a highway. The previous “powder monkey” died in an accidental explosion, leaving the job open. Pop wanted the job because even though it was dangerous, it paid twice as much as a regular laborer, twenty cents a day. He got the job.
Harold was working in the fields around Manitou, so Leroy went with Pop and became the powder monkey’s “Mud Man.” Dynamite on the road crew was used mostly to break up big rocks and boulders, not to blow up whole mountains.
Pop and Leroy would be called over to a rock too big to be moved by manpower or mule. He would put a fuse in a stick of dynamite and set it on the rock, then Leroy would plop a shovelful of heavy mud on the dynamite to direct the charge at the rock. Pop would light the fuse and they would run for cover. If the dynamite was not covered with mud, the explosion would only result in a loud bang and would not break up the rock.
Leroy complained about sometimes having to run “a long way away” to get mud. The consistency of the mud made a difference in how well the dynamite worked. If the mud was too thin or too sandy, it took more dynamite to break up the rock. If they did not use the correct amount of dynamite, they would have to blast it again using more dynamite and the job would be shut down while they had “fire in the hole.”
Later, the WPA provided a wheelbarrow, and Pop was able to blow up rocks faster because Leroy could mix up a whole batch of good mud and wheel it along with them.
During this time, Leroy’s mother Gertrude was diagnosed with liver cancer. He nursed his mother as he watched her wither away. She went from a hearty, healthy woman to a 70-pound invalid over a miserable two years and died in 1935 when Leroy was seventeen.
The oldest brother in the family was C. T. Hightower. By the middle of the Depression, he had graduated from high school and went to college at the University of Texas in Austin. With what little help everyone in the family could give him, he managed to work his way through the University of Texas by waiting tables and working odd jobs while attending classes. He earned a degree and his teaching certificate. The certificate enabled him to get a job teaching school in Canadian, Texas.
The family was extremely proud of C. T. because he had a career that gave him security when job security was extremely rare. Several years later, C.T. moved from Canadian to Liberal, Kansas where he gave up teaching and went to work for an oil company. He met and married a city girl, Jean.
It was a big deal when they came to visit; the Hightowers were a little intimidated by the sophisticated wife of C.T. who shopped in ready made stores in a big city and had not lived a hand-to-mouth, hard scrabble life like they had. There was some tension among the adults when she was coming to visit that she might judge their ways.
During his high school years, Leroy got a job in a drug store working behind the soda fountain counter as a soda jerk. This job was a life-changing event for him. He liked the work and especially all the local girls who frequented the short, spinning stools in front of him at the soda fountain.
Because Leroy had to work, he was one credit short to be able to graduate with his 1936 high school class and did not receive his diploma. He went to Canadian, Texas where his brother, C. T. was teaching school.
Leroy got a job in the Rexall Drug Store as an “experienced” soda jerk. The affable young man came to know all the salesmen that sold and delivered candy to the drugstore. He learned that the candy salesmen from Whitman’s, King Candy, Mrs. Stover's Bungalow Candies (to become Russell Stover’s Candies in the early 1940's) made good money.
After working at the soda fountain for a while, getting to know everyone, and garnering the adoration of the female population in Canadian, nineteen year old Leroy apparently got a little cocky. The druggist and operator of the Rexall Drugstore said, “Hightower, what you need is to be fired three times in a row, and I’m going to start with number one.”
A friend of Leroy’s had a car and no job, so with another unemployed friend, the three of them loaded up the car and drove west on Route 66 to Albuquerque, New Mexico. They found the local YMCA and checked in. Leroy was surprised and proud of the fact that in 1938, all three of them had a job before the sun went down on their first day in Albuquerque. They had arrived in “The Land of Enchantment.”
Using his contacts from working in the drug stores in Oklahoma and Texas, Leroy contacted Mr. King of the King's Candy Company in Ft. Worth, Texas. In another of those life-changing coincidences, the western New Mexico/Arizona route man had recently died, and the route was open. The salesman that had befriended Leroy in Canadian, Texas vouched for Leroy and he got the job.
He loved his new occupation where he had to be a fancy dresser and drive a nice car. He was a six-foot two-inch, good-looking kid with a big smile and a good head on his shoulders. He did very well in the candy sales business. Leroy bought a shiny new car with a big metal sun visor over the windshield, fog lights and a spotlight. He said the spotlight was, among other things, for the bootleggers when he went back home.
