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I don't remember that name. Is that Miss Ellie's mother? I wonder if the origin of the name Barbara is what seems the obvious.
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A Ewingverse Oral History
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James from London
International Treasure
Barbara Southworth is Miss Ellie's mama on Dallas: The Early Years and her headstone appears in the New DALLAS graveyard. However, Garrison Southworth's headstone on old DALLAS lists his mama as Anna Southworth.
Yeah, it seems like a nice touch.
Seaviewer
Telly Talk Warrior
My first reaction was just to dismiss this as an inconsistency but after giving it some thought I'm wondering: Is there any reason to think that Aaron wasn't married more than once? It wouldn't have any bearing on Garrison's and Ellie's status as his heirs if they had different mothers.
James from London
International Treasure
Other than her name(s), we're given pretty much zero info on Ellie's mother so it's possible. Except it doesn't feel like Ellie and Garrison had different mamas.
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James from London
International Treasure
1955
Amos Krebbs: I’ll admit I ain’t made much of my life.
Clayton Farlow on Rebecca: She scratched her way over the tough side of the tracks. Practically taught herself how to read.
John Mackey to Pam: Your mother was a very clever woman. She knew she wouldn’t get what she wanted out of life by waiting tables so when she got to Houston, she put herself through a good secretarial school where she learned stenography, typing, that sort of thing, and she was good at it.
Lilimae: I was touring with Alfonso the Great. I was his magician’s assistant. He wrote a song about me called ‘Lili’. [Sings:] “There was never was a girl like Lili, Lili with the bright gold hair …”
Joshua Rush, speaking about reading 'Nashville Junction' in 1984: All of sudden at the end, when she leaves to join Alfonso the Great, I started to cry.
Val: Aunt Edna put me on a bus and I rode all the way to Nashville, all by myself. I went to the theatre where Mama was playing. She was an assistant to a magician, Alfonso the Great. I remember the theatre smelt old and dirty, and it was mostly empty. When I was backstage to see her, she was in this terrible flurry. She had to run across town and audition an act of her own. She didn’t invite me along. She didn’t even ask me to stick around so that we could talk later. I was just in the way. So I took the next bus back to Aunt Edna and I lied about what a wonderful time I’d had.
Val: I was taught not to burn any bridges.
Greg: When I was twelve years old, I sold my entire mercury dime collection to buy a couple of girly magazines. I shudder to think what those dimes would be worth today.
Mack: And the magazines wouldn’t even be considered soft porn today.
Greg: I started pumping gas. Anything to make a buck.
Andy, gas station owner, in 1991: Ain’t you never pumped your own gas before?
JR: Not since I was a kid.
JR, looking round Andy’s self-service gas station in 1991: If I remember correctly, it used to be called Harley’s. Had a big old wooden garage right over there. My daddy would bring us boys down here on Saturdays and we’d watch the mechanic give a lube job and an oil change. My daddy would swap stories with Mr Harley. They were good times.
Bobby on gas distributor Brady York: Brady's been doing business with Ewing Oil for years. He's an old friend of my daddy's.
JR on Jock: He’s the only person to ever call me Junior and I was damn proud of that.
JR: No-one’s called me Junior since I was sixteen.
Dr Wexler, psychiatrist: So you’re a Junior?
JR: I was.
Dr Wexler: Did that bother you when you were growing up — being a Junior, living in your father’s shadow?
JR: What’s that got to do with anything?
Dr Wexler: Was your father a successful man?
JR: You’re damn right he was, the most successful independent oilman in the southwest.
Dr Wexler: Big footsteps for you to follow in.
JR: My daddy was like a god to me.
De Wexler: And made you feel inferior by comparison?
JR: No, not inferior. I just wanted to make him proud of me and I think I did, most of the time.
Wallace Windham, speaking in 1985: [The papers pertaining to his sale of Ewing Oil to Jock] got burned up in a warehouse fire about thirty years ago along with a lot of other stuff of mine.
Bank clerk to Bobby: This is the original [safety deposit] box taken out by your grandfather in 1934. According to the records on file, this box has been unopened since before Mr Southworth’s death.
Bobby: When I was just a little boy.
Bobby, looking through the box: That was Grandpa’s prize pistol. Mama’s birth certificate. Uncle Garrison’s discharge [papers] from the army. And a whole bunch of hunting licences.
Christopher: A mineral rights trust.
Gary on his gun: It was my grandfather’s. I inherited it.
Miss Ellie, speaking in 1984: Your company headquarters have been established in Houston for years.
Clayton: Almost thirty years.
Aunt Ginny: I visited California in the fifties. I used to listen to Ginsberg read poetry at City Lights.
Ginny on her friend Jeri Madux: We really had some gay old times together.
Bobby: I remember when Reagan was a Democrat.
1956
Mack: The only subject I was advanced in was civics and they didn’t have advanced civics back then.
Mack: My father never came to anything I was in — no play, games, graduation. I was a varsity two letterman. Did he ever see me play? No.
Mack: I was mixed up.
Karen: But your father wasn’t beating you?
Mack: No, of course not, not like that.
Karen: What did your father do to you?
Mack: He got mad, let off steam, you know.
Karen: You mean he yelled at you.
Mack: He was under a lot of pressure to put food on the table. He did the best he could. I didn’t get along with my dad.
Pete Mackenzie: We haven’t had an easy time of it, lad. I used to knock you around.
Mack: Big deal. Didn’t hurt that much.
Pete: It hurt plenty!
Mack: But hitting was done then. Nowadays, everybody knows that you shouldn’t hit your kids, but back then, not everybody knew.
Mack: When I was fifteen, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know enough to run away.
Mack: Maybe you weren’t that bad after all, huh?
Pete: I think I was.
Mack: When I got older and realised it wasn’t normal to be beaten up by your old man, I felt ashamed because I didn’t want anyone to know what my dad was like and I sure as hell didn’t want pity. I made up lies to strangers and friends, and excuses to myself, and I was hoping and praying that it would stop, that just once he would say he loved me and that he was proud of me.
Mack on Pete: It’s hard for me to say out loud that he abused me and it was wrong, and he was wrong.
Sue Ellen: My father was an alcoholic.
Sue Ellen: I hated the smell of alcohol. I hated everything it represented.
Gary: I was fourteen the first time I got drunk. One Saturday night, I sat down and I had three sixteen-ounce cans of beer and got drunk as a skunk, sick as a dog. Threw up all over the place. Swore to God I’d never do it again. Next Saturday night — boom — right back out there. And the next. Everybody was doing it. I never drank to get high, I always drank to get drunk. I was out of control from the beginning, but out of fear — or hope — I couldn’t admit it to myself. One of the symptoms of my [alcoholism] is to deny that I even have a problem, so I just kept on. I wouldn’t listen to anyone. No-one could tell me anything. I knew better than anyone else.
Gary: I used to drink to feel like a man.
Richard Avery: Maybe it's old-fashioned, but I was brought up to believe a man takes care of his family or he's not a man.
Richard on sexual equality: I wasn’t brought up that way. None of us was.
Miss Ellie: I’ve known Jenna almost all her life. She and her daddy were friends of ours.
Jenna Wade: I used to live on a ranch not more than three miles down the road [from Southfork].
Jenna, speaking in 1984: It’s taken me a long time to come five miles.
Bobby: That’s how far it was from Lucas Wade’s ranch to [Southfork].
Jenna on Jock: I liked that man.
JR: I’ve always liked Jenna.
JR to Jenna: We always did agree on things, didn’t we?
JR on Jenna: She was more like us than Pam ever was.
Bobby: Jenna, I’ve known you all my life.
Jock on Bobby: He and Jenna grew up together.
Bobby on him and Jenna: We've been friends since we were kids. I used to be in love with her.
Cliff on Jenna: Bobby’s first love.
Bobby: There’s always something real special about first love.
Jenna: All I ever dreamed about when I was growing up was being married to you. I loved you so much.
Mavis Anderson to Bobby and Jenna: I’ve heard you two you were inseparable.
Jenna: Insufferable is more like it!
JR on Bobby: He was never very famous for his smarts.
Jenna: Neither was I.
JR: Bobby was always a fool, stubborn as a mule.
Harris Ryland to his mother Judith: You always told me that I was stubborn. Well, you were right.
Christopher on Jock: Did he ever go along with you when you were out with a girl?
Bobby: I can’t remember him being there.
Miss Ellie, speaking about Jenna in 1984: Bobby used to ride his horse down to her ranch when he wasn’t much older than John Ross is now [five].
Jenna: When Bobby and I were kids, he used to ride his horse over to see me, and a couple of years later, it was a motorcycle, and then after that a convertible.
Charlie, Jenna’s daughter: He came to see you a lot.
Jenna: Whenever he could sneak away from his chores. He never liked to work much then.
Charlie: He must have really been in love with you to keep coming around like that.
Jenna: We were in love with each other.
Punk Anderson on Bobby and Jenna: These two were destined to be together ever since they was kids. I remember me, Jock and Lucas Wade talking about it when we used to hunting together. Y’all weren’t even up to our belt buckles. As soon as our backs was turned, they were always getting into some kind of devilment.
Jenna on Lucas and Jock: Their faces when they saw us up on their prize two-year-olds!
Bobby: What about my face when I saw Daddy standing there when I got down? I didn’t think we’d get caught.
Jenna: Who do you think told on us anyway?
Bobby: I still think it was the stable boy. He could have seen us, told your daddy. Your daddy told my daddy.
Jenna: Who won that race? You or me?
Bobby: I don’t remember.
Bobby to Jenna: You always were unpredictable. If I took my eyes off you for a second, you’d be out of sight.
Miss Ellie: Jenna Wade was never stoical in her life.
Ray: Guts is one thing Jenna Wade never lacked.
Bobby: I never cared too much for Marco Polo.
Jenna: That’s because you never played with me.
Bobby: We used to play it all the time.
Bobby on making a big enough splash when diving: I had to make it go to the roof when I was a kid or they wouldn’t let me in scouts.
Cliff: I was an eagle scout.
Pam: No, you weren’t.
Cliff: I wanted to be.
Greg: I still have my boy scouts’ merit badge in first aid.
Charlie on her father, Naldo Marchetta: He learnt to ski when he was really little. His daddy taught him.
John Mackey on Rebecca: When she graduated [from secretarial school], she landed herself a job with the brokerage firm of Wentworth and Pitts. She was good, efficient, and her looks didn’t hurt either.
Katherine Wentworth, Rebecca’s daughter, on Wentworth Tool and Die: That was my father’s very first company.
John Mackey on Rebecca: After a while, she found her way into the office of the President himself, Mr Wentworth, and became his executive secretary. One thing led to another and, some time after that, he asked her to marry him.
Rebecca: I never divorced Digger. I was afraid that if I tried, he’d find me and drag me back to that awful life.
John Mackey: Rebecca Barnes Burke became Mrs Rebecca Wentworth.
Rebecca: I saw a chance for happiness and I took it. I led a comfortable life, happily married to a man I adore.
Clayton on Rebecca: She was married to a very dear friend of mine.
Clayton: An old friend of mine owned Dallas’s finest finishing school for young ladies.
Val: I had the whooping cough and I had to stay home from school. My mama stayed with … wait a minute, it wasn’t my mama, it was my Aunt Edna. She was pretty. She had beautiful eyes. She was very kind. She never got married though.
Laura to Karen: You’re the best friend I ever had — except for maybe Evelyn Bater in the third grade.
Amos Krebbs: I’ll admit I ain’t made much of my life.
Clayton Farlow on Rebecca: She scratched her way over the tough side of the tracks. Practically taught herself how to read.
John Mackey to Pam: Your mother was a very clever woman. She knew she wouldn’t get what she wanted out of life by waiting tables so when she got to Houston, she put herself through a good secretarial school where she learned stenography, typing, that sort of thing, and she was good at it.
Lilimae: I was touring with Alfonso the Great. I was his magician’s assistant. He wrote a song about me called ‘Lili’. [Sings:] “There was never was a girl like Lili, Lili with the bright gold hair …”
Joshua Rush, speaking about reading 'Nashville Junction' in 1984: All of sudden at the end, when she leaves to join Alfonso the Great, I started to cry.
Val: Aunt Edna put me on a bus and I rode all the way to Nashville, all by myself. I went to the theatre where Mama was playing. She was an assistant to a magician, Alfonso the Great. I remember the theatre smelt old and dirty, and it was mostly empty. When I was backstage to see her, she was in this terrible flurry. She had to run across town and audition an act of her own. She didn’t invite me along. She didn’t even ask me to stick around so that we could talk later. I was just in the way. So I took the next bus back to Aunt Edna and I lied about what a wonderful time I’d had.
Val: I was taught not to burn any bridges.
Greg: When I was twelve years old, I sold my entire mercury dime collection to buy a couple of girly magazines. I shudder to think what those dimes would be worth today.
Mack: And the magazines wouldn’t even be considered soft porn today.
Greg: I started pumping gas. Anything to make a buck.
Andy, gas station owner, in 1991: Ain’t you never pumped your own gas before?
JR: Not since I was a kid.
JR, looking round Andy’s self-service gas station in 1991: If I remember correctly, it used to be called Harley’s. Had a big old wooden garage right over there. My daddy would bring us boys down here on Saturdays and we’d watch the mechanic give a lube job and an oil change. My daddy would swap stories with Mr Harley. They were good times.
Bobby on gas distributor Brady York: Brady's been doing business with Ewing Oil for years. He's an old friend of my daddy's.
JR on Jock: He’s the only person to ever call me Junior and I was damn proud of that.
JR: No-one’s called me Junior since I was sixteen.
Dr Wexler, psychiatrist: So you’re a Junior?
JR: I was.
Dr Wexler: Did that bother you when you were growing up — being a Junior, living in your father’s shadow?
JR: What’s that got to do with anything?
Dr Wexler: Was your father a successful man?
JR: You’re damn right he was, the most successful independent oilman in the southwest.
Dr Wexler: Big footsteps for you to follow in.
JR: My daddy was like a god to me.
De Wexler: And made you feel inferior by comparison?
JR: No, not inferior. I just wanted to make him proud of me and I think I did, most of the time.
Wallace Windham, speaking in 1985: [The papers pertaining to his sale of Ewing Oil to Jock] got burned up in a warehouse fire about thirty years ago along with a lot of other stuff of mine.
Bank clerk to Bobby: This is the original [safety deposit] box taken out by your grandfather in 1934. According to the records on file, this box has been unopened since before Mr Southworth’s death.
Bobby: When I was just a little boy.
Bobby, looking through the box: That was Grandpa’s prize pistol. Mama’s birth certificate. Uncle Garrison’s discharge [papers] from the army. And a whole bunch of hunting licences.
Christopher: A mineral rights trust.
Gary on his gun: It was my grandfather’s. I inherited it.
Miss Ellie, speaking in 1984: Your company headquarters have been established in Houston for years.
Clayton: Almost thirty years.
Aunt Ginny: I visited California in the fifties. I used to listen to Ginsberg read poetry at City Lights.
Ginny on her friend Jeri Madux: We really had some gay old times together.
Bobby: I remember when Reagan was a Democrat.
1956
Mack: The only subject I was advanced in was civics and they didn’t have advanced civics back then.
Mack: My father never came to anything I was in — no play, games, graduation. I was a varsity two letterman. Did he ever see me play? No.
Mack: I was mixed up.
Karen: But your father wasn’t beating you?
Mack: No, of course not, not like that.
Karen: What did your father do to you?
Mack: He got mad, let off steam, you know.
Karen: You mean he yelled at you.
Mack: He was under a lot of pressure to put food on the table. He did the best he could. I didn’t get along with my dad.
Pete Mackenzie: We haven’t had an easy time of it, lad. I used to knock you around.
Mack: Big deal. Didn’t hurt that much.
Pete: It hurt plenty!
Mack: But hitting was done then. Nowadays, everybody knows that you shouldn’t hit your kids, but back then, not everybody knew.
Mack: When I was fifteen, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know enough to run away.
Mack: Maybe you weren’t that bad after all, huh?
Pete: I think I was.
Mack: When I got older and realised it wasn’t normal to be beaten up by your old man, I felt ashamed because I didn’t want anyone to know what my dad was like and I sure as hell didn’t want pity. I made up lies to strangers and friends, and excuses to myself, and I was hoping and praying that it would stop, that just once he would say he loved me and that he was proud of me.
Mack on Pete: It’s hard for me to say out loud that he abused me and it was wrong, and he was wrong.
Sue Ellen: My father was an alcoholic.
Sue Ellen: I hated the smell of alcohol. I hated everything it represented.
Gary: I was fourteen the first time I got drunk. One Saturday night, I sat down and I had three sixteen-ounce cans of beer and got drunk as a skunk, sick as a dog. Threw up all over the place. Swore to God I’d never do it again. Next Saturday night — boom — right back out there. And the next. Everybody was doing it. I never drank to get high, I always drank to get drunk. I was out of control from the beginning, but out of fear — or hope — I couldn’t admit it to myself. One of the symptoms of my [alcoholism] is to deny that I even have a problem, so I just kept on. I wouldn’t listen to anyone. No-one could tell me anything. I knew better than anyone else.
Gary: I used to drink to feel like a man.
Richard Avery: Maybe it's old-fashioned, but I was brought up to believe a man takes care of his family or he's not a man.
Richard on sexual equality: I wasn’t brought up that way. None of us was.
Miss Ellie: I’ve known Jenna almost all her life. She and her daddy were friends of ours.
Jenna Wade: I used to live on a ranch not more than three miles down the road [from Southfork].
Jenna, speaking in 1984: It’s taken me a long time to come five miles.
Bobby: That’s how far it was from Lucas Wade’s ranch to [Southfork].
Jenna on Jock: I liked that man.
JR: I’ve always liked Jenna.
JR to Jenna: We always did agree on things, didn’t we?
JR on Jenna: She was more like us than Pam ever was.
Bobby: Jenna, I’ve known you all my life.
Jock on Bobby: He and Jenna grew up together.
Bobby on him and Jenna: We've been friends since we were kids. I used to be in love with her.
Cliff on Jenna: Bobby’s first love.
Bobby: There’s always something real special about first love.
Jenna: All I ever dreamed about when I was growing up was being married to you. I loved you so much.
Mavis Anderson to Bobby and Jenna: I’ve heard you two you were inseparable.
Jenna: Insufferable is more like it!
JR on Bobby: He was never very famous for his smarts.
Jenna: Neither was I.
JR: Bobby was always a fool, stubborn as a mule.
Harris Ryland to his mother Judith: You always told me that I was stubborn. Well, you were right.
Christopher on Jock: Did he ever go along with you when you were out with a girl?
Bobby: I can’t remember him being there.
Miss Ellie, speaking about Jenna in 1984: Bobby used to ride his horse down to her ranch when he wasn’t much older than John Ross is now [five].
Jenna: When Bobby and I were kids, he used to ride his horse over to see me, and a couple of years later, it was a motorcycle, and then after that a convertible.
Charlie, Jenna’s daughter: He came to see you a lot.
Jenna: Whenever he could sneak away from his chores. He never liked to work much then.
Charlie: He must have really been in love with you to keep coming around like that.
Jenna: We were in love with each other.
Punk Anderson on Bobby and Jenna: These two were destined to be together ever since they was kids. I remember me, Jock and Lucas Wade talking about it when we used to hunting together. Y’all weren’t even up to our belt buckles. As soon as our backs was turned, they were always getting into some kind of devilment.
Jenna on Lucas and Jock: Their faces when they saw us up on their prize two-year-olds!
Bobby: What about my face when I saw Daddy standing there when I got down? I didn’t think we’d get caught.
Jenna: Who do you think told on us anyway?
Bobby: I still think it was the stable boy. He could have seen us, told your daddy. Your daddy told my daddy.
Jenna: Who won that race? You or me?
Bobby: I don’t remember.
Bobby to Jenna: You always were unpredictable. If I took my eyes off you for a second, you’d be out of sight.
Miss Ellie: Jenna Wade was never stoical in her life.
Ray: Guts is one thing Jenna Wade never lacked.
Bobby: I never cared too much for Marco Polo.
Jenna: That’s because you never played with me.
Bobby: We used to play it all the time.
Bobby on making a big enough splash when diving: I had to make it go to the roof when I was a kid or they wouldn’t let me in scouts.
Cliff: I was an eagle scout.
Pam: No, you weren’t.
Cliff: I wanted to be.
Greg: I still have my boy scouts’ merit badge in first aid.
Charlie on her father, Naldo Marchetta: He learnt to ski when he was really little. His daddy taught him.
John Mackey on Rebecca: When she graduated [from secretarial school], she landed herself a job with the brokerage firm of Wentworth and Pitts. She was good, efficient, and her looks didn’t hurt either.
Katherine Wentworth, Rebecca’s daughter, on Wentworth Tool and Die: That was my father’s very first company.
John Mackey on Rebecca: After a while, she found her way into the office of the President himself, Mr Wentworth, and became his executive secretary. One thing led to another and, some time after that, he asked her to marry him.
