Sunday, July 9, 2000

Kelton novel of drought and despair still resonates
By Bill Whitaker
Reporter-News Staff Writer

SAN ANGELO — Every several years, when the clouds slip off and the sun beats down and West Texas and everything on it withers and wastes away, newspapermen, scholars and filmmakers come calling on Elmer Kelton.

He’s not a rainmaker or well-witcher or even a certifiable drought historian, though judging from his continuing popularity during these parched periods, you might well guess at least one of those pursuits was his profession.

Kelton is a writer of westerns. But his most famous book has nothing to do with gunslingers or frontiersmen in the conventional sense. The Time It Never Rained (1973) is a ruggedly painful, all-too-realistic survey of the drought that gripped West Texas in the 1950s and accelerated the end of the small towns that once dotted the landscape.

Grizzled West Texans don’t ordinarily like being reminded of the seven-year drought that baked the Southwest in the ’50s, but Kelton’s book resonates among them in a way none of his other books do, something Kelton, now 74, has only recently come to accept.

For awhile, the gracious, soft-spoken San Angelo writer would good-naturedly complain that none of his other novels got praised the way The Time It Never Rained did. But the past few years, the former newspaperman has been more and more inclined to agree with his critics.

“I probably topped out with that and The Good Old Boys,” Kelton said during an interview in his book-filled study. “I guess it’s because it was so personal. I lived through it myself, and the terrible things in that book are things I saw happen to people I knew.

“Except for inventing the characters to carry the storyline, it was really a reporting job,” he said. “I was an agriculture reporter at the San Angelo Standard-Times, and that was the running story I had for the seven years of the drought.”

The novel’s chief character, rancher Charlie Flagg, resists bankers’ efforts to close him down while also refusing government handouts, preferring to go it alone. Many real-life Charlie Flaggs knuckled down in West Texas in similar ways during the drought, though few proved so hard-headed as to resist government relief, Kelton says.

Some of those Charlie Flaggs survived. Some did not.

But you’d be hard-pressed to find the stubborn willpower and determined independence of Charlie Flagg in the generations that succeeded him.

“I’m not sure there are any today,” Kelton said. “Charlie Flagg was brought up at a time when it was disgraceful to accept a handout. But today we have come to accept more and more government intrusion in our daily lives — not just the government’s taking away from us but its giving to us.”

Old-fashioned characters like Charlie Flagg recall not only a way of life in West Texas but a feisty attitude in the face of catastrophe.

“I think one reason the book came out so good is that Elmer worked on it so long,” said Dr. Lawrence Clayton, head of Hardin-Simmons University’s College of Liberal Arts and a nationally recognized expert on Kelton’s books, which number more than 40. “His characters are so good and so authentic, and those of us who lived through the drought feel he caught the despair of that time as well as this time.

“My grandfather was a stock farmer, and he moved twice to get away from the drought. I remember he once said, ‘I’m just looking for a place where it can rain.’ That’s how our family ended up in East Texas.”

Water in the cemetery

Kelton likes to talk about how his father, Buck Kelton, a hardy West Texas cowboy and ranch manager, saw little future for Elmer as a cowboy. Elmer eventually agreed and, a few years after serving in Europe during World War II, he took a job as agriculture writer for the Standard-Times.

The drought was by far the biggest story he ever covered.

“I was as autonomous as you could be in a situation like that,” he recalled. “They let me hunt my own stories, do it my own way. Once in a while, (editor) Dean Chenoweth and Mr. Harte (the publisher) would come up with an idea.

“One time, Mr. Chenoweth suggested I go out to Fairmount Cemetery and ask the gravediggers how far they dug till they hit wet ground. I never did follow through with that one. I thought it might be a little macabre.

“I suppose they just would’ve said they didn’t find any water at 6 feet!”

The novel that so many see as capturing the merciless West Texas environment as well as the legendary independence of the people who first settled the land began to take shape in Kelton’s mind while chronicling the drought that ran from 1951 to 1957.

But The Time It Never Rained did not find success easily. Kelton completed a first draft in the late 1950s, only to see it rejected by book publishers. He wrote a second draft “from scratch” in the early 1960s, only to again find publishers uninterested.

Only after another novel, his famous The Day the Cowboys Quit (1971), garnered him fans and critical praise did his editor at Doubleday ask what else Kelton had in the writing mill. Kelton replied he had a wonderful novel in mind — and then set about writing the third and final draft of the book.

“I think that draft was far better, too,” he said. “I’m sure, with that 10 years of experience, I’d greatly developed as a writer. Plus, I think I had more nerve to put in things such as all the racial strife of the time and a certain criticism of the government’s handling of the situation.

“By the time the third draft came out, we were knee-deep in Vietnam and everyone more easily accepted the idea that the government can do wrong.”

The drought of the 1950s had several effects. First, it drove a lot of the ranchers who leased property out of business. Some returned to the cattle or sheep business, after the drought broke in 1957, but others left for good.

“But those who actually owned the land they were on, I think, they came through it, if only by the skin of their teeth,” Kelton said. “With a lot of the smaller operators, they or their wives had to take jobs in the towns. They had to find other things to count on.”

As the cost of ranching and farming continued to mount — even as prices for their agricultural products failed to rise proportionately — those determined to remain in business were forced to buy more and more land for their expanding farming and cattle operations.

