(Editor’s Note: Kingsville historian and educator Kathryn Evans devoted her last article on old King High School to the dome. In this week’s article, the late Roy Terrell, a native of Kingsville, talks about the mighty King High dome in great detail in an unpublished manuscript about growing up in Kingsville. Terrell, who died in 2007, was a noted managing editor of Sports Illustrated.)

There weren’t too many things a boy could do in Kingsville that were as much fun as painting the dome.

I suppose not everyone felt this way since it never got terribly crowded up there, but among the less academically motivated, more than a few regarded climbing to the top of Henrietta M. King High School as measurably more entertaining than joining the debating club.

Certainly the view was superior from up on the dome. Also it was much quieter.

Unique dome crowns old H.M. King High School. When Mrs. King designed the school back in 1909, she patterned it after three of Texas’ famous old Spanish missions, the Alamo, San Jose, and Concepcion. The results were unusual, to say the least. Certainly the high school bore no resemblance to the Kleberg County Courthouse, a large, foreboding mass of brick located a mile or so away at the opposite end of Kleberg Avenue, nor did it look like the Missouri Pacific general office building or the Rialto theater or (the old) Kleberg Bank, a collection of structures as drab and unimaginative as anything you might find in Robstown or Sinton or Alice.

You would never, however, have found anything like Henrietta M. King High School in Robstown or Sinton or Alice. King High was unique — and its most unusual feature was the dome.

Even Davey Crockett might have had trouble recognizing the Alamo in this particular reincarnation, tucked away as it was between the other two missions as part of the façade of the high school, and San Jose resembled a lot of other Spanish architecture, including that at A&I College.

No one, however could mistake Concepcion for anything else.

In the Kingsville version it was six stories high, if you count the dome, and slightly off center to the right, as if peering around a corner to keep an eye on what was going on down Kleberg Avenue.

The school was built of brick, a kind of rusty Southwestern tan, and the dome may once have been a matching shade of ochre or brown. By the time I became intimately acquainted with it, however, it was always black, a color scheme that owed a good deal more to Eppie Gutierrez than to Henrietta M. King.

Originally the dome was probably about six feet high and 15 or 20 feet in circumference at the base, but by the mid 1930s it was somewhat larger than that, and in the next few years it continued to grow.

With a hammer and chisel one of my predecessors once went all the way down through the countless coats of paint until he hit concrete. The chunk he chipped off was almost three inches thick. All paint.

The identity of the first Kingsville boy to paint the dome is not, alas, a matter of record, but no genius was required to figure out who kept slapping all the paint on the thing in the years that followed. They were the more daring, agile and often (intellectually disabled) members of the junior and senior classes, and one evidence of their derangement (if more evidence is needed beyond the fact they were up there in the first place) was the lack of variety in what they painted the dome.

They painted their class year numerals. The class of 1935 painted a big 35 and the class of 1936 painted 36 and so forth. Never JOE LOVES LUCY or MATH TEACHERS WEAR HIP BOOTS or other touching sentiments. Just a class number.

Those with artistic inclinations were sometimes inspired to paint a background color on the dome before doing the class number but this could get kind of messy. Usually the painters just accepted whatever color the dome was already wearing that night and put their number over it.

Having identified themselves so defiantly in one way the painters then had to be careful not to be found as individuals, for painting the dome was against the rules. When corporal punishment was still in vogue, getting caught painting the dome could lead to a whipping.

After the arrival of Mr. Wade as superintendent in the mid 30s, it could lead to expulsion. We always felt Mr. Wade took the matter far too personally. He talked a lot about defacing public property while at the same time never failing to evince proper concern for the welfare of his students (“Sooner or later some kid is going to get killed up there.”) but we always felt that in private Mr. Wade considered it entirely a matter of principle. He told those kids to stay off that building and by God he meant it!

Not that there wasn’t any reason to worry.

In the late ‘20s and early ‘30s, or so the stories go, there had been some pretty good fights over whose class number would appear on the dome at special times, such as on graduation day or following a victory over Robstown, and although none of these battles ever took place on the three-foot wide ledge around the dome itself, differences of opinion had been known to rise at least as high as the roof.

A boy had once thrown a roofing tile at another, hit him in the chest and knocked him off into one of the big bushes bordering the building a couple of stories below. Even in my day, a classmate named C.E. Hoblitt, renowned as both the toughest and most rebellious kid in school, once jumped off the roof in order to escape an infuriated upperclassman, but he had the foresight to dive headfirst.

It was generally agreed that even had C.E. missed the bushes and hit the cement sidewalk on his head, it would not have inconvenienced him a great deal.