Rebecca: I never divorced Digger. I was afraid that if I tried, he’d find me and drag me back to that awful life.
John Mackey: Rebecca Barnes Burke became Mrs Rebecca Wentworth.
Rebecca: I saw a chance for happiness and I took it. I led a comfortable life, happily married to a man I adore.
Clayton on Rebecca: She was married to a very dear friend of mine.
Clayton: An old friend of mine owned Dallas’s finest finishing school for young ladies.
Val: I had the whooping cough and I had to stay home from school. My mama stayed with … wait a minute, it wasn’t my mama, it was my Aunt Edna. She was pretty. She had beautiful eyes. She was very kind. She never got married though.
Laura to Karen: You’re the best friend I ever had — except for maybe Evelyn Bater in the third grade.
James from London
International Treasure
1957
Abby: Cathy [Geary] was born in Rockhill, Wyoming.
Cathy: I’m actually from Texas, by way of Arkansas.
John Mackey on Rebecca and Herbert Wentworth: [They had] a daughter, Katherine.
Pam: All these years, I never knew I had a sister.
Clayton on Dusty: I’ve been watching him ride since he was ten years old, even younger.
Clayton, looking over the Southern Cross: That rise over there, that’s where old Dusty tried a jump that was just a little bit too big for him one day, went flying over his horse. Walked away without a scratch.
Miss Ellie: How old was he then?
Clayton: About ten or eleven.
Clayton: Atticus came over to Southern Cross once in a while when Dusty was growing up.
Clayton on Dusty: Never cared about the ranch or the business, all he wanted to do was cowboy.
Naldo Marchetta: When I was a little boy, I was a cowboy.
Charlie Wade: Do they have cowboys in Italy?
Naldo: Well, only in the movies. But in the small town near Rome where I grew up, my family had a home with beautiful grounds. We had a stable and horses and I learned to ride when I was very young. I always thought of myself as a cowboy.
Charlie: What did you call your horse?
Naldo: Tony. It’s a good Italian name, no — Tony? But it was also the name of that horse ridden by the great American cowboy, Tom Mix.
Jenna: You never had a horse named Tony!
Naldo: Yes, I did, and we also had one named Silver.
Charlie: That’s the Lone Ranger’s horse.
Naldo: Yes. I would see many American films when I was young, mostly westerns, and that is how I learned to ride bareback. You see, one day I went to see a film with Burt Lancaster and John Wayne …
Kimberly Cryder (née Styles) on her father Herbert: He taught me to ride. He taught me many things.
JR to Kimberly: Texas belles and their ever-loving daddies. Why is it I keep thinking that you have something to do with his being married six times?
Dr Styles: I’ve been married five times. Never stopped me from getting anything I wanted.
Dr Styles to Kimberly: Remember what I told you over and over again when you were a little girl? Your worst enemy is your own impatience.
Carter McKay: I watched Kimberly grow up.
JR on playing touch football with his brothers: Old Bobby was the power house. If he couldn’t outrun you, he’d try and bite you on the knee.
Bobby to JR: You had the best hidden ball trick in Dallas.
JR: That’s what made me so successful.
Gary: Yeah, we did have some great games.
JR: I wonder how many hours Daddy had us out there, practising [our rodeo skills]?
Bobby: Quite a few. If I remember right, you didn’t take to it. It was mostly Gary and me.
Miss Ellie on Jock and their sons: He used to take them all hunting and fishing. Sometimes they’d be gone a whole week.
Gary, speaking in 1985: I’m driving the route Daddy took us [from Texas to California] when we were kids.
Bobby, speaking to JR in 2012: Let’s you and I go fishing at the big water tank. We’ll get some bass for breakfast just like the old days.
JR on Jock: I remember when he used to take all four of us out hunting.
Ray: All those ghost stories he used to tell us round the camp fire. I can remember Gary sitting there, frozen in terror.
Bobby: Gary? I remember you, sitting on your hands to keep them from shaking!
JR to Bobby: Now hold on, old Ray was the strong one. I remember waking up in the morning with you in my sleeping bag.
Bobby: That was my first hunting trip, and I was only seven years old. You’d been there before, you’d heard all those stories.
Bobby: I remember how mad I was because Daddy wouldn’t let me carry a gun.
Christopher, speaking in 1988: How come I don’t get to do any shooting?
Bobby: That’s exactly the question I asked, Christopher, when I was your age [seven].
Gary, speaking to Bobby in 1978: Does Daddy still tie you in the saddle?
Bobby to Gary: When we were kids, you and I found a mare running wild. Daddy promised she'd be mine if I could break her. He never knew you did it for me. You almost broke your back in the process.
Cathy: Haven’t you ever wanted to run and away and join the circus?
Gary: No, with me it was the rodeo.
Gary: I used to watch those cowboys on those broncs and, man, I wanted to do that. We had this horse on the ranch that was really mean so I’d practice on him. I’d get up on him and he’d throw me, and I’d get back up on him again, but I was determined to get good enough to enter the rodeo. So when I was fifteen, I figured I was ready. My daddy figured otherwise. So all my friends and I, we snuck into the rodeo at night, and I found me the meanest horse they had. And I got on him just to prove to my friends that I could do it. I stayed on for almost eight seconds. The only problem is I had to get drunk in order to do it so when he threw me, I broke my back. Afterwards, my daddy came to see me and it was like, I don’t know, like he was proud of me for having the guts to do it.
Cathy: Sounds like you and your dad didn’t get along so well.
Gary: I always felt like I could make a difference in the world if the right chance came along.
Sue Ellen: I’ve always wanted to do something useful with my life, something that would make a difference.
Gary: Ever since I was fifteen, I wanted to make a difference, not a big difference, not an earth-shattering difference, just a difference. So that when I died, I could say, “I made a difference. I made something better.” But I seemed to have the opposite of the Midas Touch.
Gary: When I was in high school, we used to hang out at a place called Dwight’s that had a pinball machine I could never beat. Drove me crazy. I must have played two hundred games on that thing. Then one night I was studying for this big final exam. I took a break, dropped by Dwight’s for a hamburger. Afterwards I played the machine and I won. Then I won again. I tell you, there must have been something wrong with it because I played sixteen games on that thing and, test or no test, I had to play them out. And when they closed up the place, I had eight games left. I flunked the exam and never beat that machine again.
Gary on chemistry: I never liked that much.
Mack: Karen, what do you remember about trig?
Karen: That I avoided it like the plague.
Bobby on math: It wasn’t my all-tine favourite subject.
Paige: Did you ever master fractions, Greg?
Greg: Actually, I never did like messing with small numbers.
Greg: I flunked math two straight years. Then I stopped and I started looking around at all those kids who were getting straight As and they all had one thing in common. They all had their underwear on backwards. So I decided I would learn math, but more important I would use what I learned.
Laura: Did you really flunk math?
Greg: No, I lied.
Mack on Claudia: The smart one, grade As, the valedictorian.
Claudia on herself: The class nerd.
Mack, speaking about sex in 1985: It’s been crossing my mind since I was Michael’s age [sixteen] — before I was his age.
Abby: Cathy [Geary] was born in Rockhill, Wyoming.
Cathy: I’m actually from Texas, by way of Arkansas.
John Mackey on Rebecca and Herbert Wentworth: [They had] a daughter, Katherine.
Pam: All these years, I never knew I had a sister.
Clayton on Dusty: I’ve been watching him ride since he was ten years old, even younger.
Clayton, looking over the Southern Cross: That rise over there, that’s where old Dusty tried a jump that was just a little bit too big for him one day, went flying over his horse. Walked away without a scratch.
Miss Ellie: How old was he then?
Clayton: About ten or eleven.
Clayton: Atticus came over to Southern Cross once in a while when Dusty was growing up.
Clayton on Dusty: Never cared about the ranch or the business, all he wanted to do was cowboy.
Naldo Marchetta: When I was a little boy, I was a cowboy.
Charlie Wade: Do they have cowboys in Italy?
Naldo: Well, only in the movies. But in the small town near Rome where I grew up, my family had a home with beautiful grounds. We had a stable and horses and I learned to ride when I was very young. I always thought of myself as a cowboy.
Charlie: What did you call your horse?
Naldo: Tony. It’s a good Italian name, no — Tony? But it was also the name of that horse ridden by the great American cowboy, Tom Mix.
Jenna: You never had a horse named Tony!
Naldo: Yes, I did, and we also had one named Silver.
Charlie: That’s the Lone Ranger’s horse.
Naldo: Yes. I would see many American films when I was young, mostly westerns, and that is how I learned to ride bareback. You see, one day I went to see a film with Burt Lancaster and John Wayne …
Kimberly Cryder (née Styles) on her father Herbert: He taught me to ride. He taught me many things.
JR to Kimberly: Texas belles and their ever-loving daddies. Why is it I keep thinking that you have something to do with his being married six times?
Dr Styles: I’ve been married five times. Never stopped me from getting anything I wanted.
Dr Styles to Kimberly: Remember what I told you over and over again when you were a little girl? Your worst enemy is your own impatience.
Carter McKay: I watched Kimberly grow up.
JR on playing touch football with his brothers: Old Bobby was the power house. If he couldn’t outrun you, he’d try and bite you on the knee.
Bobby to JR: You had the best hidden ball trick in Dallas.
JR: That’s what made me so successful.
Gary: Yeah, we did have some great games.
JR: I wonder how many hours Daddy had us out there, practising [our rodeo skills]?
Bobby: Quite a few. If I remember right, you didn’t take to it. It was mostly Gary and me.
Miss Ellie on Jock and their sons: He used to take them all hunting and fishing. Sometimes they’d be gone a whole week.
Gary, speaking in 1985: I’m driving the route Daddy took us [from Texas to California] when we were kids.
Bobby, speaking to JR in 2012: Let’s you and I go fishing at the big water tank. We’ll get some bass for breakfast just like the old days.
JR on Jock: I remember when he used to take all four of us out hunting.
Ray: All those ghost stories he used to tell us round the camp fire. I can remember Gary sitting there, frozen in terror.
Bobby: Gary? I remember you, sitting on your hands to keep them from shaking!
JR to Bobby: Now hold on, old Ray was the strong one. I remember waking up in the morning with you in my sleeping bag.
Bobby: That was my first hunting trip, and I was only seven years old. You’d been there before, you’d heard all those stories.
Bobby: I remember how mad I was because Daddy wouldn’t let me carry a gun.
Christopher, speaking in 1988: How come I don’t get to do any shooting?
Bobby: That’s exactly the question I asked, Christopher, when I was your age [seven].
Gary, speaking to Bobby in 1978: Does Daddy still tie you in the saddle?
Bobby to Gary: When we were kids, you and I found a mare running wild. Daddy promised she'd be mine if I could break her. He never knew you did it for me. You almost broke your back in the process.
Cathy: Haven’t you ever wanted to run and away and join the circus?
Gary: No, with me it was the rodeo.
Gary: I used to watch those cowboys on those broncs and, man, I wanted to do that. We had this horse on the ranch that was really mean so I’d practice on him. I’d get up on him and he’d throw me, and I’d get back up on him again, but I was determined to get good enough to enter the rodeo. So when I was fifteen, I figured I was ready. My daddy figured otherwise. So all my friends and I, we snuck into the rodeo at night, and I found me the meanest horse they had. And I got on him just to prove to my friends that I could do it. I stayed on for almost eight seconds. The only problem is I had to get drunk in order to do it so when he threw me, I broke my back. Afterwards, my daddy came to see me and it was like, I don’t know, like he was proud of me for having the guts to do it.
Cathy: Sounds like you and your dad didn’t get along so well.
Gary: I always felt like I could make a difference in the world if the right chance came along.
Sue Ellen: I’ve always wanted to do something useful with my life, something that would make a difference.
Gary: Ever since I was fifteen, I wanted to make a difference, not a big difference, not an earth-shattering difference, just a difference. So that when I died, I could say, “I made a difference. I made something better.” But I seemed to have the opposite of the Midas Touch.
Gary: When I was in high school, we used to hang out at a place called Dwight’s that had a pinball machine I could never beat. Drove me crazy. I must have played two hundred games on that thing. Then one night I was studying for this big final exam. I took a break, dropped by Dwight’s for a hamburger. Afterwards I played the machine and I won. Then I won again. I tell you, there must have been something wrong with it because I played sixteen games on that thing and, test or no test, I had to play them out. And when they closed up the place, I had eight games left. I flunked the exam and never beat that machine again.
Gary on chemistry: I never liked that much.
Mack: Karen, what do you remember about trig?
Karen: That I avoided it like the plague.
Bobby on math: It wasn’t my all-tine favourite subject.
Paige: Did you ever master fractions, Greg?
Greg: Actually, I never did like messing with small numbers.
Greg: I flunked math two straight years. Then I stopped and I started looking around at all those kids who were getting straight As and they all had one thing in common. They all had their underwear on backwards. So I decided I would learn math, but more important I would use what I learned.
Laura: Did you really flunk math?
Greg: No, I lied.
Mack on Claudia: The smart one, grade As, the valedictorian.
Claudia on herself: The class nerd.
Mack, speaking about sex in 1985: It’s been crossing my mind since I was Michael’s age [sixteen] — before I was his age.
James from London
International Treasure
1958
Senator O’Dell, speaking about Washington in 1988: People back home have been kind enough to let me spend the last thirty years here.
JR, speaking in 1978: How do you like [Pam and Bobby’s] marriage?
Digger: I don’t like it.
JR: Well that’s the first thing you and I have agreed on in twenty years!
Cliff: My daddy used to say it’s a gift from Providence when two powerful men share the same enemy.
Jamie Ewing Date of Birth: 12/04/58
Jack on Jamie: I always thought she looked like Daddy.
Joseph Pearce (neé Lombardi) on Nicholas Pearce (neé Joey Lombardi): He was my firstborn son.
John Cate on Nicholas: I think originally he must have come from Philadelphia or New York.
Gary: Pierce Lawton’s from the one of the biggest financial families on the East Coast.
Miss Ellie: These boys of mine, you should have seen them when they were growing up.
Miss Ellie: I used to want to put bricks on the boys’ heads to keep them from getting bigger. I never really wanted them to grow up.
Miss Ellie to Bobby: I used to think only JR was the true Ewing, that you and Gary were all Southworth.
Bobby: Mama, she always, always liked Gary the best. “A Southworth among Ewings,” she used to call him.
Miss Ellie: Gary was always the cowboy among my sons. He really loved this ranch.
Abby to JR: Gary’s fine. He just shouldn’t have had a brother like you.
Christopher on Gary: He and Uncle JR never got along good, did they?
Bobby: They never saw eye to eye on a lot of things.
Gary on JR: I spent my whole life hating the man.
Gary: Every step, backwards or forwards, I ever took in my life was because of JR.
Gary: You're okay, Bobby. You're probably the only one of us who is. One of these days you're gonna have to tell me how you managed to pull it off.
JR: Bobby always was the understanding one.
JR to Bobby: You were always the one with the conscience.
JR to Bobby: You were always the better man and predictable to a T.
Bobby: I was never a knight in shining armour. I never tried to be, I never wanted to be.
Cliff on Bobby: He always was a hothead.
JR on Bobby: Always did get a little hot under the collar when he didn’t get his way.
Wes Parmalee, as Jock, to Bobby: You always did have a terrible fierce temper.
Judith Ryland to Harris: Even as a little boy, your temper always got the best of you.
Ray: Miss Ellie’s a strong woman. She’s always been able to handle things.
Bobby: No lady was ever more competent than my mama.
Bobby: Ellie, my beautiful mama, I can’t begin to count the gifts you’ve filled my life with. One more precious than the next - a gold pocket watch which was your father’s and his father’s before. I treasured it always. It made me feel connected to past I only knew through your stories. What proud stories they were.
Miss Ellie: Bobby was given everything that JR had to fight for and Gary didn’t care about.
Mark Graison: All my life I’ve had everything, most of which I didn’t want or care about.
Mark: When I was a kid, I used to love huge toys.
Bobby: One birthday, I came home and there was a merry-go-round in the front yard. Not one of those dinky little things you find in front of a supermarket, but an honest to God merry-go-round, with music and mirrors and hand-carved horses. He [Jock] would give me anything if I asked for it.
Miss Ellie on Bobby: We all spoiled him.
Jock: I spoiled Bobby rotten. He turned out to be the best of lot.
Bobby, speaking in 1989: I think back on how my daddy raised me and I try and use that as some kind of role model. I just hope I’m not spoiling Christopher the way that my daddy did me.
Christopher, mucking out a stable in 1989: Why are you making me do it?
Bobby: Same reason my daddy made me do it.
Christopher: And what was that?
Bobby: He told me that we had just about everything that anybody could want, but we wouldn’t appreciate any of it unless we worked for it.
Christopher to Bobby: You were lucky to have someone like Jock as a father.
Miss Ellie on Bobby: This treehouse, Jock built it for him. Whenever he wanted time off from his chores, he used to be here. He'd swim in that pond. It's not very deep. He always called it his very own lake. Of all the places in Southfork where he used to play, this was his favourite. Gary used to come out here. The two of them would spend hours and hours doing ... I don't know what.
Clayton: Not JR?
Miss Ellie: JR always seemed to care more about the oil business. He was always trying to get to go out to work with Jock. Or he'd be out in the oil fields with him. When the other boys were playing, JR was learning from Jock.
Gary to his eight-year-old twins in 1992: What a neat fort! Your uncle and I used to make one of these all the time when we were kids.
Gary, speaking in 1985: I found a drill bit, an old one, like from one of Daddy’s early strikes. It reminds me of the time when I was a kid and we all … ah, well.
Pam on Bobby and Jock: You two always had a special relationship.
Bobby: I guess so. Mama, she always liked Gary the best so …
Pam: That left JR.
Miss Ellie on JR: I think he would have traded everything if he'd been the one that Jock built this treehouse for.
Clayton: It’s difficult to see JR in that light. Of course, I never knew him when he was a boy.
Miss Ellie: I think you might have liked him more if you’d known him then.
JR to Jock: You've been fighting Bobby's battles all his life.
Miss Ellie: Bobby was always Jock's favourite. If ever there was a fair-haired son, Bobby was it for Jock. JR always knew that Jock loved Bobby the best and it hurt him. He could never come to grips with the fact that he wasn't Jock's favourite.
Christopher: Did you and Grandpa spend a lot of time together?
Bobby: Some. He was pretty busy with Ewing Oil by then.
Bobby on Jock: You know what gave me the most pleasure? Just spending the day with him — we’d go to the office or out in the oil field — just to be with him.
Bobby on Jock: I remember when he used to take me out in the field when I was a boy. I never saw a man more excited in my life.
JR: I was with him once when he bought in a gusher. I never heard a man yell so loud. I can still hear the joy in his voice.
John Ross: You really worked in the fields?
JR: Yeah, side by side with my daddy.
Miss Ellie: My boys have always had a need to prove themselves to their father.
Bobby: I was raised by a strong mother and a very tough father.
Bobby on Jock: I've never been afraid of that man in my life.
Bobby to Christopher: Your granddaddy Jock was the most intimidating man I think I ever met. We locked horns on just about everything.
JR, speaking to John Ross in 2012: I’m throwing you in the deep end, just like my daddy did to me.
Alan Beam to JR: You had to fight for your place in your family.
JR on Ewing Oil: The company I’ve had to fight for all my life.
Bobby on Jock: He sure made fighters out of us.
Wes Parmalee, as Jock, to JR and Bobby: I’m the one who taught you boys how to fight.
Bobby: You and I have spent our entire lives trying to win Daddy’s approval by fighting with one another, neither one of us giving up till we were sure we were his favourite, right?
JR: That’s for damn sure.
John Ross, speaking to Christopher in 2012: Can you imagine what Ewing Oil would have been today if our fathers had been allies instead of enemies?
Elena Ramos: Bigger than Exxon.
John Ross: It didn’t have to be this way. Jock, he set them against each other.
Bobby: I grew up in a family where stabbing everybody in the back was encouraged.
Elena: Screwing each other over is part of the Ewing family tradition.
JR: Bobby, I thought you learned something when you were a young boy — never cross Daddy when it comes to business. Never.
Bobby: I’ve never picked my battles in life by fearing for the worst.
Cliff: The main reason I dislike the Ewings so much is that they’ve always been this big family that stood together. I mean, no matter what fighting they did amongst themselves, they always stood together against the outsiders.
Miss Ellie: I always thought that no matter what happened, I’d always stand by my family. It was always that way with the Ewings. It was always the family against all outsiders. We always stuck up for each other, even when we knew we were wrong.
Bobby: JR made Daddy his obsession.
JR on Jock: I worshipped that man. I tried to follow in his footsteps. Of course, I got a little wild sometimes, but Daddy was no saint either, you know that.
Miss Ellie: Jock was a great man, but only human. Jock may have done things in his life that he lived to regret, but he’d never lie about it. Jock didn’t lie, ever. Not ever.
