FORT WORTH, Texas, known both affectionately and derisively as "Cowtown," has a civic monument which, unlike San Antonio's Alamo, Houston's Shamrock and Dallas' Cotton Bowl, can walk & talk at incredible speed. That this monument is made of perishable material causes Fort Worth no immediate concern: Amon Giles Carter, tall, straight-backed and hefty, in his 73rd year shows no signs of erosion. He walks as fast as ever and talks even faster.
At times the talking gets out of hand. At a recent luncheon in Dallas, a city 30 miles east of Fort Worth and the object of Carter's deepest scorn, Carter was asked to introduce the speaker. Carter arose and spoke -- at length. By the time he got to the introduction, the speaker excused himself. His prepared address was long, and it was time for the club to adjourn.
The incident might have embarrassed a lesser man. It merely reminded Carter of another occasion: "Once I was asked to introduce William Jennings Bryan. I spoke for quite a long time, leaving Mr. Bryan, who followed me, possibly three minutes. When it was over, I heard a fellow say: 'Bryan was fine, but who was that bald-headed old fellow that followed him?' "
Carter is lavish with words because he is lavish with everything. For nearly half a century, he has been building a glittering legend of showmanship, generosity, boisterousness and buffoonery. The legend lives and grows in a typhoon of frantic activity that sweeps everything before it -- including Carter himself. This pays off for both Carter and Fort Worth. But his old friends know a deeper reason. Whether he is giving away hats, tracts of land, scholarships, or popcorn & peanuts at his 900-acre Shady Oak Farm, his friends see a poor boy acting out his dreams.
HIS FATHER was a Texas blacksmith, his stepmother unsympathetic. At twelve, Carter left home to make his way in the world. He walked ten miles to the farming town of Bowie, and asked for work at Mrs. Jarrott's boarding house. "Why, honey," said the landlady, "you're so small; what can you do?"
"I can do anything, ma'am," said Carter, and he did. He swept rooms, washed dishes and waited on table. When the trains came through, he sold fried chicken to the passengers. ("We fried the chickens in a thick batter, and you couldn't tell the drumstick from the gizzard.") He cleaned harness, curried the town doctor's horse and frequently slept on the livery-stable stairs. ("That was the only time I ever envied anyone. I envied people that slept in beds.")
At 18, he became a traveling salesman through the little towns of Texas, Kansas and Indian Territory, selling photo graphic portraits and frames to fit them. He soon bossed a sales crew of his own, and bought, at the age of 20, a flashy diamond ring ("I wish I was half as smart now as I thought I was then"). He drank champagne in San Francisco, broke up a light opera performance in Butte, Mont., wore boots and spurs in hotel dining rooms, and fired his six-shooter on New Year's Eve.
In 1905, he arrived at Fort Worth, a bustling metropolis of 30,000, prosperous with new meat-packing plants and railroad connections, and began his long, happy love affair with the city. He opened a small office, rented a typewriter for 50-c- a month to give the place an air, flashed his diamond, and was ready for business as the Texas Advertising and Manufacturing Co. One day he met two men who wanted to start a newspaper. For $30 a week they signed him on as advertising manager. Seventeen years and several crises, mergers and consolidations later, Carter emerged with control of the Star-Telegram, now one of the most powerful papers of the Southwest.
Carter is a smart, aggressive publisher, and knows better than to harbor any literary pretensions (by the widest estimate he has read no more than a dozen books in the last half century). He sees the promotion of Fort Worth as one of his major publishing duties, on the theory that whatever makes the city grow will, in time, make the Star-Telegram grow. It works. Friends estimate that at least one person out of four, in Fort Worth's current metropolitan population of 303,701, is there because of an industry, office or military installation which was coaxed to Fort Worth by Amon Carter. A majority of them read the Star-Telegram.
Carter's public and pecuniary motives coincided happily in various other ways. Because Fort Worth was rapidly becoming an oil center as well as a cattle town, Carter became interested in oil. He drilled 99 dry holes and was known as the "dry-hole king" before he ever reached production--a record that would baffle a professional oilman. Yet when he got production, as they say in Texas, he got it good, and sold out one chunk of his holdings for $16.5 million. When Fort Worth's largest hotel was in danger of being bought by a Dallas man, Carter fended off the dreadful civic disgrace by taking it over himself. Largely because of his determination to make Fort Worth an aviation center, he became the biggest stockholder in American Airlines.
HIS office is wildly cluttered with impromptu collections of statuary, silverplated ground-breaking spades, football jerseys, guns, loving cups, lariats, old shoes, autographed pictures, boxing gloves, back-newspaper files, geological maps, menus of note worthy Carter banquets and excursions, baseballs and teetering stacks of old correspondence. Like the late W. C. Fields in his bookkeeping role, he can plunge into the dustiest, most disheveled pile of papers and fetch out the document he wants.
Limited as his education has been, he can get the gist of a complicated legal document or accountant's report at a glance, and plunge into galvanic activity while other men would still be pondering. Conventional prudence often looks to him like niggling. When his lawyer advised him that a proposed step was not quite legal, Carter roared: "The trouble with you is you're such a goddam technical lawyer." On giving orders for a blistering editorial, he is likely to caution: "Don't put too god dam much Christianity in it. Libel? You trying to tell me what I can put in my own paper?"
CARTER complains continually of the load of work and responsibility he carries. At times he admits: "I'm tired. I don't know why I do all this." But in the next breath, he will order lunch for 300, plan a benefit show, browbeat a railroad president to get switching facilities for a Fort Worth factory, telephone New York, bully a tightfisted friend into giving $5,000 to a Carter charity, oversee the decorative detail for the men's lavatories in the new $12 million Amon Carter airport, plot another skirmish with that old devil Dallas, or order gift packages of aged whisky, western hats, smoked turkeys, jeroboams of champagne, jeweled western belts and Countess Mara neckties to be distributed to a wide assortment of friends, celebrities and casual acquaintances.
He no longer dons a cowboy suit for the annual fat stock show (Amon Carter, president), and seldom wears his checked gambler's suit with electrically illuminated necktie for soirees at Shady Oak Farm. Nevertheless, when he goes abroad, he wears his western hat and cream-colored polo coat, and people say, if they don't know him by sight, "There goes a sport," or, if they are Texans, "a nach'ral man."
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