Sunday, October 15, 2000
Bachelor pad never irked local
folks
By Bill Whitaker
Even if you missed Saturday’s salute
to local architect and civic leader Jimmy Tittle, you just knew
this affair had to be different.
Several weeks ago, a friend told me she
had forsaken hamburgers and was frantically working out at the
gym so she could squeeze into this sexy, tight-fitting black dress
she’d picked out — all to pay homage to “the oldest
living bachelor in Abilene.”
Certainly, The Grace Museum’s tribute
to Tittle was fitting. Since opening his firm with fellow Aggie
Jack Luther in 1957, this indefatigable Texas charmer has had
a hand in designing scores of unique homes, churches, schools
and public buildings, both in Abilene and beyond.
To quote Grace development director Belinda
Cook: “Abilene wouldn’t be Abilene without Jimmy Tittle.”
But if the idea of honoring Tittle was apt,
it was also ironic, considering the exhibit of French art on view
last night and the four nudes museum officials reluctantly declined
to display after Abilene school heads expressed alarm.
Longtime Abilenians will recall Tittle’s
home along Lytle Lake was once featured in a Playboy photo spread
as the ultimate bachelor pad. But the really strange thing was,
almost nobody in Abilene — not even the prudes — got
up-ended and offended about Tittle’s titillating publicity.
Then again, the photo shoot didn’t
exactly feature buck-naked Playmates lounging about Tittle’s
pad. A lifelong Abilenian with a keen insight into how much this
town can tolerate, Tittle nixed that idea.
“I told them what sort of city this
was,” he recalled, “and that there could be no drinking
and no bare-breasted women.”
And in that order.
Tittle built the place for Pat Dunigan in
the early 1960s. Dunigan had an oil-field supply yard on South
Treadaway and wanted a bachelor pad out back. By all accounts,
Dunigan loved it, too, but realized he’d have to give it
up after taking a comely bride.
It wasn’t just a matter of his new
wife living out behind an oil-field supply yard, surrounded by
weeds, mesquite and debris. No, it also reportedly involved such
things as Mrs. Dunigan’s getting locked out of the place
while fetching the morning paper — and in little more than
a kimono.
Eventually, Dunigan sold the place to Tittle,
who then moved in. Later he moved the pad out by Lytle Lake and
added to it substantially to make it more domestic.
Although the bachelor pad’s appearance
in the October 1966 issue of Playboy failed to outrage fine, upstanding
folks in Abilene, it did go a ways toward announcing Tittle’s
arrival on the national architectural scene.
“I must have gotten 500 letters from
guys over in Vietnam,” he said. “They all read Playboy,
and they all wanted something like this to come home to.”
I asked Tittle if that issue of Playboy
included anything else memorable.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“That was the only thing I looked at.”
Contact associate editor Bill Whitaker
at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com.
His column runs Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.
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Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps Publications
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