A Ewingverse Oral History

[James from London]

There's lots of it so I'll post it in instalments. (I've grouped it roughly into years, but that's just to make it easier to read, rather than to get rigidly bogged down in continuity.)

JR Ewing: Tall tales are an art form in Texas.

Gary Ewing: The stories about you are legend.
Paul Galveston: The stories about me are a lot of hogwash — although I must admit, I may have made up a few of them myself.

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.

Paul Galveston: You’re making this up. You don’t know what you remember. You wish this had happened.

Val Ewing: You don't pay any attention to the truth, Mama. You never have.

Paul Galveston: If you haven’t got any authentic Norman Rockwell memories, you can always paint a few of your own.

Orestes Mendez-Ochoa: Time has revealed the curse of ageing is not illness, but nostalgia.

JR Ewing: You see, that's the trouble. You can't tell what's real and not real in all these stories.

Elena Ramos: He got us to write his ending, the ending where JR Ewing isn’t a monster.

John Ross Ewing III, quoting The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past …”

Primeval Era

John Ross “Jock” Ewing: To hear Digger Barnes tell it, Jock Ewing’s responsible for everything evil, all the way back to original sin.

Palaeolithic Era

James Beaumont on JR Ewing: He just grew up in a different time, that’s all.
Michelle Stevens: Yeah, the Stone Age.

Bobby Ewing: Long before there were stores, men had to go out and hunt for their food, put it on the table. Otherwise they’d starve to death.

Marion Patrick “Mack” Mackenzie: I think when two cavemen met and decided not to kill each other, decided to live and let live, that was a contract, maybe the first law, and that started civilisation.

Gary Ewing: I think Sumner’s the guy that actually coined the phrase, “Contracts are meant to be broken.”

2900 BC

Mark St Claire: Ever since the first day history was recorded, untimely deaths have been as much a part of politics as kissing babies.

200 BC

Virginia “Aunt Ginny” Bullock to Val: In the second century BC, Danny was a scribe and you were a vestal virgin and against the wishes of the high priestess, he taught you secretly how to write.

AD 33

Danny Waleska, speaking in 1990: Jesus Christ came back from the dead in only three days. Surely Gary Ewing can do better than that!

1519

Orestes Mendez-Ochoa: Not since the Europeans raped our ancestors have we [Mexicans] truly been in power.

1825

Stephen F Austin: People call me the Father of Texas even though I was never married. You know why? Because I brought the first three hundred families here to Texas.

Donna Culver Krebbs: One of the things that we as Texans have always prided ourselves on is the love of the land.

Cliff Barnes on the Takapa area: Unspoiled wilderness that Texans have enjoyed for generations.

1830

Senator Harrison O’Dell on his home state: That mosquito-infested swamp. Why our ancestors drove the Indians out of that mud hole has forever escaped me.

1835

Cliff to Elena Ramos: Your great-great-grandfather was Augustine and in 1835, he purchased a stretch of land in what became Dallas.

1848

Val Ewing: Manifest Destiny was the idea that the United States was entitled by divine right to expand anywhere in North America. Polk, the President, used the idea of Manifest Destiny to justify the war with Mexico in 1848.

Cliff on Augustine Ramos’s land: It was stolen from him in the Mexican American War.

Drew Ramos, Elena’s brother, on Augustine’s land: This land is our family’s legacy. It never stopped being in our blood.

1859

John Ross “JR” Ewing II: The world's been running out of oil ever since the first well was drilled.

1862

Bobby Ewing, speaking about Southfork in 2012: This ranch has been in my mama’s family a hundred and fifty years.

Eleanor "Miss Ellie" Ewing (née Southworth) on Southfork: We Southworths have been here a long time. It’s what we’re made of. We love this land.

John Ross Ewing III: Land that’s been in my family for four generations.

Clayton Farlow to Bobby: Land that your great-grandfather staked out.

Greg Sumner to Gary Ewing: Land is the foundation of your family’s fortune, your family’s dignity.

Ray Krebbs on Southfork: The land was always Miss Ellie’s. Before she met Jock and married him, it was family land, Southworth land. It belonged to her father and her grandfather before that.

Bobby: There was a Southfork long before there was a Ewing Oil.

JR: Southfork was meant to be mine from the beginning.

1870

Jill Bennett: My family owned most of Empire Valley dating back to the 1800s when nobody wanted it.
Mack Mackenzie: That’s a lot of land. You must have been very wealthy.
Jill: You don’t know much about ranching.

1876

JR: The last time Cliff Barnes gave anyone advice it was to General Custer. He said, “Don’t you worry about them Indians.”

1880s

Lilimae Clements: Great Aunt Ida had twins. Twins run in the family.

Karen Fairgate, showing her daughter Diana an old photograph in 1981: That is Daddy's grandmother, your great-grandmother. She got married, not much older than you are now [seventeen]. Except for the clothing, she could be you.

1891

Aaron Southworth born

Barbara Southworth born

Laura Avery: Harriet — I think that was my father’s mother’s name.

