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Forward In 1680, when our ancestor, Robert de Pollok, a Scot, came to America with his Irish wife, Magdalen, he established the family homestead in a Maryland swamp along the Chesapeake, Calling it “Polk’s Folly.” That name has crossed my mind more than once in the four years since my brother and I sat about building Ragtown Ranch Theater. Chapter One Ragtown It is a magical place from my earliest memories. The Polks were not a founding family of Post City, Texas. We moved there, along with many others, in the mid fifties, for work in the oil patch. Two doors down from our house on 13th Street in Post, lived Dick and Gladys Wood. Gladys had come to Post City in a covered wagon in 1907. Her parents had heard C.W. Post’s offer of “opportunity in Texas” and responded to the promise. Gladys was an entertaining storyteller, and it was to be my good fortune that the early days in Post City were the grist of most of her tales. Neighbors just across the alley were Joe and Lucy Callis. Joe Callis was cowboy to the bone. He was there when the cereal magnate arrived from up north to make a deal with John Slaughter, the Curry Comb, and a few other ranches in the region, for over 250,000 acres of prime rangeland. The young Joe Callis must have heard a lot of talk about the Yankee millionaire, and his plan to turn most of that ranchland into farms, build a town, and bring people from all over the country down there to settle. If Mister Callis had an opinion about it, he likely kept it to himself. I wish Joe Callis had been a talker, but he was a cowboy, and that was enough. His towering, lanky form, made even taller by the high, sharply backslung riding heels of his boots, those pearl-snapped western shirts, and that wide-brimmed cowboy hat created an image of a true cowboy in my mind that remains to this day. I was a big fan of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, but I knew what a real cowboy was. One lived right across the alley. His quiet manner only fueled my imagination. I would often peek across at him, sitting alone in an old metal outdoor chair, lost in his thoughts, and try to see if he was wearing his six-shooter, wondering where he kept his horse. He was a mystery to me, and the things I write about cowboys today have a lot to do with Joe Callis. When I was four years old, the town celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its founding, Post City’s “Golden Jubilee.” Everyone was wrapped up in preparation for the event, it seemed. My dad, along with most of the men in town, grew a beard for the occasion. My mother, and most of the women, made long dresses and matching slatted sun-bonnets to wear. Mother made me a pair of blue short pants, a matching jacket, and a hat with a blue ribbon that hung down in the back. I rode on a float in the big parade, wanting only to be a cowboy, but looking for all the world like Little Lord Fauntleroy. I’m well over fifty years old now, and it still embarrasses me. Of course, the Golden Jubilee was a great time of remembering the founding of Post City, and that precipitated stories told and re-told around our neighborhood. It was then that I first heard tales about Ragtown. About families huddled in terror in covered wagons pulled by mule teams that skidded and lurched their way down a narrow rocky cut in the Caprock wall. Of cowboys riding their horses in from distant ranches, for barbecues and dances that lasted until dawn. It fueled my imagination then, and continues to today. My dad played the piano. He had played, along with several of his brothers, in a Depression era band. He played by ear, and his style of music was a unique blend of Southern Gospel and Ragtime that I once heard described as “Bapticostal.” When Dad played the piano during a revival at the church we attended, the visiting preacher commented that he had never before realized “The Old Rugged Cross” was a waltz. Gladys Wood, the neighbor I mentioned earlier, played a mean rag-style piano as well. So, even as a little boy, I knew what Ragtime music was. In the mind of a four-year-old, Ragtown, naturally, must be a grand and rowdy place filled with that kind of music, and cowboys. A utopian city That notion traveled across time. As I sat before the two keyboards that inhabit my study today, one a well-worn piano, the other an equally scarred laptop, it became the musical, Ragtown. *** Marjorie Merriweather Post attended the Golden Jubilee, and the statue of her father that graces the courthouse lawn was unveiled during the festivities. It was an event so special, that the program the Chamber of Commerce printed remained in our piano stool until I left home. When I began working on the script for Ragtown, my mother rummaged around and found it for me. Maybe still in the piano stool. The cover was gone, but it was intact. In a family full of piano players who don’t play by music, a piano stool is a safe place for keepsakes. I don’t remember seeing Marjorie Post, but my older brother Glenn, our partner in developing Ragtown Ranch Theater, and the Director of the musical, does. He remembers her as the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He