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Working the Border
A Texas Ranger's Story
by Doyle Holdridge
The Beginning
The first time I can remember ever actually seeing a Texas Ranger, I was somewhere around 10 years old. My Dad and I were in his faded, red 1952 Chevrolet pickup. We had stopped at one of those gas stations like you see in the movies in the middle of nowhere to get something to drink. We had gotten out of the pickup and were inside the station when a man dressed in khaki pants, white shirt, and cowboy hat walked through the front door. To me at the time, he looked seven feet tall. Everyone in the station snapped-to and really started paying attention to this man. I was very young, but I could tell he was some type of law enforcement officer since he carried a large handgun. No one said much while he was there, but he clearly commanded everyone’s respect.
“Who was that guy?” I asked my dad as soon as we got back into the pickup. Dad told me the man was a Texas Ranger and that those men were not the kind of men someone wanted to mess with. If he could be anything in the world that he wanted to be, Dad said, he would want to be a Texas Ranger. I have never forgotten that. Dad was from the oilfields of West Texas and for him to say something like that about anyone was really out of character. Tough as my dad was, I could tell that he had a lot of admiration for the Rangers and that really made an impression on me.
I was born in Big Spring, Texas in 1952 to Doyle and Moodean Holdridge. My mother and father were working-class people, and we did not have a lot when I was young. Dad married my mother when both of them were pretty young, and neither of them had finished high school. My mother, Moodean, never worked outside the home.
Dad was not around most of the time when I was growing up, because he was always working. When I got up in the morning he had already gone to work. I would go through my day and come in for supper. I would eat supper and settle down to watch some TV. Most of the time he wouldn't show up at the house until just before I went to bed.
Dad worked for most of his life in the West Texas oil patch, and I was moved around a lot when he changed jobs. Oil field work was both tiring and dangerous. The hours were long. I could tell when Dad came home that he was worn out. I watched him work like this all my life.
From time to time Mom, Dad, and I would go to DeLeon in Comanche County to visit Dad’s parents. I loved to go see my grandparents on the Holdridge side of the family. My grandpa, Jess Holdridge, would tell me stories about my great-great-great grandfather, John Henry Holdridge.
John Henry served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. He had enlisted into the 14th Alabama Infantry and fought for the South the entire war. Though wounded twice, he still returned to the fight. At the end of the war he was in the 14th Alabama under Generals Cadmus Wilcox, James Longstreet and Robert E. Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia. When General Lee surrendered at Appomattox, John Henry Holdridge stood nearby. He is buried in DeLeon, along with most of the other Holdridges.
While I was growing up I stayed part of every summer at my grandparents’, so I spent a lot of time with Grandpa Holdridge. The Comanche County Holdridges were very religious people. Grandpa took me to church at least three times a week.
He also taught me about hard work. He paid me a dollar a week to do chores around his place. When I got that dollar, he would take me to town in his truck so I could find something that I thought I needed.
Grandpa Holdridge was probably the best man I have ever met. I never sat down at the table with him that he didn’t say a prayer before we ate. He always stayed to himself and never had a bad word to say about anyone. I have often thought about him during my life, and I have strived to be like him as best I could.
My parents would drive me to Grandpa’s house for my summer visits. Mom always packed short pants for me to wear in the summer. Grandpa didn’t like short pants on boys, so he always took me to town and bought a pair of boots and several pairs of blue jeans for me to wear while I was staying with him. That suited me fine. I still dress that way to this day.
My other set of grandparents lived near Denton. From the time that I was very young I remember visiting Grandfather and Grandmother’s ranch northeast of Denton. Grandma Johnnie on my mother’s side was the love of my life. She spoiled me, and I knew that she was the one person I could go to if I ever needed anything. Whatever she had she split with me and my mother.
Grandfather Ernest ran a small herd of cattle, and Mom and Dad often went to the ranch to help him out. I never really did like staying on the ranch because my grandparents did not have a TV. The house they lived in consisted of two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. The thing I hated most was that the house did not have indoor plumbing. To go to the restroom I had to walk about forty yards out back to the outhouse. I remember that it was always cold in the winter months, and I hated to go out in the weather to use the restroom. At night there were the bedpans to deal with.
The up side to our visits was that I got to help the men work cattle. They always put me on a horse, and I got to push the cattle into the squeeze chute. I thought that was a really big deal. I started doing this at about six years old. I was also trusted with an old .22 caliber single-shot rifle. I was allowed to walk the entire ranch and hunt whatever I wanted.