1909

Jock Ewing born

Wes Parmalee: I was born in Texas, but I’ve been here and there — all around, you might say.

1910

Karen: Picasso was a very interesting man. Once he thought a painting was finished, he never went back to it no matter what anyone else said. That’s what made him such an original. He was so consumed with life and the seeking of fresh horizons that he simply never looked back. The past was dead even before his paints were dry. Do you know what he once said to a critic who attacked him for creating a new art form? “Only cowards dwell in the past. The artist must reach for tomorrow.”

1912

JR on Carter McKay: Last time he had a good laugh was when the Titanic went down.

1914

JR: Cliff Barnes would have everybody believe I started World War I and II.

1915

Miss Ellie to her daughter-in-law Cally in 1989: You need something borrowed and this is a necklace my mother wore at her wedding.

Ann Ewing, looking at a homemade cook book in 2012: It’s a collection of all the Ewing family recipes dating back to Miss Ellie’s mom.

Clayton on Southfork: You were born on this ranch, Ellie.

Jenna Wade to Miss Ellie: Bobby said you were born in a garden.

JR to Miss Ellie: You’ve been around Texas men all your life.

Jock on Willard “Digger” Barnes: Willard — that was his name before he called himself Digger.

Jock on Digger: Been a loser every day of his life.

Harrison “Dandy” Dandridge: I never gave a hoot about money. I was born without a dime.

1918

Garrison Southworth, son of Aaron and Anna Southworth, born

1919

Greg Sumner: They should never have given women the vote.

1920

Margaret Krebbs born

Greg to Mack Mackenzie: Your family [came] over in steerage.

Mack Mackenzie on his father Pete: He was the only one of his brothers that were born this side of the Atlantic.

Miss Ellie: My father was an early person. He said the ranch was always at its best in the morning.

Bobby: Aaron Southworth [was] a man who understood the value of preserving this family’s heritage, of protecting it.

Miss Ellie: My daddy had a feeling for the land that only a rancher could know.
Matt Devlin: Or a rancher’s daughter.

JR on Southfork: Mother loves this land just like her daddy did.

Miss Ellie: My father always wanted my brother to follow in his footsteps, but Garrison hated ranching. So it was me daddy always took to the cattle auctions and taught to ride before I could walk.

Miss Ellie, speaking at a cattle auction in 1986: Every time I come to one of these, I feel like a little girl sitting here watching my daddy buying and selling.

Miss Ellie: When I was four or five and found out what the auctions were, I made a terrible fuss. I didn’t want them to sell any of the livestock. Then pride took over. Once we got there and saw the other livestock and listened to the buyer, I swelled up. The steer on my daddy’s ranch was always the best in the state.

Clayton to Miss Ellie: They tell me that you used to be a pretty good cowhand when you were a little girl.

Miss Ellie: When I was a girl, I was terrified of tornados.

Miss Ellie: I don’t know how to skim stones. I just never learned.

1924

Polygraph expert: Were you born in San Angelo, Texas?

Arlen Ward: Yes sir, I was.
Polygraph expert: Was your mother’s maiden name Haley?
Arlen: Yes.

Clayton on the Southern Cross: My father built that ranch.

Sue Ellen Ewing: The Southern Cross Ranch in San Angelo? I thought the Wayne family owned that.
Steven “Dusty” Farlow: My mama's name was Farlow.

Harry McSween on Clayton: He lived all his life in San Angelo on the Southern Cross.

Clayton on his father: Big man, he was. He liked the oil business, but ranching was his real love. I guess he passed it on to me.

Miss Ellie: Dammit it all, Jock. You couldn’t have been an insurance salesman or a shoe salesman. No, you had to have oil in your blood, in your heart.

Abel Greeley, resident of Big Springs: Wildcatting was a big thing at the time. Everybody was pecking around for their own pool of oil.

Miss Ellie: Jock loved the wildcatting days.
Clayton: Those were frontier days.

Marvin “Punk” Anderson on Jock Ewing: A man I’m proud to say was one of closest friends ever since we was kids, wildcatting together over in the East Texas fields. Now, y’all might not think that he was such a good friend when I tell you that it was him that hung the name Punk on me!

Punk: Mr Anderson was my daddy. Everybody that knows me just calls me Punk.

Frank Crutcher on Punk: He’s been ordering me around ever since we was kids.
Punk: The exact opposite’s true!

Bobby: Punk was never one of Daddy’s more tactful friends.

JR on Jason Ewing: He was Daddy’s brother.

Miss Ellie on Jason: He was tall. I think Jason and Jock were the same size. Jock always said that Jason was hopeless in the marriage department.

Jamie Ewing, Jason’s daughter, on an old photograph: That’s a picture of Daddy and Uncle Jock before they split up.

Jenna on her father, Lucas Wade: He knew the Ewing brothers very well.
Jamie on Jason: He liked [Lucas] a lot.
Jenna: From what I heard from Lucas, they couldn’t stand each other.
Jamie: Well, your daddy may not have liked mine, but old Jason never had anything but nice things to say about Lucas Wade.
Jenna: I know they hated each other.