In much of the west, absent mountains, rivers and other obstructions, the land had been surveyed, and the roads were laid out along the section lines running north and south and east and west. Leroy remembered back in Oklahoma, in the mornings, coming up on wrecks at the intersection of the section line roads.
The bootleggers would run with their lights off at night and sometimes would have collisions at the intersections. Because they could not afford to be caught with a car full of booze, they just took the booze, walked away and left the cars where they sat.
On the dirt roads in Oklahoma at night, Leroy would turn on the spotlight shining it down the road and watch for a “dark wreck”. He could not use the spotlight on the main highways because the highway patrol would give you a ticket for blinding the oncoming traffic.
After Prohibition, fewer bootleggers practiced their trade, but Oklahoma was a dry state, so gangsters continued to satisfy the law of supply and demand until Oklahoma finally voted to go “wet” in 1959.
The coalition of those who benefited financially from Prohibition included preachers, bootleggers, cops, revenuers, judges and jailers, aka “the unholy alliance.” The 1920 U.S. Constitutional 18th Amendment was preceded in 1907 by Oklahoma’s “new” Constitution which prohibited alcohol stronger than 3.2%. The “Sooner’s” Constitution defined every place indoors and outdoors where alcohol was not allowed to be consumed. There were no indoor bathrooms in Oklahoma at the time.
When the 21st Amendment was ratified legalizing alcohol again in 1933, Oklahoma stuck with their “new” Constitution and allowed 3.2% alcohol sales. The legislature had gone to great lengths to define all the places, indoors and outdoors, where drinking alcohol was prohibited; in 1907 there were no bathrooms in homes, so in1933, Oklahomans joked that the only place they could legally drink in their homes were in their bathrooms, unless they were still using an outdoor outhouse.
In 1959, a law was passed in Oklahoma to sell 6 point beer that was not artificially refrigerated, and other alcohol could be sold at State Liquor Stores. In 1984, mixed drink sales were allowed in bars and restaurants in Oklahoma. Mississippi was also a hold out state and didn’t ratify liquor sales until 1966.
From 1938 thru 1941, Leroy traveled all over the southwest, either while working for King Candy Company and sightseeing. One of Leroy's favorite products of King Candy Company was the King's French Creams, all soft centers in milk and dark chocolate.
In his old travel photographs, Leroy always had a pretty girl on his arm or leaning on his shiny car. He went to the Grand Canyon, Pikes Peak and Denver, Death Valley, Northern California to see the Giant Redwoods and to La Jolla, California where he met Cecilia O’Hagin.
Cecilia had placed runner up in the 1939 Miss Arizona pageant, was singing with a local band at dances, church functions, local fiestas, and on local radio stations in Tucson. Someone she met at one of the radio stations told her she should go to Hollywood, California.
Cecilia left Arizona and got a job singing and dancing at an upscale supper club, the famous Florentine Gardens in Hollywood; she was briefly under contract at Columbia Pictures.
O’Hagin shared an apartment with a couple of girls who also worked at the Florentine Gardens, one being Yvonne De Carlo. Yvonne and Cecilia looked alike and people often confused one for the other.
De Carlo was billed as a Brazilian bombshell, but actually was from Vancouver, Canada. Her big break came when she played Moses’ wife, Sephora, in “The Ten Commandments.” Afterwards, Yvonne mostly starred in “B” westerns, married a cowboy actor/stuntman and had two children.
Before De Carlo married, she made the gossip columns quite regularly by dating Howard Hughes, Burt Lancaster, Robert Stack, and Prince Abdul Pahlavi of Saudi Arabia. She ended her career with the part she is most known for, Lily Munster on the television series, The Munsters.
Cecilia had a few bit parts in movies; Columbia did not pay well, unless they used you in a starring role in a movie. She was successful at the supper club, but the singing and dancing job did not pay that well either; Hollywood was full of beautiful starlets and competition and wages were fierce.
The chef at the supper club was Foster Exline. He and his wife took a liking to Cecilia and Foster would feed her in the back of the kitchen because he thought she was too skinny. She was very grateful to him because the struggle of purchasing makeup, costumes, rent, food, and transportation stretched her budget to the limit.