JR: I worked for a number of years with Daddy side by side when he was running Ewing Oil.
JR to Jock on the three Bs: Booty, booze and broads — first thing you told me a good lobbyist likes.
JR: First thing my dad taught me was the only way to a politician's heart … [opens a briefcase full of cash].
Bobby to JR: You’ve always told me every man has his price.
Mr Hopper, realtor: Anything can be had for the right price.
JR: That’s the motto I’ve been living with all my life.
JR: Senator, we’ve had a very friendly relationship in the past.
Senator Harbin: I know that and I’ve treasured our relationship.
JR: And our campaign contributions.
Senator O’Dell: The Ewings have always come through for me when I came through for them.
Jock to Senator "Wild Bill" Orloff: Used to be we could count on you to keep things locked up forever. You used your muscle for us.
Jenna to Bobby: I know how important the truth’s been to you all your life.
Bobby: Everything I've done in my life I've done because I've thought it was right and I've never run out on anything.
JR: Bob, you’ve never gone back on a deal.
Bobby: Throughout my life, it’s pretty much been easy for me to do good because I could always count on JR to do bad. A lot of times, those bad things were necessary. Maybe more often than I care to admit.
Bobby: Things with JR were almost never as they appeared to be.
JR: I’ve never turned my back on a fight in my life.
Karen: Sid, you've never run from anything in your life.
Ruth Sumner Galveston: You never were a coward, Gregory.
Claudia: You were always self-absorbed, Greg. Not everybody has an ulterior motive.
Greg: Everybody in our family always did.
Val: How long you been running?
Ben Gibson: It seems like all my life.
Gary: I've been running all my life.
JR: I've been taking chances all my life.
Bobby on JR: He always was one for taking chances. That’s what made Ewing Oil what is today.
Sid: Abby's always been a little bit wild, but she's never done any harm.
Lilimae on Abby: She has never done an unselfish thing in her life.
Olivia: Were you ever a tomboy?
Abby: I don't think so.
Abby: I practically grew up in a garage.
Abby: Sid was always so sweet, so strong. When I was a kid, he always knew when I needed him and he was always there.
Abby: I loved my brother.
Abby on Sid: I never [listened to him].
Abby: I have never been interested in other people’s opinions about my life.
Jill Bennett to Abby: I bet you’ve spent your whole life figuring out how to trick men.
Bobby on Naldo Marchetta: He spent his entire life using women.
Bobby on Naldo: This is a guy who has lived off of one con or another, one woman or another, his entire life.
Bobby on Naldo: He’s supported himself his entire life convincing people that he’s sincere.
Naldo: I have spent my life, my entire life, doing things for which I felt ashamed afterwards.
Gary: All my life, my father made me feel worthless.
Amanda Ryan to Gary: When you were growing up, you were the type of kid who was always getting into trouble. As far as your parents were concerned, you couldn’t do anything right so you’ve either been ticked off or trying too hard ever since.
Miss Ellie on Jock: He was always hard on Gary. Too hard.
Miss Ellie: Gary was a lot like my daddy, always in trouble with Jock.
Jock: I loved Gary.
Miss Ellie: But you never cared about him. You never took the time to find out about him.
Jock on Gary: Maybe I could’ve done better by him, but I didn’t know how.
Gary: All my life, every time I've tangled with JR, I've lost.
JR to Gary: We’ve been head to head and I always come up on top.
Gary: I've never beaten JR at anything in my life.
JR: Gary was always the Ewing with the integrity.
Bobby: That’s why Daddy turned away from Gary — the Ewings must succeed, and Gary didn’t care about that. But dammit, JR and I do.
Ray: Most of my life, I never thought of myself as a Ewing.
Ray: When I was growing up, I was Amos Krebbs’ kid, the town drunk’s son.
Lil Trotter on Ray: He sure didn’t get two licks of help from that ne’er-do-well father of his.
Lil on Ray and Amos: I know you two weren’t especially close.
Ray: I’ve always taken care of my own life.
Ray: For most of my life, I've been kind of a loner.
Ray: I’m talking about spending your whole life looking over your shoulder.
Ray: I never had a home much or anything. I was just this skinny, useless kid, tired of drifting, running from the law, juvenile authorities.
Ray: Mama died. Showed up at Southfork one day. No place else to go, just the clothes on my back and a note from my mama to Jock Ewing asking him to help me out.
Ray on Southfork: When I was fifteen years old, my mama shipped me down here just before she died and Jock Ewing took me in, just like he would any other stray.
Jock to Ray: You were the skinniest kid of fifteen that I ever saw in my life.
Ray: Old Jock gave me a job right on the spot. He didn’t have to take me in, but he did.
Jock to Ray: No doubt about my hiring you. I knew you’d stick around and work your tail off. I was glad to have you.
Ray on Southfork: I was overpowered by some of this when I first got here.
Ray on Southfork: I remember when I first came out here, I thought this place was bigger than the whole state of Kansas.
Bobby: I know it must have been kind of scary for you because you couldn’t even ride a horse then.
Ray on branding cattle: One of the first things old Jock had me do when I landed on Southfork.
Rodeo announcer on Ray: We've been watching him ride since he was fifteen years old.
Jenna to Ray: You were raised around cowboys and horses.
Ray: I can remember looking over at Southfork and wondering what it would be like to be part of a real family.
Ray: I always wanted to see how it feels to live at Southfork.
Ray on Southfork: I’ve always loved that ranch, been sort of a home for me.
JR on Ray: He wouldn’t walk into this house without first asking permission.
Ray: I didn’t eat dinner at Southfork when Jock was alive.
Ray on Southfork: I never have felt right there.
Miss Ellie: Ray’s always had a problem with his self-esteem. He’s never been able to realise what a good man he is.
Ray: I know Jock’s cared about me for a long time, even before he knew I was his son.
Ray to Amos: Jock Ewing has been more of a father to me than you have ever been.
Bobby, speaking about Jock in 1979: You know how he feels about Ray, like he is one of the family.
JR: Yeah. Never could figure that one out.
Jock on Ray being his son: I don’t know why in the world I never realised it.
Ray on Jock: With his help, I pulled myself up and I made something out of my life.
Donna: What was Jock like then?
Ray: Jock was a great man. He was decent, kind. Sure did right by me.
Donna: Practically perfect.
Ray: No, not perfect. He was the best man I ever knew.
Ray on Jock: How I used to look up to him when I was a kid, how I idolised him. I’d goof something up, though, and he’d chew me up one side and down the other. And I thought, “How could somebody I idolise act like that?” Now I know he was concerned about me, teaching me. He knew when to be firm, and when to be affectionate. He was all those things, but mostly I guess I thought he was almost perfect.
Ray on Jock: You never loved him.
JR: Didn’t I?
Ray: Not the way I did. You’re a taker. You don’t have any love to give. I worshipped that man. I really loved him.
Ray: Never been able to talk to anybody, except for Jock.
Bobby to Miss Ellie: Ever since I was a little boy, I could only speak to two people — you and Gary.
Bobby on Gary: I never really knew him.
Bobby to Gary: You were always the one brother I could count on.
Gary: Bobby is the only one who’s ever had my back in this family.
Gary to Bobby: You were the only one that took me seriously, you and Mama. Yeah, I’d tell you about growing things and what to look for in fine cattle.
Bobby: And about your drawings, your wanting to paint. You never made me feel like a little brother.
Gary: All my life, the only time I ever felt happy was working the ranch. I don't know, I can't explain it. It's something about the rhythm of it, the seasons, I don't know, but it's in me. It's part of me. I had to get away from my family, but I always thought I’d like to live like this again.
Gary: I always wanted to raise horses, quarter horses.
Gary: I loved the ranch, but hated being there. Hated the way they treated me.
Gary: I never hated Dallas, just everything else that came with it.
Gary: I never could figure out the oil business.
JR: I wasn’t cut out to punch cattle, that’s for sure.
Bobby to JR: You never gave a damn about this ranch.
Clayton: I figure JR never helped with the round up [on Southfork]?
Sue Ellen: No, he was always busy trying to prove to his daddy that he could run Ewing Oil.
Bobby: When I was a kid, I used to think I’d never want to run Ewing Oil, thought there’d be too much work. I used to look down my nose at the whole operation, the wheeling and dealing. I could never understand what Daddy and JR found so exciting about it.
Gary on oilmen: In Texas, I was used to seeing them all grimy in fields. And in my living room. And in my dreams.
JR: When Gary was sixteen, he somehow got into his head that he wanted a motorcycle. Now our family spoiled us boys rotten, but on this issue my daddy put his foot down. He said, “You want a motorcycle, you’re going to have to earn it.” And my God, he did — before dawn, up every day mucking out the stables, pitching hay, working on the rigs in the blazing sun. He just never missed one single day. Come September, my daddy took him down to the showroom, gave him a slap on the back and a blank cheque. And of course, Gary had read all the brochures and motorcycle magazines. He knew exactly what he wanted. He signed the cheque, revved that old motorcycle up ... and drove straight through that pate glass window.
Richard Avery: When I was fifteen, my brother Philip was killed in a motorcycle accident. I don’t think a day goes by when I don’t think about him. I remember something we did together or something he said and I imagine what our lives would be like if he was still here. And sometimes I think maybe at the times when I’m thinking about him that he is here, I feel his presence and somehow I think he knows I still love him.
Karen: My mother used to cry her heart out whenever anyone died. It didn’t matter who it was — the butcher, a third cousin, anyone. The day her mother died, I went over to her house and she was sitting there, crying, just like she cried for the butcher and I was so angry at her. I mean, I thought it was wrong, it’s not enough, it was your own mother this time. She had every right to act any way she wanted to act.
Abby: My Great Aunt Sarah never shed a tear when her husband died. For six months she carried on as though nothing had happened and then all of a sudden, one day, everything caught up with her. She started to cry and never left her house again.
Senator O’Dell, speaking about Washington in 1988: People back home have been kind enough to let me spend the last thirty years here.
JR, speaking in 1978: How do you like [Pam and Bobby’s] marriage?
Digger: I don’t like it.
JR: Well that’s the first thing you and I have agreed on in twenty years!
Cliff: My daddy used to say it’s a gift from Providence when two powerful men share the same enemy.
Jamie Ewing Date of Birth: 12/04/58
Jack on Jamie: I always thought she looked like Daddy.
Joseph Pearce (neé Lombardi) on Nicholas Pearce (neé Joey Lombardi): He was my firstborn son.
John Cate on Nicholas: I think originally he must have come from Philadelphia or New York.
Gary: Pierce Lawton’s from the one of the biggest financial families on the East Coast.
Miss Ellie: These boys of mine, you should have seen them when they were growing up.
Miss Ellie: I used to want to put bricks on the boys’ heads to keep them from getting bigger. I never really wanted them to grow up.
Miss Ellie to Bobby: I used to think only JR was the true Ewing, that you and Gary were all Southworth.
Bobby: Mama, she always, always liked Gary the best. “A Southworth among Ewings,” she used to call him.
Miss Ellie: Gary was always the cowboy among my sons. He really loved this ranch.
Abby to JR: Gary’s fine. He just shouldn’t have had a brother like you.
Christopher on Gary: He and Uncle JR never got along good, did they?
Bobby: They never saw eye to eye on a lot of things.
Gary on JR: I spent my whole life hating the man.
Gary: Every step, backwards or forwards, I ever took in my life was because of JR.
Gary: You're okay, Bobby. You're probably the only one of us who is. One of these days you're gonna have to tell me how you managed to pull it off.
JR: Bobby always was the understanding one.
JR to Bobby: You were always the one with the conscience.
JR to Bobby: You were always the better man and predictable to a T.
Bobby: I was never a knight in shining armour. I never tried to be, I never wanted to be.
Cliff on Bobby: He always was a hothead.
JR on Bobby: Always did get a little hot under the collar when he didn’t get his way.
Wes Parmalee, as Jock, to Bobby: You always did have a terrible fierce temper.
Judith Ryland to Harris: Even as a little boy, your temper always got the best of you.
Ray: Miss Ellie’s a strong woman. She’s always been able to handle things.
Bobby: No lady was ever more competent than my mama.
Bobby: Ellie, my beautiful mama, I can’t begin to count the gifts you’ve filled my life with. One more precious than the next - a gold pocket watch which was your father’s and his father’s before. I treasured it always. It made me feel connected to past I only knew through your stories. What proud stories they were.
Miss Ellie: Bobby was given everything that JR had to fight for and Gary didn’t care about.
Mark Graison: All my life I’ve had everything, most of which I didn’t want or care about.
Mark: When I was a kid, I used to love huge toys.
Bobby: One birthday, I came home and there was a merry-go-round in the front yard. Not one of those dinky little things you find in front of a supermarket, but an honest to God merry-go-round, with music and mirrors and hand-carved horses. He [Jock] would give me anything if I asked for it.
Miss Ellie on Bobby: We all spoiled him.
Jock: I spoiled Bobby rotten. He turned out to be the best of lot.
Bobby, speaking in 1989: I think back on how my daddy raised me and I try and use that as some kind of role model. I just hope I’m not spoiling Christopher the way that my daddy did me.
Christopher, mucking out a stable in 1989: Why are you making me do it?
Bobby: Same reason my daddy made me do it.
Christopher: And what was that?
Bobby: He told me that we had just about everything that anybody could want, but we wouldn’t appreciate any of it unless we worked for it.
Christopher to Bobby: You were lucky to have someone like Jock as a father.
Miss Ellie on Bobby: This treehouse, Jock built it for him. Whenever he wanted time off from his chores, he used to be here. He'd swim in that pond. It's not very deep. He always called it his very own lake. Of all the places in Southfork where he used to play, this was his favourite. Gary used to come out here. The two of them would spend hours and hours doing ... I don't know what.
Clayton: Not JR?
Miss Ellie: JR always seemed to care more about the oil business. He was always trying to get to go out to work with Jock. Or he'd be out in the oil fields with him. When the other boys were playing, JR was learning from Jock.
Gary to his eight-year-old twins in 1992: What a neat fort! Your uncle and I used to make one of these all the time when we were kids.
Gary, speaking in 1985: I found a drill bit, an old one, like from one of Daddy’s early strikes. It reminds me of the time when I was a kid and we all … ah, well.
Pam on Bobby and Jock: You two always had a special relationship.
Bobby: I guess so. Mama, she always liked Gary the best so …
Pam: That left JR.
Miss Ellie on JR: I think he would have traded everything if he'd been the one that Jock built this treehouse for.
Clayton: It’s difficult to see JR in that light. Of course, I never knew him when he was a boy.
Miss Ellie: I think you might have liked him more if you’d known him then.
JR to Jock: You've been fighting Bobby's battles all his life.
Miss Ellie: Bobby was always Jock's favourite. If ever there was a fair-haired son, Bobby was it for Jock. JR always knew that Jock loved Bobby the best and it hurt him. He could never come to grips with the fact that he wasn't Jock's favourite.
Christopher: Did you and Grandpa spend a lot of time together?
Bobby: Some. He was pretty busy with Ewing Oil by then.
Bobby on Jock: You know what gave me the most pleasure? Just spending the day with him — we’d go to the office or out in the oil field — just to be with him.
Bobby on Jock: I remember when he used to take me out in the field when I was a boy. I never saw a man more excited in my life.
JR: I was with him once when he bought in a gusher. I never heard a man yell so loud. I can still hear the joy in his voice.
John Ross: You really worked in the fields?
JR: Yeah, side by side with my daddy.
Miss Ellie: My boys have always had a need to prove themselves to their father.
Bobby: I was raised by a strong mother and a very tough father.
Bobby on Jock: I've never been afraid of that man in my life.
Bobby to Christopher: Your granddaddy Jock was the most intimidating man I think I ever met. We locked horns on just about everything.
JR, speaking to John Ross in 2012: I’m throwing you in the deep end, just like my daddy did to me.
Alan Beam to JR: You had to fight for your place in your family.
JR on Ewing Oil: The company I’ve had to fight for all my life.
Bobby on Jock: He sure made fighters out of us.
Wes Parmalee, as Jock, to JR and Bobby: I’m the one who taught you boys how to fight.
Bobby: You and I have spent our entire lives trying to win Daddy’s approval by fighting with one another, neither one of us giving up till we were sure we were his favourite, right?
JR: That’s for damn sure.
John Ross, speaking to Christopher in 2012: Can you imagine what Ewing Oil would have been today if our fathers had been allies instead of enemies?
Elena Ramos: Bigger than Exxon.
John Ross: It didn’t have to be this way. Jock, he set them against each other.
Bobby: I grew up in a family where stabbing everybody in the back was encouraged.
Elena: Screwing each other over is part of the Ewing family tradition.
JR: Bobby, I thought you learned something when you were a young boy — never cross Daddy when it comes to business. Never.
Bobby: I’ve never picked my battles in life by fearing for the worst.
Cliff: The main reason I dislike the Ewings so much is that they’ve always been this big family that stood together. I mean, no matter what fighting they did amongst themselves, they always stood together against the outsiders.
Miss Ellie: I always thought that no matter what happened, I’d always stand by my family. It was always that way with the Ewings. It was always the family against all outsiders. We always stuck up for each other, even when we knew we were wrong.
Bobby: JR made Daddy his obsession.
JR on Jock: I worshipped that man. I tried to follow in his footsteps. Of course, I got a little wild sometimes, but Daddy was no saint either, you know that.
Miss Ellie: Jock was a great man, but only human. Jock may have done things in his life that he lived to regret, but he’d never lie about it. Jock didn’t lie, ever. Not ever.
JR: I worked for a number of years with Daddy side by side when he was running Ewing Oil.
JR to Jock on the three Bs: Booty, booze and broads — first thing you told me a good lobbyist likes.
JR: First thing my dad taught me was the only way to a politician's heart … [opens a briefcase full of cash].
Bobby to JR: You’ve always told me every man has his price.
Mr Hopper, realtor: Anything can be had for the right price.
JR: That’s the motto I’ve been living with all my life.
JR: Senator, we’ve had a very friendly relationship in the past.
Senator Harbin: I know that and I’ve treasured our relationship.
JR: And our campaign contributions.
Senator O’Dell: The Ewings have always come through for me when I came through for them.
Jock to Senator "Wild Bill" Orloff: Used to be we could count on you to keep things locked up forever. You used your muscle for us.
Jenna to Bobby: I know how important the truth’s been to you all your life.
Bobby: Everything I've done in my life I've done because I've thought it was right and I've never run out on anything.
JR: Bob, you’ve never gone back on a deal.
Bobby: Throughout my life, it’s pretty much been easy for me to do good because I could always count on JR to do bad. A lot of times, those bad things were necessary. Maybe more often than I care to admit.
Bobby: Things with JR were almost never as they appeared to be.
JR: I’ve never turned my back on a fight in my life.
Karen: Sid, you've never run from anything in your life.
Ruth Sumner Galveston: You never were a coward, Gregory.
Claudia: You were always self-absorbed, Greg. Not everybody has an ulterior motive.
Greg: Everybody in our family always did.
Val: How long you been running?
Ben Gibson: It seems like all my life.
Gary: I've been running all my life.
JR: I've been taking chances all my life.
Bobby on JR: He always was one for taking chances. That’s what made Ewing Oil what is today.
Sid: Abby's always been a little bit wild, but she's never done any harm.
Lilimae on Abby: She has never done an unselfish thing in her life.
Olivia: Were you ever a tomboy?
Abby: I don't think so.
Abby: I practically grew up in a garage.
Abby: Sid was always so sweet, so strong. When I was a kid, he always knew when I needed him and he was always there.
Abby: I loved my brother.
Abby on Sid: I never [listened to him].
Abby: I have never been interested in other people’s opinions about my life.
Jill Bennett to Abby: I bet you’ve spent your whole life figuring out how to trick men.
Bobby on Naldo Marchetta: He spent his entire life using women.
Bobby on Naldo: This is a guy who has lived off of one con or another, one woman or another, his entire life.
Bobby on Naldo: He’s supported himself his entire life convincing people that he’s sincere.
Naldo: I have spent my life, my entire life, doing things for which I felt ashamed afterwards.
Gary: All my life, my father made me feel worthless.
Amanda Ryan to Gary: When you were growing up, you were the type of kid who was always getting into trouble. As far as your parents were concerned, you couldn’t do anything right so you’ve either been ticked off or trying too hard ever since.
Miss Ellie on Jock: He was always hard on Gary. Too hard.
Miss Ellie: Gary was a lot like my daddy, always in trouble with Jock.
Jock: I loved Gary.
Miss Ellie: But you never cared about him. You never took the time to find out about him.
Jock on Gary: Maybe I could’ve done better by him, but I didn’t know how.
Gary: All my life, every time I've tangled with JR, I've lost.
JR to Gary: We’ve been head to head and I always come up on top.
Gary: I've never beaten JR at anything in my life.
JR: Gary was always the Ewing with the integrity.
