He was surely one of the most colorful characters to ever roam the campus. There were some, no doubt, who were ornerier, crustier, even crazier, but certainly none more colorful. His trademarks were bowed legs and boots, a white broad-brimmed cowboy hat, a whistle, and a watering hose. Often taunted by the boys and cajoled by the girls, he was given to threatening talk and enforcing the letter of his law.
There were some who thought him a pesky clown, and some who were just plain scared of him, and if you haven’t figured out by now who the grizzled old gnome of this story is, you weren’t around TCU from 1948 to 1959.
“Cowboy” Luois Monroe was already retirement age when he was hired in September of 1948, primarily as a member of the grounds crew, but also as a “policeman” to issue tickets to those illegally parked. Born in 1882 to poor sharecroppers, he had grown up in Texas, chopping cotton in his father’s and other farmers’ fields, working later as a trail hand on short cattle drives and, still later, as a stock buyer for local ranchers. At 66, “short on my bills and still staying behind” (as he put it), he applied for maintenance work at TCU. To the unsuspecting TCU community, he just seemed to appear one day, a book of tickets in one hand and a hose in the other, ready to water down the first trespasser on what he came to call his “range”–the grasslands of the TCU campus.
Thinking back now and having known the campus both before and after his time, Cowboy arrived at a period when the campus was probably at its most ragged point since its initial years on the southwest prairieland of Fort Worth. A major building program, actually proposed in 1929 and twice put on hold for the passing of a severe economic depression and then for a World War, had been reactivated and had already seen the stadium enlarged and the completion, in 1947, of Waits Hall dormitory for girls. University Drive was soon to be widened, the Fine Arts Building was under construction and plans for the Winton-Scott Hall of Science were on the drawing board.
Before Cowboy would retire in 1959, the new Religion Center with its Carr Chapel would be built, as well as the Brown-Lupton Student Center, Pete Wright, Milton Daniel, and Clark dormitories for men, Colby Hall and Sherley dormitories for women, and Dan D. Rogers Hall, which would house the M. J. Neeley School of Business. Jarvis Hall and the Bailey Building would be renovated, the library tripled in size, and the stadium enlarged for a second time. It’s safe to assume, then, that with all this building going on, the landscaping was continually battered.
When my mother first came to the campus in 1921 and lived in Goode Hall with her parents, the gentle “Mr. Fred” Strandburg tended the grounds, nurturing the rows of red cannas and the pink, purple, and white petunia beds planted along the walks and at the edge of a road that curved in from University Drive in front of the five original buildings facing east. Sycamores, elms, and a variety of shrubs reaching toward maturity contributed to a park-like atmosphere.
My own early memories of the campus and its keepers center around patchy green stretches of grass, ground-hugging shrubs, a few large shade trees, and a group of kind and soft-spoken men like Mr. Dees, Mr. Doss, Mr. Redwine, Carl Tyler, and Johnny Greer. Even Carter, a hulking black man known to be one you wouldn’t want to challenge in his own community, was mild-mannered in his role as campus handyman.
Cowboy was of an altogether different cut. A small, spare man, he seemed all sharp angles and quick menacing moves. His sun-washed blue eyes were like the ubiquitous hawk’s; they caught the slightest movement in the fields he patrolled–and he was just as swift to strike. Armed with only that whistle, that hose, and a stick with a sixteen-penny nail in the end of it to stab maverick paper and an occasional dog, he was everywhere at once, keeping the lawns inviolate. Just when you were sure the coast was clear, Cowboy would come seemingly from nowhere to whistle you down. And sometimes, if provoked and the hose was handy, a well-placed squirt punctuated his feelings. There was nothing he could do about mechanical ditch diggers, cement trucks, cranes, and the disrespect of itinerant construction workers for vegetation in their way, but there was, by gosh, something he could do about the resident population’s disregard for the grass.
“Cutting across” was the most heinous offense, and one he simply would not tolerate. He wasn’t about to let outlaw trails get even a toehold on his land, and he once gave chase to a coed in the very act of committing the odious sacrilege, tracking her all the way from the Ad Building to the street curb opposite the drugstore on the “drag,” to deliver his opinion of her erring ways.
Some of the boys liked to wait until they were sure Cowboy was looking, then step off the walk just to hear him holler, “Git off that grass, kid!” With all the bravado of youth, one or two would stand their ground for the follow-up scene in which Cowboy would finally demand, “What’s your name, young feller? I’m gonna turn you in!” To which the perpetrator would obediently reply, “My name is Tom Mix, Sir,” or “Babe Ruth” of “Mickey Rooney,” Cowboy writing each one dutifully down while the group sniggered. I’m not so sure but that Cowboy was laughing too, and responded in the way he did, because the boys got such pleasure from it.
He took his police duties just as seriously as his ground duty, showing, like the Grim Reaper, no privilege in selection. He descended on student and staff without a trace of bias, and once ticketed President Sadler for a parking violation. If Cowboy’s own version of that story is to be believed, Dr. Sadler thought the incident honorable, commended Cowboy for his attention, and sent the paid ticket back to him as a “souvenir.”
Since the days of Cowboy, the number of cars and, thus, the number of parking violations on the campus have multiplied a thousandfold. A single person, albeit the Cowboy, would be unable to ride today’s herd. And since we are forty progressive years from that time, pulsing area sprayers and automatic sprinkling systems have largely replaced the hand-held hose. And with no one to watch, “cutting across” has become commonplace.
The shortest distance between two points is still a straight line. And sometimes in a mindless moving with the mass, I start to step onto the grass and cut across, too. But everytime I do the spectre of that old cowboy with a whistle in his toothless mouth stops me, and mindful of his presence, I find I must return to the laid-out walks, unable to violate his commanding spirit.
©1988 Joan Hewatt Swaim