Tag Archives: Texas

THE MAN WHO DANCED ACROSS ROUTE 66

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The dapper Mr Walker.

Travellers on Route 66 in the early 1960s might have been surprised to see a middle-aged man in a white suit and broad-brimmed hat bobbing and weaving along the road. That man was Lewis Larrimore Walker and, despite the incongruity of his surname, he was dancing across the United States.

Lewis Walker and his twin Lois were born in Childress, Texas, in 1909, to cotton farmers Lee and Lillie Walker. Yes, Lewis and Lois. The Walkers had an interesting approach to names; the twins had an older brother by the unusual name of Akard, another brother called Bernice and a younger sister who was christened Billy…

Lillie Pearl and Lee Walker. Larry said he learned to dance in his father’s cotton fields.

By early 1930 Lewis was working in the oilfields, along with another brother, Rudolph, but it was not a profession that suited him and a few months later he was working in Kitty O’Connor’s Dance Studio (‘above Panhandle Paint and Wallpaper Co’). That didn’t last long and in October 1930 he opened the Lewis Walker Dancing School at the Hilton Hotel in Lubbock, Texas. He would later say that he learned to dance from the black workers in his father’s cotton fields.

There was little scope for men to take dancing classes at Lubbock High School, so Lewis turned to sports. Here he is part of the Bi-District Basketball Championship team in 1928.

Lewis ran a tight ship. In early 1931 he took out newspaper adverts which listed the ten rules to observed in his dancing school that included ‘This is a dancing school, not a loafing school. There are other places more suited to loafing.’ (#4) and ‘Don’t talk crude. This doesn’t help you or anyone else’ (#6).

This was the Great Depression and dancing lessons might have seemed very low on many people’s priorities, but Lewis would trade cakes and pies for classes and often offered free lessons. In 1935 he changed the name to the Larrymore School of the Dance and then the Larrymore School of Fine Arts. He had hated his middle name as a child but adopted it for his business, although, with typical Walker disregard for convention he spelled it with a ‘Y’ rather than as the ‘Larrimore’ with which he and Lois had been born.

That dance studio would move around a bit – Lewis once said that it had had an address “on every street [in Lubbock] from 8th to 25th” – and he also opened studios in Ruidoso and Carlsbad, New Mexico. However, business was paused when Lewis went off to serve his country in 1943. He flew as a glider pilot and then as a gunner on a B-17 in the 8th Air Force, flying 35 missions and being awarded the Air Medal with five clusters. He spent his last months of service at South Plains Army Airfield as a non-commissioned officer in charge of special services on the airfield.

Lewis was discharged on September 30, 1945, after serving 3 years and 9 months; he immediately returned to Lubbock to build a new dance studio. That would grow to three locations in Lubbock in the 1950s with some of his pupils the children of those he had originally taught. (Lewis liked teaching children and teenagers because they were more difficult to train and he liked the challenge.) He never married, although he had been engaged to Nancy Faver, one of his students, in 1933, but that came to an end when she married someone else.

Then in January 1962, he announced the closure of the Larrymore Dance Studio. He moved to Hollywood but then came his next venture – he would dance across America. (He claimed it was to settle a bet made 31 years previously with his friend Harold Gore.)

His penchant for long distance dancing had began early. In 1931 he danced from Lubbock to Slaton, Texas, and back again in a day, a distance of around 35 miles, accompanied by a piano and a phonograph on a decorated truck.

Lewis being partnered in July 1962 by Elaine Dunn who was then starring in ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ at the Hotel Riviera in Las Vegas.

It appears that the cross-country dance started with the intention of a continuous trip, but – probably to the relief of his feet – he soon decided it would be completed in stages. (He had thought he would manage 35 miles a day but the terrain and his age quickly caught up with him and across California he averaged little more than 10 miles a day.) So, on May 2, 1962, he dipped a toe in the Pacific Ocean in California and, with a foam dummy as a dancing partner, headed east. At first he was accompanied by a transistor radio to supply music to which he would do a tango or a waltz, along with a driver and car, although during school holidays his teacher nephew, Robert Vaughn, would join him, driving a motor home.

By July he had danced across the Mojave (getting lost on occasion) and was approaching Las Vegas but it appears that the trip stalled at that point. It resumed at the beginning of the following year: he danced through Seligman, Arizona, spotting a mountain lion, and then had a close encounter with a Hereford bull in Ash Fork. In January 1963, Lewis danced into Two Guns, Arizona, where he was greeted by Fern Rawlinson, the then owner of the trading post, to whom he gave a dancing lesson before moving onto the Hopi House and then to Winslow.

Fern Rawlinson greets Lewis at Two Guns, Arizona, in January 1963.

And so he danced on, through Grants and Albuquerque and across the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles By July he was in Kansas with plans to reach New York by the fall. Did he? Alas, I can’t tell you that. I could find no further reports of the ‘Dancing Texan’ after Kansas and if he did complete the trip, then it seems to have gone unreported. However, Lewis’s mother, Lillie, died in August 1963 and it could be that that brought a premature end to the challenge, but I would like to think that Lewis did indeed dance all the way to the east coast!

In a posed publicity shot.

MURDER ON MAIN STREET IN ALANREED

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It was a quiet night in Alanreed, Texas. Perhaps a dog or two barked at the automobile weaving its way down Main Street; cars were still a novel enough sight for the canine population to call attention to each one, but those automobiles provided a living for Tobe Clodfelter who ran a garage in town.

