What's in the Water in Midland, Texas?

Written by David B. Edwards

Mac, Jimmy, and I were school pals.  In 1962 we were freshmen at Lee High School in Midland, Texas, population 50,000.  My brother Larnie was a seventh-grader at Alamo Junior High, a feeder school to Lee.  All three of us 14-year-olds proudly carried our newly-acquired driver’s licenses.  It was a Friday night in October when the four of us went cruising around town.  Mac drove his parents’ Pontiac station wagon.  Jimmy rode shotgun, and my brother and I occupied the back seat.  Ordinarily, we three would be performing as Lee High band members at our team’s football game, but this mercifully was a bye week for the weak, winless Mighty Rebels, who needed some time off to nurse their bruises both of body and ego.  Our cross-town rivals, the Midland High School Bulldogs, were playing the Lubbock Monterey Plainsmen this night in Midland’s Memorial Stadium.

Around seven that evening we began our cruise along Illinois Avenue, and then over to Cuthbert Avenue, exchanging blinking headlights and honking horns with other cruisers coming our way, none of whom we knew yet who were as excited as us to be acknowledged.  Nearing the intersection at Andrews Highway, Mac turned into the driveway of the popular Burger Chef, home of the 19-cent hamburger.  A quarter was burning a hole in my pocket, so I looked forward to sharing a burger with Larnie.  It would be a brief pleasure, because the Chefburger was not much larger than my quarter.  But as it turned out, that delight was not to be.  Sitting on one of the outdoor tables were four cigarette-smoking, thuggish-looking Midland High upperclassmen, who to me resembled buzzards perched and waiting to score a kill before going to their ball game.  In short order we morons handed them that opportunity.  As Mac drove by them he shouted out his window to the thug-buzzards, “Crap on MHS!”  All four threw down their cigarettes and ran to their ’57 souped-up Chevy to come after us.  Mac gunned the Pontiac and sped back up Illinois Avenue toward our side of town.  The chase was on.

The Pontiac was no match for the Chevy, which soon caught up with us on Cuthbert Avenue.  Speeding alongside us, the thugs angrily motioned for us to pull over, as if there were any chance we would actually do that.  Nevertheless, we managed to graciously present them with the functional equivalent of pulling over.  Mac, though sometimes indiscrete with his scatological exclamations, was at the oddest times law-abiding to a fault.  This was one of them.  In those days Texas law did not allow taking a right on red after stop.  The red light to Cuthbert Avenue where it dead-ended at Midland Drive was notoriously long.  So there we sat, hopelessly stymied in the dark at the red light as the Chevy’s brakes squealed behind us and our executioners came running to do the deed.  Fortunately, all our doors could lock and all the windows could close.  They grabbed at the door handles and pounded on the windows and hood.  They tore the radio antenna off and whipped the car with it.  I glanced at Larnie to see if he was all right.  He had snatched Mac’s football helmet from the storage area behind our seat and strapped it on.  Mac was a bench-warming quarterback on our freshman football team and his helmet had a face mask that I was sure Sonny Liston’s best Sunday punch couldn’t penetrate.  At least Larnie would survive to tell Mother and Dad what happened.  I had serious doubts about my own survival.  Just then, the light turned green and Mac out of pee-level panic slammed the car in reverse and knocked one of our tormentors down.  Quickly finding a forward gear, he peeled out on the right turn while the bad guys raced back to their car. 

As Providence would arrange it, before our pursuers turned the corner Mac took a hard right into the first alleyway between the neighborhood houses.  The alley was L-shaped, so he made the second right, parked, and turned off the lights and motor.  Mac whispered to us, “Okay, if they find us and things go bad, I’ll tell them when I said MHS I meant Monterey High School, not Midland High School.  Sorry, that’s the best I can do.”  Just then the Chevy boys rocketed past the alley and didn’t see us.  We all sighed a chorus of relief and waited in silence longer than we had to before heading home.  Larnie and I were disappointed in not getting that Burger Chef treat but were happy to be alive.  I still don’t know how Mac explained the damaged Pontiac to his parents.