September 18, 2013 Wednesday
At some point along the way, you may meet a teacher who will make a difference, maybe even change your life. For me, one of those was the late great Jay Milner, a Texas author who became my first journalism teacher and mentor at Southern Methodist University in the early 1970s.
We loved Jay for his ability to inspire us. But he also knew some remarkable people. Two of his closest friends were Texas literary legends Edwin “Bud” Shrake and Gary Carwright. There was no greater thrill in those days than to hang out with writers such as these and pick their brains about journalism or just to hear their stories, which were amazing.
These men were true Texas characters, both of whom wrote for the sports department of The Dallas Morning News in the early 1960s before becoming published authors and screenwriters. Shrake, who died a few years ago, compiled a body of work that included novels, screenplays and biographies. He also dated former Gov. Ann Richards. Cartwright also wrote novels and screenplays and crafted a distinguished career at Texas Monthly from the moment the magazine was founded. He now makes his home in Austin.
A day after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 
on Nov. 22, 1963, Shrake and Cartwright traveled with the Dallas Cowboys to Cleveland for an ill-advised road trip (what a pair to send on the road!). As you will see in this story of mine, which ran in our print edition on Sunday, Pete Rozelle, the commissioner of the National Football League, refused to cancel the weekend’s games. It made it all the worse for the Cowboys, who unwittingly became traveling ambassadors for the so-called “City of Hate.”
My Sunday story had to be trimmed a bit (yes, I wrote too long), but I wanted to share with you this passage, which documents the Shrake-Cartwright reaction to the events of that awful weekend:
Edwin “Bud” Shrake knew all about the craziness of 1963 Dallas as the sports columnist for The News. He captured it perfectly in his 1972 novel, Strange Peaches.
On the day of the Cleveland game, Shrake was watching TV in the office of Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell an hour or so before kickoff when he saw a guy he knew – Jack Ruby – gun down presumed presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Shrake, who died in 2009, shared his memories with The News in a story by Matt Mosley in 2003.
Shrake had been dating Jada, whose real name was Janet Conforto. Jada was Ruby’s lead stripper and one of the women who had invited Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith and tight end Lee Folkins to the Carousel Club on a hot August night in 1963.
Shrake spotted his roommate, Cowboys beat writer Gary Cartwright, in the parking lot minutes later.
“When Bud told me that Oswald had been shot dead in the basement of the police station and added, ‘And you’ll never guess who did it,’ I said, ‘Jack Ruby.’ It just popped out,” Cartwright told me in a recent interview. “To this day, I can’t say why, except that Ruby always carried a gun and liked posing as a gangster and a tough. But I was just trying to be a wise-ass, to respond to a very dramatic and unbelievable piece of information with the first name that came to mind. I remember the look of astonishment in Bud’s face. My own astonishment was just as great.”
I was an 11-year-old growing up in Pleasant Grove at the time of the assassination. I grabbed the sports page first thing every morning, following the bylines of Shrake and Cartwright as one would the lyrics of a favorite songwriter. Those guys could turn a phrase.
Cartwright went on to author one of my favorite football novels, The Hundred-Yard War, a forerunner to the classic novel written by his and Milner’s good friend Peter Gent, a former Cowboys wide receiver who wrote North Dallas Forty, which became a hit movie starring Nick Nolte. Shrake and Cartwright share a screenwriting credit for the cowboy movie, J.W. Coop. But more than that, they shared some incredible memories together, many of them in Dallas, during their days at this newspaper.
And many of those are documented in Milner’s great book about the “Mad Dogs” of Texas literature, whose charter members have to be Shrake and Cartwright.