Watched THE HIGHWAYMEN last night--Not the 4 mighty singers but Kevin Costner & Woody Harrelson & a superb Crew

Sunday, March 31, 2019 [Revised 13 April 2020]

Thank you, Stephen Kiernan, for the heads up on Facebook about the Netflix showing.

I had never heard of the movie but after THE BAKER'S SECRET I trusted Kiernan's judgment and made a note to watch it. I just finished it. As I said, I had not known who was in THE HIGHWAYMEN. Kevin Costner was. His father was my 2nd cousin, so I look at Kevin's ears and nose and listen to his voice carefully, thinking of Uncle Andrew. I think he must be one of the bravest movie stars working now, to let himself look like a believable Frank Hamer. 

I was prepared to be moved by a movie that takes place in the Depression just where this one is set. I have been steeped in Texas and Louisiana and Oklahoma in the last months. For I few years I have been publishing about the American Revolution, mainly events that involved kinfolks I never knew about until recently. That is, I am learning Southern history by finding relatives who were involved in momentous events, and even are in historical records, sometimes. Following Hill cousins, one a Texas Ranger, I recently wrote an article on the 1862 Great Hangings of Gainesville, Texas, that is published in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. (I found an unknown very early history of the hangings. Cousin Aaron Hill does not come out well.)  Kevin and Woody cross the Red River on a long, long bridge near Gainesville. Lately the Texas Revolution has been on my mind, particularly Nacogdoches, where my Revolutionary veteran cousin William Sparks died in 1848.  I sent off a thing today, an unknown piece written in Nacogdoches by a participant in the so-called Runaway Scrape. The first portrait in Frank Dobie's OUT OF THE OLD ROCK, Cousin George McGehee, was in the Scrape at the age of two months. George told his mother's story, a thrilling tale involving another McGehee cousin. I did a longer still unpublished piece on the 1836 flight to the Gulf ports and the Sabine. 

The Panhandle of Oklahoma has been on my mind. I explained to a cousin the other day that the "IT" she found in a document did not include Guymon--that was OT. In 1952 when I was an apprentice telegrapher in Red Rock, OK, we had OT and IT tickets on big solid brass hooks in the AT&SF depot, printed before statehood and still valid. Coffeeville, Kansas, where Frank and Woody go, is where I had the AT&SF physical exam in 1952 before becoming a telegrapher apprentice. Two Mississippi brothers went out to Oklahoma Territory around 1900 and homesteaded near Guymon, my grandfather Gene Costner and his older brother Mode (Moses Amariah) Costner. Mode stayed there and died there. There were years when the only kinfolks the children knew were the two Costner families. My parents appear at Guymon in the 1930 census--something I learned recently. They had been in the Panhandle of Texas during some of the worst of the Dust Bowl. Guymon in 1930 must have been a brief stay. After I was born near Comanche, Oklahoma, they got to a private oil field in Escobas, on the Rio Grande, in 1936, and stayed for four or so years. You can rely on the censuses. I know because I am in the 1940 Federal Census as born in 1930. We did a lot of Model A driving across Texas in the Depression. You would not believe the number of bullfrogs that thronged a flooded underpass in San Angelo once.

When the War ended in 1945 we went to a farm a few miles north of  Wister, Oklahoma. The county seat, Poteau, was part of the Bonnie and Clyde story. After the Eastham prison raid Barrow's next robbery was in Rembrandt, Iowa, on 23 January 1934. The next, after one of Barrow's longest drives, was in Poteau two days later, the 25th. Pursuers lost Barrow's car somewhere "in the hills near Wister." How near the farm none of the neighbors knew, in our time.

I have been thinking about Texas and Louisiana for weeks because the flight to the Sabine in 1836 put the Texian refugees near places I worked at on the Kansas City Southern starting in 1952--Noble, Zwolle, Many (you say it manny), DeRidder, Dequincy. I was in a TB warehouse east of Shreveport, out toward Texas, one summer. The doctors had not heard of streptomycin. We could see the kitchen staff shoulder hams and beef quarters to carry away in their cars. I escaped the warehouse found a place that had heard about streptomycin. For two years I was night telegrapher (8 pm to 4 am) on the Kansas City Southern at Port Arthur while I went to school in Beaumont. I am so old that when I graduated with highest honors in 1959 (I see a photograph in the Journal) Dan Rather read my name aloud--on the radio, in Houston. Had he ever been on television? \

I thought for the last several years that my Melville Collection (books and research files) would go there, to Beaumont. That fell through early in 2019 and after much distress my first choice, the Berkshire Athenaeum, under a new young director, came through with a welcome to the books and research files--an enthusiastic welcome, publicized at once.  I will not have to put 60 bankers' boxes at the curb, after all. Well, I thought 60 but on 13 April 2020 I am working on Box 91, and trying not to go more than a couple above that.

So, I was all set to be powerfully moved by a Depression movie that took place in Texas and Louisiana and Oklahoma and that starred Kevin Costner. 

The movie never had a false move until the slapstick ending, the exchange of drivers. What is phony about it is that Mr. Gault would have had to pee when they changed drivers. Did they shoot two endings? 

Thank you, Stephen, and congratulations to your friend, the writer John Fusco. It was a splendid movie.

---P. S. I had to check. If you are Southern you are either kin or connected, Triple Cousin Lois says. Clyde Barrow is my 8th cousin 11 times removed, through the Knoxes. Mississippi cousins, deal with it. Well, Kevin is my 2nd cousin once removed, descended from Mode, the brother who stayed in Guymon, while my grandfather was Gene, who sold out his homestead and went back to Mississippi, then Texas and Oklahoma. I knew him in Duncan in 1945 then in Heavener in this last years before he died in 1951 at 79. At 84 now, five years older than Grandpa Costner lived to be, I remind myself that I am twice the Costner that Kevin is, being of his father’s generation. It is a great gift to an old Melville scholar to share DNA with a movie star who pads his belly rather than cinching it in and who dares to choose roles that explore episodes of Southern (or Western) history.