Jenna on Lucas: My father had as much power in his way as Jock Ewing did.

 

[Taylor Bennett Jr.]

bring back the 'winner' rating!

 

[Seaviewer]

The amount of research, not only within the shows themselves but history generally, is mind-boggling.

 

[James from London]

The amount of research, not only within the shows themselves but history generally, is mind-boggling.

Aw thanks, Seaviewer! (To be honest, though, the historical research mostly amounts to a few quick glances at Wikipedia ....)

 

[Lastkidpicked]

That's just to make it easier to read, rather than to get rigidly bogged down in continuity.

No reason to get rigidly bogged down in rigid continuity (Looking at you, Ray and Lucy).

 

[James from London]

1925

Laura Avery, suggesting baby names to her husband Richard in 1982: How about Martin, after your father?

Laura to her daughter Meg: Your great-grandmother went around the world on her honeymoon all by herself because your grandfather, he didn’t want to go.

1926

Pierce Lawton, speaking about California in 1991: There’s possibility in the air here. You can feel it. This is where everybody’s life begins over.
Paige: That’s why God invented California.

Paula Vertosick on California: Sometimes people forget this place is a desert.
Greg Sumner: Was a desert.
Paula: It was a desert until the Colorado River was tapped and Owen’s Valley became a manmade oasis.
Greg: People wanted to come here. People needed water.
Paula: The developers wanted the water to lure the people here.
Greg: People needed homes. The developers provided them.
Paula: At a cost to the environment.

Paul Galveston: I grew up on the land just east of Lotus Point. Used to be able to ride a horse all day and never see another person or run into any semblance of civilisation.

Miss Ellie on Southfork: I remember when we used to ride out here and we'd see cattle all the way down to the river and up on the hillside on the Haskins place.
Aaron Southworth: That was before the drought.

1927

Senator O’Dell: Have you ever visited my state?
Bobby: I can’t say as I have.
Senator O’Dell: Well, there’s no reason why you should. I wouldn’t if I hadn’t been born there.

1928

Matt Devlin to Miss Ellie: You haven’t changed since you were a girl. You were always fighting other people’s battles.

Carter McKay: My life has been one battle after another.

Lilimae: Where I come from, anger is better than helplessness any day of the week. Anger is real-life feeling.

Lilimae: The Pine Country is where Val and I have our roots.

Lilimae: My mother’s family name is Wylie.

Lilimae to her son Joshua: You look just like Orabelle Patrick — your grandmother, my mother.

Laura to Meg: “Marguerite, go wash your feet, The Board of Health is across the street.” They used to tease your grandma with that song when she was a little girl. She had red hair. And her mother had red hair. She used to put tea in her hair to keep it red.

Mack Mackenzie: My mother had red hair.

1929

Clayton on Jordan Lee: I’ve known him all my life.

Arlen Ward to Clayton: We’ve been friends all our lives.

Clayton to Arlen’s twin brother Atticus: I never did like you, Atticus.

Clayton: Atticus always tugged at his earlobe when he was nervous or lying. Arlen always teased him constantly. Said his ear would fall off if he wasn’t careful.

Clayton: We go back a long way, Rabbit.
Robert “Rabbit” Hutch: We sure do.

Arlen on Curly Morrison: He was a good friend to me.

Clayton on himself, Atticus, Arlen, Rabbit and Curly: Most of us grew up together in San Angelo.

Harry McSween on Clayton’s sister Jessica: She grew up with him in San Angelo.

Digger Barnes on Miss Ellie: My daddy used to work for her daddy, old man Southworth.

Aaron Southworth: Ellie, you know how I close I was to Willard's daddy.
Miss Ellie: Henry saved your life.
Aaron: I wanted to give him a piece of [Southfork] land, but he got insulted when I made the offer.
Miss Ellie: Real proud, huh?
Aaron: Too proud. Almost had to break his arm to get him to take a pair of handmade boots for Christmas. Anyway, he never let me bring up the land again until he was dying.
Miss Ellie: Did he know he was dying?
Aaron: Yeah. Near the end, I could tell he was fretting about Willard. The boy’s always been kind of a misfit and Henry was worried about what would happen to him after he was gone. So I told him that he always had a home and a job at our place and when he was ready to go out on his own, I’d give him the deed to the property and help him out. He argued a little, but I think he was glad. Seemed to take a load off his mind.

Miss Ellie to Digger: My daddy gave your daddy a parcel of land and when your daddy died, my daddy said you'd get it.

Garrison Southworth on him and Digger: We were round-the-neck buddies.

Maggie Monahan (née Barnes) on Digger: I’m his sister, but I was raised by the nuns. You [Ellie] grew up with him right here on this ranch, more his sister than I was. You probably knew him better.

Digger: She was a sweet little thing, Ellie was, with a great big laugh. She had a way about her. She would be sweet as sugar one minute, and come at you with a shotgun the next, and, oh, what a temper she had, go off like a firecracker - bang! - and just as quick, it was all over. Sure had a way about her.

Cliff on Digger: Ellie Ewing was someone very special to him. She was his first love.