Bobby: That’s why Daddy turned away from Gary — the Ewings must succeed, and Gary didn’t care about that. But dammit, JR and I do.
Ray: Most of my life, I never thought of myself as a Ewing.
Ray: When I was growing up, I was Amos Krebbs’ kid, the town drunk’s son.
Lil Trotter on Ray: He sure didn’t get two licks of help from that ne’er-do-well father of his.
Lil on Ray and Amos: I know you two weren’t especially close.
Ray: I’ve always taken care of my own life.
Ray: For most of my life, I've been kind of a loner.
Ray: I’m talking about spending your whole life looking over your shoulder.
Ray: I never had a home much or anything. I was just this skinny, useless kid, tired of drifting, running from the law, juvenile authorities.
Ray: Mama died. Showed up at Southfork one day. No place else to go, just the clothes on my back and a note from my mama to Jock Ewing asking him to help me out.
Ray on Southfork: When I was fifteen years old, my mama shipped me down here just before she died and Jock Ewing took me in, just like he would any other stray.
Jock to Ray: You were the skinniest kid of fifteen that I ever saw in my life.
Ray: Old Jock gave me a job right on the spot. He didn’t have to take me in, but he did.
Jock to Ray: No doubt about my hiring you. I knew you’d stick around and work your tail off. I was glad to have you.
Ray on Southfork: I was overpowered by some of this when I first got here.
Ray on Southfork: I remember when I first came out here, I thought this place was bigger than the whole state of Kansas.
Bobby: I know it must have been kind of scary for you because you couldn’t even ride a horse then.
Ray on branding cattle: One of the first things old Jock had me do when I landed on Southfork.
Rodeo announcer on Ray: We've been watching him ride since he was fifteen years old.
Jenna to Ray: You were raised around cowboys and horses.
Ray: I can remember looking over at Southfork and wondering what it would be like to be part of a real family.
Ray: I always wanted to see how it feels to live at Southfork.
Ray on Southfork: I’ve always loved that ranch, been sort of a home for me.
JR on Ray: He wouldn’t walk into this house without first asking permission.
Ray: I didn’t eat dinner at Southfork when Jock was alive.
Ray on Southfork: I never have felt right there.
Miss Ellie: Ray’s always had a problem with his self-esteem. He’s never been able to realise what a good man he is.
Ray: I know Jock’s cared about me for a long time, even before he knew I was his son.
Ray to Amos: Jock Ewing has been more of a father to me than you have ever been.
Bobby, speaking about Jock in 1979: You know how he feels about Ray, like he is one of the family.
JR: Yeah. Never could figure that one out.
Jock on Ray being his son: I don’t know why in the world I never realised it.
Ray on Jock: With his help, I pulled myself up and I made something out of my life.
Donna: What was Jock like then?
Ray: Jock was a great man. He was decent, kind. Sure did right by me.
Donna: Practically perfect.
Ray: No, not perfect. He was the best man I ever knew.
Ray on Jock: How I used to look up to him when I was a kid, how I idolised him. I’d goof something up, though, and he’d chew me up one side and down the other. And I thought, “How could somebody I idolise act like that?” Now I know he was concerned about me, teaching me. He knew when to be firm, and when to be affectionate. He was all those things, but mostly I guess I thought he was almost perfect.
Ray on Jock: You never loved him.
JR: Didn’t I?
Ray: Not the way I did. You’re a taker. You don’t have any love to give. I worshipped that man. I really loved him.
Ray: Never been able to talk to anybody, except for Jock.
Bobby to Miss Ellie: Ever since I was a little boy, I could only speak to two people — you and Gary.
Bobby on Gary: I never really knew him.
Bobby to Gary: You were always the one brother I could count on.
Gary: Bobby is the only one who’s ever had my back in this family.
Gary to Bobby: You were the only one that took me seriously, you and Mama. Yeah, I’d tell you about growing things and what to look for in fine cattle.
Bobby: And about your drawings, your wanting to paint. You never made me feel like a little brother.
Gary: All my life, the only time I ever felt happy was working the ranch. I don't know, I can't explain it. It's something about the rhythm of it, the seasons, I don't know, but it's in me. It's part of me. I had to get away from my family, but I always thought I’d like to live like this again.
Gary: I always wanted to raise horses, quarter horses.
Gary: I loved the ranch, but hated being there. Hated the way they treated me.
Gary: I never hated Dallas, just everything else that came with it.
Gary: I never could figure out the oil business.
JR: I wasn’t cut out to punch cattle, that’s for sure.
Bobby to JR: You never gave a damn about this ranch.
Clayton: I figure JR never helped with the round up [on Southfork]?
Sue Ellen: No, he was always busy trying to prove to his daddy that he could run Ewing Oil.
Bobby: When I was a kid, I used to think I’d never want to run Ewing Oil, thought there’d be too much work. I used to look down my nose at the whole operation, the wheeling and dealing. I could never understand what Daddy and JR found so exciting about it.
Gary on oilmen: In Texas, I was used to seeing them all grimy in fields. And in my living room. And in my dreams.
JR: When Gary was sixteen, he somehow got into his head that he wanted a motorcycle. Now our family spoiled us boys rotten, but on this issue my daddy put his foot down. He said, “You want a motorcycle, you’re going to have to earn it.” And my God, he did — before dawn, up every day mucking out the stables, pitching hay, working on the rigs in the blazing sun. He just never missed one single day. Come September, my daddy took him down to the showroom, gave him a slap on the back and a blank cheque. And of course, Gary had read all the brochures and motorcycle magazines. He knew exactly what he wanted. He signed the cheque, revved that old motorcycle up ... and drove straight through that pate glass window.
Richard Avery: When I was fifteen, my brother Philip was killed in a motorcycle accident. I don’t think a day goes by when I don’t think about him. I remember something we did together or something he said and I imagine what our lives would be like if he was still here. And sometimes I think maybe at the times when I’m thinking about him that he is here, I feel his presence and somehow I think he knows I still love him.
Karen: My mother used to cry her heart out whenever anyone died. It didn’t matter who it was — the butcher, a third cousin, anyone. The day her mother died, I went over to her house and she was sitting there, crying, just like she cried for the butcher and I was so angry at her. I mean, I thought it was wrong, it’s not enough, it was your own mother this time. She had every right to act any way she wanted to act.
Abby: My Great Aunt Sarah never shed a tear when her husband died. For six months she carried on as though nothing had happened and then all of a sudden, one day, everything caught up with her. She started to cry and never left her house again.
James from London
International Treasure
1959
Lilimae: When I was growing up at home, there was a pair of identical twins, Candy and Mandy Snopes, and they always dressed alike. Years later when I was passing through, I saw them again. Well, they must have been in their thirties by then and there they were, walking down Main Street hand in hand, dressed in identical little polky-dot dresses.
Val, speaking to Lynette, a waitress, in 1991: That expression you just used, “Makes no never mind” — I haven’t heard that since I visited some of my mama’s people in Muleshoe.
Val to Lynette: My own mother, God bless her, she is the brightest person in the world, but she couldn’t read until she was older than you are now [late-twenties]. She just got tired of embarrassing herself and tired of feeling ashamed. So, at age thirty, she learned.
Greg: When I was in high school, I used to work for a friend of Mack’s father. He used to frame houses. I got to be pretty good at it.
Barbara, a nanny: I didn’t know you were a carpenter.
Greg: Oh yeah, I’ve been just about everything. You name it, I’ve done it.
Greg: I did my time at the White Castle. People came from miles around to watch me work.
Abby: That explains your expertise with the ground chuck.
Peter Hollister: My mother was a dancer, but [Paul Galveston] convinced her to quit and become his secretary.
Sylvia Lean, Peter’s pretend mother, on Paul: He was a scoundrel and I trusted him.
Sylvia on Paul: He was a scrapper, always looking for a fight. When he wanted something, he never rested until he got it. He was the same way with people, very charming when he wanted something or someone. He was a rugged-looking guy with a glint in his eye. We fought all the time, but in the end, he always got what he wanted.
Greg on Paul: Pop did get around, you know.
Sylvia, speaking in 1986: How can I remember every little detail — the exact date that Paul Galveston asked me to marry him?
Sylvia: I would have made one terrific wife, but I screwed up. Never give a man what he wants until you get that ring.
Mavis Anderson, mid-story: Actually, it was Ellie who was the matchmaker because she’d insisted that I come out to this party at Southfork and I said no, that I didn’t want to come there alone. I’d just been through a rather painful divorce.
Punk: I’d already told Jock that I’d show up. Of course, I didn’t really want to start dating after my divorce and I just told him, I said, “Forget about finding an extra lady for me.” He said, “OK.”
Miss Ellie: Well, he lied.
Punk: Jock lied? All this time I just thought it was an accident!
Miss Ellie: No, he lied but I put him up to it. I thought you and Mavis were so right for each other and I didn’t want to scare you off. Mavis was my best friend and I thought she deserved a wonderful man.
Miss Ellie: Remember that hunting preserve in Cato Lake, on the Louisiana side? You used to hunt there a lot when the boys were small.
Jock: A place called Landowne. Beautiful country. You could bag a dozen birds, just like that.
JR, speaking about Landowne in 1979: I think it's been nearly twenty years since we hunted down here.
JR: What was the name of that place up on the Arkansas/Louisiana border — one of those places Daddy used to take us?
Bobby: Haleyville.
JR: Real good hunting around there.
Bobby: Boy, that was out in the middle of nowhere.
JR: That’s why the hunting was so good.
Bobby: What I liked best was when we’d go salmon fishing in Alaska.
John Ross: Grandpa used to do everything with you, didn’t he?
JR: Yeah, he sure did.
Christopher: What about Uncle Ray — did he go with you?
Bobby: Oh sure, when we were all in high school together, except for JR, of course. He was a lot older.
JR: I tell you, Daddy and the three of us used to have some good old times, didn’t we?
Lucy: What about Uncle Gary, huh?
JR: Gary wasn’t into things like that. I remember the first time he had to bait his own hook he almost fainted! He was different from the rest of us. For one thing, he used to like to write poetry. Now can you imagine a real man who would rather write poetry than go hunting? Not me!
Christopher on Gary: He and Uncle JR never got along good, did they?
Bobby: They never saw eye to eye on a lot of things.
Gary on a ranch of his own: Something I always wanted.
Gary: I always pictured myself having a working ranch, raising a family, making toys for my children. Even when I was a little bitty kid, I imagined myself sitting at the fireplace, a couple of dogs by my side and children playing around me, and my wife …
Val: Just darning your socks, huh?
Gary: Yeah well, I was kind of young.
Scotty Demerest, attorney: You were raised on a ranch. You must have fired a gun.
Jenna: I’ve shot a rifle and I’ve shot shotguns.
Bobby: There’s nothing wrong with guns. I grew up around guns.
JR to Bobby: Remember that time when you got grounded for “borrowing” Daddy’s favourite shotgun? You swore up and down it wasn’t you, but Daddy said there was no point in lying because he found those extra shells in your room. Well, we both know it was me that planted those shells.
Bobby to JR: You taught me how to use these guns [a hunting rifle, an over and under shotgun] when we were boys. I never thanked you for that. There were lots of things you taught me throughout my life I never thanked you for.
Bobby to JR: I always loved you.
JR to Bobby: I hope in the quiet place in your heart where the truth lives you know that my jealousy, as powerful as it was, was nothing compared to my love for you.
JR: Bobby’s the only [brother] that mattered to me.
Bobby to JR: I think we were the closest then before things changed, and circumstances, more times than not, put us on opposite sides of Ewing Oil.
Bobby: I was butting heads with JR long before I came to Ewing Oil.
JR to Bobby: All the fights, all the times butting heads with one another — I’m sorry we were never closer.
Lucy: JR had always, always tried to keep my daddy and Bobby from getting too close to Grandpa.
Miss Ellie on JR and Bobby: They’ve always been opposites, ever since they were children.
Bobby, speaking about a business deal in 1982: I can’t go ahead without you and you know it.
JR: Seems to be the story of your life.
Bobby: You should have seen your Uncle JR when we were growing up.
Christopher: Why — did he pick on you and tease you and stuff?
Bobby: Well, he tried.
Bobby to Christopher in 1989: I see you found my old dartboard. When I was your age, I had your Uncle JR’s picture on it.
Karen: My mother used to say, “It’s all right to hate your brother from time to time as long as you love him with all your heart.”
Joe Cooper, Karen’s brother: You are just as stubborn as ever.
Karen: What are you talking about - stubborn? I’ve always been a pushover. I’m the peacemaker in the family.
Karen, speaking about her son Michael in 1991: I was in his office not more than two minutes when you should have heard what was falling out of my mouth — from the glare on his computer screen to the cost of his jacket. If I were his age and I had a mother like that, I’d go crazy. I did have a mother like that.
Mack, looking at his daughter Paige in 1989: Did you ever wear a dress like that going to your father’s house on a date?
Karen: My father would have grounded me for a year!
Karen: I used to hate it when my father made me dress up for home movies.
Karen: I used to [watch one movie after another] in New York all the time.
Sue Ellen: Maybe I saw too many Doris Day movies when I was growing up. She always seemed to know what to do in a romance.
Jenna: She had a way of making things look easy.
Sue Ellen: I’ve always been a romantic dreamer, sure that some man would always come around and sweep me off my feet.
Judith Ryland: I have always been a proponent of reciprocity in all my relationships.
Judith: I’ve always had an eye toward public service.
Karen: My instincts have always been perfectly reliable.
Lilimae: When I was growing up at home, there was a pair of identical twins, Candy and Mandy Snopes, and they always dressed alike. Years later when I was passing through, I saw them again. Well, they must have been in their thirties by then and there they were, walking down Main Street hand in hand, dressed in identical little polky-dot dresses.
Val, speaking to Lynette, a waitress, in 1991: That expression you just used, “Makes no never mind” — I haven’t heard that since I visited some of my mama’s people in Muleshoe.
Val to Lynette: My own mother, God bless her, she is the brightest person in the world, but she couldn’t read until she was older than you are now [late-twenties]. She just got tired of embarrassing herself and tired of feeling ashamed. So, at age thirty, she learned.
Greg: When I was in high school, I used to work for a friend of Mack’s father. He used to frame houses. I got to be pretty good at it.
Barbara, a nanny: I didn’t know you were a carpenter.
Greg: Oh yeah, I’ve been just about everything. You name it, I’ve done it.
Greg: I did my time at the White Castle. People came from miles around to watch me work.
Abby: That explains your expertise with the ground chuck.
Peter Hollister: My mother was a dancer, but [Paul Galveston] convinced her to quit and become his secretary.
Sylvia Lean, Peter’s pretend mother, on Paul: He was a scoundrel and I trusted him.
Sylvia on Paul: He was a scrapper, always looking for a fight. When he wanted something, he never rested until he got it. He was the same way with people, very charming when he wanted something or someone. He was a rugged-looking guy with a glint in his eye. We fought all the time, but in the end, he always got what he wanted.
Greg on Paul: Pop did get around, you know.
Sylvia, speaking in 1986: How can I remember every little detail — the exact date that Paul Galveston asked me to marry him?
Sylvia: I would have made one terrific wife, but I screwed up. Never give a man what he wants until you get that ring.
Mavis Anderson, mid-story: Actually, it was Ellie who was the matchmaker because she’d insisted that I come out to this party at Southfork and I said no, that I didn’t want to come there alone. I’d just been through a rather painful divorce.
Punk: I’d already told Jock that I’d show up. Of course, I didn’t really want to start dating after my divorce and I just told him, I said, “Forget about finding an extra lady for me.” He said, “OK.”
Miss Ellie: Well, he lied.
Punk: Jock lied? All this time I just thought it was an accident!
Miss Ellie: No, he lied but I put him up to it. I thought you and Mavis were so right for each other and I didn’t want to scare you off. Mavis was my best friend and I thought she deserved a wonderful man.
Miss Ellie: Remember that hunting preserve in Cato Lake, on the Louisiana side? You used to hunt there a lot when the boys were small.
Jock: A place called Landowne. Beautiful country. You could bag a dozen birds, just like that.
JR, speaking about Landowne in 1979: I think it's been nearly twenty years since we hunted down here.
JR: What was the name of that place up on the Arkansas/Louisiana border — one of those places Daddy used to take us?
Bobby: Haleyville.
JR: Real good hunting around there.
Bobby: Boy, that was out in the middle of nowhere.
JR: That’s why the hunting was so good.
Bobby: What I liked best was when we’d go salmon fishing in Alaska.
John Ross: Grandpa used to do everything with you, didn’t he?
JR: Yeah, he sure did.
Christopher: What about Uncle Ray — did he go with you?
Bobby: Oh sure, when we were all in high school together, except for JR, of course. He was a lot older.
JR: I tell you, Daddy and the three of us used to have some good old times, didn’t we?
Lucy: What about Uncle Gary, huh?
JR: Gary wasn’t into things like that. I remember the first time he had to bait his own hook he almost fainted! He was different from the rest of us. For one thing, he used to like to write poetry. Now can you imagine a real man who would rather write poetry than go hunting? Not me!
Christopher on Gary: He and Uncle JR never got along good, did they?
Bobby: They never saw eye to eye on a lot of things.
Gary on a ranch of his own: Something I always wanted.
Gary: I always pictured myself having a working ranch, raising a family, making toys for my children. Even when I was a little bitty kid, I imagined myself sitting at the fireplace, a couple of dogs by my side and children playing around me, and my wife …
Val: Just darning your socks, huh?
Gary: Yeah well, I was kind of young.
Scotty Demerest, attorney: You were raised on a ranch. You must have fired a gun.
Jenna: I’ve shot a rifle and I’ve shot shotguns.
Bobby: There’s nothing wrong with guns. I grew up around guns.
JR to Bobby: Remember that time when you got grounded for “borrowing” Daddy’s favourite shotgun? You swore up and down it wasn’t you, but Daddy said there was no point in lying because he found those extra shells in your room. Well, we both know it was me that planted those shells.
Bobby to JR: You taught me how to use these guns [a hunting rifle, an over and under shotgun] when we were boys. I never thanked you for that. There were lots of things you taught me throughout my life I never thanked you for.
Bobby to JR: I always loved you.
JR to Bobby: I hope in the quiet place in your heart where the truth lives you know that my jealousy, as powerful as it was, was nothing compared to my love for you.
JR: Bobby’s the only [brother] that mattered to me.
Bobby to JR: I think we were the closest then before things changed, and circumstances, more times than not, put us on opposite sides of Ewing Oil.
Bobby: I was butting heads with JR long before I came to Ewing Oil.
JR to Bobby: All the fights, all the times butting heads with one another — I’m sorry we were never closer.
Lucy: JR had always, always tried to keep my daddy and Bobby from getting too close to Grandpa.
Miss Ellie on JR and Bobby: They’ve always been opposites, ever since they were children.
Bobby, speaking about a business deal in 1982: I can’t go ahead without you and you know it.
JR: Seems to be the story of your life.
Bobby: You should have seen your Uncle JR when we were growing up.
Christopher: Why — did he pick on you and tease you and stuff?
Bobby: Well, he tried.
Bobby to Christopher in 1989: I see you found my old dartboard. When I was your age, I had your Uncle JR’s picture on it.
Karen: My mother used to say, “It’s all right to hate your brother from time to time as long as you love him with all your heart.”
Joe Cooper, Karen’s brother: You are just as stubborn as ever.
Karen: What are you talking about - stubborn? I’ve always been a pushover. I’m the peacemaker in the family.
Karen, speaking about her son Michael in 1991: I was in his office not more than two minutes when you should have heard what was falling out of my mouth — from the glare on his computer screen to the cost of his jacket. If I were his age and I had a mother like that, I’d go crazy. I did have a mother like that.
Mack, looking at his daughter Paige in 1989: Did you ever wear a dress like that going to your father’s house on a date?
Karen: My father would have grounded me for a year!
Karen: I used to hate it when my father made me dress up for home movies.
Karen: I used to [watch one movie after another] in New York all the time.
Sue Ellen: Maybe I saw too many Doris Day movies when I was growing up. She always seemed to know what to do in a romance.
Jenna: She had a way of making things look easy.
Sue Ellen: I’ve always been a romantic dreamer, sure that some man would always come around and sweep me off my feet.
Judith Ryland: I have always been a proponent of reciprocity in all my relationships.
Judith: I’ve always had an eye toward public service.
Karen: My instincts have always been perfectly reliable.
James from London
International Treasure
1960
JR, speaking about his son James in 1990: I don’t want to see him suffer all the bruises and knocks I got when I was a kid his age [twenty-one].
Patricia to Sue Ellen: I stayed with your father though he had far less to offer than JR.
Sue Ellen on her father: He left us right after Kristin was born.
Kristin Marie Shepard, birthplace: New Mexico.
Sue Ellen: When I was a little girl, I used to dream about going to the Far East.
JR: When I was in the service, I spent a lot of time in Japan.
JR: I never killed anybody, not even during the war.
Richard Avery, speaking in 1980: Haven't had mousse this good since I was in the army.
