On a Saturday blue-sky morning the little lake in our alley still has water from the recent rains and there is some mud too where the gravel is gone. A male grackle chatters loudly then swoops down to parade and ruffle his feathers and stomp around for a couple of females. I look up and over the old stone walls of the buildings across the alley that face out to Fisk Street and there in the sky towers the abandoned Brownwood Hotel. A ghostly watcher. Solitary and still impressive, empty windows for eyes and the fire escape zigzags up the side terminating at the 12th floor, which was the ballroom where it is rumored that Glenn Miller and his service band played. If that happened, it was in 1942 when Miller and his band toured around the country playing at military camps and bases. Brownwood fits the bill for that kind of thing in 1942.
I can hear the music now in my head, Moonlight Cocktail, String of Pearls, Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else but Me) and (I’ve Got a Gal) In Kalamazoo. And they definitely played American Patrol, if they played in Brownwood at all, which I reckon they did. Whenever I hear American Patrol, though, in my head, I hear it from Red Nichols and the Five Pennies since theirs is the version I’ve heard the most. I suppose the sounds drifted down over the area where I stand here on Saturday morning. The large ballroom windows, now missing but still intact then, would likely have been opened to the cooler night air. If anyone knows for sure and can prove that Miller and his band played in Brownwood, I’d appreciate you showing me (wink, wink.) It’ll make a good detail in a book.
I wonder, also, if Robert E. Howard was ever at the hotel. I guess he probably was. The downstairs had many businesses, including a drug store and a barber shop. The hotel was completed in 1930 and Howard didn’t commit suicide in Cross Plains until 1936. Howard was in Brownwood quite often in the early 1930s, doing business and completing more college courses. Hotels were often the location for the sending and receiving of messages and telegrams, and Howard was scrupulous about keeping up correspondence.
You might say, “Bunker, why are you speculating? Aren’t you a time traveler?” To which I would reply that the “what ifs,” the “I reckon,” and the “I wonder” could be a ploy. A tactic. Keeping up plausible deniability is critical to escape the attention of the time cops.
In 1932, two years after the Brownwood Hotel opened and ten years before Glenn Miller and his band might have played there, Robert E. Howard made a trip down south from Cross Plains to experience more of Texas. It was a trip, Howard said, dedicated to “the wholesale consumption of tortillas, enchiladas, and cheap Spanish wine.” In this way, Howard was very much the kin of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway loved the consumption of cheap Spanish wine. There is little doubt that Howard would have stopped in Brownwood on his way south to Fredericksburg, and it is possible (in my imagination) that he stayed at the Brownwood Hotel while he was here. What I’m saying is that it is possible, if one were a time traveler or a careful researcher, to pinpoint the time when Howard could have possibly been staying at the Brownwood Hotel.
So, by this time in all of my columns, you are saying to yourself “What is the point of all of this?”
The point is that sometimes things… places… that exist critically or magnificently in a particular moment in time, later, that thing or place doesn’t exist anymore. Or it exists in a different way. And sometimes maybe it can come back? In the early to mid-1920s, both Howard and Hemingway were struggling writers, wannabes, trying to find a foothold in the industry. They have other things in common, not to mention their suicides, but that’s a column for another day. Let’s focus here. I forgot where I was going with this, but to say that by the middle of the 1920s, both Hemingway and Howard had very successful (albeit different) careers. Even later, they – through mental illness and depression – grew despondent and unhappy. But in 1932 when Howard might have been in Brownwood and staying at the Brownwood Hotel, it is likely that he was a happy man. Happily consuming enchiladas and whatnot.
This started out having something to do with the Brownwood Hotel and Glenn Miller and me standing in the alley and the hope that someday this great building, the Brownwood Hotel, would come back to its former glory (the Lyric came back!) But I think I messed it up somewhere along the line (or I’m acting like I did.) So, let’s just pretend it isn’t a huge charade to cover up my attempts to relate to you some details of my time travels.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.
