I tend to assign personalities to cities. Just another weird thing I do.
Austin is like the hipster who recorded noise music in the garage as a 12-year-old and now sells steamed seaweed from the Nut Hut on South First. San Antonio is the heiress collecting old world antiques and tending carnivorous plants on her patio. Then there’s Lubbock, the cotton farmer and his pious wife who strung together a few good crops and built a brick house in town.
Amarillo? It depends. Sometimes I see Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite ruminating over that 4th quarter in ’82 when his football team was derailed on the way to state. But in Amarillo’s case, the favored setting on the mail-order time machine is 1964, the year we took a huge “L” in the economic win-loss column that still has us wondering what might’ve been.
On a cool, damp November afternoon 60 years ago, a little more than two weeks after President Lyndon Johnson won a landslide election against Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, Amarillo Globe-Times newsboys tossed a shocking headline into the dormant lawns of the capital of the Golden Spread. The Amarillo Air Force Base, the city’s major employer and a driving force propelling our phenomenal population growth throughout the 1950s and early ’60s, had been marked for closure by 1968. The headline writer even resorted to the rarely used exclamation mark in order to scream the agony a little louder.
Just the previous year, Amarillo papers boldly reported that the city had grown to an estimated 167,000 people, and many believed Amarillo was on track to reach 300,000 or more by the 1980s. Downtown was still booming with new escalator-equipped department stores. Modern neighborhoods were sprawling in almost all directions, and Sunset Center was packing in hordes of shoppers from all over the region every weekend.
Some folks in Texas had oil, others fed gleefully at the trough of the military-industrial complex, and every place boasted of good weather and ample space to spread out. But it seemed Amarillo had it all in one package. It was unimaginable that any of the economic engines that made the city hum would throw a rod and strand us on our way to the top.
On the morning of the 19th, when everything was still OK, the Amarillo Daily News reported that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was to announce the closure of 95 military bases. Apparently no one in the newsroom was tasked with “localizing” the story with quotes of concern from civic and business leaders, an indication that most people didn’t dream Amarillo would be on the list.
The news that followed the announcement was mostly dire. Globe-Times Associate Editor Paul Timmons bird-dogged a list of expenditures from the base comptroller and added up close to $75 million in annual local spending that would soon evaporate into dry air. Amarillo Public Schools estimated a loss of 3,200 students. And all those jobs—as many as 16,000 airmen and civilians—held recession-proof positions at the base that pumped money into businesses all over the city. Gone.
The papers noted that at least the city’s airport problem had been solved. English Field shared runway facilities with the Air Force, which had been pushing to move civilian aviation elsewhere prior to the closure announcement. With no base, Amarillo could spread out and take all the room it wanted. Too soon for a silver lining? Never in Amarillo.
There were other attempts to keep on the sunny side, but it was mostly the shock of the loss that numbed the pain. That and maybe a whiskey sour or two at the Clover Club on Northeast Eighth, where life went on as if nothing had happened. Buck Owens and The Buckaroos were in town, after all, and so was Willie Nelson. Thanksgiving was coming and, for the time being, Amarillo could leave the worrying to the boardrooms and council chambers downtown.
In the years to follow, however, the impact became very real for more and more Amarilloans. As the job losses mounted on the road to 1968, people were forced to skip town. Two years after the last military personnel left the base, the 1970 census counted just 127,010 residents in Amarillo. Almost a quarter of the city’s residents had checked out.
Amarillo spent the next couple of decades making up for the loss, and the memories of that 4th quarter under the lights, when victory slipped through our hands, began to fade. As early as 1968, Amarillo got a second shopping mall with an Orange Julius. City leaders participated in some serious retail therapy with bond proceeds and bought a new city hall, civic center and central library. The skyline got taller and we wound up with that new airport in 1971.
By the 1980s we were boasting that the runway at Amarillo International, designed for landing nuclear-armed B-52s, was long enough to accommodate the space shuttle. That still doesn’t seem quite right to me, but I’ve probably said it, too. The ever-trustworthy internet did tell me that we’ve got the seventh-longest civilian runway in the nation, so that’s cool.
Another thing we often repeat as gospel truth is that one man caused this whole thing to happen. Yes, the announcement came right after an election when the Panhandle didn’t exactly go hog wild for Lyndon. Of the 16 counties in Texas that voted for Goldwater, eight were in the Panhandle, including Randall. Potter dang near turned Republican, too. Just maybe when LBJ saw Red Randall popping in the middle of the blue map he could’ve called McNamara and asked if it was too late to throw another base in the reject pile. No one can say for sure, but it makes a good story.
And like Uncle Rico, Amarillo makes a great character to liven any story that’s told of Texas. We live large and sometimes fall flat. We’re quirky, unpredictable but mostly content with life, even if our wildest dreams don’t come true (now and then).