There was a large stock tank located several hundred yards behind the house, and that’s where I spent most of my time. That tank had lots of turtles and snakes, and I nearly burned the barrel out of that .22 trying to thin them out. I think that’s when I started to have a love affair with firearms. I really liked messing with guns.
Grandpa Ernest had an old single-shot Long Tom shotgun that I was allowed to shoot as long as he was with me. The gun was far too long and heavy for me to hold up, so when I did get to shoot it I had to prop it on something. Grandpa also carried a double barrel .410 shotgun with a pistol grip. He kept that gun in the front seat of his pickup and took it everywhere he went. The gun was about ten inches long, and I know now that it would be illegal to possess today, but Grandpa didn’t worry about its length.
When we got down near the river that ran through his place we always found a lot of snakes. I was scared to death of snakes, and Grandpa felt the same way. When he ran across one, it didn’t take him long to dispatch the thing with his sawed-off .410. He just pointed it in the general direction and the problem was solved.
When we were working cattle we always went back to the house for lunch. I remember one day when we were all sitting around the table. I finished my lunch and got up to leave. I looked over and saw one of the hot shots that my father had been using to move the cattle.
A hot shot is a small tube with batteries that produces an electric shock when pressed into the side of cattle – or some other object. It is used to move cattle through the chutes as they are being worked. I was not allowed to touch the hot shots, but everyone was too busy eating to notice that I had it in my hands.
I remember that Dad was sitting at the table with his shirt off, still eating. I decided that I was going to play a joke on him, so I buried that hot shot in the middle of his back, right between the shoulder blades. He screamed, jumped up, and turned the table over. I could tell real quick that he failed to see the humor in my joke.
I hit the back door on the run and headed for the river down in the pasture. I stayed away from the house the rest of the day. When I finally came back, I found that most of the family thought that it had been really funny. Dad learned that he had better not leave one of his hot shots lying around where his six-year-old son could get his hands on it.
My father was always looking for a better job and a way to provide us with more of the things people want in life. For a while we lived in the Denton area and he got a job working in a bomb factory in Dallas. Grandma Johnnie and Grandpa Ernest couldn’t afford to hire help, so while we lived in the area, my parents spent a lot of time helping out around the ranch.
As much as Dad worked, we never really lived in a nice place. At one point he tried to branch out from working for someone else and bought a used dump truck. He worked at that for a while until he finally went flat broke. We lost our house and sold everything we had to be able to move back to an area where Dad could return to the oil field where he could get the kind of work he knew best.
I can still remember moving from Denton to Odessa in that old red ’52 pickup. We had everything we owned loaded in it. A good friend of Dad’s, John Pippen, helped him get a job with Western Oil Company and let us live with him and his family until we could get enough money together to get our own place. I’ll never forget what the Pippens did for my family in our time of need. I can still remember drinking powdered milk when we could not afford to buy fresh.
From this point until the day he died, Dad worked in the oil field. To this day, I have never seen anybody work so hard. Though I could not know then that he would end up with nothing at the end, I made up my mind when I was ten that I was going to get some kind of job that provided me with a good working environment, a steady income and some kind of retirement. Even at this young age I was very aware of what Dad was going through trying to support our family.
One day when I was about twelve my dad came home from work and told my mother and me that he had gotten a new job in Rankin. Apparently Western Oil was moving its operations from Odessa to Rankin, a one-time boomtown in Upton County. When we moved there in the early 1960’s, it was a new start for my family.
I had never been to Rankin and I had no idea what it was going to be like. When we drove into town I noticed that there really wasn’t much to it. At the time I think the population was somewhere around twelve hundred people, though it had been much bigger than that in the mid-1920s when the Yates Field first came in. Dad drove us around to show us where we were going to live. It took us about ten minutes to see the whole place. There was no good side of town or bad side. There was just Rankin.
When we pulled up in front of our new rent house the first thing I noticed was that it needed a coat of paint. The house consisted of a living room, a kitchen, one bedroom, and one bathroom. I found that my “room” was a folding bed set up behind the kitchen table at night. At this stage of my life, I really didn’t think about the fact that we were poor. I had never known anything else.
West Texans are hard working and tend to take care of their own problems. Most of the people in Rankin either worked in the oil field, the school, for the county, or in ranching. The people tended to be close-knit and it took a long time before they accepted newcomers into the community. The folks around town all seemed to be in the same position in life that we were. Everyone was trying to get by, working as hard as they could to provide for their families. The only people in town who seemed to have a lot of money were the people who owned land and had worked hard for what they had.
