2/04/2023

The Ghosts of the Asherton Trojans

"If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise."  

William Blake


I spent the fall of 2011 traveling US Highway 83, from the Canadian border town of West Hope, ND to the Mexican border town of Laredo, TX. My intent was to look into what it is like to live on the High Plains of our heartland, one of the least populated areas of our nation. I chose high school football as the thread that would tie the story together, but the exercise was much more sociological in nature than it ever was about high school football. The experience was gratifying to the extreme; the fruits of my labor became the book Prairie Blitz: High School Football on America’s 50 Yard Line (Barnes and Noble).

 


On this journey I took up the side task of photographing each small-town football field that lie along Highway 83. I found there were 67 active fields and one inactive. (To take the full tour, go here: America's 50 Yard Line: Glory Fields (rollingdownhwy83.blogspot.com)


The inactive gridiron, located in the south Texas town of Asherton, unexpectedly became part of my busy itinerary more by accident than be design. Finding the trash strewn lot more eerie than ominous, I spent three afternoon hours that I really didn’t have simply walking back and forth from one overgrown scrub brush end zone to the other. On a day that the 3 pm temperature reached 107 degrees, I could only wonder the assessment being drawn by the half a dozen occupants of a public housing complex across the street were compiling about this strange gringo with the out of state license plates. What could I have possibly found so fascinating about this 120 yard by 55 yard eyesore?

 

My stopping in the small south Texas town of Asherton, population 386, on that hot, late summer afternoon in 2011, can be filed as another of those random acts that determine the path our lives follow. I was an hour north of the southern-most stop on my Highway 83 journey, Laredo, TX. The gas gauge said you will not make it to the trail’s head without one more pit stop. My middle aged bladder agreed. Having no high school listed in the State of Texas Public Educational Directory, Asherton was not on my itinerary for that day's stops. I wanted to get to Laredo, snap a quick photo of the Public School Football Stadium, then get back on the road north and make San Antonio before night fall.

 

The area of south Texas I was traveling through that day, from the Hill Country in the land of Lyndon Johnson to the boarder territory of the Rio Grande, is steeped in romantic sounding names that conjure up images in the mind’s eye of the classic Old West. I had started the day in Menard, crossed the West Brazos, the Rio Grande, the Colorado, had lunch in Rim Rock and bought gas in Sweetwater. In reality, the landscape is as barren and as unattractive as any I have ever traveled through. The level of poverty is striking, the small towns in the area riddled with trash and populated by many structures, although inhabited, in various stages of collapse. It is an area that appears to the traveler to be overcome with despair. The farther south I drove the day, the worse it got. Asherton, as I pulled off or Highway 83, looked like a village from a third world nation, with no obvious redemptive values or civic reason for its survival. And it was just plain hot that day. I was in no mood to spend any more time than was needed to fill the car’s tank and to empty my bladder.

 

As I exited the metal building that housed both the station’s attendant and a public restroom fitting in its lack of cleanliness to blend nicely with the rest of the community, I came face to face with a stooped old man entering the same door I was attempting to exit through. We were not going to both fit. “Too damn hot to be in such a big hurry,” he said. We stood with his nose level to my sternum. The man’s appearance also blended nicely with the local scenery. The only noteworthy trait I picked up on was his skin; white. He was the only non-Hispanic I saw in the store or gathered around pickup trucks in the parking lot. I stepped back into the store to let him pass, although he really didn’t give me an option.

 


“Always this hot,” I asked, avoiding that awkward silence that settles in when dealing with someone, no matter how slight or short the duration of contact; that you would rather avoid. “Shit no,” he said. I waited for a qualification, such as “worse last week,” but none was forth coming. I moved towards the gas pump and my refueled vehicle. “I got a brother in Missouri,” he called after me. He must have noticed my license plates. I turned back to face him. “But I can’t stand the bastard. Hell, he might be dead for all I know. Married to a bitch and I can’t stand her either.”

 

I have a real weakness for the belligerent and the profane. Their “kiss my ass” attitude and lack of pretense to genuflect to any type of acceptable social norms, stokes my rebellious furnace and raises my inquisitive antenna. Janis sang all those years ago that freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, and this gentleman was as free as the hot South Texas wind that whipped through his disheveled mane of thick white hair. I had a new friend.

 

Elmer was his name. I would guess his longevity to be somewhere around his 8th decade. I leaned against the car and he joined me. “Where do kids here go to school,” I asked. “ Bus em up to Carrizo Springs,” a town I had just passed through 10 miles north on Highway 83. “Closed the high school here about 10 years ago,” he continued, “and this place been going down the shitter ever since.”

