Oak literature

Give A Good Book With A Local Twist

Story by RACHEL STONE | Photography by DANNY FULGENCIO

Billy Lee Brammer grew up at 922 S. Windomere, a “menopause baby” whose older parents alternately doted on him and left him alone, according to a new biography about the author’s life.

“Hence, his frequent boredom,” writes Tracy Daugherty in “Leaving the Gay Place.”

Brammer’s father worked as a lineman for the Texas Power and Light Co. and kept a spare fridge filled with cold Dr Peppers on the screened-in porch out back, according to the book.

Brammer had two much-older siblings, and bridge parties were the highlight of his parents’ social life.

“The greatest excitement in the neighborhood was to watch for the Oak Farms milk truck making its morning deliveries” or hop a streetcar to the Texas Theatre, which had “a night-sky tableau on the ceiling featuring projected clouds and winking-light stars,” Daugherty writes.

Brammer first gained an interest in politics in 1938 when thenCongressman Lyndon Johnson convinced President Franklin Roosevelt to force the Texas power company’s hand in bringing electricity to rural parts of the state.

Brammer would later work for LBJ in the United States Senate.

But his claim to fame is the book he wrote late at night, high on speed while in the politician’s employ. It’s the roman á clef that simultaneously exposed Johnson as a lecher and put Texas on the literary map: “The Gay Place.”

In honor of this new spotlight on our homegrown literary saint and the gift-giving spirit of December, we chose these Oak Cliff-related books that are better than a gift card.

“The Gay Place”

Billy Lee Brammer

The book is composed of three interwoven novellas about the shenanigans of Texas politicians.

Brammer, by then living in New York City’s East Village, was afraid to return to his home state for an Austin booksigning after it was published in 1962 because he feared his old friends would turn their backs on him.

All these years later, “The Gay Place” is considered one of the best American political novels of all time. And Brammer, a newspaper reporter who graduated from Sunset High School and the University of Texas at Austin, became an original beloved Austin weirdo before his death from drug addiction in 1978.

“Candy”

Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg

This is a naughty book. Screenwriter Terry Southern composed it, mostly via letters, with poet Mason Hoffenberg. Risqué French publisher Olympia Press paid them $500 each and released it under the pseudonym Maxwell Kenton in 1958.

Southern grew up in Oak Cliff and graduated from Sunset High School in 1941. He graduated from SMU and was a founder of New screenplay. A New York Times book reviewer at the time chalked the book up to “Mr. Southern's artistas-young-dog days. If he had intended it to be more than that, he would have put his name to it in the first place.”

But “Candy,” which began as a Southern short story based on Voltaire’s “Candide,” holds up as a hilarious parody of American sexuality.

Journalism. He is encapsulated in pop culture of the Baby-Boom generation as the only person pictured on the cover of The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” not wearing sunglasses.

“Candy” became an underground hit and was republished by Putnam under the authors’ real names in 1964. By then Southern already was respected for his novels "Flesh and Filigree" and "The Magic Christian" as well as his work on the "Dr. Strangelove"

In 2004, Southern’s son Nile Southern published “The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy,” to positive reviews.

Grove Atlantic published a 60th-anniversary edition of “Candy” earlier this year, featuring an intro from actor/writer B.J. Novak.

That publisher also offers editions of the previously mentioned novels, plus “Blue Movie,” his satire of the film industry, and “Now Dig This,” a collection of Southern’s journalism pieces and memoirs.

“Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood”

Horton Foote

He once lived in a boarding house in Oak Cliff.

That’s enough to put one of the greatest American playwrights on this list.

Horton Foote was born and raised outside of Houston in Wharton, Texas, in 1916.

“Dangerous Animals Club”

Stephen Tobolowsky

Stephen Tobolowsky lives in this generation’s pop-culture highlights as his character Ned Reyerson in “Groundhog Day.”

His stack of accolades include the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play “The Young Man from Atlanta” in Club,” is named after his childhood club that spent hot afternoons trapping spiders and snakes in the Kiest Park area. The name serves as a metaphor for the “dangerous animals” one encounters throughout life.

He’s less famous for his fabulous storytelling and delightful persona, but he may just go down in history for his books of true tales.

Tobolowsky grew up in Oak Park Estates on Watervaliet. As a kid, he thought, “Oh my goodness, that uses so many letters of the alphabet,” he told the Advocate in 2013.

The only Jewish kid at Kimball High School, he once recorded an album with classmate Stevie Ray Vaughan. His first book, “Dangerous Animals

1995, two Academy Awards — Best Original Screenplay for “Tender Mercies” in 1984 and Best Adapted Screenplay for “To Kill a Mockingbird” in 1963 — and the National Medal of Arts in 2000. Oh, and an Emmy in 1997 for his adaptation of William Faulkner’s “Old Man.”

If you love Foote’s screenplays, which also include “The Trip to Bountiful” and Glen Campbell’s first movie, “Baby the Rain Must Fall,” then Foote’s 1999 memoir will sound as sweet as Robert Duvall singing “Wings of a Dove.”

A biography, “Horton Foote: American Storyteller” by Wilborn Hampton, published six months after Foote’s death, in September 2009.

“It’s a collection of short stories. They’re all true, and they all happened to me. It could fall into the category of a memoir, but the stories are not chronological,” Tobolowsky said in 2013. “Most of the book is a good laugh. As you read the stories, as you get about halfway through, you see the pieces connecting, and it creates a narrative.”

Tobolowsky’s second book, “My Adventures with God,” reveals that he’s not just a comic storyteller but also a bit of a mystic. Another collection of real-life short stories, this one explores the idea that most people’s lives can fit into Old Testament narratives.

“The Hidden City”

Bill Minutaglio and Holly Williams

If this isn’t on your coffee table, do you even live in Oak Cliff?

Published in 1990, when Bill Minutaglio was a Dallas Morning News columnist, it remains the definitive book about early Oak Cliff history.

After it was out of print for a few years, Heritage Oak Cliff had it republished and now offers it for sale online and at events.

The narrative, composed with Minutaglio’s wife, Holly Williams, begins on the grassy hills of undeveloped 1800s Oak Cliff and moves into the real-estate drama of Thomas L. Marsalis, our neighborhood’s first developer. While the businessman managed to turn the old “Hord’s Ridge” into streets and parks and houses, it ruined him financially.

The book is full of pictures and anecdotes about Oak Cliff and cowritten by Minutaglio, one of Texas’ most accomplished journalists, who also is known for writing the original magazine story “The Dallas Buyers Club.”