Miss Ellie, looking at an old picture of Digger: How young he looks and so full of hope!
Cliff: You really loved him?
Miss Ellie: Oh, yes. I loved many things about him.

Miss Ellie: Willard Barnes, always the romantic. No-one ever knew how gentle you were.
Digger: Except you. I remember how you used to look when you used to pick [wildflowers] in the field, face all lit up and glowing. I remember every day we ever dated. Remember that time you was teaching me how to ride a horse? A big Palomino, name of Buckwheat. I still had oil on my boots. You must have spent hours cleaning up that animal.
Miss Ellie: And you picked the only spot of mud in the whole corral to fall into.
Digger: I wasn’t much of a horseman. Of course, I had a terrible temper.

Digger: We were good for each other.
Miss Ellie: For a while.

Digger: I always loved you, Ellie.

Jock Ewing on Digger and Ellie: Sweethearts?? He and Ellie were fourteen years old, fifteen tops!

Digger: We was just kids.
Miss Ellie: You meant a great deal to me, Willard.

Digger: I know ranchers. I grew up with them and for the life of me, I can’t understand what they love about ranching and what they got against oil.

Ed Haynes on Digger: [He] was one of the best wildcatters in the whole state.

Cliff on Digger: He was the greatest wildcatter in the whole state of Texas.

Cliff: You didn’t ever run across an old oil driller named Digger Barnes, did you?
Dandy Dandridge: Yeah, once or twice. Now there was a man who could find oil. Found it with his nose, just like me.

Cliff: My daddy never needed any reports to find oil. He just followed his nose and he never missed.

Digger: They used to point me in any direction, any direction. I’d start walking and where I stopped, that’s where the oil was. I didn’t even use a doodle stick, I could smell it coming right up out of the ground.

Jock on Digger: I swear that man could smell oil fifty thousand feet below the ground.

Miss Ellie: Jock, Digger was your friend and your partner.

JR Ewing: I’ve heard lots of stories about the early years, how Jock and Digger were partners, how they met riding the rails during the Depression when they were still practically kids, how they worked the oil fields, went wildcatting together.

Jock: Barnes and I were a heck of a pair back in those days.

Jock on him and Digger: We sure had some great times together.

Jamie Ewing: Daddy, Jock and Digger Barnes were pretty close.

Maggie on Jock, Jason and Digger: They sure did a lot of work together at one time.

JR on Blackie Callaghan: He was a friend of my daddy.
Meg Callaghan, Blackie’s daughter: They used to go wildcatting together with Digger Barnes.
JR: My daddy used to say when Blackie sniffed oil, everybody was covered with crude just as soon as they started drilling.
Meg: Yes and that’s why they called him Blackie.

Jock on Wally Kessel: He and Digger go way back.

Bobby on Jock: He used to do some wildcatting with you up in the Northwest territories, didn’t he?
Thornton McLeish: With my father.

Elroy Askew on Jock: He helped my daddy out of a real hole once.

Jock: Wild Bill [Orloff] did me a few favours years back when we were hawking oil leases on the street corners.

Father Mallory: I assume Mr Ewing’s first big strike would have been [in Texas].
Miss Ellie: I don’t remember. It was long before I was married to Jock and there were so many wells, so many towns.

Jordan Lee on Jock’s first big oil strike: Jock was in East Texas at the time. I was in the west. It was one of those little places that existed only for the amount of oil it could produce — Pride, Texas.

Miss Ellie, visiting Pride in 1989: I can just see those young wildcatters strutting around here. They must have felt as if they owned the world.

Miss Ellie, standing on Jock’s first drill site in Pride: This is where your dream started, but sometimes I wish it had never ever started at all.

John Ross Ewing III, Jock’s grandson: Grandpa hit his first gusher here [in Pride]?
JR: That’s right. Your granddaddy fought for this land and he won.
John Ross: This is the place where Grandpa made so much money!
JR: There’s more to it than just making money. Our heritage started here, son. Ewing Oil started here.

Miss Ellie: Pride is the birthplace of Ewing Oil.

Maggie: Jason, Jock and Digger — those three were the best of friends at one time. It was striking all that oil that broke them apart.

Miss Ellie on Jock, Jason and Digger: They were inseparable for a while. I thought that they would go on forever in business together, but Jason had wanderlust and Digger had a fixation on that bottle very early in life.

Miss Ellie on Jason: Did he ever tell you the nickname that Jock and Digger gave him?
Jamie: Why, sure — Tumbleweed. Tumbleweed Ewing.
Miss Ellie: Right, because he could just never settle in one place for very long.

Miss Ellie to Bobby: Once a well came in, Digger lost all interest. He’d be drunk for weeks, leaving your daddy with all the responsibility.

Punk Anderson on Alf Brindle and Joe Davis: A couple of roughnecks. They worked every field in East Texas.