says she looked, and carried herself like a queen, which of course, she was. A queen and a pioneer of industry. She had ably taken the helm of C.W. Post’s cereal empire 43 years before her appearance at Post City’s Golden Jubilee. Six years before women were granted the right to vote in the United States, at only 27 years of age, Marjorie Merriweather Post began blazing trails in corporate mergers and acquisition. Building around the core of the Postum Cereal Company, she formed the international giant, General Foods. For that brief time, in 1957, everyone realized what an extraordinary story the founding of Post City, Texas had been. Famous movie and television stars attended the Jubilee to honor Marjorie Post’s remarkable father, and the town he had envisioned and founded. *** Shortly after the great celebration, our family temporarily relocated to a big two-story house on the south end of town. My parents, for reasons I never understood, decided to take over the operation of, what was commonly called then, an Old Folks Home. The experience there was to further shape my romantic notion of Ragtown, as a place where cowboys lived and danced, rode horses, and wore six-shooters low on the hip. Most of the residents of the Old Folks Home were original Post City settlers. For a year or so I spent all day, every day with Uncle Walter and Aunt Jane, whose last name no one in the family seems to recall, Mr. Pate, Mrs. Pennell, and a parade of short term residents. I heard story after story about Ragtown, covered wagons, and cow camps, but sadly, all I clearly recall is a sense of sadness that my friends were so very old. When I was writing the script of Ragtown, those people came to mind again, and although none of the characters in the play specifically depicts any one of them, I hope the end result honors their lives. They were the hearty, and indeed courageous people, who uprooted their families and traveled to a vast and empty prairie, beckoned by the promise of a better life. In that way, the story of Post City is the story of America. Post City was envisioned and founded by a millionaire cereal inventor and manufacturer, but it was built on a foundation of hope. That is the theme of the musical, Ragtown. *** During this same era of my life, during the fifties, I was a singer. Until I was seven years old, I was an unabashed showman, performing at the Mystic Sewing Club, family reunions, at church, and on rare occasions, onstage. I recall once performing at the Post High School auditorium, where I sang Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons” with a traveling group, “The Serenaders”. But with teenage siblings guiding my career, all fans of rock’n roll, my big number was “Houndog,” which I sang complete with the moves, and the confidence only a six-year-old can muster, believing completely that I was going do what everyone said I was going to do--- be the next Elvis. The novelty of a child singer doesn’t last, and the sixties ended my hopes of stardom. I was a has-been at seven. My farewell performance was “I Love You Truly,” sung in a second-grade program called “A Tom Thumb Wedding.” However, the connection to Ragtown continues, because when I quit singing, I began to focus on a new outlet for my musical inclination. I began to play the piano, and that led directly to the music I was to later compose for the musical. It retrospect, it seems that my family was not inclined to seek out instruction. There were piano teachers in Post, but it never occurred to anyone that I might benefit from lessons. Dad played by ear, and my older brothers, Travis and Glenn played by ear. Playing the piano was organic in the Polk clan, and the ones who didn’t have the gene were meant to be the audience. It similarly never occurred to anyone, that if some of us would learn to play other instruments, we could possibly play together, rather than wait in line to play the family piano. Usually playing the same songs that had just been played, because our repertoire was limited, and shared by all. It was inefficient, but it was a delight. Delightful all the more in memory. The Polk household was always filled with music. At every gathering, after one of Mother’s famous “a pie-per person” meals, we would pass out tattered copies of the “Old Time Gospel Hymnbook”, then after much debate about whether to start with “He Bore It All” or “When The Saints Go Marching In,” we’d rattle those living room windows. Daddy was in the middle of things, playing the fool out of that old piano, his foot pounding the floor louder than the music, playing and singing his heart out, and each of us in that circle receiving our portion of that dear man’s joy. An often-told family story is about the time we were all singing, along with an assortment of aunts and uncles, and in lull in the music, a little boy knocked on the front door. His family had recently moved into a house across the street, so they didn’t yet know about the Polk’s gatherings. When Dad went to door, the cute little guy very timidly said, “My mamma wanted me to ask if y’all’s having church.” Of course, we were. That was the dearest and purest “having church” I recall experiencing. The