She met and fell in love with Leroy Hightower and he asked her to choose between a career in Hollywood or a future with an Okie. She chose the more reliable Okie and they went back to Tucson where her large family of brothers and sisters, parents, aunts and uncles attended their wedding. She could now accompany him as he traveled his candy route.
America entered the war after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Leroy was drafted in January of 1942. King Candy Company appealed to the draft board and got Leroy a deferment to finish the candy season. Sales only ran from late September to April because chocolate did not hold up well in the heat of the southwest since there was no refrigeration in the shipping or the drug stores.
Leroy took his now pregnant wife to his father’s farm in Oklahoma, then went to El Paso, Texas and was inducted into the Army for his basic training at Fort Bliss; he prepared to fight in the Pacific war theatre. On the appointed day in May 1942, they loaded up his outfit and took them to the train station in El Paso. On the loading dock they were stopped. After a short wait, the sergeants ordered everybody to sound off by the number, one, two, three, four, etc.
Then the lieutenants ordered the men that were odd numbers to get on the train and the even numbers to take their gear and get back in the M35 series 6x6 cargo deuce and a half trucks. Leroy was an even number; he got on one of the two and a half ton trucks and was sent as part of a base activating unit to Alamogordo, New Mexico to help build Alamogordo Army Air Base.
The odd numbers were sent to the Philippines and became part of the units that took part in the Bataan Death March. Fred and Ted Roessler from Alamogordo were part of the group that was in the Death March. Fred carried his injured brother Ted much of the time because the Japanese would shoot those that could not walk on their own. New Mexicans made up the majority of those on the march. It was a brutal stab in the heart to lose so many soldiers from the Land of Enchantment.
Upon arriving west of Alamogordo, there was little but desert, cactus, rattlesnakes, scorpions, tarantulas and caliche hardpan dirt. The Army Corps of Engineers surveyed and marked off the base. They scraped some roads and a runway, but that was just the beginning. The troops pitched and lived in tents. They dug latrines, graded roads, laid out a pierced steel planking runway, built an officer’s club and other military buildings. The soldier’s barracks were the last buildings to be constructed.
Leroy told stories of Yankees in the outfit trying to cut down ocotillo with an ax. The tops would break off, fall and stick into the soldier’s back or whip around and stick in his buddy - the aptly nicknamed “Devil’s whip sticks” proved its point.
Ocotillo
The mesquite bushes were huge and their roots seemed driven into the center of the earth. Mesquite wood is extremely hard and difficult to cut with an ax and the soldiers did not have chain saws. The prickly pear cactus, like the ocotillo, has a bad habit of whipping back and sticking you.
The group of pilgrims finally got the base laid out and learned about caliche dirt, which when it is dry, if disturbed, turns into a super fine powder. The Yankee officers would order an inspection and before the troops could get to the parade ground walking through the two-inch thick talcum powder, their spit shined shoes would be unrecognizable and the bottoms of their khaki trousers would be white with the two-inch thick caliche dust.
The rain and the caliche made the slickest, gooiest, stickiest mud imaginable and when it dries, it turns hard as a rock until it is once again disturbed when the cycle starts all over again.
Leroy had made some friends in the outfit. His big smile and good nature paid off. A friend that worked as a clerk in headquarters ran up to him excitedly one day and said, “Do you want to make an extra seventy-five dollars a month?”
“Sure! How?” he questioned doubtfully.
“Well, the NCO club steward was shipped out. I looked up your records and your soda jerk experience in the drug stores qualifies you as having food and beverage experience and the Base Commander says that qualifies you to apply for the job.”
Leroy applied for and got the job as steward of the Alamogordo Army Air Base Non-Commissioned Officers Club.
Because he was a private, he depended on his senior grade non-com sergeants at arms to handle the senior non-commissioned officers to keep the wheels greased; he figured out how to work around his barriers.
The first time the slot machine technician came by to service the machines after Leroy became NCO Club manager, Leroy found a bag of quarters on his desk. He thought the man had forgotten them and went running after him to return them.
The man laughed at Leroy and told him, “No, those are yours for taking care of things.” Leroy felt naive about learning the system he was working under.