Elmer had my attention, any thoughts of making San Antonio by night fall, forgotten.

 

He may have not known it, but from my sociological based analysis of the rural High Plains, Elmer was right on. It was not long into my journey on Highway 83 that I had learned a truism that my new friend in his own crude way had reaffirmed: American communities, urban, suburban and rural, are defined by their local public schools. Let the school die and the town will follow. Bus the communities’ young to a nearby bigger school and soon the town square will be empty of all but the weeds of neglect, store front windows boarded up and doors locked.

 

Gather as many educational, societal and economical school consolidation experts as you can fit in your hat of demigods, then let them spout their expert findings, plan their innovative strategies for rural renewal and disaggregate their data to their little bureaucratic heart’s desire; bottom line is: lose the school, lose the town. Drive Highway 83 back and forth between Mexico and Canada, as I have multiple times, and your eyes will hammer home to your brain a simple truth of the economic reality of dying High Plains communities: every dead town I passed through contained a dead school.

 

Many other small towns along Highway 83 are even worse off, having not survived, fallen into the state of a ghost town. Despite that most are no longer even listed on a map, I still on my travels passed through their decayed remains, municipal roadkill, a rotting carcass on the side of the road. The crumbling buildings tell the story of a community that for whatever reason, did not adjust its sails to the changing economical winds. Now mere memories -deserted and forgotten - boarded up buildings that once housed a living community. It is sad even to a stranger like me, passing through at 65 miles per hour. The demise of each town and the broken dreams that accompany any failed community, I am sure, would make a good book in itself. However, is anyone left to tell the tale?



In almost every one of these deserted hamlets I encountered, I could identify the building that once was the community school. I would speculate that the section of the “schoolhouse” that is two stories tall was the gymnasium. I imagined years of basketball games played on frigid January Friday nights when two small prairie towns packed it to the rafters, necessitating the opening of the windows, just to cool the place down. From the banker to the town drunk, everyone was there to witness the drama and the heroics of the local team, a respite for one night a week to the drudgery of life in a lonely prairie town. And I wonder what happened to the trophies, earned by sweat and blood and once displayed with such pride, won on those long-ago cold winter nights?

  

I asked Elmer to tell me about the days of public education in Asherton, Texas.

 

Surprisingly, to me at least, Elmer proved to be an excellent civic spokesman for the town of Asherton, TX. He was knowledgeable and passionately proud of “the only damn place I have ever lived, only damn place I have ever wanted to call home and damn proud this is where they are going to bury my poor ass, someday, and that someday is probably pretty soon.”

 

Doomsday humor aside, he was, he stated proudly, an Asherton lifer.

 

“Dad did what he could,” Elmer said, after we had retreated from the boiling afternoon sun of the parking lot and relocated to a wooden bench on the side of the store, where we could rest our backs against a shady east wall of the metal building. “It was hard back in those days,” said. “It has always been hard around here. I was the youngest of six, three girls and three boys, when Mother died. I was four years old, but I have good memories of my mother. I remember her being sick, but not much else about her death. In those days, out here in the poor lands, people just died. Nobody really questioned why. We just buried ‘em and life went on. Probably, if I had to guess, it was the cancer, but who knows for sure. She here one day, gone forever the next. She just got sick and died.”

 

Still a young man, Elmer’s father remarried and sired a second family, once again three boys and three girls.” I guess six was his lucky number,” Elmer said. “I had six sisters and five brothers, all born right here in Asherton. Two - a brother and a sister from my mom -died before I was even born. I couldn’t even tell you, their names. Once again, back in those days, death was pretty common and often happened really quick, especially with little kids. I am sure mom and dad mourned for them. But what are you going to do? There were lots of others to feed and money scarce around here, so you had to get up and go on. People now days are always complaining about this or that; the government, the weather, bills to pay. All I knew growing up was hard times. We were the poorest of the poor; the Depression then the War; that was my childhood. Still, I remember those days with good memories. We didn’t know any better, I guess.”

 

“The other nine (siblings),” Elmer continued with the litany of his family history, “Are scattered to the wind. Some of them I couldn’t tell you if they (are) alive or not. Everybody just went their own way. Dad died back in 1978 and my stepmom passed within a year of that, right here in Asherton,” enunciating the name of his hometown with a prideful emphasis. My new friend, I was to learn, had a sharp memory for dates and historical sequences.