old Johnny Cash song, “Daddy Sang Bass,” perfectly fit our clan, and among my many hopes and expectations for Heaven, is a living room with an old piano, and that family circle unbroken, hearing Daddy’s foot pounding out the beat, and Mother’s alto lead in “I’d Rather Have Jesus.” *** Mother had a fine voice. She liked to sing the old cowboy songs that her mother had taught her. She sang “Flying U Twister” and “Zebra Dunn,” and of course, “Strawberry Roan.” There were a number of others that she sang, all without accompaniment, the way she had been taught them, including one special tune, entitled “Whistling In Heaven” that Mother always believed her mother wrote. My grandmother had hinted at it, but to have admitted that she wrote it would have been prideful, according to her rigid code of behavior. So we are left to wonder. It is a great story, told in song, written in the cowboy poetry style. I like to believe that she did indeed compose the song, and that my own penchant for songwriting can be traced back to her, a grandmother I never knew. She died many years before I was born. My mother wrote poetry as well, and that inclination, she passed on to my brother, Glenn, and to me. The cowboy songs and poetry that punctuate Ragtown, will always be a tribute to her dynamic, creative presence in our lives. Chapter Two When I was ten, my big brother, Glenn, enrolled in Texas Tech, as a speech and drama major. I idolized Glenn. He was an actor and musician, who played the piano in a band. He was talented, good-looking, athletic, charming, and always had a lovely girl on his arm, and several in his wake. I would look in the mirror at my own scrawny body, big ears, and Brylcreem-laden hair. Glenn was hope. We were brothers, after all. The genes had to kick in sooner or later. They never did, a disappointment to a succession of coaches, and a few girls who had older sisters. I wrote a little tune about Glenn some years ago, that includes the lines, “I grew up in the shadow cast by his limelight. I never got his hair, and I never got his height.” That wasn’t all I didn’t get. Glenn’s theater performances inspired me to act as well, but in the end, I couldn’t. He has that rare presence, and ability to connect with an audience, that is magical. It cannot be taught, and it wasn’t among my package of gifts. The first person to recognize his penchant for the stage, was my brother’s fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Raphelt. She cast him in his first role in a production, and ignited the charismatic magic that has since defined him. Fourth grade has long been the year that Texas students first learn about the colorful history of our state. Mary Raphelt was one of those rare teachers, who not only had great passion for her work, but an extraordinary gift for infusing her students with a belief in possibilities, and the need to take decisive action, if mere possibilities were to become realities. She managed to impart something of herself to every student, and most still affirm that her early influence has affected the rest of their life. Mary was captivated by the story of the founding of Post City, Texas. She was not a descendent of a founding family, but she found a kindred spirit in C.W. Post, a man who lived and breathed possibilities. He was not only a visionary, and a man of great accomplishment, but he had an amazing ability to inspire everyone around him with the power of positive thinking. It was communicated through the advertising for his cereal company, and it similarly drew people, from all parts of the country, to a remote spot in Texas. Mary Raphelt delighted in sharing Post City’s history with the children of the town, and a nine-year-old Glenn Polk was among them. Almost fifty years later, when Glenn and I began the Ragtown Historical Project, Mary Raphelt was the first financial contributor, and she serves on the Board of Directors. Her dynamic personality has not dimmed, nor has her passion for imparting and preserving the story of the founding of Post City. She inspires us, and infuses us with her own determined confidence that Ragtown will become the great success C.W. Post’s memory deserves it to be. *** Glenn’s college acting career gave me a taste of the magic of the stage. By the time he graduated from Tech, with his degree in Speech and Drama, I had seen Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, Richard III, Tobacco Road, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, and many lesser-known plays, including one that made a particular impression on me, called Noah. It took me some time to realize that I would never be the actor my older brother was, so I remained enthralled with theater through high school, though the opportunities to perform were limited to UIL One-Act Play competition. It would take decades for me to realize that play writing was my true connection to the stage. *** In my sophomore year in Post High School, I was a student council representative. That year the student council traveled to a convention in Amarillo. It was to be a fateful trip for me. Among the activities planned for our group, was a tour of Pioneer Amphitheater in Palo Duro Canyon. It