He was a good food and beverage man. Unlike the Officers Club, the NCO Club served no hard liquor, only beer and soft drinks were allowed, but he sold cigarettes, cigars, candy, beer, Coca-Cola, other soft drinks, coffee and good food. That was where Leroy learned that the quality of the ingredients has a lot to do with the quality of the finished product. People talked about how good the fried chicken was at the NCO Club.
New Mexico was a wild west gambling state until 1947, when Federal Revenuers came and took axes to the gaming tables, slot machines and untaxed liquor. When Leroy was at the NCO Club there was a poker game, dice tables, punchboards and slot machines. The Base being a military installation was exempt.
The place was full of troops waiting to be shipped out to the war in the Pacific. They thought they might not come back and spent their money like there was no tomorrow.
By late October, with his seventy-five dollar a month bonus, his gambling winnings and his quarters from the slots, Leroy “was flush” and he drove to Oklahoma, picked up his wife and baby and returned (on time) to his job and Alamogordo.
He went back to the base until Mrs. Patty Patee, the hospital administrator, got them a one-room apartment around 700 or 800 block of Texas Avenue with her sister Betty. They moved in together and were a family.
Cecilia, JR with a boo-boo on his knee, Leroy
Leroy became good friends with most of the local pillars of the community. He played a lot of poker in the game over the Hermitage Pool Hall and in the basement of Henry’s bar, at the corner of 1st Street and Pennsylvania Avenue - later White Sands Blvd. Henry’s was on the south side of 1st Street making it outside the original Alamogordo town site. Leroy and Henry became friends during the war when Leroy ran the NCO Club.
Junior would go to Henry’s with Leroy and Cecilia to visit with Henry and his wife. He liked to sip on a ginger ale with grenadine in it with a cherry and orange slice garnish and listen to the live music while the adults talked and It was especially fun for Junior when they sat in the raised alcove on the south end of the saloon overlooking the hugged together dancers, women twirling and dancing backward, boots scuffing along the floor and occasional jitterbugs with feet a-flying!
After the war, Henry’s would become The Jet Bar. In 1969, Leroy would buy it from his long time friend Red Burnett, and remodel it into The Backdoor Saloon and Supper Club.
Leroy made a lot of friends with the town people while he managed the NCO club. During the war, sugar was rationed and sometimes hard to get, but in those days, a druggist mixed up prescriptions in the pharmacy and sugar was the filler in most prescriptions and a large part of the ingredients of prescriptions. It was a part of their inventory and druggists were exempt from the ration and could get all the sugar they wanted.
Mr. Loggains was having trouble-getting cigarettes for the Corner Drug Store, partly because the military had priority on cigarettes. Leroy could get all the cigarettes he wanted for the NCO Club.
Leroy talked to his friend, Mr. Felix Loggains, and they worked out a deal. Leroy took cases of cigarettes to the drug store and got a like value in sugar from Mr. Loggains. He took the sugar to the base and shared it with the Officers Club and the mess halls. He helped the base get sugar and the townspeople get cigarettes. Everyone won on that deal.
The Army being the Army, things never went smooth long. Leroy’s unit was ordered to ship out. Not wanting to lose his NCO manager that kept the non-commissioned officers happy, kept the violence to a minimum with the big senior NCO “sergeants at arms” and did not lose money hand over fist, the base commander transferred Leroy to another unit that was not scheduled to ship out.
Every time Leroy’s unit was scheduled to ship out, that maneuver was repeated. It was repeated several more times before the end of the war. Leroy was promoted and busted several times, but the Base Commander never allowed him to be transferred from Alamogordo Army Air Base. He spent the whole Second World War at his first and only duty assignment in the Army.
After a time, Leroy really got the hang of managing the club but the General Accounting Office, the GAO, blew a gasket. The Alamogordo Army Air Base NCO Club had made so much money it had “too much money in the bank”. Leroy was called on the carpet where he was told, “The purpose of the NCO Clubs was to entertain the troops, give them a diversion and to improve their quality of life, not to make money.” Leroy was ordered to do something to draw down the money in the bank, and not to accumulate enough money to upset the GAO again.
Using a contact of Cecilia’s in California, Leroy contacted a booking agent for bands and entertainers. He found out the big bands and show acts needed a gig in the middle of the country so when they were traveling from coast to coast, they could make some expense money and try out new music and new musicians. Better than that, they performed at a bargain price.