The people around Rankin actually cared about each other and took the time to help their neighbors. No one ever locked their doors and most everyone left the keys in their car. After living there a short time, you knew most everyone in town. It was a good place to be a kid.
Not long after we arrived I began to notice that most everyone in town seemed to know the Highway Patrolmen who worked the area, Vic Atwood from Big Lake and Sammy Long from McCamey. They stood out in their community and everyone looked up to and respected them. Those two officers handled whatever came up. They worked wrecks, enforced the traffic laws, assisted the local sheriff’s office, and at times helped raise the young people, like myself, in the communities where they served. There wasn’t much to talk about in Rankin, so most of the people in town really kept up with what the local Highway Patrolman was doing. After I got a driver license and began looking for female companionship, I started to have encounters with Sammy Long.
We all took our girlfriends to the drive-in movie until a storm blew it down. After that, there was not a lot to do. The town’s standard joke was that “Gone with the Wind” was always playing at the local drive-in. I ran with a bunch of young boys who had the same basic values as I had. We all played football and we liked to drink beer and chase girls, not necessarily in that order. As young men will do, I made every effort to party, fight, and get into mischief on a regular basis. In those days you could actually get into a good fistfight with someone and not get shot full of 9mm holes.
Instead of cruising the highways, on Friday and Saturday nights Sammy spent most of his time in town. He would often catch me and my friends with some kind of alcoholic beverage, parking with a girl, fighting, drag racing or doing something else we thought was fun. I was certain that Sammy would end up putting me in the county jail for minor-in-possession of alcohol or something else, but he always hauled me back to my house and turned me over to my dad. Most of the time I would plead with Sammy to just put me in jail, but he always took me home. In my mind that was the worst thing that he could do to me. I understand now that Sammy was doing me a huge favor by not getting me a criminal record for some offense that was a direct result of the growing pains of just being a young man.
The town took great pride in our football team. Nearly everyone in Rankin went to the home games. It was the social event of the week, and everyone took advantage of it to get out and spend time with their friends. The wives and their young children always sat with their female friends in the stands, and all the men stood near the concession stand along the fence so they could talk during the event. Most of the men found time during the game to walk to the parking lot to their cars to get something a little stronger than soft drinks to drink. Even now it still brings a smile to remember those days, when I was so very young and did not know the bad things that could happen to good people.
Home games were important, but the biggest deal of the year was the homecoming game. All the boys I ran with would save their lunch money to pay for the homecoming party that was to take place after we had beaten whomever we were scheduled to play. This event was always planned with great detail.
One year, my high school buddy Gary Glosser and I were the chosen ones to go to McCamey to make the beer run (That’s everyone’s beer and wine for the after-game party). No one in Rankin would sell us beer because everyone knew we were under age.
We had collected everyone’s lunch money and had decided that we would make the run during the week, in the afternoon, because Highway Patrolman Sammy Long usually did not work on Tuesday or Wednesday. The party depended on us being able to get by Sammy and getting the beer successfully back to Rankin without getting apprehended.
Over the years, we had found a bootlegger in McCamey who would sell us whatever we wanted at an inflated price because we were under age. On the day that we made the run, we left Rankin just after football practice. We had collected the money and made a list of requests. We drove the eighteen miles to McCamey and were on the lookout to make sure that Sammy was not between the two towns. So far so good. We knew where Sammy lived, and we drove by his house in McCamey to make sure his patrol car was at home and he was not out working. Bad news. Sammy’s patrol car was not at his house.
We decided to proceed with the plan and go ahead and pick up our party favors. We made contact with our bootlegger buddy and loaded the trunk with beer, cherry vodka and wine. “Man,” we thought, “this is really going to be a good party!”
The road between Rankin and McCamey is straight for about ten miles as you leave Rankin. There is really only one major curve as you get near McCamey, and that was the area Sammy always worked. We headed back to Rankin, being careful to obey the speed limit in the event we ran into Sammy. We had driven about eight miles back toward town and had just gone around the curve. From that point, you could actually see Rankin about ten miles away. To my horror, I saw Sammy in his black-and-white patrol car about two miles ahead of us, slowly moving east toward Rankin. He was driving about thirty miles an hour. I knew if I turned around he would stop me, so I slowed down in an effort to stay as far away from him as I could. When I slowed, so did Sammy.