Carl Berman on Richard: Was he in the service?
Karen: The coastguard, back east.
Sid: You remember Mom's apple pie, Abby? Burnt.
Abby: Exactly.
Mack: Every meal my mother ever made — pasta salad.
Michael Fairgate: Even breakfast?
Mack: Yeah. Ever hear of a pasta omelette?
Karen on flan: Of course, in Philadelphia when we discovered this, it was simply “caramel custard”. There was that instant custard. What was it, that mix? It was called Junket, I think.
Jenna on baking: Learned from my father. This is his famous split top wheat bread. Most girls learn from their mothers, I guess. Mine couldn’t cook a thing. She never did teach me anything.
Bobby to Miss Ellie: I remember you once told me that family is like baking a cake from scratch — real messy.
Donna: When things used to bother me, I would run right to the refrigerator and start eating. I was a fat little kid till I realised that if you just talked to somebody, it meant I wouldn't have to stuff my face.
Greg on Anne Matheson: I bet her parents never let her have a lollipop.
JR: Never could understand what those vegetarians were about anyhow.
Mack: Oatmeal is oatmeal. I never liked it.
Ben Gibson: I always hated seafood.
Cliff: I happen to like Chinese food because when I was very small, Chinese food was a treat.
Lilimae to Val: Black bottom pie used to be your favourite. It always used to cheer you up.
Val: I always wanted to know how to make paella.
Val: I got no education at all to speak of.
Richard on Val: Didn't even graduate from high school.
Bess Riker on Val: A ninth-grade dropout.
Clay McKinney, screenwriter, speaking in 1997: What I want to know is why you didn’t find me first?
Val: Gary and I met when we were kids in Texas, probably while you were still in diapers.
Lucy on Gary: Once upon a time, he went off and got this lovely fifteen year old girl pregnant — my mommy.
Sid: You must have been babies.
Val: I was fifteen, Gary was seventeen.
Gary on Val: I was fifteen when I met her. When she smiles or turns her head a certain way, I get a glimpse of exactly the way she used to be.
Val: I was fifteen years old, fresh out from Tennessee, waitressing at this little diner just outside of Fort Worth, Texas, at the intersection of two highways.
Lucy to Val: But you said you were sixteen to get the job.
Val: Most of the customers were truck drivers and I was used to getting teased by them, but this one night, we were real busy. Mary Jo, the other waitress, had called in sick, and I was just trying my very best to keep on top of it. Everything backfired. First, one table started complaining, then another and another and before I knew it, I was right in the middle of it all, in tears, when this blond god got up from the counter and just started helping me. He didn’t say a word to me, he just smiled at me, and I got this real flutter feeling in my tummy, and right away I knew everything was gonna be all right. It was Gary.
Val on Gary: I think I fell in love with him that very minute.
Kate Whittaker: How did you and Gary know that you were in love? Was it right away?
Val: Yep, the very first time we saw each other. Yeah, it was right away.
Val to Gary: You were the prettiest man I ever saw.
Karen: Val’s been in love with Gary since she was fifteen years-old.
Lilimae: Val has given her whole life to Gary Ewing.
Val: All I've ever really wanted to do is what's best for Gary.
Gary on Val: She spent half her life investing in a dream — me. Her dream of me.
Val, speaking about Gary in 1982: I see him the same way I’ve seen him since I was fifteen years-old.
Val to Gary: I have spent my whole adult life living for you, ever since I was fifteen years-old.
Gary: Trust me.
Val: I always have.
Val on Gary: He made me feel like a lady. He was there when I got off work to walk me home. “Miss Valene,” he said, “I have the urge to ask you to marry me.” I knew it was just flirting, but it was good flirting.
Lucy: What did you say?
Val: I didn’t know what to say, but he took that as a yes.
Gary: You remember when your mother found us in the garage?
Val: Please don’t remind me. What was it you said — we were just looking for what?
Gary: I said we were looking for a pencil sharpener. It was the only thing I could think of. Under the circumstances, I considered it a brilliant ad-lib, especially as you didn’t come up with anything.
Val: And then Mama said, “You'd have better luck finding it, sweetpea, if you turn the light on.”
Val on Gary: He never even touched me. He never even hardly kissed me till after. It was a good thing too, because I would have been scared. I mean, I was always a good girl. Three days later, we got married.
Lilimae: My daughter married into the Ewings of Dallas. We were just down-home folk before that.
Val on her and Gary: We were so young, sometimes I wonder how we ever survived.
Gary on Val: She’s always been a little high-strung.
Val to Gary: It’s always just been the two of us together. We only work together.
Gary to Val: I have never loved anyone the way I’ve loved you.
Val: That’s when I was the happiest — fresh out from Tennessee with Gary at the very beginning.
Lilimae: I never married Jonathan J Rush. We fell in love. I settled down. I even joined his congregation.
Jonathan J Rush to Lilimae: How spirited you were. I never knew another woman like you.
Lilimae, describing herself: She really loved people — too much. She trusted them too much and she got hurt a lot, and she was a beautiful dancer, graceful as a leaf on the wind.
Ben: I always had plans on being an important, sophisticated man of the world. I guess it was my small-town upbringing that I was trying to escape. While I was growing up, it was never good enough.
LeeAnn De La Vega: I was seventeen years-old, all of a sudden at the University of Texas, the biggest place I’d ever seen. I’d never even been to a dance back home.
Michelle Stevens: No wonder you were scared.
LeeAnn: It took a while, but I got used to it. I just kind of lost myself in my books and then I got a job in a little restaurant to help pay the bills.
Michelle: And that’s where you met him?
LeeAnn: Later. It was towards the end of the first year. I’d never met anyone quite like him. He was mighty impressive, Mr JR Ewing — a real high-stepping senior, heir to Ewing Oil. He was something.
Michelle: And you started dating him?
LeeAnn: After a while. I said no for a long time. Well, there were lots of girls there.
JR: I can’t deny there have been a lot of women in my life.
Kimberly Cryder: You’re practically a legend amongst the women of Dallas. I wonder if all the wonderful things I’ve heard about you could possibly be true?
JR: Oh, I was a pretty fair long distance runner in my time.
JR: I’ve found that power and money are a mighty aphrodisiac to a lot of women.
An extract from Capricorn Crude, Val’s novel based on life with the Ewings: “Though still seething with anger, she found herself caught up by his passion. His hands were like steel, pressing her against him. His kiss was molten fire. His touch made her shiver. Her desire consumed her. She did not think; she yielded. By then, nothing mattered but being reborn in his touch and as his lips followed the trail of his fingers, she heard her own voice crying out in wild, passionate, shameless love. His eyes opened wide. ‘Alright,’ she sobbed. ‘I love you. There, I’ve said it.’ He laughed and grabbed her as she tried to turn away.”
Kimberly: I’ve always been attracted to men of strength, power — men who do what they have to do to get what they want.
JR: I’ve always been attracted to women who know what they want and go after it.
Karen: There’s something I’ve always loved about southern men.
JR: What’s that?
Karen: They never forget what it means to be a man.
JR: Or how to appreciate a really beautiful woman.
Lee Ann: I couldn’t quite figure out why he kept coming after me.
Michelle: JR mostly wants what he can’t have.
LeeAnn: That might have been it. He finally wore me down. We went out and it was wonderful. Well, I’d never been to the kind of places that he took me. He knew everyone.
Cliff: Wally Hampton and JR not only went to the same university, but they were in the same fraternity.
JR on Lila Cummings: Boy, I really cared for that girl back in college.
Lila, speaking to JR in 1985: You’re still as big a liar as you ever were.
Ray on JR: I never knew a man in my life who could lie so well.
Bobby: JR always liked that saying of Mark Twain’s, “A lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth can put on its pants.”
LeeAnn on JR: Just being with him made me feel kind of special. I forgot all the good things my daddy drummed into me and one day I realised I was pregnant.
Michelle: You told him, didn’t you?
LeeAnn: Of course. I thought he’d be happy. I thought we’d get married and everything would be all right. What he did was call me everything but the village whore. He said he didn’t think that the baby was his and he wasn’t going to spoil his life by marrying some little no account like me.
LeeAnn: I’d like to tell you a little story, if I may. It’s about an innocent young girl who went away to school and fell in love with a handsome prince. They had what she thought was a beautiful romance, but when she got pregnant the prince turned into a frog and he threw her out of his life like five-day-old trash. The moral of the story is that LeeAnn Nelson should never have kissed a toad like JR Ewing.
Cliff, speaking to JR in 1989: After all these years, you must have knocked up half the women in Dallas.
JR: How did I know you were telling the truth? Do you have any idea how many woman have tried to pull that stunt on me?
LeeAnn: I don’t give a damn. It was my life you threw away and it was my self-esteem you stamped out just like that.
Michelle: Did you have the baby?
LeeAnn: Oh honey, things were different then. Unmarried pregnancies were unacceptable in those days. I knew my parents would never understand and it would cause a scandal in the small town I came from. I couldn’t go home and I couldn’t have a baby. So I did something I’ve regretted all my life. A girlfriend told me about a doctor. Doctor? He was a miserable dirty quack. He did it in some nasty little hotel room.
Michelle: You had an abortion.
LeeAnn: It was illegal of course, and highly unsafe.
LeeAnn: I lost my baby, all right, but I almost died from the abortion.
LeeAnn: It took me a long time to recover. I was sick for a long time and I had to drop out of school. But you wouldn’t care about that, of course. I mean, isn’t that what the village whore deserved?
JR: I never said that.
LeeAnn: You said that and a hell of a lot worse.
LeeAnn: By the time I got back on my feet, all my money was gone.
Bobby: JR always said, “Fortune and misfortune are just two buckets from the same well.”
LeeAnn to JR: You took away the thing most precious to me. Because of that botched abortion, I was never able to have children.
Aunt Ginny: I was never able to have kids of my own.
Sylvia Lean: I did have Galveston’s son.
Peter Hollister: Paul Galveston was my father too.
Greg: Yeah? Funny, he never mentioned you. According to your resume, you were born 1960, in …
Peter: Baltimore.
Greg: Baltimore. Now what’s a guy like Galveston doing in Baltimore?
Peter: He was nowhere near Baltimore when I was born. Just my mother and me.
Sylvia: Peter’s father knew that from the day Peter was born, his son would make it big. He came to see me in the hospital.
Laura: I thought you said his father never laid eyes on him?
Sylvia: Oh yes, you’re right. He never laid eyes on Peter after that first visit to the hospital.
Greg: Galveston kept a file on the kid’s mother. He was sending her support payments.
Sylvia: Never give a man what he wants until you get that ring.
Laura: My mother used to say the same thing.
Laura: My mother never told me about sex, but she sure drummed into me about childbirth and how it hurts. She said no woman would have a second child if she could remember the pain of the first. My mother said that childbirth is a woman’s curse, that the best thing to do is just lie there, suffer through it and then pray you don’t die. I heard it all my life. My mother had a million stories about women dying in childbirth.
Laura: When I was twelve, my mother died. It was hard. We were close. I was the youngest. I really tried to replace her, especially for my dad. It was impossible. I couldn't be her for him, as much as I wanted that.
Hank, Laura’s father: You made me take [your help] when Mama died. You were only twelve years old. Your brother was out on his own and your two sisters were already married.
Laura: I was the only one left.
Hank: And I was miserable and crotchety.
Laura: Well, you were lonely.
Hank: I remember how hard you worked to keep the house clean, cook my meals, iron my work clothes and sit beside me night after night, quiet and not say a word.
Laura: I tried to take Mama's place, but I couldn't do that.
Hank: But you made me feel like I wasn't alone. I was hard on you, Laura, but you knew what to do. You were there and you did it.
Chip Todson, speaking to Laura in 1980: How does a woman like you get to be a woman like you?
Laura: When I was a kid, I used to feel like I was invisible, that people never noticed me. I used to do things to attract attention, any attention. Not bad things, good things.
Val: I bet you were a straight A student.
Laura: No. I was the kid who had to work twice as hard as anyone else just to make Bs. It was always like that. It was never enough. I always had to do more, or do it better or faster.
Bobby to Jenna: The Braddock school system was good enough when you and I were growing up.
Bobby on kissing Jenna for the first time: I was ten years old. I was scared out of my mind. I knew she was in the barn so I was going to go around the barn, climb up in the loft and sort of swing down on a rope, make an Errol Flynn entrance.
Jenna on Bobby: He was trying to scare me.
Ray: He was famous for that sort of thing.
Bobby: The only problem was the rope was attached to the grain chute door so when I grabbed onto it and swung the doors open, a couple of thousand pounds of grain fell out!
Jenna: He wasn’t welcome at my daddy’s ranch for quite a while.
Bobby: Your daddy took it way too seriously.
Mark Graison: I wish I’d met you when I was ten. I wish we’d had all that time together.
Pam: I wasn’t very cute when I was little.
Mark: You would have been just perfect for me.
Rebecca: I’ve never been able to talk Katherine into much of anything.
Katherine on her father’s office at Wentworth Tool and Die: I was three feet high last time I saw it. Daddy had an antique cabinet. It was wood with a bold grain, probably oak. It was so beautiful. It always seemed to belong there.
Rebecca on Mike Hughes: He’s done business with Wentworth Tool and Die for years.
Mort Wilkinson, Galveston refinery owner, speaking in 1980: I never had more than a handshake agreement with the Ewing family for twenty years.
Dandy, mid-story in 1987: ... I told them twelve years earlier there was oil in that ground. Did they listen? No, they was too college-educated to listen to me. While they had their noses stuck in their reports, mine was smelling oil.
April Stevens: I’ve been poor my whole life.
JR, speaking about his son James in 1990: I don’t want to see him suffer all the bruises and knocks I got when I was a kid his age [twenty-one].
Patricia to Sue Ellen: I stayed with your father though he had far less to offer than JR.
Sue Ellen on her father: He left us right after Kristin was born.
Kristin Marie Shepard, birthplace: New Mexico.
Sue Ellen: When I was a little girl, I used to dream about going to the Far East.
JR: When I was in the service, I spent a lot of time in Japan.
JR: I never killed anybody, not even during the war.
Richard Avery, speaking in 1980: Haven't had mousse this good since I was in the army.
Carl Berman on Richard: Was he in the service?
Karen: The coastguard, back east.
Sid: You remember Mom's apple pie, Abby? Burnt.
Abby: Exactly.
Mack: Every meal my mother ever made — pasta salad.
Michael Fairgate: Even breakfast?
Mack: Yeah. Ever hear of a pasta omelette?
Karen on flan: Of course, in Philadelphia when we discovered this, it was simply “caramel custard”. There was that instant custard. What was it, that mix? It was called Junket, I think.
Jenna on baking: Learned from my father. This is his famous split top wheat bread. Most girls learn from their mothers, I guess. Mine couldn’t cook a thing. She never did teach me anything.
Bobby to Miss Ellie: I remember you once told me that family is like baking a cake from scratch — real messy.
Donna: When things used to bother me, I would run right to the refrigerator and start eating. I was a fat little kid till I realised that if you just talked to somebody, it meant I wouldn't have to stuff my face.
Greg on Anne Matheson: I bet her parents never let her have a lollipop.
JR: Never could understand what those vegetarians were about anyhow.
Mack: Oatmeal is oatmeal. I never liked it.
Ben Gibson: I always hated seafood.
Cliff: I happen to like Chinese food because when I was very small, Chinese food was a treat.
Lilimae to Val: Black bottom pie used to be your favourite. It always used to cheer you up.
Val: I always wanted to know how to make paella.
Val: I got no education at all to speak of.
Richard on Val: Didn't even graduate from high school.
Bess Riker on Val: A ninth-grade dropout.
Clay McKinney, screenwriter, speaking in 1997: What I want to know is why you didn’t find me first?
Val: Gary and I met when we were kids in Texas, probably while you were still in diapers.
Lucy on Gary: Once upon a time, he went off and got this lovely fifteen year old girl pregnant — my mommy.
Sid: You must have been babies.
Val: I was fifteen, Gary was seventeen.
Gary on Val: I was fifteen when I met her. When she smiles or turns her head a certain way, I get a glimpse of exactly the way she used to be.
Val: I was fifteen years old, fresh out from Tennessee, waitressing at this little diner just outside of Fort Worth, Texas, at the intersection of two highways.
Lucy to Val: But you said you were sixteen to get the job.
Val: Most of the customers were truck drivers and I was used to getting teased by them, but this one night, we were real busy. Mary Jo, the other waitress, had called in sick, and I was just trying my very best to keep on top of it. Everything backfired. First, one table started complaining, then another and another and before I knew it, I was right in the middle of it all, in tears, when this blond god got up from the counter and just started helping me. He didn’t say a word to me, he just smiled at me, and I got this real flutter feeling in my tummy, and right away I knew everything was gonna be all right. It was Gary.
Val on Gary: I think I fell in love with him that very minute.
Kate Whittaker: How did you and Gary know that you were in love? Was it right away?
Val: Yep, the very first time we saw each other. Yeah, it was right away.
Val to Gary: You were the prettiest man I ever saw.
Karen: Val’s been in love with Gary since she was fifteen years-old.
Lilimae: Val has given her whole life to Gary Ewing.
Val: All I've ever really wanted to do is what's best for Gary.
Gary on Val: She spent half her life investing in a dream — me. Her dream of me.
Val, speaking about Gary in 1982: I see him the same way I’ve seen him since I was fifteen years-old.
Val to Gary: I have spent my whole adult life living for you, ever since I was fifteen years-old.
Gary: Trust me.
Val: I always have.
Val on Gary: He made me feel like a lady. He was there when I got off work to walk me home. “Miss Valene,” he said, “I have the urge to ask you to marry me.” I knew it was just flirting, but it was good flirting.
Lucy: What did you say?
Val: I didn’t know what to say, but he took that as a yes.
Gary: You remember when your mother found us in the garage?
Val: Please don’t remind me. What was it you said — we were just looking for what?
Gary: I said we were looking for a pencil sharpener. It was the only thing I could think of. Under the circumstances, I considered it a brilliant ad-lib, especially as you didn’t come up with anything.
Val: And then Mama said, “You'd have better luck finding it, sweetpea, if you turn the light on.”
Val on Gary: He never even touched me. He never even hardly kissed me till after. It was a good thing too, because I would have been scared. I mean, I was always a good girl. Three days later, we got married.
Lilimae: My daughter married into the Ewings of Dallas. We were just down-home folk before that.
Val on her and Gary: We were so young, sometimes I wonder how we ever survived.
Gary on Val: She’s always been a little high-strung.
Val to Gary: It’s always just been the two of us together. We only work together.
Gary to Val: I have never loved anyone the way I’ve loved you.
Val: That’s when I was the happiest — fresh out from Tennessee with Gary at the very beginning.
Lilimae: I never married Jonathan J Rush. We fell in love. I settled down. I even joined his congregation.
Jonathan J Rush to Lilimae: How spirited you were. I never knew another woman like you.
Lilimae, describing herself: She really loved people — too much. She trusted them too much and she got hurt a lot, and she was a beautiful dancer, graceful as a leaf on the wind.
Ben: I always had plans on being an important, sophisticated man of the world. I guess it was my small-town upbringing that I was trying to escape. While I was growing up, it was never good enough.
LeeAnn De La Vega: I was seventeen years-old, all of a sudden at the University of Texas, the biggest place I’d ever seen. I’d never even been to a dance back home.
Michelle Stevens: No wonder you were scared.
LeeAnn: It took a while, but I got used to it. I just kind of lost myself in my books and then I got a job in a little restaurant to help pay the bills.
Michelle: And that’s where you met him?
LeeAnn: Later. It was towards the end of the first year. I’d never met anyone quite like him. He was mighty impressive, Mr JR Ewing — a real high-stepping senior, heir to Ewing Oil. He was something.
Michelle: And you started dating him?
LeeAnn: After a while. I said no for a long time. Well, there were lots of girls there.
JR: I can’t deny there have been a lot of women in my life.
Kimberly Cryder: You’re practically a legend amongst the women of Dallas. I wonder if all the wonderful things I’ve heard about you could possibly be true?
JR: Oh, I was a pretty fair long distance runner in my time.
JR: I’ve found that power and money are a mighty aphrodisiac to a lot of women.
An extract from Capricorn Crude, Val’s novel based on life with the Ewings: “Though still seething with anger, she found herself caught up by his passion. His hands were like steel, pressing her against him. His kiss was molten fire. His touch made her shiver. Her desire consumed her. She did not think; she yielded. By then, nothing mattered but being reborn in his touch and as his lips followed the trail of his fingers, she heard her own voice crying out in wild, passionate, shameless love. His eyes opened wide. ‘Alright,’ she sobbed. ‘I love you. There, I’ve said it.’ He laughed and grabbed her as she tried to turn away.”
Kimberly: I’ve always been attracted to men of strength, power — men who do what they have to do to get what they want.
JR: I’ve always been attracted to women who know what they want and go after it.
Karen: There’s something I’ve always loved about southern men.