Alf Brindle: Digger was a real good friend of mine. We did a lot of drinking and playing together, yes sir — but he always knew how to smell out where the oil was, that Digger did. And the fights them three had, I tell you!
Cliff: You mean the Ewing brothers against my daddy?
Alf: Well, that’s the way most people would have thought it was, but it just wasn’t so. Digger and Jason, they was the ones doing most of the fighting. Oh yeah, many’s the time Jock had to come between them because Jason really hated Digger, you know? He was all the time trying to get Jock to get rid of him, that they didn’t need him, that he was just a drunk - which he mostly was - but Jock wouldn’t hear of it, no sir! Jock took care of Digger. He kept him on the payroll even when he was off doing his drinking and he kept Jason from doing him any real damage too.

Jamie: My daddy didn’t like Digger Barnes any better than Jock did.

Alf: Begging your pardon, Miss Jamie, but your daddy was a blackhearted man. He and Jock were all the time going at each other over Digger and I’ve got to tell you that Mr Jock Ewing was near a saint putting up with the two of them.
JR: My daddy protected Digger and put up with his drinking. Any money he had, he was given by my daddy.
Alf: That’s about it. Digger was a weak man but Jock cared for him. Why, you’d have thought Digger was his brother, not Jason.

Sam Culver: They’d just elected me Justice of the Peace the week before and here they come, pulling Digger Barnes and Jock up in front of me. It seems they just hit one. Digger come into town to drink the bar dry, buying for everyone. In come old Jock, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and hauled him out. Well, that didn’t sit too good with the boys he was buying the drinks for, so there ensued one of the finest brawls ever to take place west of the Mississippi. Gave them both a week in the pokey.

 

[James from London]

1930

Clayton: I remember my daddy brought me to my first cattle auction. I think I was six or so.

Abel Greeley: Jonas [Culver] had a parcel of land that [his nephew] Sam just naturally wanted.

Harve Smithfield on Sam Culver: He was a fine lawyer.

Extracts from Sam Culver’s diary:
“February 3rd, 1930. Upped the offer to Jonas, but the old cootus still won’t budge. Jock thinks the land is worth a fortune in oil.”
“February 25th, 1930. Today I got a court order to have Jonas committed to Signal Mountain Sanitarium. Had myself appointed custodian of Jonas’s estate.”

Abel on Jonas: [He was] stubborn as a mule, but not crazy. A man like that, used to the outdoors, must have felt like a caged animal in that hospital. Putting him away was the same as shooting him through the heart.

Extracts from Sam Culver’s diary:
“March 27th, 1930. Today, as custodian of Jonas’s estate, I sold to Ewing/Culver all but forty acres of Jonas’s land. The money is in an account in his name and he’ll get a 25% royalty from all oil-producing wells. Next week, I’ll release him from the sanitarium. Neither Jock nor I wanted to do things this way, but the old codger left us no option. Anyway, now he’ll be a rich man despite himself.”
“April 12th, 1930. Lord oh lord, what have we done? Jonas killed himself today.”

Dave Culver, Sam’s son: Jonas made my father his sole heir. He got everything.

Donna: Jonas’s property was the field that started the entire Culver/Ewing fortunes.

Cliff: The Ewing fortune was founded on Digger’s skill.

JR: Ewing Oil #3 — one of the first fields Daddy ever struck it big on.

Digger: Now, nineteen and thirty was my year. My partner and I walked out right here in Texas, and I just followed my nose, and I said, “Here!”

Cliff: My daddy is the one that found the oil the Ewings have been sucking out of the ground for all these years. Without him, they wouldn’t have a penny. They have been taking the oil and they have been taking the honours. If it weren’t for Digger Barnes, nobody would ever have even heard of Jock Ewing.

Blackie Callaghan to JR: Everybody knew that Jock was overrated as an oilman. It was me and Digger Barnes that had the gift. Your daddy talked a big deal but it was always me and Digger that found the oil.

Blackie to JR: Your daddy was a great oilman, maybe the greatest.

Digger: Jock Ewing had the head, I had the nose. He was the smarter, I’ve never said otherwise. But without my nose, he wouldn’t have had nothing. I found the oil, he claimed it. I drilled it, he sold what bubbled up. We was partners. One needed the other. I trusted him.

Rebecca Wentworth (née Burke, ex-Barnes): Digger never had a chance. Jock was too shrewd, too strong and too fast.

Digger on Jock: He's been robbing me since we was partners.

Cliff on the Ewings: They cheated old Digger Barnes and they laughed. Jock Ewing treated him like dirt.

Cliff: The Ewings haven’t taken responsibility for anything they’ve ever done.

JR on Jock and Digger: They broke up over a — I don't know what. Some say it was a deal of some kind. Some even say it was over my mama.

Cliff to JR: Ewing 6 is the field that split up your daddy and mine. You see, my daddy found it, and your daddy swindled him out of it.

Elena Ramos to Cliff’s daughter, Pamela: [Ewing 6 is] the land Jock Ewing took from your grandfather.

Pamela Barnes to Cliff: That plot of land was robbed from your father and, because of that, I was robbed of ever having one [a father].

Miss Ellie on Jock, Jason and Digger: They leased a field that Digger had had his eye on and they worked it for almost three months.