Tobe Clodfelter’s garage in Alanreed.

Given his trade, it was probably Tobe at the wheel that May night, accompanied by his friends, Joe Hayes, a labourer from Alanreed, and Roy Tipton, a farmer who lived a few miles outside town. The trio had been on a trip into the country for what was described as an entertainment – which could be anything from a shoot to a party and was probably both – at which, by all accounts, the three men had been heavily drinking. It would end very badly that night.

For Tobe the trip and the accompanying libations were probably a chance to let off steam, away from the pressures of running his own business and providing for his two young daughters. At 30, he was the oldest of the three men and the only one to be married, having wed his wife Vallie when she was just 14.

The very young and beautiful Vallie Agee, soon to be Mrs Clodfelter.

Vallie and Tobe had both grown up in the Chickasaw Nation of the Indian Territory (the state of Oklahoma would not become part of the Union until 1907) and, in 1900, the Clodfelter family had applied to become recognized as Missouri Choctaws. His mother Mary claimed to be 1/8th Choctaw, making her only son Tobe and his seven sisters 1/16th Choctaw. It is unlikely this had anything to do with ancestral pride and everything to do with the idea that they would be then be able to claim land or money. There were countless fraudulent claims at the time by people claiming to have ‘Indian blood’ in order to be allocated land and it’s all too likely that the Clodfelters were among those. In any event, in 1902 the claim of Mary and her children to be Choctaws was resoundingly rejected.

The Clodfelter family. Tobe is in the centre, flanked by his parents Newton and Mary and his six sisters. It’s likely this photo was taken around 1894 or ’95 when Tobe was about 9. One of the sisters, Lulu (on far left) would die in 1901 at the age of 16 while another, Mildred (‘Birdie’) was born in 1897.

Tobe and Vallie moved to Alanreed after their marriage in 1905 at a time when the town was growing. It had a hotel, a bank, Baptist and Methodist churches, two grocery stores, a hardware store, a blacksmith’s shop and, in 1912, a new two-storey school. In July 1906 their first daughter, Audrie Mae, was born, followed almost two years later by her sister Arble Faye.

26-year-old Roy Tipton was, in 1916, farming with his brother Charles in Gray County, while Joseph Hayes, the youngest of the three men at 22, got by with general labouring work. The Hayes family was still recovering from the death of Joe’s older sister, Sarah, the previous year. Her death certificate stated she had been suffering from pellagra (a nutrition-related disease which was prevalent in Oklahoma and Texas in the early years of the 20th century) for the previous three years. She had died at the age of 30, leaving three young daughters under the age of six.   

In the early hours of Friday May 12, 1916, as the men drove onto Main Street in Alanreed, an argument broke out. We will never know the cause of the altercation – and the fact the men were intoxicated no doubt exacerbated the situation – but Tobe Clodfelter brought it to a swift and savage end by drawing his gun and shooting his two companions. Roy Tipton fell dead, but Joe Hayes was still alive. With the last of his strength he fired back at Tobe Clodfelter. At 3.30am all three men lay dead in the street.

An inquest was held that morning and, at 4pm on Friday afternoon, the three men were buried in Alanreed Cemetery in a single ceremony conducted by the Methodist minister, Rev Howell.

A plain plaque marks young Joe Hayes’ grave.

It seems Joe’s younger brother Tom went off the rails after his brother’s death. Like his brother he had had little education, spending just three years in school. On May 29, 1917, despite pleading not guilty, Tom Hayes was convicted of stealing ‘one cattle’ for which he was sentenced to two years in Huntville prison where he died on November 8, 1918.

Although the gravestone reads November 11, Huntsville prison recorded his death as three days earlier.

He is buried next to his brother although, curiously, his gravestone gives his date of death as November 11. Tom’s older brother Sam also died young in 1935 of pernicious anaemia, a disease, like pellagra, brought on by vitamin deficiency. He was 46 and left two young sons.

Vallie Clodfelter in later years.

Vallie Clodfelter remarried ten months – probably a necessity for a young woman with two small children – to a man coincidentally called Sam Hays. (He was also from Alanreed and the same age as Joe Hayes’ brother but, while it might have made for a better tale, they were not the same man.) The marriage produced Bradford, a half-brother for Audrie and Arble, but ended in divorce within a few years. Vallie married again to JA Jackson on July 15, 1933, but also divorced him shortly afterwards. She moved to Pampa in 1938 where she rented out property and lived there until her death in 1976. Vallie is buried in Alanreed cemetery along with her eldest daughter Arble.

Arble and Audrie Clodfelter married brothers, Philip and Raymond Howard; Arble and Philip’s marriage lasted just a few months and they were divorced in 1922. Arble married again to Harley Hickman but that too ended swiftly in divorce with Harley dying of a coronary thrombosis in 1952, just as her sister’s husband, Raymond, would in 1958. Neither sister would remarry after that.

While Joe Hayes’ grave is marked with a simple plaque and Tobe Clodfelter’s with a simple and possible more modern stone, it is Roy Tipton’s memorial which attracts most attention and that, even almost 110 years later, resonates with the anguish of his family. A tall marble column, it is etched not only with the family name and Roy’s details, but with the stark words, ‘MURDERED IN COLD BLOOD’.

Roy Tipton’s gravestone.