JR: What’s that?
Karen: They never forget what it means to be a man.
JR: Or how to appreciate a really beautiful woman.
Lee Ann: I couldn’t quite figure out why he kept coming after me.
Michelle: JR mostly wants what he can’t have.
LeeAnn: That might have been it. He finally wore me down. We went out and it was wonderful. Well, I’d never been to the kind of places that he took me. He knew everyone.
Cliff: Wally Hampton and JR not only went to the same university, but they were in the same fraternity.
JR on Lila Cummings: Boy, I really cared for that girl back in college.
Lila, speaking to JR in 1985: You’re still as big a liar as you ever were.
Ray on JR: I never knew a man in my life who could lie so well.
Bobby: JR always liked that saying of Mark Twain’s, “A lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth can put on its pants.”
LeeAnn on JR: Just being with him made me feel kind of special. I forgot all the good things my daddy drummed into me and one day I realised I was pregnant.
Michelle: You told him, didn’t you?
LeeAnn: Of course. I thought he’d be happy. I thought we’d get married and everything would be all right. What he did was call me everything but the village whore. He said he didn’t think that the baby was his and he wasn’t going to spoil his life by marrying some little no account like me.
LeeAnn: I’d like to tell you a little story, if I may. It’s about an innocent young girl who went away to school and fell in love with a handsome prince. They had what she thought was a beautiful romance, but when she got pregnant the prince turned into a frog and he threw her out of his life like five-day-old trash. The moral of the story is that LeeAnn Nelson should never have kissed a toad like JR Ewing.
Cliff, speaking to JR in 1989: After all these years, you must have knocked up half the women in Dallas.
JR: How did I know you were telling the truth? Do you have any idea how many woman have tried to pull that stunt on me?
LeeAnn: I don’t give a damn. It was my life you threw away and it was my self-esteem you stamped out just like that.
Michelle: Did you have the baby?
LeeAnn: Oh honey, things were different then. Unmarried pregnancies were unacceptable in those days. I knew my parents would never understand and it would cause a scandal in the small town I came from. I couldn’t go home and I couldn’t have a baby. So I did something I’ve regretted all my life. A girlfriend told me about a doctor. Doctor? He was a miserable dirty quack. He did it in some nasty little hotel room.
Michelle: You had an abortion.
LeeAnn: It was illegal of course, and highly unsafe.
LeeAnn: I lost my baby, all right, but I almost died from the abortion.
LeeAnn: It took me a long time to recover. I was sick for a long time and I had to drop out of school. But you wouldn’t care about that, of course. I mean, isn’t that what the village whore deserved?
JR: I never said that.
LeeAnn: You said that and a hell of a lot worse.
LeeAnn: By the time I got back on my feet, all my money was gone.
Bobby: JR always said, “Fortune and misfortune are just two buckets from the same well.”
LeeAnn to JR: You took away the thing most precious to me. Because of that botched abortion, I was never able to have children.
Aunt Ginny: I was never able to have kids of my own.
Sylvia Lean: I did have Galveston’s son.
Peter Hollister: Paul Galveston was my father too.
Greg: Yeah? Funny, he never mentioned you. According to your resume, you were born 1960, in …
Peter: Baltimore.
Greg: Baltimore. Now what’s a guy like Galveston doing in Baltimore?
Peter: He was nowhere near Baltimore when I was born. Just my mother and me.
Sylvia: Peter’s father knew that from the day Peter was born, his son would make it big. He came to see me in the hospital.
Laura: I thought you said his father never laid eyes on him?
Sylvia: Oh yes, you’re right. He never laid eyes on Peter after that first visit to the hospital.
Greg: Galveston kept a file on the kid’s mother. He was sending her support payments.
Sylvia: Never give a man what he wants until you get that ring.
Laura: My mother used to say the same thing.
Laura: My mother never told me about sex, but she sure drummed into me about childbirth and how it hurts. She said no woman would have a second child if she could remember the pain of the first. My mother said that childbirth is a woman’s curse, that the best thing to do is just lie there, suffer through it and then pray you don’t die. I heard it all my life. My mother had a million stories about women dying in childbirth.
Laura: When I was twelve, my mother died. It was hard. We were close. I was the youngest. I really tried to replace her, especially for my dad. It was impossible. I couldn't be her for him, as much as I wanted that.
Hank, Laura’s father: You made me take [your help] when Mama died. You were only twelve years old. Your brother was out on his own and your two sisters were already married.
Laura: I was the only one left.
Hank: And I was miserable and crotchety.
Laura: Well, you were lonely.
Hank: I remember how hard you worked to keep the house clean, cook my meals, iron my work clothes and sit beside me night after night, quiet and not say a word.
Laura: I tried to take Mama's place, but I couldn't do that.
Hank: But you made me feel like I wasn't alone. I was hard on you, Laura, but you knew what to do. You were there and you did it.
Chip Todson, speaking to Laura in 1980: How does a woman like you get to be a woman like you?
Laura: When I was a kid, I used to feel like I was invisible, that people never noticed me. I used to do things to attract attention, any attention. Not bad things, good things.
Val: I bet you were a straight A student.
Laura: No. I was the kid who had to work twice as hard as anyone else just to make Bs. It was always like that. It was never enough. I always had to do more, or do it better or faster.
Bobby to Jenna: The Braddock school system was good enough when you and I were growing up.
Bobby on kissing Jenna for the first time: I was ten years old. I was scared out of my mind. I knew she was in the barn so I was going to go around the barn, climb up in the loft and sort of swing down on a rope, make an Errol Flynn entrance.
Jenna on Bobby: He was trying to scare me.
Ray: He was famous for that sort of thing.
Bobby: The only problem was the rope was attached to the grain chute door so when I grabbed onto it and swung the doors open, a couple of thousand pounds of grain fell out!
Jenna: He wasn’t welcome at my daddy’s ranch for quite a while.
Bobby: Your daddy took it way too seriously.
Mark Graison: I wish I’d met you when I was ten. I wish we’d had all that time together.
Pam: I wasn’t very cute when I was little.
Mark: You would have been just perfect for me.
Rebecca: I’ve never been able to talk Katherine into much of anything.
Katherine on her father’s office at Wentworth Tool and Die: I was three feet high last time I saw it. Daddy had an antique cabinet. It was wood with a bold grain, probably oak. It was so beautiful. It always seemed to belong there.
Rebecca on Mike Hughes: He’s done business with Wentworth Tool and Die for years.
Mort Wilkinson, Galveston refinery owner, speaking in 1980: I never had more than a handshake agreement with the Ewing family for twenty years.
Dandy, mid-story in 1987: ... I told them twelve years earlier there was oil in that ground. Did they listen? No, they was too college-educated to listen to me. While they had their noses stuck in their reports, mine was smelling oil.
April Stevens: I’ve been poor my whole life.
James from London
International Treasure
1961
Ray: Jock brought me to a cattle auction first time, I guess I was sixteen.
Bobby, speaking to Christopher in 1991: I don’t think I was much older than you are right now [ten] when Grandpa took me out on my very first cattle drive.
Bobby: I remember how much fun it was when your grandpa would take me out on a cattle drive. You know, sometimes Grandma would come along too and she was darn good with a rope.
Christopher: It must have been fun when you were growing up.
Bobby: It sure was.
Bobby, riding on Southfork in 1988: I remember when the grass on this part of the ranch was so thick and high you could barely walk through it.
Guzzler Bennett, speaking about Braddock County in 1978: Look at all these houses. Used to be nothing out here but prairie.
Bobby: When I was a boy, the herd was so large, there was cattle as far as you could see. Sometimes it would take a week, maybe two weeks, to get them from one pasture to another.
Christopher: You really liked it then, didn’t you?
Bobby: Those were the best times of my life. Then Ewing Oil business started taking over.
Val on her and Gary: Somehow we always had fun together, even through the rough times.
Lilimae on Val and Gary: Everything bad that's ever happened to them happened because of his family.
Val: Gary just never got along with his family.
Val on Gary: He was the dearest man I ever knew, every day I knew him, till he brought me home to meet his family. He kept saying no and stalling, but after you [Lucy] were on the way I made him take me home to meet them. Well, that was the biggest mistake of my whole life.
Pam, looking around Southfork in 1978: Who lives there?
JR: No-one now. That’s my middle brother Gary’s house. He used to live there with his little bride, briefly.
Gary on him and Val: Our marriage was so short.
Lucy on Gary and Val: He brought her home, but he couldn’t do nothing right.
Val on the Ewings: Last thing they wanted was him being married to a nobody like me.
Val: I was just poor white trash from Tennessee who got Gary into trouble. I wasn’t fit to be [Lucy’s] mother. I had no business raising a Ewing, much less being one.
JR on Gary: I tried to annul that marriage to that trashy girl.
Val on Gary: He just wasn’t strong enough to stand up to them, especially to JR.
Val: Bobby was the only one who ever treated me like a … who ever acted like he was on my side.
Val on her and Bobby: We were really very close. There were times when I …
Val to Bobby: You were just a child.
JR: We were all pretty young and hotheaded in those days. I guess I was the worst offender of us all.
Val on her pregnancy craving: Watermelon pickle, I loved it.
Lucy on Dr Grosvenor: He delivered me.
Sue Ellen to Lucy: You’ve known JR all your life.
Lucy on Gary and Val: They didn't want me when I was born.
Gary: I've never had a real relationship with my daughter.
Miss Ellie to Gary: You tried to stand on your own two feet when you had Lucy, and your family kicked your heels right out from underneath you.
Gary: I let my brother mess up my life when I was a kid.
Gary: As far as I could tell, I wasn’t good for anything.
Val: Oh, that was your big brother talking, not you.
Gary: Well, I didn’t do much thinking on my own in those days. All I knew was I couldn’t breathe on this ranch.
Val to Gary: You’ve always been too hard on yourself.
Gary to Val: You’ve always been very complimentary, very supportive. It’s just sometimes, the truth would be better than politeness.
Val: You’ve always come through for me.
Gary: Except when I didn’t.
JR on Gary: He was always weak.
Sue Ellen: Is that why you drove him away?
JR: I did not drive him away. I tried everything I could to keep him around here. I had plans for him. He was going to college.
JR: Gary’s never amounted to much in his life and I think that’s because of you. You think small, Valene, real small.
Lucy on Gary: He started drinking all the time.
Val on Gary: I used to think that he drank because he didn't fit in, because his daddy and his brothers said he was weak and he had no character because he wasn't a tough and ruthless Ewing like them.
Miss Ellie: No-one wants you to be perfect, Gary, which is what you always thought you had to be.
Val: I lived with Gary when he was drinking and I would see him drift away, even when we were sitting in the same room. I would watch him helplessly and I’d wonder what I was doing wrong, how I’d failed him. Well, I know now it wasn’t me. There was nothing I could do to stop him and nothing I could blame myself for. The only thing I could do for Gary was stand by him and love him, and wait.
Gary on Val: All the times she should have left home, but didn’t.
Ray: I was just a kid the last time I was back in Emporia, Kansas.
Margaret Krebbs dies 1961
Ray on Reverend Wyman: He was the one who was there when Mama died?
Lil Trotter: He was. Beautiful service.
Sue Ellen on her father: I guess it was a year [after Kristin was born] Mama got a letter saying he was dead.
Sue Ellen on her mother: My father drank away everything she wanted out of her life — money, prestige, social position. So she did the next best thing. She raised me to have that kind of life. She raised me to marry somebody important — to love, honour and obey. And she made it very clear to me that if I couldn’t love and honour, I could sure as hell obey.
Dr Gibson, therapist: That’s valid, Sue Ellen. A lot of women thought that way.
Sue Ellen: Mama wanted us girls to have everything she wanted, but couldn’t get by herself. We were like little dolls created to fulfil all the things she wanted. She wanted wealth and position and decided we could get it for her.
Patricia: I raised those daughters of mine to be perfect wives, perfect mothers.
Sue Ellen: How hard you worked to turn me into the perfect wife.
Patricia: When your father died, that’s all I devoted my life to. And I succeeded.
Patricia: Sue Ellen was everything I wanted her to be.
Sue Ellen on Patricia: She had such high hopes for Kristin, and for me.
Sue Ellen: You’ve always made plans for Kristin, for me.
Patricia: Of course I did. You were my children.
Sue Ellen: Your children had feelings too. You were too busy planning for their future to hear what they needed in the present.
Patricia: That’s not true.
Patricia: There’s nothing wrong with the way Sue Ellen was brought up.
JR: No, just the way she turned out.
Patricia to Sue Ellen: All I ever wanted for you was for you to have the good things that I never had. I did the best I knew how.
Judith Ryland to her son Harris: I made my bones dealing with psychopaths and criminals while you were still playing with your Easy Bake oven.
Judith Ryland on Harris: He had always been sheltered.
Ann Ewing on Harris: He’d grown up in a suffocating home. His mother controlled his every breath.
Harris Ryland to Judith: I have done everything that you have ever asked me to do.
Mack, speaking about Eric Fairgate in 1985: I was ashamed of my parents at his age [nineteen].
Michael Fairgate, speaking in 1986: Mack said his dad hasn’t remembered his birthday in twenty-five years.
Lilimae on her son Joshua: He was born on Easter Sunday.
Lilimae: How could I have given birth to anyone as cold, as cruel?
Joshua: I am what you made me.
Jonathan J Rush on him and Lilimae: What we had was not love.
Joshua: You had me.
Jonathan: Sin!
Val: Whereabouts are you from?
Joshua: Tennessee, mostly.
Lilimae: After Joshua was born, I tried to be a good mama.
Joshua: Papa told me when I was born that Mama had a superstition about cribs. So the first year of my life I slept in a sink full of pillows. I’ve never heard of anyone else believing that, have you?
Val: No, I haven’t.
Lilimae: Joshua — Lord, he never wanted to sleep. Even as a baby, he had so much energy.
Jack Ewing on his mother Nancy: I loved her. I could trust her. As long as she was there, nothing could hurt me. She was strong — not physically, but morally. And I remember her voices — her speaking voice which was clear and filled with truth, and her singing voice which seemed to come from a deeper part of her soul, a sadder part. I could never quite figure that out. When she sang, she seemed so far away, and I would put my head on her lap and I would close my eyes and I would try, try to dream with her.
Greg Sumner: "Shall I be frighted when a madman stares?" It's a line from Julius Caesar. I played Brutus in college. He says it to Cassius — you know, the one with the mean and hungry look.
Richard Avery: I've been working since I got into college.
Anne Matheson: I never worked a day in my life.
Karen: I was a candy striper once. I worked in a children's hospital.
Karen, speaking to her daughter Diana in 1981: When I was your age [sixteen], we brought the house down with this number [‘Put On A Happy Face’].
Jeff Cameron: What the hell is the red and the blue?
Karen: My school colours.
Diana: What was high school like? Was it as bad as they say?
Karen: It wasn't bad at all.
Diana: I mean the whole thing about good girls and bad girls. Was it really like that?
Karen: Yeah, I guess so.
Diana: What did Grandma tell you about handling boys?
Karen: She said, "Don't." It never would have occurred to her to say that lovemaking is a beautiful experience when two people are …
Mack on sex: You know how young people are. They’re … interested. But you, Karen, were undoubtedly a saint.
Karen, speaking in 1981: I really only knew two men in my whole life.
Karen: When you’re young, your whole life is new things, first times — your first date, your first prom, the first time you fall in love.
Karen on Teddy Becker: The first serious boyfriend, the only serious one, until Sid.
Teddy: As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been bright and bubbly and effervescent, spontaneous and impulsive.
Karen: Yeah and it always got me into trouble.
Teddy: Hey, don’t knock it. That’s what I fell in love with you for.
Karen: When I got my first [credit] card, I went out and got my father this really expensive gift and then I bought dinner for my boyfriend. It wasn’t very prudent but it was a lot of fun.
Rina Jackson: Did you pay the bill on time?
Karen: Oh, you bet I did and then I put that thing away for three months! I mean, it really scared me when the bill came in and I realised how easily and how fast I could spend that money.
Karen to Teddy: You were always very practical.
Karen on Teddy: He always had that knack — holding people's attention, making them believe him and trust him.
Val: Karen's had a college education.
Karen: I once took a class on Picasso in college.
Karen: Spanish — two years.
Michael to Karen: You were an English major.
Karen on ‘The Complete Poems of Emily Bronte’: I’ve loved these poems.
Karen on Charles Scott: Someone from my University of Pennsylvania days.
Karen to Victoria Hill: You've been competing with me since the day I met you. You always have [resented me].
Lilimae: I can't believe you went to school with Victoria Hill!
Karen: Yeah, we were roommates.
Gary: Did you have any idea then she was going to be famous?
Karen: Well, we thought we were both going to be household words.
Karen to Victoria: You always use my life as a yardstick to measure yours.
Victoria Hill: You always could wrap me around your little finger.
Karen: Sure, like a cobra.
Victoria to Karen: Everything I learned about organising, I learned from you.
Abby: Karen's been telling me that you and she were sorority sisters.
Victoria: Karen Cooper in a sorority? Never. She wouldn't have been caught dead. She thought sororities were much too bourgeois.
Karen: Don't give me that. You were the one who didn't want to go to Rush Tea. You thought it meant girls standing around saying, "Hurry up, finish your tea!"
Victoria: What was that horrible girl's name? "First base, second base"?
Karen: Bunny Phelps.
Victoria: Funny Bunny Phelps. She'd go on a date and you'd say, "How'd it go?" And she'd go, "First base or hmm, second base?"
Karen: We never knew if she was going to get pregnant or win the Penethit.
Annie Fairgate, Sid and Susan’s daughter: I haven't cried since I was two.
Sid Fairgate on Susan: She left me. I was miserable for a while. I moped around, I felt sorry for myself, but after a while, you pick yourself up, you brush yourself off and you start all over again, and you start living your life. She left me — she made the choice.
Ray: Jock brought me to a cattle auction first time, I guess I was sixteen.
Bobby, speaking to Christopher in 1991: I don’t think I was much older than you are right now [ten] when Grandpa took me out on my very first cattle drive.
Bobby: I remember how much fun it was when your grandpa would take me out on a cattle drive. You know, sometimes Grandma would come along too and she was darn good with a rope.
Christopher: It must have been fun when you were growing up.
Bobby: It sure was.
Bobby, riding on Southfork in 1988: I remember when the grass on this part of the ranch was so thick and high you could barely walk through it.
Guzzler Bennett, speaking about Braddock County in 1978: Look at all these houses. Used to be nothing out here but prairie.
Bobby: When I was a boy, the herd was so large, there was cattle as far as you could see. Sometimes it would take a week, maybe two weeks, to get them from one pasture to another.
Christopher: You really liked it then, didn’t you?
Bobby: Those were the best times of my life. Then Ewing Oil business started taking over.
Val on her and Gary: Somehow we always had fun together, even through the rough times.
Lilimae on Val and Gary: Everything bad that's ever happened to them happened because of his family.
Val: Gary just never got along with his family.
Val on Gary: He was the dearest man I ever knew, every day I knew him, till he brought me home to meet his family. He kept saying no and stalling, but after you [Lucy] were on the way I made him take me home to meet them. Well, that was the biggest mistake of my whole life.
Pam, looking around Southfork in 1978: Who lives there?
JR: No-one now. That’s my middle brother Gary’s house. He used to live there with his little bride, briefly.
Gary on him and Val: Our marriage was so short.
Lucy on Gary and Val: He brought her home, but he couldn’t do nothing right.
Val on the Ewings: Last thing they wanted was him being married to a nobody like me.
Val: I was just poor white trash from Tennessee who got Gary into trouble. I wasn’t fit to be [Lucy’s] mother. I had no business raising a Ewing, much less being one.
JR on Gary: I tried to annul that marriage to that trashy girl.
Val on Gary: He just wasn’t strong enough to stand up to them, especially to JR.
Val: Bobby was the only one who ever treated me like a … who ever acted like he was on my side.
Val on her and Bobby: We were really very close. There were times when I …
Val to Bobby: You were just a child.
JR: We were all pretty young and hotheaded in those days. I guess I was the worst offender of us all.
Val on her pregnancy craving: Watermelon pickle, I loved it.
Lucy on Dr Grosvenor: He delivered me.
Sue Ellen to Lucy: You’ve known JR all your life.
Lucy on Gary and Val: They didn't want me when I was born.
Gary: I've never had a real relationship with my daughter.
Miss Ellie to Gary: You tried to stand on your own two feet when you had Lucy, and your family kicked your heels right out from underneath you.
Gary: I let my brother mess up my life when I was a kid.
Gary: As far as I could tell, I wasn’t good for anything.
Val: Oh, that was your big brother talking, not you.
Gary: Well, I didn’t do much thinking on my own in those days. All I knew was I couldn’t breathe on this ranch.
Val to Gary: You’ve always been too hard on yourself.
Gary to Val: You’ve always been very complimentary, very supportive. It’s just sometimes, the truth would be better than politeness.