 


I set off on my journey with the knowledge that challenges for 21st century small towns along US Highway 83 are numerous and enormous. The national media has hammered home that point to our national conscious. I found the problem to be not overstated. Many rural hamlets along America’s 50-yard line could be labeled as still functional, but barely. Asherton fit this perception like a glove. A faint pulse was still present, pumping a minimum amount of oxygen into the few operating businesses that were still open. But it was obvious that a slow and irreversible death was occurring. Government social service programs in the dying rural towns on Highway 83 can at times appear to be nothing more than a hospice for terminally ill communities, making those left behind as comfortable as possible, as they wait for the inevitable end. Asherton, TX belongs on this civic terminal list, hanging on, barely, in critical condition.

 

When I would take the time, as I sometimes did, to stop and talk to the few old timers still hanging out in these depressed towns, my simple inquiry as to local history will almost always unleash a stream of community pride, based on “how things used to be.” Tales of famous sons who moved away and made good or the undefeated 1948 high school football team- “line outweighed Kansas State’s line that year” – or the town doctor who worked until the day he died at 93 years of age, or how many troop trains use to pass through and stop each day during the war; all told with a pride that defies the downtrodden current state of a once thriving community.

 

I asked Elmer about the history of public education in Asherton. “Graduated here myself,” he said. “Class of 1948, I was a Trojan.” Why did the school close, I asked. “Not enough kids, not enough money, too many damn Mexicans, it was a lot of things. Young families don’t want to live here. No work. The ones that are here ain’t worth squat. Mostly get by on unemployment and whatever they can steal. But as you can see,” he motioned in a wide circle with his right hand, “ain’t much around here worth stealing.”

 

So, what did they do with the old school, I asked. “It is still standing. Up that street,” he pointed to a gravel road that ran up a slight hill to the east. And the football field, I pushed on with my nosiness? “Still there, but what a mess. Some guy bought it right after the school closed and was going to put government housing in, but somehow that didn’t work and now it just sits there.”

 

"Jump in,” I said, motioning toward my now fully fueled car.

 

“Did you follow the football team,” I inquired as we drove the half mile to the eastern edge of town and what had been for 71 years -from 1927 to 1998 - the home field of the Asherton Trojans. I was soon to learn, what a dumb question I had just asked.

 


The Light poles still stood erect and straight, although it had been almost 15 years since they had illuminated any games. Other than the wooden poles, which upon close inspection were visible form the downhill path of Highway 83, the rest of the former stadium had the sad look of civic abandonment. If not for the necessary amenities of the sport that still stood: the scarred goal posts, the rusting scoreboard, the collapsing grandstand which supported a rotting press box, and at the former stadium’s entrance, a combination concession stand and public restroom with one wall already collapsed and a second not far behind; I would have never guessed that the sagebrush covered lot we now stood on had for over 70 years been the sacred battle ground for the Friday night warriors of Asherton High Schools. Above the iron wrought passage that spectators would pass through upon entering the stadium was a weathered but still readable sign: Trojan Pride.

 

Highway 83, as a north-south passage, has none of the up and down topography one finds as they travel the nations’ cross country east/west routes. The elevation from the Canadian border to the Mexican border remains constant – flat as a pancake. As I would travel Highway 83, I could always spot the next community on the horizon by two common landmarks rising above the level land line; the town grain elevator and the lights on the high school football field.

 

When passing through towns that had lost their public schools; normally swallowed up by a consolidation with a larger neighboring district, the former school buildings still stood and was easy to recognize. Sometimes abandoned, but most often they had been sold and converted to private use. It became my habit to stop and pay my respects to the former anchor of a once thriving community. I compiled a list; often accompanied by a photo I would take with my digital camera, a sort of morbid death mask tribute to commemorate the soul of ghost town public education. I found former schools filling roles of antique shops, senior center apartments, community centers, private homes; and in one sad case, a shelter for hogs.

 

But nowhere, until Asherton, did I find an abandoned football field that stood exactly as it had been left after the final whistle of the last game, now subjected to neglect and the elements of time. It was a sad sight, even for a stranger like me, as if a loved one had died 15 years prior, left to lie where they had fallen, never given a respectful and proper burial. Trojan Stadium was a field lost in time, as if the lights were simply turned off after the last game ever played on this now rotting gridiron, a 33-28 Trojan triumph over Medina. Elmer told me as we stood in the west end zone under the goal posts looking out to the scoreboard, “It was like everyone just went home after the last game (in November 1998), expecting to be back next year.” But next year never came.

 

“We really didn’t see it coming,” he told me of the school’s closing. “I am really kind of glad we didn’t. I never had to go through coming up here and knowing this was the end. I loved this team. Most years we were bad, a lot of those years, worse than bad. But I never gave up. I always knew there would be another day and every once in a while, we would reach up and surprise everyone. That is what we lived for. It gave us hope and not winning much all those years made when we did win sweet. But it is like I told you about how poor we were growing up. We never had much, but we didn’t know any better, so we never expected much. No, we never knew it was the end of the school, and that is the way it should be. I would rather go out hit by a truck than lying around knowing I was dying and nothing I could do but watch myself wither away.”