With families moving out, some small towns began to shrivel in the drought, especially if the towns’ economies were based entirely on agriculture. Those who had a stake in the oil and gas industry hung on, Kelton said, but other towns nearly vanished from the map.

Examples can be found easily enough on any Sunday drive out of the cities and into the West Texas countryside. They’re the wide spots in the road, maybe with one or two old, abandoned buildings to testify of their former existence.

“Most of these towns never did make it back afterward,” Kelton said, recalling a trend that began after World War II and only accelerated with the drought. “Look at Talpa or Valera. Except for the post office, I don’t think there’s a place where you can spend a dime in Talpa.”

Adding the clouds

On the wall of Kelton’s study is a photo he took in the mid-1950s. It has its genesis in a rancher west of Fort Stockton who had more money borrowed against his cattle than he could ever get for them on the market. Finally, he told the bank he was quitting, that the cattle were theirs.

Kelton’s photograph shows a cattle buyer and his cowboys rounding up the cattle on an endlessly desolate stretch of West Texas.

“The darkroom lady added the clouds,” Kelton said of the stark black and white photograph. “There actually weren’t any there.”

The author marvels at his father’s good fortune. While the drought broke many men, Buck Kelton lost his lease earlier on a spread in West Texas when the landowner’s sons decided to go into ranching on their own. So Buck sold his cattle and confined his interests to working as a ranch manager for someone else.

“Looking back, it was the best thing that could have happened, losing that lease and selling off his cattle before the drought began,” Kelton said. “The others finally got out of the business, and meanwhile he had this cattle money sitting in the bank during most of the drought.”

The hopelessness of an unrelenting drought destroyed other farmers and ranchers or brought them to the brink of catastrophe.

“Elmer’s book was very true to life,” said longtime rancher Ed Meador, 79, of Eldorado, southwest of San Angelo. “The western part going out to Crane, where he grew up, was even worse, and it probably is now. One thing you can’t run from is a drought. I have a friend in Sonora and he bought a ranch up in Missouri and moved all his cattle there, only to run into another drought.

“You know, this ranching is a beast,” Meador added. “You can’t tell which way it’s going to run.”

Meador’s long-established ranching family had 300 head of cattle on the eve of the drought of the 1950s “and we ended up with 23 heifers and, of course, we had the sheep,” he said. “We came out of it largely as a result of the sheep. I remember my father had $50,000 saved up in war bonds when I came home in 1946 — and by 1957 both it and our cattle were gone.”

Kelton and Meador both remember when, in 1957, the rains at last fell in significant enough amounts to do some good. The skies opened up, ironically, shortly after President Dwight D. Eisenhower came to tour the dry, broken stretches of West Texas.

“After that, it started raining,” Kelton said, “and a lot of people started voting Republican!”

Kelton still recalls U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, in the last days of the drought, learning that ranchers were burning the spines off prickly pear cactus for their cattle to eat. The astonished secretary naively inquired what would happen in the future.

“He wanted to know what they would do when they used up all the prickly pear in Texas — as if we ever could!” Kelton said, smiling.

Day at a time

Actor Tommy Lee Jones later directed and starred in a movie of Kelton’s novel The Good Old Boys, but The Time It Never Rained has yet to go Hollywood. Considering the complexities that make up stubborn, cantankerous, yet compassionate Charlie Flagg, it’s no great surprise.

Yet, the character’s sympathy for the mistreated Mexican-Americans of era, his deep faith in the land and his rustic demeanor continue to fascinate.

“I get calls from Hollywood about this and that, but the check never follows,” Kelton said. “Barry Corbin has stated several times how he’d like to play Charlie Flagg. He thinks he fits the role and so do I. He’s been doing real good lately with a one-man show about Charles Goodnight.”

Although he wrote three versions of The Time It Never Rained, Kelton sees little need for revising his classic novel today, even with the presumed wisdom that comes more than 40 years after the Big Drought.

“I think the time I did the third version, I pretty well had it down,” he said. “I can’t think of anything I’d change if I had the chance. A lot of people say they didn’t like the ending, but I think to tie it all up with a pretty pink ribbon wouldn’t have been true to the times.

“Charlie Flagg got his rain, but he paid a price.”

Judy Alter, director of Texas Christian University Press, which reprinted The Time It Never Rained in 1984, says the book sells regardless of the whims of Texas weather.

“It just sells and sells,” she said. “Elmer has a following and a lot of his books are good, but that one is a classic.”

No one seems to have a handle on how many copies it’s sold, but the book is certainly highly regarded by publishers. After Doubleday published it, The Time It Never Rained was reissued by other publishers, including Ace and Bantam. Texas Christian University Press maintains the book in both hardback and paperback.

“It was only after TCU republished it that the academics started paying attention to it,” Kelton said. “I guess it’s my No. 1 book.”

Of the current drought, Kelton has little to say, except to note that occasional wet spells lull many people into forgetting that West Texas is, after all, semi-desert and that dry spells are the norm, not the exception.

Even so, the drought of the 1950s proved something utterly unique.

“I don’t know if people who didn’t live here at the time can fully grasp the ramifications. It’s like a lot of traumatic things. If you weren’t there, you can’t comprehend it. The drought of the 1950s was the second most traumatic thing in my life, World War II being the first.

“But back then, people lived through it a day at a time, a month at a time, a season at a time, always hoping the next season would bring rain. You find you can live through it better that way. You didn’t live all seven years at a time. You lived it a day at a time.”

Contact associate editor Bill Whitaker at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com.