Val: You’ve always come through for me.
Gary: Except when I didn’t.
JR on Gary: He was always weak.
Sue Ellen: Is that why you drove him away?
JR: I did not drive him away. I tried everything I could to keep him around here. I had plans for him. He was going to college.
JR: Gary’s never amounted to much in his life and I think that’s because of you. You think small, Valene, real small.
Lucy on Gary: He started drinking all the time.
Val on Gary: I used to think that he drank because he didn't fit in, because his daddy and his brothers said he was weak and he had no character because he wasn't a tough and ruthless Ewing like them.
Miss Ellie: No-one wants you to be perfect, Gary, which is what you always thought you had to be.
Val: I lived with Gary when he was drinking and I would see him drift away, even when we were sitting in the same room. I would watch him helplessly and I’d wonder what I was doing wrong, how I’d failed him. Well, I know now it wasn’t me. There was nothing I could do to stop him and nothing I could blame myself for. The only thing I could do for Gary was stand by him and love him, and wait.
Gary on Val: All the times she should have left home, but didn’t.
Ray: I was just a kid the last time I was back in Emporia, Kansas.
Margaret Krebbs dies 1961
Ray on Reverend Wyman: He was the one who was there when Mama died?
Lil Trotter: He was. Beautiful service.
Sue Ellen on her father: I guess it was a year [after Kristin was born] Mama got a letter saying he was dead.
Sue Ellen on her mother: My father drank away everything she wanted out of her life — money, prestige, social position. So she did the next best thing. She raised me to have that kind of life. She raised me to marry somebody important — to love, honour and obey. And she made it very clear to me that if I couldn’t love and honour, I could sure as hell obey.
Dr Gibson, therapist: That’s valid, Sue Ellen. A lot of women thought that way.
Sue Ellen: Mama wanted us girls to have everything she wanted, but couldn’t get by herself. We were like little dolls created to fulfil all the things she wanted. She wanted wealth and position and decided we could get it for her.
Patricia: I raised those daughters of mine to be perfect wives, perfect mothers.
Sue Ellen: How hard you worked to turn me into the perfect wife.
Patricia: When your father died, that’s all I devoted my life to. And I succeeded.
Patricia: Sue Ellen was everything I wanted her to be.
Sue Ellen on Patricia: She had such high hopes for Kristin, and for me.
Sue Ellen: You’ve always made plans for Kristin, for me.
Patricia: Of course I did. You were my children.
Sue Ellen: Your children had feelings too. You were too busy planning for their future to hear what they needed in the present.
Patricia: That’s not true.
Patricia: There’s nothing wrong with the way Sue Ellen was brought up.
JR: No, just the way she turned out.
Patricia to Sue Ellen: All I ever wanted for you was for you to have the good things that I never had. I did the best I knew how.
Judith Ryland to her son Harris: I made my bones dealing with psychopaths and criminals while you were still playing with your Easy Bake oven.
Judith Ryland on Harris: He had always been sheltered.
Ann Ewing on Harris: He’d grown up in a suffocating home. His mother controlled his every breath.
Harris Ryland to Judith: I have done everything that you have ever asked me to do.
Mack, speaking about Eric Fairgate in 1985: I was ashamed of my parents at his age [nineteen].
Michael Fairgate, speaking in 1986: Mack said his dad hasn’t remembered his birthday in twenty-five years.
Lilimae on her son Joshua: He was born on Easter Sunday.
Lilimae: How could I have given birth to anyone as cold, as cruel?
Joshua: I am what you made me.
Jonathan J Rush on him and Lilimae: What we had was not love.
Joshua: You had me.
Jonathan: Sin!
Val: Whereabouts are you from?
Joshua: Tennessee, mostly.
Lilimae: After Joshua was born, I tried to be a good mama.
Joshua: Papa told me when I was born that Mama had a superstition about cribs. So the first year of my life I slept in a sink full of pillows. I’ve never heard of anyone else believing that, have you?
Val: No, I haven’t.
Lilimae: Joshua — Lord, he never wanted to sleep. Even as a baby, he had so much energy.
Jack Ewing on his mother Nancy: I loved her. I could trust her. As long as she was there, nothing could hurt me. She was strong — not physically, but morally. And I remember her voices — her speaking voice which was clear and filled with truth, and her singing voice which seemed to come from a deeper part of her soul, a sadder part. I could never quite figure that out. When she sang, she seemed so far away, and I would put my head on her lap and I would close my eyes and I would try, try to dream with her.
Greg Sumner: "Shall I be frighted when a madman stares?" It's a line from Julius Caesar. I played Brutus in college. He says it to Cassius — you know, the one with the mean and hungry look.
Richard Avery: I've been working since I got into college.
Anne Matheson: I never worked a day in my life.
Karen: I was a candy striper once. I worked in a children's hospital.
Karen, speaking to her daughter Diana in 1981: When I was your age [sixteen], we brought the house down with this number [‘Put On A Happy Face’].
Jeff Cameron: What the hell is the red and the blue?
Karen: My school colours.
Diana: What was high school like? Was it as bad as they say?
Karen: It wasn't bad at all.
Diana: I mean the whole thing about good girls and bad girls. Was it really like that?
Karen: Yeah, I guess so.
Diana: What did Grandma tell you about handling boys?
Karen: She said, "Don't." It never would have occurred to her to say that lovemaking is a beautiful experience when two people are …
Mack on sex: You know how young people are. They’re … interested. But you, Karen, were undoubtedly a saint.
Karen, speaking in 1981: I really only knew two men in my whole life.
Karen: When you’re young, your whole life is new things, first times — your first date, your first prom, the first time you fall in love.
Karen on Teddy Becker: The first serious boyfriend, the only serious one, until Sid.
Teddy: As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been bright and bubbly and effervescent, spontaneous and impulsive.
Karen: Yeah and it always got me into trouble.
Teddy: Hey, don’t knock it. That’s what I fell in love with you for.
Karen: When I got my first [credit] card, I went out and got my father this really expensive gift and then I bought dinner for my boyfriend. It wasn’t very prudent but it was a lot of fun.
Rina Jackson: Did you pay the bill on time?
Karen: Oh, you bet I did and then I put that thing away for three months! I mean, it really scared me when the bill came in and I realised how easily and how fast I could spend that money.
Karen to Teddy: You were always very practical.
Karen on Teddy: He always had that knack — holding people's attention, making them believe him and trust him.
Val: Karen's had a college education.
Karen: I once took a class on Picasso in college.
Karen: Spanish — two years.
Michael to Karen: You were an English major.
Karen on ‘The Complete Poems of Emily Bronte’: I’ve loved these poems.
Karen on Charles Scott: Someone from my University of Pennsylvania days.
Karen to Victoria Hill: You've been competing with me since the day I met you. You always have [resented me].
Lilimae: I can't believe you went to school with Victoria Hill!
Karen: Yeah, we were roommates.
Gary: Did you have any idea then she was going to be famous?
Karen: Well, we thought we were both going to be household words.
Karen to Victoria: You always use my life as a yardstick to measure yours.
Victoria Hill: You always could wrap me around your little finger.
Karen: Sure, like a cobra.
Victoria to Karen: Everything I learned about organising, I learned from you.
Abby: Karen's been telling me that you and she were sorority sisters.
Victoria: Karen Cooper in a sorority? Never. She wouldn't have been caught dead. She thought sororities were much too bourgeois.
Karen: Don't give me that. You were the one who didn't want to go to Rush Tea. You thought it meant girls standing around saying, "Hurry up, finish your tea!"
Victoria: What was that horrible girl's name? "First base, second base"?
Karen: Bunny Phelps.
Victoria: Funny Bunny Phelps. She'd go on a date and you'd say, "How'd it go?" And she'd go, "First base or hmm, second base?"
Karen: We never knew if she was going to get pregnant or win the Penethit.
Annie Fairgate, Sid and Susan’s daughter: I haven't cried since I was two.
Sid Fairgate on Susan: She left me. I was miserable for a while. I moped around, I felt sorry for myself, but after a while, you pick yourself up, you brush yourself off and you start all over again, and you start living your life. She left me — she made the choice.
James from London
International Treasure
1962
Gary to Lucy: When you were a little baby, I used to dance with you every night. Of course, it’s a little hard to dance to ‘Rock-A-Bye Baby’.
Lilimae, speaking in 1985: Joshua, you were so colic-y and stubborn, always wanting your own way.
Lilimae: You won’t remember this, Joshua, you were just a baby, but I had an Aunt Rhonick who died and I had to go there for a few days. It was the first time I left you since you were born and when I came home, your daddy had you on his shoulders standing in the old union station and when you saw me step off the train, you started to shout, “She’s back! She’s back!”
Lilimae on Joshua: His father was always a little edgy after a good sermon.
Lilimae: Jonathan J told everybody we were married. For a year after Joshua was born, I stayed with him and protected his lie. He kept after me, telling me how much he loved me and begging me. Finally I said yes.
Lilimae: It was a difficult time for us. Jonathan’s congregation was small and very poor. The two of us were trying to hold it together as best we could. Joshua was just an infant. He needed most of my attention, but Jonathan kept giving me more and more to do.
Jonathan to Joshua: Your mother used to sing. She started a sort of a choir.
Lilimae: I’m afraid I was awful.
Jonathan: Yes, she was.
Lilimae: I was in charge of the choir, of course. They were a sorry bunch. Some were half hungry. It’s amazing they had the strength to sing at all, but they wanted to please Jonathan as much as I did and we rehearsed and rehearsed for this big Easter Sunday gathering Jonathan had planned. Well, that choir sang their hearts out for Jonathan. Somehow it all came together and the sound was so beautiful. To this day, I know it was. We finished the programme. Jonathan just sat there, silent for the longest time and then he got up and left without a word. It wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t good enough. I never forgave him for that, for the way he made those people feel that day, for the way he made me feel. I could never live up to his expectations. He always wanted more of me than I could give, more than anyone could give. I couldn’t live with that, that constant disappointment with everything I touched, even for Joshua’s sake.
Lilimae: I never wanted your pity. I wanted your love.
Jonathan: I gave you everything.
Lilimae: No you didn’t. You shut me out. I loved you, Jonathan. I never loved any man as much as you.
Lilimae: Then Teddy Keener passed through and asked me to join his act. I didn’t even have the courage to tell Jonathan J to his face. I left him a note and I never saw either of them again.
Joshua: Mama died just after I was born so it’s been just Papa and me.
Lilimae to Joshua: Your mother didn’t die when you were a baby. She knew she’d make you and your father miserable if she stayed. She knew she couldn’t live the kind of life your father wanted. She couldn’t be the kind of person he wanted her to be. She tried, but she just couldn’t make it work. She knew you’d be better off with him so she left, but she never stopped loving you. It was the most painful thing she ever did. She suffered for it. She never stopped suffering.
Jonathan: You left me. You left your son.
Lilimae: I didn’t want to.
Joshua: She had her reasons.
Jonathan: They weren’t reasons.
Lilimae: In those days, my ambition and my need for excitement were more important than anything else or anyone else. I was convinced I could do it all, especially if I weren’t tied down.
Jonathan to Joshua: She abandoned you, she abandoned me. What she did was unforgivable.
Lilimae to Joshua: Your mother was vicious and wicked. She was just a tramp, selfish and spiteful. Thought of nothing but herself. Wanted to be this big singing star. Nothing else mattered, not her family, not her husband. She deserved everything she got. And you weren’t the first. There were others she abandoned too.
Val to Lilimae: Where were you all those years? Do you think I like having a mother who goes around from man to man without one ounce of consideration for those she leaves behind? How do you think I feel having a mother who’s a tramp?
Val on her and Joshua: Brothers and sisters shouldn’t grow up alone. Maybe we’d both be better people if …
Lilimae: I lost my children and the only man I really loved. I worried about my children. Even if I couldn’t be with them, I worried about them. I wondered, “What would they become? Would they be safe? Would they be happy?” I was always hoping for something that would ease the worry.
Lilimae: My dreams led me far away and they led me into trouble.
JR to Gary: You've always been susceptible to pressures from other people.
Val to Gary: You’d say one thing and end up doing another. You’re the most undependable person that I’ve ever known.
JR on Gary: He was scared of I don’t know what. Always running away. Every time there’s any pressure, any time there’s any responsibility: out the door.
Lucy on Gary: He just came and went.
Gary to Lucy: I ran away from you and your mama a lot.
Lucy on Gary: Disappeared for weeks and months, came back again and started hitting my mom.
Val: I have seen you in a blind rage. I’ve seen you laugh and cry in the same breath. I’ve seen you stumble and fall and kick down doors and throw things. Gary, I have seen you hurt yourself for many years, but I have never ever seen you hurt someone else.
Cathy Geary: Where did you get that scar on your chin?
Gary: Fell through a shower door when I was drunk.
Gary: Daddy never trusted me. He liked Val. He used to call her my anchor.
Jock on Gary: I tried to teach him to stand up and fight. It broke my heart when I found out he didn’t have any guts.
Bobby to Gary: I can remember Daddy and Mama sparring with words. I was just a kid when you left, but I can still remember them talking about you. Daddy would say that you didn’t have the Ewing guts and Mama would say, “Well, thank goodness for that,” because she thought you had Southworth gallantry and that was a much better thing to have. Mama thought guts were low-grade courage, and gallantry was courage with grace.
Jock: I don't think I've been a very good father.
Miss Ellie: Yes, you have.
Jock: Gary pulling out, a drifter.
Jock on Miss Ellie: She held me responsible for running Gary off.
Miss Ellie: The Ewing men are strong — Jock, JR, Bobby. Lucy’s father, he wasn’t strong, couldn’t compete. That’s why he left.
JR on Gary: He did not leave. He flat ran out.
Gary: I was weak, and I let my father and my brother drive me away, and I ran.
Val: We would have gone with you.
Gary: To do what? To go where? I was a drunk and a gambler and a loser. I know it’s no excuse, but when I left here, I didn’t think they’d make you leave too. I thought I’d be back.
Bobby: My brother Gary left, I didn’t have anyone to talk to.
Val to Gary: As soon as you left, JR got rid of me.
JR on Val: I told that girl never to set foot in Texas again.
Val: I snuck back for Lucy and took her.
Lucy: When JR found out, he called some nice old boys in Dallas.
Val: JR sent some mean old boys after me to get Lucy back. And they followed me all the way to Tennessee.
Val on Lilimae: I went to her with our baby in my arms and she turned me away.
Lilimae to Val: I let you down that night you came running to me with Lucy and begged me to take you in and I had more selfish things on my mind. [That was] the worst mistake I ever made.
Valene: It was me and my baby, and you turned us away.
Lilimae: How could I have let you in? If my manager had found out I was a grandmother, it would have been over.
Valene: What would have been over — your wonderful career? When did that ever get started?
Lilimae: It could have been my big break. It almost was.
Valene: I told you that I was in trouble, Mama. Those old boys were after me, and when you wouldn’t let me in, they caught me and they took my baby. They took her back to Texas, to Gary’s folks. So I went back after her, and when I got back to Texas, those old boys wouldn’t let me near the ranch.
Lucy on Val: They told her that if she ever came near Texas again, they’d kill her.
Val: Scared me half to death. They weren’t fooling. I believe they’d have killed me soon as look at me.
Lucy on Val: One time, I even heard she went to the law to get me back.
Valene: I went to the sheriff’s office.
Lucy: Didn’t amount to anything though.
Gary: The law was pretty tight with my family.
JR, speaking about him and Dallas Police Captain Fogarty in 1984: We go back a number of years.
Val: I can’t tell you what that was like, knowing anything at all could be done to me, and there wasn’t nothing the police would do about it because there wasn’t any difference between those old boys and the police.
Val: What did I have? Nothing.
Val on Lucy: I didn’t see her again for fifteen years.
Lilimae: Val had a baby and that baby was taken away from her. My girl never got to raise her and there's been a big emptiness in her, a need that never was fulfilled.
JR, speaking about Lucy in 1981: She hasn’t got a lot of mothering from you, darlin’.
Val: How could she have? You wouldn’t allow it. You’re the reason why we we’re not together, all of us, like we ought to be.
JR: I would not want to be held responsible for keeping you from your loved ones.
Val: Oh no, of course not. That’s all you’ve ever done. That’s all you have ever done to me.
Lucy: It was JR who done it all.
JR: Guilt has never been one of my strong emotions.
Karen: I’ve always believed that anyone could make amends.
Val: At least I knew Miss Ellie would raise Lucy right.
Miss Ellie to Val: I raised [Lucy] because the Ewings made it impossible for you to raise her but I shouldn’t have. I should have fought them but I didn’t.
Miss Ellie: Do you remember how I used to sit over there in that chair for hours, trying to feed Lucy? I was just so happy to have her here. What a beautiful child she was.
Bobby: I just remember she was awful stubborn, that’s all.
Jock: Which side of the family do you think Lucy takes after? Miss Ellie: A little of both I guess, but leaning towards the Ewings.
Jock: Well, that ain’t all bad, is it?
Mickey Trotter, Lil’s son: The only one that ever called me Michael is Ma.
Ray to Mickey: You, me, your ma — we’re all out of the same stock. We’re just as good as anyone.
Kate Whittaker, Claudia’s daughter: What was my mom like when she was young? Greg: Young? She was never young. She was always middle-aged.
Kate: Come on — really.
Greg: You mean did she stay out late, drink beer and make out in the back of ’57 Chevys? No.
Kate: But she did date, right?
Greg: Well there was one guy, but he always wore a brown paper bag over his head so we never knew who he was. I don’t think dating was her style.
Kate: Why don’t you think? Greg: She just thought that high school men, college men were too immature for her.
Frank Williams: A few dates can get serious after a while. I know that much from high school.
Claudia: I knew Anne Matheson in the old days.
Anne on Claudia: She has always resented me. Is it my fault that I had money when were growing up and she didn’t?
Claudia to Anne: You haven’t had an idea since you were twelve.
Claudia: When I was very young, I got into trouble.
Kate: What kind of trouble?
Claudia: It’s a euphemism we used to use to refer to unwed mothers. I was very young. I got pregnant.
Anne: When Claudia and I were younger, she had the most beautiful opal ring. It was a Coober Pedy opal and she would never tell me who gave it to her, but one day I saw her with a man.
Greg, meeting Steve Brewer, Claudia’s illegitimate son, in 1991: You remind me of Jimmy Stewart but I don’t think my sister ever met Jimmy Stewart.
Anne: Nobody liked Paul Galveston except Greg’s mother. She only saw the charming, dashing side of him and I’m sure that his money didn’t hurt, but everyone else just hated his stinking cigars and his mean sense of humour. That man would have insulted Sister Teresa if he’d gotten the chance, and then he would have come on to her. He did come on to me but I, contrary to some people’s opinions, have my standards. The real question is why on earth would Claudia have an affair with him — her own mother’s lover?
Claudia: Look, Greg, I don’t know if I was angry at Mother for giving you all the attention or simply swept off my feet by a charismatic rich older man, probably a little bit of both, but I didn’t know what an ogre Paul Galveston was until I was already pregnant.
Greg on Claudia: When a person runs around all her life trying to be right, when she does something wrong, she goes nuts. And getting pregnant by Paul Galveston was definitely wrong.
Greg to Steve: You’ve been sired by one of the great son of a bitches of our time.
Greg: I would have believed Jimmy Stewart.
Greg on Claudia’s pregnancy: Did the old lady know about this? Claudia: How much help do you think she would have been?
Greg: You should have come to me.
Claudia, speaking to Greg in 1991: I was too scared and too ashamed to tell anybody for reasons which I’m sure are obvious to you now.
Greg on Claudia: She went off to California.
Claudia, visiting Kate’s apartment in 1991: It’s such an interesting neighbourhood, reminds me of where I started out. There was this little bookstore around the corner. We all used to gather there.
JR, speaking in 1982: Been years since I read a book all the way through.
Ben Gibson: When I was in high school, I heard a bunch of people talking about me one day and they called me S.O.B. I liked it. I thought it gave me a change of image, sort of rakish, unpredictable — the kind of guy that girls would eat their hearts out over. Then a couple of days later, a friend of mine used it again and he told me what it meant: “It wasn’t what you thought at all. It was Solid Old Ben.”
Ben: My father had a nervous breakdown while I was in high school. At least that’s what they called it. All I know is that one day he piled all of our furniture in the living room and tried to set it on fire. I was the one who found him. Sounds kind of funny now, but it wasn’t very funny then. He was my father and I couldn’t believe I was seeing him like that. For the next year or so, he was in a mental hospital and I didn’t go see him for a long time because I was ashamed and because I was afraid of what I might see. He got better.
Pam: I didn’t have much of a home when I was little.
Bobby: Pam was raised by her Aunt Maggie, along with her brother Cliff and Digger, Digger Barnes.
Maggie on Digger: He put you through a lot.
Pam: Thank goodness he had you to take care of him.
Pam: You raised me and Cliff and [Maggie’s son] Jimmy, and cared for Digger, all in this one little house. I think it’s remarkable.