 

Elmer was an encyclopedia of local lore. The Trojans were first organized into a football team back in 1927, then proceeded to lose every game played that first season. The total number of contests that inaugural year has been subject for debate over the years, Elmer told me, but he put the tally at somewhere between two and five. The winless year proved to be a beam of light illuminating what the future held for the Trojans of Asherton High. 

 

The first official football win for the Trojans came the next season, 1928, a 28-0 whitewash of Carrizo Spring, the neighboring bully 10 miles to the north, who, ironically, at the turn of the millennium would cannibalize through forced consolidation the Asherton Public Schools.

 

The football teams of Asherton had never been very successful, Elmer said, “but people got used to it. But when we did win, knowing how much we had to overcome, it made the wins just that much sweeter. I never gave up on the team until the very end. From the time I could get myself to the field, on fall Friday night’s, I was here. We had lots of disappointments (from the best my research could gather, over the 70 plus years Asherton fielded a football team, the Trojans were victorious less than 1/3 of the time), but we also had our moments, for sure.”

 

As Elmer had been pointed out, Asherton was never known for winning football. Between 1967 and 1972, Elmer remembered clearly, the team had a 40 plus game winless streak. “At the time it might have been a state record. But we never gave up and I was here for every game. Then we finally got a coach in here that would stay for a while, who believed in the poor kids from this poor little school. That is all we needed, someone to work and say we can. As I said, my daddy raised 10 kids on starvation wages through a depression and a war, but he always found a way because he had no choice, he had nowhere else to go. That is the attitude we had here in the 70’s and we stood proud, the Trojans did, they surely did. For years neighbors beat on us like a stepchild, but for one good run, in the 70’s, we did the beating.”

 

Between 1974 and 1979, the Asherton Trojans struck pay dirt, six consecutive winning seasons; with two seven games back to back finishes, in 1974 and 1975. Records, although sketchy at best, document only two other seasons with winning records over a seventy-year stretch, a 4-3-2 mark in 1934 and one last surge of accomplishment, a 7-2 record in 1992. The football well then ran terminally dry as the Trojans won only 6 games over the next seven years, until the plug was pulled for good after the 1998 season.

 

Why was it so difficult to win here, I asked?

 

"We don’t win often in Asherton because we don’t have the tools to win. Look around, would you want to live here? Bet you would not have even stopped if you hadn’t needed gas, now would you,” Elmer said with a mocking twitch of his head? I silently noted that, when discussing the Trojans, he had changed the tense from the past to the present.

 

But what about that good run in the 70” s, I asked, steering the conversation away from the general condition of the town and back to the specifics of Asherton Trojan football. “Fool’s gold,” was his response. “We caught lightening in the bottle, we finally got some breaks, and everything fell into place. We got a good coach, we had a few kids with some ability coming through, whose moms and dads had the goods to give, that always helps, and wanted to see their sons do well and they put their money where their mouths were. It was a good time. There was pride around here those years. Place wasn’t so gloomy, and the kids started achieving, not just in football, but in all kinds of things up at the school. But it wasn’t going to last. I knew it when we were going through it, but I didn’t let that distract me, I just enjoyed the hell out of it because it was a long time coming.”

 

I asked how he felt about his personal status. “Am I happy? Am I sad? Who knows,” Elmer confessed. “I just live the best I can. I don’t need much. Never been married, have no kids that I know of. Do I wish I had kids? It’s dumb to think that way. How would I know? I never had any. You can’t miss what you don’t have and that’s a pretty good way to survive in a shit hole like this place.”

 

Why, I asked, would he defend his hometown with such passion and eloquence just prior to labeling Asherton a “shit hole?” “Look around,” he countered. “It is a shit hole. Look, I didn’t ask to be put here. It just happened. It was like when we still had the football team, if I wanted to go to the games, I had to go to Asherton games, crappy team or not, I had no choice.”

 

Elmer had adopted a philosophy of survival; you simply play the cards life deals you, don’t expect too much and you will never be disappointed; just hang in there and take life as it comes. Perhaps necessary for survival in an environment as harsh as the South Texas Plains, but certainly not romantic, certainly not the sentiment we like to consider as the lore of our culture; for sure Elmer was certainly not the feel good type character I like to write about .