JR: Between Jason, Digger and Jock, was there any one boss?
Alf Brindle: Well if there was, it was Jock. Digger did the sniffing out and Jason kind of ran the crews. Yeah, Jock was heading the operation all right.
Ray Krebbs: Did they ever talk about being partners?
Alf: That I don’t recall. I guess it was understood. I didn’t know about them splitting it up in thirds or anything like that, but everyone just kind of took it for granted that each of them had a piece of the pie.

A notation in Sam Culver’s diary: "August 8th, 1930. It looks like Jock, Jason and Digger are getting real close to oil. They'd better hit in a couple of days though or they are gonna run out of money.”

Miss Ellie on Jock, Jason and Digger: The three of them were so far in debt that I thought they were going to have to get down on their knees and actually dig with their bare hands.

JR: Daddy told me about that well. He said he made a vow that if it didn’t come in, he was going to stop wildcatting and open a haberdashery.
Bobby: I doubt if he’d have kept that promise.

Miss Ellie, looking at a picture: It’s an old photograph of Jock, Jason, Digger Barnes and Sam Culver. It looks like they’re near the discovery well in East Texas.

Alf Brindle, looking at the same picture: That’s me! That’s me right up on that platform there!

An inscription on the back of Digger’s copy of the same photo: “August 10 1930. Nacogdoches County. We’ve done it. Jock, Jason, Sam and me celebrating the big strike.”

Jamie: They hit a gusher on the eighty-ninth day.
Miss Ellie: And they paid off all their debts and I didn’t see Jock for a week. That’s how long they celebrated, the three of them.

Alf: The night the well came in, we had one hell of a celebration — I mean, the loud mouth was really flowing. Me and Jason and Digger, we all got drunk as skunks and tore up the town. The sheriff threw us in the pokey for three days. Jock was smarter than the rest of us. He had a few drinks and sacked out early.
Ray: So the very next day, Jock went down to register the claim?
Alf: Yeah, while we was in jail. Listen, in them days, you didn’t want to wait around too long before registering a strike, you know. You had to register in person back then.

Punk: Sure, I remember that gusher. I was wildcatting down in Nacogdoches County at the time right close to where the boys were. Word of that strike spread like wildfire.

Front page headline of the Nacogdoches News, August 11th 1930: "RICH OIL STRIKE! Ewing Brothers And Willard Barnes Hit New Gusher"

JR, looking at an old legal record: It’s dated August 11th, 1930 and it says that Jock Ewing recorded the discovery of oil and it’s in the name of the Ewing Oil Company and it lists Daddy as the sole owner.
Harve, reading the same document: As of the eleventh of August of that year, Jock Ewing appears to be the only one with a claim to the strike and Ewing Oil.

Jock on Ewing Oil: Hell, I started that company and ran it for many years.

Bobby: Mama, you know how proud Daddy always was of Ewing Oil.

JR: Ewing Oil is everything this family has stood for.

Jock: I put that claim in my name to keep [Digger] from gambling his half away.

Digger on Jock: And he went to register the claim and I stayed there and I drilled, and when I thought we had enough, ten times more than we could ever spend, I said “That’s a-plenty”.

Jock on Digger: I come back with the claim. He’s drunk. He looks at the paper, sees my name, jumps me, tries to tear my eyes out.


Digger on Jock: He looked at me and laughed in my face and said that I owned nothing, nothing at all, I even owed him some money.


Jock on Digger: I was gonna give him half the money.

An extract from one of Sam’s journals: “August 17th 1930. On this morning, I went out to the field and met Jock, Jason and Digger. The boys were still celebrating the big strike. Since there are two Ewings and one Barnes, they are calling the newly founded company Ewing Oil. And after they finally sobered up, I drew up an agreement between them giving them each one third ownership in the new company.”

Clayton on the agreement drawn by Sam on the back of an old oil lease form: It says that the discovery well in East Texas is the first asset of the newly formed Ewing Oil company, and it also says that the well, the field and all future holdings of Ewing Oil are owned jointly in equal one third shares by Jock Ewing, Jason Ewing and Willard “Digger” Barnes and their heirs in perpetuity.

Alf on the document: Does that there say that Jock gave Digger one third of Ewing Oil?
Cliff: It sure does.
Alf: I’ll be doggone, I guess he really done it! Jock was always saying he was afraid something might happen to him, and Jason would take over so I guess he did that so no-one could cheat Digger out of his third.

Bobby: Mama, did Daddy ever talk to you about dividing the company up like that?
Miss Ellie: No, he never did and I never saw a document like that either.

Jamie on Jason’s copy of the document: My daddy carried it around for almost fifty years.

JR: You ever go up and see Daddy [at the site]?
Punk: You betcha. I jumped in the truck and drove up there to see what all the hollering was about. I found that the boys were feeling no pain. By the time I got there, all three of them had drunk up half the bootleg in the county.
JR: They say anything about a partnership?
Punk: Yeah, I remember them talking about it but I don’t know whether it was for real or not. I mean, I don’t know whether it was legal or just something they had talked about.
Bobby: Was Sam Culver there?
Punk: No, he had already gone by the time I got there. When I got there, nobody was saying anything that was very coherent. I remember Digger and Jason were trying to punch each other out and as a matter of fact, it would have been a pretty damn good fight if they hadn’t been so drunk. I didn’t stay. I had to get back and set the well I was drilling. Boy, we were eager beavers in those days - me and Jock, Jason, Digger.