Maggie: I enjoyed it, most of it.
Mandy Winger: Cliff’s told me all about how you practically raised him and Pam.
Maggie: Well, I did my best.
Mandy: As far as I’m concerned, your best was pretty good.
Cliff to Pam: Mama abandoned us, poor Digger was a drunk that left us to grow up with Aunt Maggie and all of our lives all we ever had was each other. You’re my sister and it’s always been you and me against the world.
Cliff on him and Pam: When we were being raised by our aunt, we were so close together. We just did everything together.
Cliff on him and Pam: We were two tough kids growing up. We had to be.
Cliff: Pam, she always was the strong one.
Pam: I’ve lived through hurricanes.
Cliff on Pam: She has never let me down.
Pam on Cliff: I know how important he’s always been to me. When we were growing up, we were poor kids on the wrong side of the tracks and Cliff was always my hero. He always found time to take care of me, to watch out for me.
Pam to Cliff: When we were growing up, I thought you were the most wonderful thing that ever happened.
Cliff to Pam: Digger wasn’t your actual father, but he raised you and loved you just like you loved him. You remember how they used to treat him — like he was a nobody?
Barfly, speaking to his friends in 1987: Digger Barnes was full of crap.
Cliff: That man had more brains in the seat of his pants than all three of you have in your heads.
Cliff on Digger: A shadow of a brilliant man who I grew up adoring.
Mr Wicker, lawyer: Your daddy must have been a real gentleman to have a son like you.
Cliff: He was.
Harris Ryland: I hope you don’t mind me saying so, Cliff, but your twenty-twenty hindsight on Digger Barnes might be a bit romanticised.
Pam: No-one’s ever accused Cliff of being a romantic.
Jock to Pam: Young lady, you’ve heard [Digger’s side] your whole life.
Pam to Cliff: I was raised to hate the Ewings just as much as you were.
Pam: After everything Digger had told me about the Ewings, I thought they were a family of monsters.
Mitch Cooper: All my life, I grew up believing people like the Ewings were the enemy.
Jamie: My whole life, I always thought it was Jock who was the bad guy.
Pam: I was always so sure that the Ewings were the bad guys. They're the ones who'd do anything to anyone.
Bobby: And the Barneses were the poor but honest good guys?
Pam: Yeah.
Cliff to Pam: You used to be worse than I was, breaking up windows in the Ewing building down town. You used to plot revenge.
Judith Ryland: I’ve never been one to dwell on wrongs done to me.
Jenna: It made you really happy when I pushed Dotty Maypack into the pool because you asked her to the movies.
Bobby: I was only twelve years old at the time.
Pete Adams on Jason: His wife died in 1962 when the kids were still small.
Jamie on her mother: I don’t remember her much. She died when I was five.
Jack on his mother: I remember a lot about her even though I was young when she died.
Angelica Nero on Nancy’s death: Dimitri was heartbroken even then. Jason left Montana with the children and Dimitri lost track of them.
Donna to Jamie: So it was your daddy Jason, your brother Jack and you.
Pete Adams on Jason: That’s when he started hitting the bottle in earnest.
Karen, speaking to Sid to 1980: [It's] eighteen years after your divorce.
John Ross, speaking in 2012: I sank a test well in Section 18 [on Southfork], on that stretch of land that everyone’s ignored for fifty years.
Gary to Lucy: When you were a little baby, I used to dance with you every night. Of course, it’s a little hard to dance to ‘Rock-A-Bye Baby’.
Lilimae, speaking in 1985: Joshua, you were so colic-y and stubborn, always wanting your own way.
Lilimae: You won’t remember this, Joshua, you were just a baby, but I had an Aunt Rhonick who died and I had to go there for a few days. It was the first time I left you since you were born and when I came home, your daddy had you on his shoulders standing in the old union station and when you saw me step off the train, you started to shout, “She’s back! She’s back!”
Lilimae on Joshua: His father was always a little edgy after a good sermon.
Lilimae: Jonathan J told everybody we were married. For a year after Joshua was born, I stayed with him and protected his lie. He kept after me, telling me how much he loved me and begging me. Finally I said yes.
Lilimae: It was a difficult time for us. Jonathan’s congregation was small and very poor. The two of us were trying to hold it together as best we could. Joshua was just an infant. He needed most of my attention, but Jonathan kept giving me more and more to do.
Jonathan to Joshua: Your mother used to sing. She started a sort of a choir.
Lilimae: I’m afraid I was awful.
Jonathan: Yes, she was.
Lilimae: I was in charge of the choir, of course. They were a sorry bunch. Some were half hungry. It’s amazing they had the strength to sing at all, but they wanted to please Jonathan as much as I did and we rehearsed and rehearsed for this big Easter Sunday gathering Jonathan had planned. Well, that choir sang their hearts out for Jonathan. Somehow it all came together and the sound was so beautiful. To this day, I know it was. We finished the programme. Jonathan just sat there, silent for the longest time and then he got up and left without a word. It wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t good enough. I never forgave him for that, for the way he made those people feel that day, for the way he made me feel. I could never live up to his expectations. He always wanted more of me than I could give, more than anyone could give. I couldn’t live with that, that constant disappointment with everything I touched, even for Joshua’s sake.
Lilimae: I never wanted your pity. I wanted your love.
Jonathan: I gave you everything.
Lilimae: No you didn’t. You shut me out. I loved you, Jonathan. I never loved any man as much as you.
Lilimae: Then Teddy Keener passed through and asked me to join his act. I didn’t even have the courage to tell Jonathan J to his face. I left him a note and I never saw either of them again.
Joshua: Mama died just after I was born so it’s been just Papa and me.
Lilimae to Joshua: Your mother didn’t die when you were a baby. She knew she’d make you and your father miserable if she stayed. She knew she couldn’t live the kind of life your father wanted. She couldn’t be the kind of person he wanted her to be. She tried, but she just couldn’t make it work. She knew you’d be better off with him so she left, but she never stopped loving you. It was the most painful thing she ever did. She suffered for it. She never stopped suffering.
Jonathan: You left me. You left your son.
Lilimae: I didn’t want to.
Joshua: She had her reasons.
Jonathan: They weren’t reasons.
Lilimae: In those days, my ambition and my need for excitement were more important than anything else or anyone else. I was convinced I could do it all, especially if I weren’t tied down.
Jonathan to Joshua: She abandoned you, she abandoned me. What she did was unforgivable.
Lilimae to Joshua: Your mother was vicious and wicked. She was just a tramp, selfish and spiteful. Thought of nothing but herself. Wanted to be this big singing star. Nothing else mattered, not her family, not her husband. She deserved everything she got. And you weren’t the first. There were others she abandoned too.
Val to Lilimae: Where were you all those years? Do you think I like having a mother who goes around from man to man without one ounce of consideration for those she leaves behind? How do you think I feel having a mother who’s a tramp?
Val on her and Joshua: Brothers and sisters shouldn’t grow up alone. Maybe we’d both be better people if …
Lilimae: I lost my children and the only man I really loved. I worried about my children. Even if I couldn’t be with them, I worried about them. I wondered, “What would they become? Would they be safe? Would they be happy?” I was always hoping for something that would ease the worry.
Lilimae: My dreams led me far away and they led me into trouble.
JR to Gary: You've always been susceptible to pressures from other people.
Val to Gary: You’d say one thing and end up doing another. You’re the most undependable person that I’ve ever known.
JR on Gary: He was scared of I don’t know what. Always running away. Every time there’s any pressure, any time there’s any responsibility: out the door.
Lucy on Gary: He just came and went.
Gary to Lucy: I ran away from you and your mama a lot.
Lucy on Gary: Disappeared for weeks and months, came back again and started hitting my mom.
Val: I have seen you in a blind rage. I’ve seen you laugh and cry in the same breath. I’ve seen you stumble and fall and kick down doors and throw things. Gary, I have seen you hurt yourself for many years, but I have never ever seen you hurt someone else.
Cathy Geary: Where did you get that scar on your chin?
Gary: Fell through a shower door when I was drunk.
Gary: Daddy never trusted me. He liked Val. He used to call her my anchor.
Jock on Gary: I tried to teach him to stand up and fight. It broke my heart when I found out he didn’t have any guts.
Bobby to Gary: I can remember Daddy and Mama sparring with words. I was just a kid when you left, but I can still remember them talking about you. Daddy would say that you didn’t have the Ewing guts and Mama would say, “Well, thank goodness for that,” because she thought you had Southworth gallantry and that was a much better thing to have. Mama thought guts were low-grade courage, and gallantry was courage with grace.
Jock: I don't think I've been a very good father.
Miss Ellie: Yes, you have.
Jock: Gary pulling out, a drifter.
Jock on Miss Ellie: She held me responsible for running Gary off.
Miss Ellie: The Ewing men are strong — Jock, JR, Bobby. Lucy’s father, he wasn’t strong, couldn’t compete. That’s why he left.
JR on Gary: He did not leave. He flat ran out.
Gary: I was weak, and I let my father and my brother drive me away, and I ran.
Val: We would have gone with you.
Gary: To do what? To go where? I was a drunk and a gambler and a loser. I know it’s no excuse, but when I left here, I didn’t think they’d make you leave too. I thought I’d be back.
Bobby: My brother Gary left, I didn’t have anyone to talk to.
Val to Gary: As soon as you left, JR got rid of me.
JR on Val: I told that girl never to set foot in Texas again.
Val: I snuck back for Lucy and took her.
Lucy: When JR found out, he called some nice old boys in Dallas.
Val: JR sent some mean old boys after me to get Lucy back. And they followed me all the way to Tennessee.
Val on Lilimae: I went to her with our baby in my arms and she turned me away.
Lilimae to Val: I let you down that night you came running to me with Lucy and begged me to take you in and I had more selfish things on my mind. [That was] the worst mistake I ever made.
Valene: It was me and my baby, and you turned us away.
Lilimae: How could I have let you in? If my manager had found out I was a grandmother, it would have been over.
Valene: What would have been over — your wonderful career? When did that ever get started?
Lilimae: It could have been my big break. It almost was.
Valene: I told you that I was in trouble, Mama. Those old boys were after me, and when you wouldn’t let me in, they caught me and they took my baby. They took her back to Texas, to Gary’s folks. So I went back after her, and when I got back to Texas, those old boys wouldn’t let me near the ranch.
Lucy on Val: They told her that if she ever came near Texas again, they’d kill her.
Val: Scared me half to death. They weren’t fooling. I believe they’d have killed me soon as look at me.
Lucy on Val: One time, I even heard she went to the law to get me back.
Valene: I went to the sheriff’s office.
Lucy: Didn’t amount to anything though.
Gary: The law was pretty tight with my family.
JR, speaking about him and Dallas Police Captain Fogarty in 1984: We go back a number of years.
Val: I can’t tell you what that was like, knowing anything at all could be done to me, and there wasn’t nothing the police would do about it because there wasn’t any difference between those old boys and the police.
Val: What did I have? Nothing.
Val on Lucy: I didn’t see her again for fifteen years.
Lilimae: Val had a baby and that baby was taken away from her. My girl never got to raise her and there's been a big emptiness in her, a need that never was fulfilled.
JR, speaking about Lucy in 1981: She hasn’t got a lot of mothering from you, darlin’.
Val: How could she have? You wouldn’t allow it. You’re the reason why we we’re not together, all of us, like we ought to be.
JR: I would not want to be held responsible for keeping you from your loved ones.
Val: Oh no, of course not. That’s all you’ve ever done. That’s all you have ever done to me.
Lucy: It was JR who done it all.
JR: Guilt has never been one of my strong emotions.
Karen: I’ve always believed that anyone could make amends.
Val: At least I knew Miss Ellie would raise Lucy right.
Miss Ellie to Val: I raised [Lucy] because the Ewings made it impossible for you to raise her but I shouldn’t have. I should have fought them but I didn’t.
Miss Ellie: Do you remember how I used to sit over there in that chair for hours, trying to feed Lucy? I was just so happy to have her here. What a beautiful child she was.
Bobby: I just remember she was awful stubborn, that’s all.
Jock: Which side of the family do you think Lucy takes after? Miss Ellie: A little of both I guess, but leaning towards the Ewings.
Jock: Well, that ain’t all bad, is it?
Mickey Trotter, Lil’s son: The only one that ever called me Michael is Ma.
Ray to Mickey: You, me, your ma — we’re all out of the same stock. We’re just as good as anyone.
Kate Whittaker, Claudia’s daughter: What was my mom like when she was young? Greg: Young? She was never young. She was always middle-aged.
Kate: Come on — really.
Greg: You mean did she stay out late, drink beer and make out in the back of ’57 Chevys? No.
Kate: But she did date, right?
Greg: Well there was one guy, but he always wore a brown paper bag over his head so we never knew who he was. I don’t think dating was her style.
Kate: Why don’t you think? Greg: She just thought that high school men, college men were too immature for her.
Frank Williams: A few dates can get serious after a while. I know that much from high school.
Claudia: I knew Anne Matheson in the old days.
Anne on Claudia: She has always resented me. Is it my fault that I had money when were growing up and she didn’t?
Claudia to Anne: You haven’t had an idea since you were twelve.
Claudia: When I was very young, I got into trouble.
Kate: What kind of trouble?
Claudia: It’s a euphemism we used to use to refer to unwed mothers. I was very young. I got pregnant.
Anne: When Claudia and I were younger, she had the most beautiful opal ring. It was a Coober Pedy opal and she would never tell me who gave it to her, but one day I saw her with a man.
Greg, meeting Steve Brewer, Claudia’s illegitimate son, in 1991: You remind me of Jimmy Stewart but I don’t think my sister ever met Jimmy Stewart.
Anne: Nobody liked Paul Galveston except Greg’s mother. She only saw the charming, dashing side of him and I’m sure that his money didn’t hurt, but everyone else just hated his stinking cigars and his mean sense of humour. That man would have insulted Sister Teresa if he’d gotten the chance, and then he would have come on to her. He did come on to me but I, contrary to some people’s opinions, have my standards. The real question is why on earth would Claudia have an affair with him — her own mother’s lover?
Claudia: Look, Greg, I don’t know if I was angry at Mother for giving you all the attention or simply swept off my feet by a charismatic rich older man, probably a little bit of both, but I didn’t know what an ogre Paul Galveston was until I was already pregnant.
Greg on Claudia: When a person runs around all her life trying to be right, when she does something wrong, she goes nuts. And getting pregnant by Paul Galveston was definitely wrong.
Greg to Steve: You’ve been sired by one of the great son of a bitches of our time.
Greg: I would have believed Jimmy Stewart.
Greg on Claudia’s pregnancy: Did the old lady know about this? Claudia: How much help do you think she would have been?
Greg: You should have come to me.
Claudia, speaking to Greg in 1991: I was too scared and too ashamed to tell anybody for reasons which I’m sure are obvious to you now.
Greg on Claudia: She went off to California.
Claudia, visiting Kate’s apartment in 1991: It’s such an interesting neighbourhood, reminds me of where I started out. There was this little bookstore around the corner. We all used to gather there.
JR, speaking in 1982: Been years since I read a book all the way through.
Ben Gibson: When I was in high school, I heard a bunch of people talking about me one day and they called me S.O.B. I liked it. I thought it gave me a change of image, sort of rakish, unpredictable — the kind of guy that girls would eat their hearts out over. Then a couple of days later, a friend of mine used it again and he told me what it meant: “It wasn’t what you thought at all. It was Solid Old Ben.”
Ben: My father had a nervous breakdown while I was in high school. At least that’s what they called it. All I know is that one day he piled all of our furniture in the living room and tried to set it on fire. I was the one who found him. Sounds kind of funny now, but it wasn’t very funny then. He was my father and I couldn’t believe I was seeing him like that. For the next year or so, he was in a mental hospital and I didn’t go see him for a long time because I was ashamed and because I was afraid of what I might see. He got better.
Pam: I didn’t have much of a home when I was little.
Bobby: Pam was raised by her Aunt Maggie, along with her brother Cliff and Digger, Digger Barnes.
Maggie on Digger: He put you through a lot.
Pam: Thank goodness he had you to take care of him.
Pam: You raised me and Cliff and [Maggie’s son] Jimmy, and cared for Digger, all in this one little house. I think it’s remarkable.
Maggie: I enjoyed it, most of it.
Mandy Winger: Cliff’s told me all about how you practically raised him and Pam.
Maggie: Well, I did my best.
Mandy: As far as I’m concerned, your best was pretty good.
Cliff to Pam: Mama abandoned us, poor Digger was a drunk that left us to grow up with Aunt Maggie and all of our lives all we ever had was each other. You’re my sister and it’s always been you and me against the world.
Cliff on him and Pam: When we were being raised by our aunt, we were so close together. We just did everything together.
Cliff on him and Pam: We were two tough kids growing up. We had to be.
Cliff: Pam, she always was the strong one.
Pam: I’ve lived through hurricanes.
Cliff on Pam: She has never let me down.
Pam on Cliff: I know how important he’s always been to me. When we were growing up, we were poor kids on the wrong side of the tracks and Cliff was always my hero. He always found time to take care of me, to watch out for me.
Pam to Cliff: When we were growing up, I thought you were the most wonderful thing that ever happened.
Cliff to Pam: Digger wasn’t your actual father, but he raised you and loved you just like you loved him. You remember how they used to treat him — like he was a nobody?
Barfly, speaking to his friends in 1987: Digger Barnes was full of crap.
Cliff: That man had more brains in the seat of his pants than all three of you have in your heads.
Cliff on Digger: A shadow of a brilliant man who I grew up adoring.
Mr Wicker, lawyer: Your daddy must have been a real gentleman to have a son like you.
Cliff: He was.
Harris Ryland: I hope you don’t mind me saying so, Cliff, but your twenty-twenty hindsight on Digger Barnes might be a bit romanticised.
Pam: No-one’s ever accused Cliff of being a romantic.
Jock to Pam: Young lady, you’ve heard [Digger’s side] your whole life.
Pam to Cliff: I was raised to hate the Ewings just as much as you were.
Pam: After everything Digger had told me about the Ewings, I thought they were a family of monsters.
Mitch Cooper: All my life, I grew up believing people like the Ewings were the enemy.
Jamie: My whole life, I always thought it was Jock who was the bad guy.
Pam: I was always so sure that the Ewings were the bad guys. They're the ones who'd do anything to anyone.
Bobby: And the Barneses were the poor but honest good guys?
Pam: Yeah.
Cliff to Pam: You used to be worse than I was, breaking up windows in the Ewing building down town. You used to plot revenge.
Judith Ryland: I’ve never been one to dwell on wrongs done to me.
Jenna: It made you really happy when I pushed Dotty Maypack into the pool because you asked her to the movies.
Bobby: I was only twelve years old at the time.
Pete Adams on Jason: His wife died in 1962 when the kids were still small.
Jamie on her mother: I don’t remember her much. She died when I was five.
Jack on his mother: I remember a lot about her even though I was young when she died.
Angelica Nero on Nancy’s death: Dimitri was heartbroken even then. Jason left Montana with the children and Dimitri lost track of them.
Donna to Jamie: So it was your daddy Jason, your brother Jack and you.
Pete Adams on Jason: That’s when he started hitting the bottle in earnest.
Karen, speaking to Sid to 1980: [It's] eighteen years after your divorce.
John Ross, speaking in 2012: I sank a test well in Section 18 [on Southfork], on that stretch of land that everyone’s ignored for fifty years.
southfork88
Telly Talk TV Fanatic
Is this your project suspended? I really appreciated this topic, as always all the others of which you are the author.
James from London
International Treasure
Thanks so much, Southfork! I am gonna come back to this thread. I just realised I need to do some more research first.
southfork88
Telly Talk TV Fanatic
Do you have good news regarding this fantastic thread? Thanks.
James from London
International Treasure
It's gonna be a while yet, but I'm still working on it - honest!
southfork88
Telly Talk TV Fanatic
I'm still eagerly awaiting your post-1962 timeline.
You've completed Dynasty (a masterpiece!) and Falcon Crest.
I hope that even just 5 years at a time, you can complete the Dallas/Knots Landing timeline.
Please .....
You've completed Dynasty (a masterpiece!) and Falcon Crest.
I hope that even just 5 years at a time, you can complete the Dallas/Knots Landing timeline.
Please .....
James from London
International Treasure
Thanks so much, sf88, I appreciate your interest!
I am honestly still working on it! I decided to make it more comprehensive so I'm revising the whole thing. I just need to finish re-watching all the Ewing-verse episodes alphabetically and then I'll be ready. I've completed "Abby's Choice" through to "Proof Positive", so there's just "Quandary" to "You Can Call Me Nick" to go!
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southfork88
Telly Talk TV Fanatic
I can understand this work requires more time and attention, having you put together two timelines, Dallas and Knots Landing. I take this opportunity to congratulate you on all other original research and initiatives on Dallas and the other TV serials.
They could be real television 'bibles'.