was 1968, and the musical, Texas, was just two years into its 40 year run. The musical was not in production at the time we were there, but the theater staff demonstrated the stunning sound system and explained features of the amphitheater, and the production of Texas. Later that summer my family went back to see the musical, and the experience of sitting there, looking up at that high canyon wall, listening the to music reverberating across that historic setting set me upon a path that brought me back to Post 34 years later. *** I worked in the soda fountain at Collier Drug during the time that I first experienced the amphitheater production of Texas. Dear Bob and Mattie Collier provided the first job experience for many Post kids, and it was a formative experience for me. Bob’s father, Doc Collier, helped establish the thriving business community in Post City, founding Collier Drug in 1907. The soda fountain in Collier Drug was the meeting place for many of the more colorful local characters. Two of those fellows came to mind when I began writing the script for Ragtown. Red Chandler and Cooney Hartell spent a good portion of most afternoons sitting at the counter, drinking coffee, shooting the breeze with anyone who happened by. Everyone in town eventually happened by, either for medicine, a gift, or the good-humored company of whomever was sitting in the soda fountain . Cooney and Red solved most of the geopolitical problems of the late sixties daily. Other frequent coffee-drinkers were Dub Caffey and Marvin Hudman. Dub and Marvin usually had a joke to tell, or, in Marvin’s case, a wry comment about whatever the subject of the day happened to be. Together, they gave a teenage would-be writer a rich memory of the best of small-town West Texas. I would later name three cowboys in Ragtown after Cooney, Red, and Dub. The characters aren’t in any way a depiction of those men, but I liked honoring the fond memories of them in that way. I took the liberty of naming several characters after some of the more interesting folks I knew in my youth. There were many to choose from in Post City, Texas. *** One of the most colorful, and dynamic of the regulars at Collier’s soda fountain, was Maxine Durrett Marks. When I learned what the word “vivacious” meant, she immediately came to mind. Now, over 35 years later, the descriptive still applies. After experiencing the production of Texas, I returned home sure that Post’s grand story needed to be told in its own amphitheater, with the Caprock canyon walls as the backdrop. C.W. Post, inventor of POST TOASTIES®, GRAPE-NUTS®, POSTUM®, and a celebrated national business icon, had envisioned Post City as a utopian community. He purchased land, carefully thought out and designed every aspect of the city and its surrounding agricultural community. He brought together people from all walks of life, from every area of the country, at a time when the memory and passions of the Civil War lingered. Add to that, the drama of his epic rain battles, replete with thundering explosions, and the idea that C.W. Post was willing to take on the raw forces of Nature, with little doubt that he could win. All the elements for a grand story were there to be told. It has been long enough since that fateful summer, that I recall only impressions of my conversations with Maxine about the dream of an amphitheater production of the story of Post City. What I do remember is her excitement about the idea. It had long been her dream, to capture the spirit of those first families, who traveled from all over America, to a remote and desolate prairie, motivated by hope, and sustained by faith. At the time Maxine and I were first discussing an amphitheater in Post, many of the original settlers were still alive; Scotty Samson, for one. George “Scotty” Samson was the stonemason C.W. Post had brought from Scotland, to quarry the stone, and build the marvelous buildings that remain a monument to C.W. Post’s vision, and Scotty’s great craftsmanship. There were others still living, but all were getting on in years. There was a sense, then, of urgency to capture their story. Now, all these years later, the original settlers are all gone, and the children of those settlers, and others of us, who heard their stories firsthand, are getting to the age that the story of Ragtown, and the indomitable spirit of those founding families of Post City, Texas would be in danger of fading into little more than a footnote, were it not for that same spark of determination that remains among the descendants of those settlers. Maxine remains determined that she will see that story celebrated, and this remarkable piece of Texas and American history preserved. That is the mission of the Ragtown Historical Project. When my brother Glenn and I returned to Post City in 2002, Maxine, now Maxine Durrett Earl, and her husband Lewis, became staunch, and generous supporters of Ragtown Historical Project, the non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, formed to build the amphitheater, and produce Ragtown. It is amazing to me that these connections, some spanning almost 50 years, have been woven together to bring this production to the stage. |