It is much easier to explain why we painted the dome (as Mallory said of Everest, because it was there) than how we got up top in the first place. An acceptable doctoral thesis probably could be written describing the techniques involved in scaling the dome but I will spare you such depth of detail here. Basically, in this flattest of flat countryside, you just had to be able to do one heck of a lot of climbing. The first half of the journey to the dome could in fact be accomplished quite easily by the simple device of breaking into the school and walking up the stairways but no real dome painter would stoop to that. If you wanted to get up there with pride, you climbed.

In recessing the Alamo section of the building slightly behind the other two mission sections, the builders had created what modern rock climbers call, I believe, a chimney. You could place your back against one side of the chimney, your feet against the other side, and with a great deal of wiggling and squirming and pushing and shoving work your way up to the roof, three stories above the ground. With practice it became quite easy, or at least easier than it had been the first time you tried it, when you wished you had brought a parachute. As long as you didn’t get too weak in the knees, and begin shaking, you were okay.

You then climbed up a peak of the roof and over into a kind of sub-chamber, open on four sides, which in turn sat just below the belfry, or what would have been the belfry had there been bells inside. Both the sub-chamber and the belfry were overhung with ledges. You reached up and out and grabbed a ledge and swung yourself out into space and then pulled yourself up high enough to throw a knee over the ledge and then you crawled over the ledge and got on top.

You did this once to get to the belfry level from the subchamber and again to get from the belfry to the dome. The top section involved the longer reach and was one reason very few midgets ever painted the dome. If you fell from the dome ledge, however, at least you would land on the belfry ledge below. Maybe. I also probably should reemphasize at this point, although you could hardly have failed to have figured it out already for yourself, that no student of reasonable sanity ever climbed the dome. Only dingbats.

In order to get up on the dome to paint over our handiwork, Eppie the janitor had to perform no such acrobatics, of course. He kept a ladder locked away in an attic room, and from the attic there were stairs leading to the sub-chamber. In the old mission there must have been still another set of stairs leading up to the trap door giving free access to the belfry, but here there were no stairs.

Eppie would set up his ladder, open the trap door from below and then pull his ladder up after him. He would then steady it on the belfry ledge and climb the ladder to the dome.

Many years later it occurred to me that had Mr. Wade’s psychology been as advanced as his fervor he would have built a broad stairway all the way to the dome, perhaps carpeted and with banisters.

Then anyone in school could have painted their class numbers there, with the result that none of the real dome painters would have bothered. Climbing on and off the dome was probably less difficult than I have made it sound, however. At least that’s the only explanation I have as to why so many of us lived to worry about our own kids.

King High athletic teams (the Brahmas) wore black and gold, and this color scheme eventually became de rigueur on the dome: a big yellow 39, or whatever, against a black background. This, in turn, decreased Eppie’s workload considerably. All the janitor had to do was get out his can of black paint and cover up the yellow numbers. The color of the dome, whatever it might have originally have been, was now more or less officially black.

Inspired by Easter’s approach, Vernon Glascock and I once decided to paint the dome pink. Since Vernon was in the class behind me, which inevitably led to an argument over whose number we would put up there, on this occasion we decided to forget the numbers and concentrate on the big Easter egg. It took a quart of paint to cover the dome, and had our parents asked us to work that hard around the house we would have screamed like panthers. But after we had finished painting, even in the dark we could see that one coat of pink wasn’t going to produce the kind of Easter egg we would want to be associated with. It was blotchy, still about as much black as it was pink. We sat there and considered our options. Finally, sorrowing greatly, we decided to abort the mission. For one thing it was night, the stores were closed and we had no way of getting another quart of pink paint even if we could have come up with the money. We also didn’t have time on our side. Counting on two days of uninterrupted creativity would be wishful thinking as long as Mr. Wade was in town.

Mr. Wade was a short, rounded little man with infinite courage to run a tight ship. If his life lacked purpose before he arrived in Kingsville, I like to think that we helped him find fulfillment (I also always suspected the reason King High classes of those years produced so many World War II pilots was nothing more than a reaction to Mr. Wade’s determination that our feet remain planted firmly on the ground). Before Mr. Wade, boys who painted the dome on a Saturday night could expect their handiwork to remain visible, and appreciated, at least throughout the remainder of the weekend, or until Eppie got to work on Monday morning. After the new superintendent arrived, however, the class numerals barely saw the light of day. It wasn’t at all uncommon for Mr. Wade to drive to where Eppie lived, awakening the poor man at the crack of dawn from his Sunday morning slumbers, and drag him back to the school to paint the dome that very moment.

Anyway, the dome never became a pink Easter egg.

I first went up there when I was a sophomore, 13 years old, helped over the tough spots in the climb by my older friend Fred Forrest Eubanks. That day we didn’t paint.

