BLOOMING GROVE — Journalism professor David McHam, a University of Houston legend, got his start as a newsman in the mid-1950s at the Waco Times-Herald. That’s how he knew about his friend Jules Loh’s assignment to write about the 1956 Christmas pageant in this little town near Corsicana. Loh made the 50-mile drive on a Monday evening, came back to the newsroom and typed out his story, only to have it rejected. Irreverent, his editor ruled. The story didn’t run, although Loh’s newsroom colleagues all made copies.
Before the veteran reporter died in 2011, he bequeathed his “irreverent” story to McHam, who passed it along to me. David also sent it to our mutual friend Bob Darden, a Baylor journalism professor who persuaded the Waco Tribune-Herald to finally publish the story last Christmas.
Making a recent trip to “The Friendliest Community in Texas,” population 821, I found most of its modest business district shut down because of the pandemic. Once-imposing brick buildings, now empty, suggested that much of the business district has been shuttered for decades. No one I talked to had heard of Loh’s story about a long-ago pageant. Gary Patterson, a retired Department of Public Safety trooper serving as Blooming Grove’s mayor, made a few calls but couldn’t find anyone either. “I don’t know, maybe our parents were too embarrassed to tell us about it,” he suggested.
Loh’s article is reprinted here with permission of the Waco Tribune-Herald.
BLOOMING GROVE — They held the Nativity pageant here Monday night, and if it happened in Bethlehem like it happened in Blooming Grove, Christmas would be a day sooner — or maybe not at all.
For a year, the good people of Blooming Grove, Barry and Emhouse had prepared for the pageant.
They practiced religiously, as it were, and sacrificed nothing to realism. The women made the costumes; the men gathered their sheep. Somebody even found some myrrh.
The Blooming Grove preacher, a former tent show operator called Brother Bill, arranged the setting.
The manger was in an old barn. A milk cow and an old ram were tied to the manger. At the left was the inn, at the right were the fields where shepherds, costumed and holding long crooks, were watching over their sheep by night.
Brother Bill had put spotlights on both sides. These were to follow the characters as they entered. Miss Alva Taylor was the reader. As she read the Christmas story from the Bible, the characters would enact the passage.
However, some things got enacted that weren’t exactly biblical.
The choir began to sing, the reader began to read and the pageant was on.
Out of a pasture behind the barn came Mary and Joseph on their way to enroll; Mary riding a donkey, Joseph walking beside.
The donkey was balky. He kept stopping and Joseph kept yanking at the halter. Finally, right before they got to the inn, the donkey had enough.
With a grand bray, he r’ared back and pitched Mary right on her bundle of swaddling clothes. She lit with both legs straight up in the air.
The audience gasped. Some of the women thought she was actually pregnant.
The donkey went down on his side. Joseph thought the donkey was hurt. The donkey wouldn’t get up. While Mary picked herself up, Joseph inspected the donkey’s legs. He finally decided it was a too tight saddle girth that caused him to pitch.
There was Mary brushing straw off her clothes, and Joseph loosening the saddle girth, and Brother Bill hollering, “For Lord’s sake, get those spotlights off ’em! Shine ’em on the inn.”
Mary was fixing to mount up again for another try, but the saddle was too loose so she and Joseph decided to walk the rest of the way to Bethlehem.
Joseph stopped at the inn and, just as he was about to knock, the door opened with the innkeeper shaking his head. Mary had forgotten about the inn and was already kneeling at the manger.
The ruckus didn’t phase Miss Alva a bit. She kept right on reading and managed to stay about four verses ahead of the rest of the pageant.
Then it came time for the angels to appear to the shepherds.
At about the same time the spotlights shifted to the fields and the choir began with “Angels We Have Heard on High,” the sheep spied the ram tied to the manger.
The sheep started for the ram.
The angel popped up from behind some cedar boughs and said, “Fear not.”
And the shepherds were afraid. They were running this way and that, swatting the sheep with their crooks, trying to keep the whole flock from charging the manger.
A few got away — about six. They crowded into the barn next to the ram and began eating straw out of the manger.
Happy now, the old ram went baa baa the rest of the night, and it was somewhat disconcerting to Miss Alva. She would look over at that ram disgustedly, lose her place, find it and continue.
Out of the east came the wise men, slowly, following the star. They deposited their gifts before the manger — all except one of them who had a vase and couldn’t get it to stand on the straw.
Finally, he got it balanced, stepped back. The old ram stepped up and kicked it over. The wise man shrugged and let it lay.
Now all were in the barn — Mary, Joseph, shepherds, wise men, sheep and cow — for all to watch and meditate while the choir sang.
But there was more excitement.
In the middle of Adeste Fideles, the loudspeaker went to shrieking.
And during the deathly pause while it was being fixed, the old milk cow raised her tail and let loose right where somebody was sure to step in it.
Then the Blooming Grove Nativity pageant was over.
“Amen,” said Brother Bill, and the audience answered, “Amen.”
Loh, who joined the Associated Press in 1959 and spent four decades as a reporter and columnist, recalled his Blooming Grove adventure in a 2003 letter to McHam. He wasn’t trying to poke fun, he recalled. He wrote the story the same way he would cover a performance at Radio City Music Hall.
“My aim was to show that efforts of a small town, though amateurish, could be as respectful and reverent as any, and this would show in a touching way. Well, it was about a 40-minute drive back to Waco (no big highways then) and, thinking about it on the way, I found myself chuckling. I decided to write it just like it happened and then try to redo it with the tone and touches I had in mind. Just like it happened. I broke up laughing to myself. I decided, naw, I’ll just leave it, let the (editing) desk decide.”
There’s no pageant this year, of course. Blooming Grove last week was quiet — the way residents like it, Robert Phipps, a local Realtor, told me. City folks move to the area for breathing space and good schools. That’s what the Phipps family did 20 years ago when they left Dallas; they’ve never regretted their decision.
“It’s like some place in the Twilight Zone,” Phipps said. (He meant it as a compliment.) “The town hasn’t grown much and doesn’t want to grow. It’s just trying to hang on to its small-town feel.”
Alva Smith, a former mayor, was one of those who didn’t remember the ’56 Christmas pageant, but he did recall a memorable parade from the summer of that same year. As I picture the scene he described, the lovely queen is riding in a two-wheeled surrey, smiling and waving to the crowd lining Fordyce Street, when something spooks her horse. The trusty steed, suddenly wild-eyed, takes off in a gallop, and the surrey flips over on its side in front of the bank. The queen ends up sprawled on the pavement. She comes up smiling, shaken but unhurt.
And who says things are always peaceful and quiet in Blooming Grove?
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