MIDLAND 101: NEW YORK WRITER NO BIG FAN OF MIDLAND It has not been uncommon for people to speak ill of Midland and its surrounding countryside. Our lack of beauty is well known and most residents have come to accept that. Even the man given credit for treading across this land in the 1840s, looking for a straight path to lay the railroad, was not as complimentary as you would expect someone who basically discovered the land for the town might be. Captain Randolph Marcy once said this part of West Texas would likely never by any means be considered inhabitable by humans. In 1961, the writer John Bainbridge published a book called “The Super-Americans.” His work of non-fiction was a collection of stories he had written in The New Yorker, where he worked as a writer. One of his pieces was on Midland. His story on our town was likely not counter to what many other writers have recorded through the years but there were portions of his Midland account that spoke somewhat pleasantly of the dusty outpost. Still, he didn’t seem a fan of the town or its people overall. Some sample sentiments about Midland include: “Because more than six hundred oil and oil-service companies have offices in Midland’s skyscrapers, the city is known as The Brains of the Permian Basin. (Odessa, which is twenty miles to the southwest and furnishes supplies and labor for the twelve hundred-odd oil fields, is naturally called, The Brawn.” On the Scharbauer Hotel: “Its lobby has served as Midland’s informal stock exchange. There, ranchers and oilmen gather every week to trade and deal, their transactions amounting to some $50 million a year. Quoting a longtime Midlander, Bainbridge wrote, ‘It used to be if you got to the hotel at seven in the morning and stayed until nine, you’d see anybody you wanted to see, whether it was about oil or cattle. In those days the hotel was decorated in what you might call Western Victorian. Big, heavy furniture. Mounted steer heads on the wall. Plenty of brass spittoons. The Coffee Shop had a tile floor and men waiters in aprons. It’s all been what they call modernized. No more steer heads. No more spittoons. Waitresses in the Coffee Shop. Even a TV in the lobby. That’s what’s happening to Midland and everything else out this way.” On our style of dress: “In all seasons, (men wear) pointed Western boots and a light-colored Western hat, which a native apparently never removes except when sleeping.” On our communication ability: “They seem to take as much pride in their taciturnity as in their shabby appearance. What talking they do is generally about business, and even when it isn’t, it is chiefly related to money.” Next week: Bainbridge on a few renowned Midlanders, and on the weather here. Jimmy Patterson’s book “A History of Character: The Story of Midland, Texas” will be completed this year.
Posted on: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 16:25:42 +0000
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