Some have compared what seems to be a political and social revolution pitting conservatives and progressives today to a parallel, although profoundly different period of change outlined in the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club’s 2016 Spring Read’s book A Strong West Wind by author Gail Caldwell who grew up in the Texas Panhandle in the 1950s and 60s.
Caldwell’s memory of the Texas high plains may be one of vast spaces swept by sun and wind, but they are not without darkness. Caldwell remembers a conservativism of the place that she found stifling and threatening. With the social turmoil of the 1960s looming, Caldwell writes, “Amarillo, too, responded to the lion at its gates with radical measures. The Dean of Girls at my high school, a formidable woman known to all as Miss Willie, took to carrying around a ruler to measure our hemlines, and she wielded that weapon as though it were a holy scepter. Once apprehended, we had to drop to our knees on the linoleum floors of the high school corridors, genuflecting before Miss Willie’s mighty gauge. When I was sent home to change, I took the reprimand as a badge of honor; within a few years, I would be wearing more confrontational garb. Like the rest of the would-be bad kids at Tascosa High, I had to make do with the minor rebellions of smoking in the parking lot and skipping journalism class; the only real trouble we could find involved unlocked liquor cabinets and illegal keg parties.” Yet Caldwell describes other social tensions—African American and Mexican American populations kept strictly in their places. Religious and moral majority type pressures. When Caldwell was busted for marijuana while attending Texas Tech, she writes, “The police found a negligible amount of grass, a couple of pipes, and a lot of psychedelic posters, all of which must have seemed as menacing as uranium; once we got to the city jail, we were treated like dangerous celebrities” (53). Caldwell’s opposition to the war in Vietnam is offensive to her father and an affront to the regional popular view. Later, we learn that the Caldwell family’s Amarillo physician had recommended electro-shock therapy to cure the daughter’s views on Vietnam and her desire to hitchhike (180-81). Perhaps conservativism, the preservation of traditional values, are inherent to sense of place. Perhaps nostalgia for sense of place always has a dark side. Certainly, Caldwell’s story includes one.