Ben Stivers: I, like most young bucks, tried my hand at wildcatting. Back in the thirties it was, over in East Texas, not all that far from where the Ewings hit their first big field. I never had much luck so I figured I better stick with what I knew best, so I moved back to Colorado.

Digger to Jock: You took the oil wells and gave me nothing in return. You took my oil wells and my money and my sweetheart and I never got a cent for them.

JR to Cliff: You know the difference between your daddy and my daddy? My daddy knew how to invest in the right talent and the right tools. He knew how to pump oil out of the ground. But your daddy claimed that he could sniff oil out of the ground, didn’t need anything but his nose. The only place his nose ever led him was Skid Row.

Cliff: The Ewings drove my father to drink and left him penniless and broken.

Cliff: My daddy didn’t have a mean bone in his body and in all his life, there isn’t anybody who ever tried to help him or put out their hand to him. He drank, he drank a lot. No reason for the Ewings to rob him.

Alf: Round about the time Digger and Jock had their big falling out, Digger give this [a packet containing his copy of the document splitting Ewing Oil in thirds] to me. I guess he was afraid of getting drunk and losing it or something. Anyways, we parted paths along about then and the only times we saw each other after that, why, we’d start drinking and clean forget that we even had it.

Harve: Jock and Jason had a falling out a long time ago. I think it was before you were born, wasn’t it, JR?

 

[James from London]

1931

Jock Ewing: Her name was Amanda Lewis. She was a pretty little thing, fragile. You know, the kind you had to protect.

Amanda Ewing (née Lewis): You were always sweet on me, weren’t you, Jock?
Jock: Always.
Amanda: And we were always a pair, you and me.
Jock: We sure were.

Jason Ewing: They was always sweethearts, Jock and Amanda.

Amanda: Everybody always said Miss Brannigan was sweet on Mr Trippet, that awful druggist.
Jock: They weren’t much of a pair.
Amanda: I didn’t say they were a pair, I just said she was sweet on him. Papa once hit Mr Trippet because he said something not so nice about Mama.

Jason on Jock and Amanda: He married her even though he knew the older she’d get, the more she’d get like her mama.
Digger: What’s her mama like?
Jason: Loony.

Wallace Windham: I was I suppose what some people would call an entrepreneur. I dabbled in all sorts of ventures as long as they were legal and profitable.
Harve Smithfield: Did you ever dabble in the oil business?
Wallace: Once, briefly, in 1931. At that time, our country was in great trouble. There were so many people out of work, so few jobs. A man would even sell you the shirt off his back for his next meal. If you had money, and I had it, why, you could buy almost anything at a fraction of its value. That’s how I met Jason Ewing and Digger Barnes. See, the price of petroleum was tumbling. People couldn’t afford to drive cars. Industry round the country was coming to a standstill. And Jason Ewing wanted out of the oil business before his third of Ewing Oil became worthless.
Harve: So he offered to sell his share of Ewing Oil to you?
Wallace: Yes.
Harve: What about Digger Barnes?
Wallace: He offered to sell his share too, though he never said too much. We met three times, I think he was drunk every time. Anyway, Jason Ewing did all the talking for both of them.
Harve: Did you finally decide to buy both their shares of Ewing Oil?
Wallace: I did. See, Jason was greedy and stupid so I bought their two-thirds of Ewing Oil for a very low price.
Harve: What did you do then, Mr Windham?
Wallace: I never bought anything that I couldn’t turn over for a quick profit so after their first visit, I checked on Ewing Oil and I found out they could and wanted to sell me their shares without telling Jock Ewing. Oh, and I found out a lot about Jock Ewing too. He was the brains of the outfit. The company meant everything to him so I knew I had a buyer and I sat back and I waited. I didn’t have to wait too long. When he found out about the deal, he was furious — and ashamed. He didn’t want anyone to know what his brother and best friend had done to him. He asked me to spare him the embarrassment of not changing the name of Ewing Oil. Since I was interested in owning it no longer than it took Jock to buy it back, I thought, “Well, that’s the least I can do.” So we agreed to conduct our business in secret. You know, he borrowed money up to his eyeballs, mortgaged everything he owned, and then week by week, month by month for over a year, Jock made payments to me. I don’t know how he scrimped and saved so much.

Wallace to Jock’s sons: Your daddy really earned my respect for what he did. The man mortgaged nearly everything he owned at that time.

Wallace: Jock Ewing was one hell of a man.

1932

Harve: Jock Ewing bought back Jason Ewing’s and Digger Barnes’ shares of Ewing Oil from Wallace Windham and became the sole legal owner of Ewing Oil on November 28th 1932.

JR: Daddy didn’t keep many records in the early years.