It was a “no brainer”; Leroy started hosting free concerts, with acts like Count Basie, Jimmy Dorsey, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. He added free fried chicken dinners and free beer and Coca-Cola. In addition, the diplomat that he was, Leroy invited the Officers to attend at no charge to the Officers Club. I saw telegrams confirming the bookings and a regret from Lewis Armstrong due to a prior engagement.
Count Basie Jimmy Dorsey
Those concerts were some of the rare times Cecilia was able to go to the NCO Club as “first lady” and mix with her friends from town. Some of her friends were Colonel Alderson’s wife, Lieutenant Frank Simpkins’ wife, Loma, (Loma Simpkins was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Tinsley - Alamogordo’s biggest landlords - at the Tinsley’s trailer park) and Lieutenant Red O’Dell’s wife Dottie, (Dottie Odell was the druggist’s Felix Loggains' daughter).
A fearful event at the NCO happened in October 1943. The local suppliers were unable to get any beer because of all the rationing during the war. The base Commander called Leroy to his office and ordered him to go find some beer for the troops.
In some of the most unusual language in military orders ever, “Sgt. Leroy Hightower is ordered to proceed to Texas and points east, for the purpose of procuring beer for Alamogordo Army Air Base and to return when his mission is accomplished”.
They struck out on finding beer in Dallas and Ft. Worth but struck gold getting tickets to the Oklahoma University vs. Texas University football game. The “Red River Rivalry” is always played in Dallas. That game was played at the Cotton Bowl at the Texas State fair in Dallas. After the game, they had a great time at the Texas State Fair (wearing civilian clothes of course). The Texas State Fair is where the corn dog was first introduced the year before.
They went to San Antonio to the Pearl Brewing Company where they had heard there might be beer available. Sure enough, the President of Pearl told them he had four train cars of Pearl beer loaded and on the siding.
It had been loaded to be sent to a base in Texas but all the troops shipped out to the Pacific and the base did not need it anymore. Leroy bought the beer, signed for it to be delivered to the NCO Club, and they left to get back to Alamogordo in time to meet the train.
Leroy got one of his NCO Club board members that ran the motor pool to take all of his deuce and a half trucks to meet the train in Alamogordo. There was no railroad spur from Alamogordo to the base yet. They loaded the beer on the trucks and convoyed it to the base, sending the first trucks to the Officers Club of course. He was not busted for fraternizing with officers this time.
By 1944, the Hightowers had moved to an apartment at 507 16th Street owned by Lon French, the Firestone storeowner. It was a one-bedroom three-room apartment with hardwood floors which Cecilia did not enjoy keeping dusted and waxed.
Junior liked the big mysterious barn out back to play in (he wasn’t ‘spose to go in it) and apple and pear trees and fig bushes. Cecilia grew hollyhocks on the west side of the building next to the driveway. North of the French’s was open pastureland all the way to Indian Wells Road with big 50-year-old pecan trees on each corner of the blocks and smaller ones scattered throughout the area.
Cecilia’s sister, Jo O’Hagin, married Roger K. O’glesbee who was a test pilot at the air base. One night they were all having dinner at Helen and Harold’s, they were living in the original ranch house of Senator Aubrey Lyle Dunn’s father, James C. Dunn. His place was on Indian Wells just east of Pecan Drive. Senator Aubrey Lyle Dunn, 1893-1959, was the father of Senator Aubrey Lee Dunn, Chairman of the New Mexico Senate Finance Committee in the 1960’s and 1970.
Jo O’Hagin Oglesbee, U. S. Navy
World War II ended and Leroy’s experiences from his early days as a soda jerk, to a candy salesman, to NCO manager, to the Plaza Cafe set his course in the food and beverage industry. In 1968, Leroy asked Junior what he thought about selling the Plaza Cafe. He said that Amelia and Mike Musgrove wanted to buy the cafe and Junior agreed that they should sell it to them.
In late 1968 Leroy bought the Jet Bar from his old friend “Red” Burnett. The Jet Bar had been Henry’s in the 1940’s and 50’s. Unlike Henry’s, the classy nightclub, The Jet Bar had become a beer joint. It was located at the corner of First Street and White Sands Boulevard. Due to The Eddy brothers’ alcohol prohibition covenants in the original city limits of Alamogordo, the Jet Bar was on the south side of First Street, outside the original city.
To be continued…
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