It was about five miles to the Iraan highway so I decided that I would stay behind Sammy until I could turn south and get away from him. I knew a back way into Rankin that came out at the town cemetery south of town, and I knew that if I could make the Iraan highway I was home free. I just had to make it to the highway crossing at the Mule Train Bar so I could turn right. I knew that Sammy kept an eye on the Mule Train because a lot of the local cowboys and oilfield hands used it as a watering hole. I was hoping that he would stop in there to check it out and I could get around him and on into town.
As I drove on, Sammy slowed even more. He knew my car well, and I knew if I got close to him he would know something was up. There was no reason in the world for me to be between Rankin and McCamey on a school day. Sammy had stopped me numerous times before, and he would know that I was up to no good. So I followed Sammy for what seemed to be forever. I finally got to the Iraan highway at the Mule Train and turned south toward Iraan. Sammy went on down the highway toward Rankin. I thought man I got it made. I worked my way down several dirt roads, knowing that I would end up south of Rankin near the cemetery. Then it was just a short distance on into town. Boy, I thought, I am good.
As I drove up to hit the paved road back into town, you would never guess who was parked on the side of the road by the cemetery waiting for us. Trooper Sammy Long. Sammy just got out of his car and waved me over. He had known all along what I was up to! I pulled over and got out. Sammy told me to open the trunk of the car. I opened the trunk and Sammy just looked at me and said, “Homecoming!”
Sammy then made us open every single beer and pour it on the ground. After that, he made us pick up all the cans and bottles and put them back in the trunk. Then he told us to go throw them away. Sammy then just got in his car and left us standing on the side of the road, in a puddle of wasted beer.
I had a lot of explaining to do to all the friends who had asked me to get their Friday night refreshments. We managed to have somewhat of a party anyway, but it was not as big as it would have been if Sammy hadn’t ambushed us with our load of beer on the way home. That’s just the kind of guy Sammy was. He found a way to enforce the law, but no one got their life screwed up in the process.
My mother was a religious woman, and she would throw a fit if she found out that I was running loose in the world. She would get my Dad stirred up and he was the one who always found the solution to the problem at hand. When he got involved, that’s when I suffered life-changing events. Dad always found a lot of work for me to do around the house for the next six weeks after some infraction on my part. He would also take my car away from me for that period of time, and he would have my mother take me to high school each day.
She would drive me up in front of the school where everyone could see that my mother was bringing me to school. It just killed me to have all the good-looking girls see me being brought to school by my mother. Well, this would go on for the full six weeks until finally I would get my car back. Most of the time I would not mess up again for at least two or three weeks.
In my defense, in a small town there was not much else to do but to get into some kind of mischief. I was really good at that. I never did ask my dad what the deal was with the six-week punishments. I think now that it was just the first number that came into his head, and until I left home that was the standard length of time I got for one of the numerous offenses against the Holdridge House Rules.
Like I said, in West Texas the one sport that really matters is football. You live, breathe, and eat football. In Rankin all the people in town felt the same way. You could run through Main Street naked on Friday night and most likely no one would see you if it was a home game night. Most of us played the other sports as well, but the only reason we did was to stay in shape for football. I played football all four years in high school and to this day I can still remember the games and what we went through every Friday night in the fall. Those were some of the best times that I can remember. I made friends that I still have to this day. Also, some of the things that I learned from the coaches have stayed with me. For one thing, they taught us to work hard together, and the physical and mental hardships that were put on us as football players helped me later in life.
Coach Bill Beasley taught me more about what it took to succeed in life than any one else. He taught me that you had to work really hard at whatever you were doing to get to the top. He told me more times than I can remember that at some point in life the only thing that would get you over the hump was that you had to try harder than the next guy and you had to get mean. Those few words told to me many years ago by an “old fat football coach,” as he referred to himself, have continued to serve me. It has made the difference many times in my life: get mean and try harder. I live by those words even now.
Over the next few years I continued to live my life as young men will do. I attended school, played sports, and worked around town to make money to support my social life. At the end of my senior year Dad came into my room one night just before graduation and told me that he had provided for me the last eighteen years and it was time for me to move out into the world. I had family in San Angelo, Texas, and my girlfriend, Dana Jo Brown planned to attend Angelo State University. That made it easy enough to decide that I would move to San Angelo to get a job and try to go to college, too.
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