a bank, lumberyard, two barbershops, and several stores before a highway connection to Skidmore was built in the early 1930s.
Of the many celebrations (parades, rodeos, parties, graduations) of Johnny Barnhart’s boyhood, this election-night gathering meant the most to him. His dad had brought him down to his first election party when he was twelve, and Johnny felt that he himself was a candidate. Because—in a way, in a big way—he was. The Barnhart family had moved to Beeville two years before. In 1938, he won the grade school declamation regionals at Kingsville. At the time, Colonel Ernest Thompson was running for governor of Texas. His campaign recruited the junior declamation champ to give speeches as part of their “Texans of Tomorrow” strategy. His name was in the Bee-Picayune: “Johnny Barnhart, 12, no doubt youngest politician in the campaign, was a big hit at the Ira Heard barbecue for Col. Ernest O. Thompson. Johnny said, ‘I think that Texas will be in better shape in nine years from now when I come of age if Colonel Thompson serves the state as governor for the next four years.’” With a flatbed truck for a platform and a new public address system, the “Texans of Tomorrow” campaign drew crowds on courthouse squares in towns across South Texas. He was inspired by the grand applause, the sense of purpose. It was the most important summer of his life. At twelve years old and four feet ten, the new boy in town won the regional in Kingsville and declaimed for the governor of Texas and would never worry again about being the shortest person in the room. He knew the exact spot where he had stood, back to the Rialto, during that first election party, watching a man he didn’t know writing magic numbers in chalk.
Gentry Dugat’s booming voice:
“Precinct 3—Blanconia. Wachtendorf twenty-three, Robinson nine, Ennis ten.”
Johnny saw dozens of familiar faces in the crowd. The old sheriff, Will Corrigan, stood off by himself, looking up at the board. The old cowboy, Johnny Murphy, was talking with Dick Jones, the bank president. Freddie Hobrecht, the fighter pilot war hero, was there. Miss Orrie Hynes from the bank. During his high school years as a soda jerk, Johnny had brought trays of Cokes and coffee from the Schulz pharmacy soda fountain, making his way through this crowd and listening to old men telling each other stories of past elections. But they didn’t like to talk about the elections between 1922 and 1932, when the community was split. Those were the years of the Ku Klux Klan. When they were over, people preferred to erase them from the county history. The elections of the 1930s were passive by comparison. Friendly. The town was a community again. In the late 1930s and 1940s, the only arguments had to do with the elections for president (Texans didn’t like Roosevelt’s New Deal) and governor (Pappy O’Daniel, Coke Stevenson). And sheriff, of course. Even in Vail’s first run in 1944, he had strong opposition. And the 1946 election had been bitter.
More results:
“Precinct 15, Olmos: Wachtendorf eight, Ennis forty-eight.”
“Precinct 7, Clareville: Wachtendorf one, Robinson one, Ennis sixty.”
Tonight, everyone was watching the count in the Senate race. Box by box, Coke Stevenson came out ahead, as people expected. Johnny remembered at age twelve watching the governor’s totals on this blackboard, knowing that this blackboard wouldn’t decide the winner, but feeling that it would foretell the winner. And it did. It always did. Like the rest of Texas, Bee County would vote for Coke, Lyndon Johnson, and George Peddy, in that order.
A slight Gulf breeze was enough to bring back the night during the summer of 1938 when his dad had brought him here. This was a celebration, one that brought this community together in a way that took his breath away, so filled it was with common understanding, with appreciation of the ways of a people, of Texans, of Americans. Scents. Angles of light. Landmarks. Streetlights. The darkness beyond the buildings. The gathering of huge men, all bigger than his dad. On that night he’d known he wanted to do this the rest of his life.
A murmur in the crowd. The word was that Box 1 had been counted. This was the county’s biggest, the original Beeville, the town laid out in 1860 on lines west and south from Block 1—the cemetery—to the bending Poesta Creek.
“Precinct 1. Wachtendorf sixty-five, Robinson sixty-four, Ennis three hundred seven.”
Johnny saw Vail in the crowd. People were congratulating him. Johnny went over to shake his hand. Vail looked down at him and smiled.
“Thank you, Johnny. Did you vote for me?”
“Yes, I did, Vail.”
In Johnny Barnhart’s memory, in one moment he is watching the crowd thin before the big blackboard, Vail Ennis there with well-wishers, breathing the late Gulf breeze coming easily over the courthouse lawn. In the next—the very next—he is choking in the smoke-smogged bedlam of the Democratic Party Convention in Fort Worth, squeezed into a middle-row seat between two huge men in Stetsons in the Venetian Ballroom of the Blackstone Hotel. The place is a cacophony of the shouts of hundreds of delegates drunk on bourbon or adrenaline, and the party’s Executive Committee is voting to decide whether Coke Stevenson or Lyndon Johnson will be the next U.S. senator from Texas.
A delegate named Clint Small is speaking to the crowd:
“Can we allow Precinct 13 in Jim Wells County to elect a United States senator?”
There are boos, shouts, guffaws. But Small continues.
“There were 202 votes added for Lyndon and one measly little vote added to Mr. Stevenson’s total in Jim Wells County . . .”
Someone yelled:
“Never mind Jim Wells County. How about Duval County?”
“There’s an iron curtain around that county.”
Are we going to let George Parr decide the Senate election?
The crowd shouted him down.
“I’m just about through . . .”
Hecklers and boobirds drowned him out.
Johnny, again the shortest person in the room, couldn’t see beyond the men surrounding him, each asking the next what was happening. There was no readable blackboard here, only blare, glare, shouts across the room, shouts returned, guffaws. The crowd to a man was swept up in the thrill of the wild night, waiting for a resolution to the most bizarre election in Texas history.
Coke Stevenson, Lyndon Johnson, and George Peddy finished one, two, three, in the primary. The voting in the runoff between Coke and Lyndon took one day—Saturday, August 28. The counting took a week. Stevenson versus Johnson was scored like a baseball game, inning by inning.
Sunday. Stevenson leads by 854 votes.
Monday. Johnson out ahead by 693.
Tuesday. Stevenson by 119.
Wednesday. A Houston paper reported Stevenson’s lead had “soared” to 349.
A final tally was turned in on Thursday, September 2, before the Bee-Picayune went to press. Camp Ezell’s headline was simple:
Coke Wins in Senate Race
But a weekly newspaper wasn’t prepared to cover an election like this one. By the time the Bee-Picayune was delivered to the newsstand, Lyndon Johnson had been credited with an additional 203 votes. The phantom votes, all from a precinct in Alice supervised by the Parr machine, were added to a count reported as final a week before.
They