 

“This is not a sentimental place,” Elmer told me. “If you are a dreamer, you don’t live here. I play the Power Ball (which on this day was up to record 274 million dollars), but if I ever win, what would l do with all the money? It would be a full-time job just trying to spend it all. I would buy a couple of bottles and couple of women and just sit in the shade. I got a Mex buddy here in town and I kid him all the time that (when I win) I am going to buy him a classic El Camino, a low rider,” he said with a soft laugh. “After that, I don’t know what I would do with the rest. Wouldn’t be worth the hassle of hearing from all my long-lost brothers and sisters,” he said, with not a hint of sarcasm.

 

I asked about his mode of transportation. “Don’t have a car,” he said matter-of-factly. “Don’t need one; I just walk wherever I need to go. Use to have a license and that Judge over in Carrizo keep taking it from me, so finally I said, ‘why don’t you just keep it.’ You see, I have been known over the years to drink a bit.”

 

We were now back in my car, headed west down the hill and back to the Highway 83 convenience store where we had met. I asked if he had ever thought of leaving Asherton, as all nine of his surviving siblings had done. “And go where? I have lived other places for short periods on account of work,” Elmer shared. “I have driven a truck and I have done a lot of construction work. I have a way with mechanics, fixing cars and stuff, but I don’t like being shut up in a garage all the time. I did live in the Dakota’s one winter. Let me tell you it took me two years to get the chill out of my bones. Dakota winter, no thank you. This body was not made for the cold. For some reason, I have always been drawn back to Asherton.”   

 

How do you survive, what do you live on, I asked? “Don’t need much,” Elmer said. “Life would be a lot easier (for some) if they ever figured that out. Two fifty-pound bags of potatoes, 10 pounds of bacon and a couple of big cans of coffee will get me through the winter. I get a check each month and it really is more than I need.”

 

“I live back across the highway on the first farm-to-market road on the right,” he offered, without my prompting. “Go back about a mile and a half and you will see a shack on the left. (That has) been my home going on over 35 years now. First, I did some work for the old lady that owned the farm out there in return for the house. She died way back, and I just stayed. Not a farm anymore and legally I don’t own one square inch of the place. I don’t know who pays the taxes. I guess her kids. Nobody has told me to leave and until they do, it is where I intend to stay. Figure squatter’s rights are worth something. Besides, if you ever saw the place, you’d understand ain’t a whole lot of developers lining up to evict me.”

 

On the surface and evaluated against the American dream, Elmer’s lot in life - and perhaps analogized to Asherton as well - would be judged by most as a failure. He has not a legal claim or right to even one square inch of the worn-out old building he has called home for over three decades. The philosopher in him had been unleashed and was now rolling. “Think about this, how much money is spent by people today trying to lose weight? Back when I was growing up, we would have thought that was the craziest thing we had ever heard of. Our worry was getting enough to eat just to stay alive. The thought of getting fat was only a dream. Want to lose weight, don’t make so much money.”

 

“I like to read, lots of different types of stories. I don’t watch TV. On a cold winter night, no one on the planet, not the richest man in the biggest of mansions, sleeps as warm, as dry or as safe as I do, cozy in the wood burning warmth of my wooden shack. It is the one place on this earth that I feel connected, content in a life that many do not understand. But I do.”

 

There is wisdom and a sense of inter peace in giving one’s life a complete self-evaluation. “When I am true to myself,” he continued, “I must admit, I feel blessed to have my ‘home,’ even as only a squatter, It is not much, most would call it at best, a shack.”

 

Often, happiness can sneak in through a door you didn't know you left open. It was clear that Elmer viewed his hometown like a well-worn but time proven lover; the years having not diminished his true loyalty or connection to this crumbling community. In many ways the Asherton Trojans still lived in the body and soul of this broken old man, a self-proclaimed Asherton “lifer.”

 

We were parked in the convenience store lot. “Laredo not getting any closer,” he said, reminding me of my original destination.

 

“Can I take you home,” I asked.

 

“Nope.”

 

Elmer was out of my car and headed back to the coolness of the store’s AC.

 

The chance potential encounters along Highway 83 are mind boggling, lending credence to my hypothesis, as I said in the beginning, that we live in a much more random world than we like to acknowledge. Life is really nothing more than one big crap shoot. If I would have had that piece of pie that day in Sweetwater at lunch, as I had contemplated, then I would have been 10 minutes later stopping in Asherton for gas, thus never exposed to the “Ghost” of the Asherton Trojans.

 

I made a right out of the gravel lot and headed again south on Highway 83, my estimated time of arrival in Laredo now pushed back by three hours of time well spent; with a full tank of gas far from the only accrued value of my Asherton lay over.

 

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