It was a Saturday morning, and we just sat on the top ledge, leaning back against the dome and enjoying the wonderful view. All of Kingsville lay below, like a three-dimensional exhibit at a science fair. When you tired of looking to the east, toward downtown and the courthouse, you could move around to the north and see A&I college, and on a good day as far as Bishop, six miles away. Then you could move to the west and look toward the King Ranch buildings on the horizon, and finally on to the south, toward the Kingsville Country Club and the Tex-Mex (Presbyterian Pan American) school for boys. Closer in were the streets of town, and our houses, and the houses of our classmates and friends. It was a marvelous place for a boy to be, off the streets and out of trouble.

This was not a sentiment shared by everyone. That day, from down in front of the school came the insistent honking of an automobile horn, and from the window of the automobile a very large arm was waving vehemently for us to get down.

Since both the car and the arm belonged to Buck Barr, the football coach, we got down. Buck was never as determined as Mr. Wade to keep boys off the dome but I think he was worried that one slip by Fred Forrest and he might lose a good senior starting guard.

The last time I painted the dome was late in my senior year, and before we even began our climb Tommy Gilstrap, Harry Moore and I decided that this one was to be something special. We were going to adorn the black dome with yellow polka dots. Furthermore, we were damned if Eppie was going to erase our masterpiece the next morning. We would nail shut the trap door to the belfry so he couldn’t get up there.

When we got to the base of the chimney we discovered that although we had brought along a hammer and enough nails to build a new high school we had forgotten the can of paint. Harry went back to his house to get it. Tommy and I climbed up the chimney and into the subchamber and onto the ledge and into the belfry. Since we were already there, we figured, and had to wait for Harry before we could start decorating the dome, we might as well get on with the business of nailing shut the trap door.

Bang, bang, bang, we hammered. Bang, bang, bang. Finally we ran out of nails. King Kong couldn’t break through there now, we said. Then we looked over the side to see what might be detaining Harry. What we saw was a schoolyard swarming with people. We had made enough noise not only to awaken the dead but also Mr. Wade and half the teachers in town. Harry, who had almost blundered into this posse on his return, said it looked like an army down there. They were not friendly forces.

“Come down right now,” Mr. Wade was screeching.

“We’re gonna get expelled,” Tommy said.

“No we’re not,” I told him. “We don’t have to go down and they can’t get up here. We’ve nailed the trap door shut, remember?”

“Then we’ll starve to death,” said Tommy.

Pretty much ignoring Mr. Wade’s screams we figured out a way to escape. We would crawl across the roof to the far back corner of the building and slide down a drainpipe.

No one would think to watch for us back there. I would go first and then Tommy. If they saw me coming down, and chased me, Tommy would slide down while the coast was clear. As a plan it fell somewhat short of the Normandy invasion.

There were even more people around the schoolhouse than we had figured, and they had us surrounded. As I started my slide someone yelled and I pretty much had to go into free fall in order to beat them to the bottom of the drainpipe. But when I hit the ground I still had a few yards head start and no bunch of out of shape 30-year-old teachers was going to run me down. Tommy could have made it, too, if only he had followed immediately, but he became so fascinated in watching the chase going on down below that he waited too long to slide. The posse had regrouped by the time he came down and they nabbed him.

The next day Mr. Wade grilled Tommy mercilessly, trying to get him to name his accomplice, but hot coals wouldn’t have made my old buddy squeal. I can still see the captive sitting there, his mouth a tight straight line, shaking his head. All Mr. Wade really knew was that the first boy down had blondish hair and when Tommy refused to identify him Mr. Wade and his assistants decided the solution lay in interrogating every yellow-haired boy in school. Some of them could no more have climbed the dome than Mrs. Williams, the English teacher. Finally, when they got to working pretty hard on E.C. Gaertner, who was not only blond but known to be one of Tommy’s best friends, I couldn’t stand it anymore. E.C. was also one of my best friends.

“I’m going in to fess up,” I told Harry. I don’t think they’re going to expel anybody.” I was the only senior of the three culprits and since I was on schedule to graduate in a few weeks it seemed logical that they would be more than happy to get rid of me the easy way. Since Tommy was a junior things didn’t look quite so good for him but at least my confession might help. As for Harry, no one had any idea a third boy was involved. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut and he would be okay.

And that’s how it worked out. Mr. Wade sternly shook his finger at me and tutt-tutted while Buck Barr tried to hide a grin in the background, and I was allowed to graduate on schedule.

They made Tommy sign a document vowing never to paint the dome again or he would be expelled, forever and ever amen. Harry was never found out. With a great deal of trouble Eppie finally broke through the trapdoor, splintering it so badly that a replacement had to be built. And we all lived happily ever after.

I don’t think the tradition of painting the dome survived the war. Years later I thought how neat it would be to climb up there and put a big 39 on the dome, even though hardly anyone would know what it meant, but of course I never did. For one thing, some of the fun of painting the dome had departed with Mr. Wade. For another, I guess I felt the dome, like Eppie, deserved to sleep in peace after all those years.

And finally, I wasn’t sure I could still make it over that top ledge.