Wallace: Jock was a very careful man. He had copies of everything. He gave most of his papers to Amanda for safekeeping.

Amanda, speaking to Jock as if it were still 1932: I feel positively awful you losing all your money that way.
Bobby, pretending to be Jock: Do you remember some documents I gave you, some documents that I signed with Mr Windham?
Amanda: Oh yes, I remember him. He came to the house once or twice.
Bobby: They were some documents concerning Ewing Oil and me and Digger and Jason and Mr Windham.

Jock on Amanda: I was wildcatting. Tough times. Men shooting, killing each other. There were accidents. It was just something that she couldn’t cope with, that’s all. All that strain. Everything got to her, everything depressed her.

Pete Adams, private detective: Jason Ewing was quite a traveller. Starting in 1932, he left Texas for the first time.
JR: That was when he and Daddy had their big blow up.
Ray: Guess they had an awful fight and Jason just pulled up and left.

Cliff on Jason and Digger: [Jock] took everything that was rightfully theirs and drove them away.
Jamie: Nobody drove my daddy away.

Pete Adams on Jason: He was in and out of Texas for the next five or six years or so.

1933

Al Baker: Remember when Fred and Ginger did the Carioca? “It's not a foxtrot or a polka …”
Lilimae: I’m too young to remember that.

Miss Ellie: The thirties were like a plague around here. There was drought, depression.

Miss Ellie: Raising chickens kept my daddy and me alive during hard times.

Garrison Southworth: I loved Daddy. I just couldn’t stand that look in his eyes when he’d come back from selling things off with hardly any money at all. I was his only son and I couldn’t help him. And he’d go right on, as if Southfork was the most prosperous ranch on earth. But his voice had an edge of fear. He never knew I heard that.

Garrison: I never really hated this ranch. It was just that I could never live up to Daddy's expectations.

Miss Ellie, speaking in 1933: You did say you’d come to the damn barbecue, Willard.
Digger: I know.
Ellie: Well, why didn’t you?
Digger: I guess I forgot.
Ellie: You didn’t forget. You were scared.

Digger’s doctor, speaking in 1951: I set this wrist eighteen years ago. I set it temporary. He supposed to come in and see me to get a real cast, but he never did.

Jock on Amanda: Two years after we married, she had a nervous breakdown. She lost all touch with reality. They had to confine her to a state mental hospital. Dr Filey told me to divorce her, that she’d never be a well woman. It’s something I never told anybody.

1934

Clayton: My daddy used to tell me when I was a little shaver that if I wanted to find myself a little peace of mind, just to find myself a nice fireplace.

Paul Galveston: When I started out, I had a hundred dollars. Everything came from that.

Mark Graison: My father used to work fourteen hours a day.

Bobby: My daddy built an empire because he was smarter than the next guy and he worked harder and he was luckier.

JR to Jock: You built Ewing Oil from the ground up and whatever it took, you did it for Ewing Oil.

Jock: Ewing Oil is mine. I started it, I worked it, I made it what it is today.

JR: My daddy always wanted Ewing Oil to be the biggest independent oil company in Texas.

JR: My family built Texas into the great state it is now.

Bobby on Ewing Oil: Daddy spent his whole life building that company.

Bobby: Money and oil, the very things that built this company.

JR: Ewing Oil was always a private company. Expansion was just a question of buying and selling with us.

JR: Ewing Oil was built by our daddy. He meant for it to stay in the family.

JR to Jock: You always said you’d never let Ewing Oil be destroyed.

JR: Harve's been Ewing Oil's lawyer ever since there's been a Ewing Oil.

Jock: Harve, you've been my lawyer since near Day One.

Harve: I was your daddy’s attorney before you were born, JR.

Harve: My job has always been to follow the orders of the man in charge of Ewing Oil.

Miss Ellie to Harve: You’ve been representing Ewing interests for as long as I can remember.

Miss Ellie: When you’re young and you find a man like Jock, the future’s so full of promise.

Jock to JR: When I was able, I had [Amanda] moved to a private hospital in Colorado. Paid for her expenses ever since. Used to see her real often. I always dreaded seeing her. When I started seeing your mama, I stopped.

Amanda to Jock: I missed you. I worry about you because you work so hard.

Miss Ellie on Amanda: Why did you stop visiting her? Was it because of me?
Jock: It was becoming harder and harder finding excuses. I was afraid that if I told you about Amanda, I’d lose you.

Jock to Miss Ellie: Always wanted to tell [you about Amanda]. I must have been on the verge of it a hundred times, but the time was never right. I just didn’t have the guts to tell you, that’s all. I was in competition with Digger Barnes for you. I wasn’t so sure of myself in those days.

Rebecca Wentworth: Digger Barnes was in love with Ellie. So was Jock Ewing. Two men in love with the same woman, happens all the time — but when one of the men is a Ewing, he isn’t content to win the woman fair and square, he has to destroy his rival at the same time.

Digger on Jock: He not only stole my fortune, he stole my sweetheart.

Miss Ellie on Jock: He didn’t steal me, Digger.

Maggie Monahan on Digger: "Jock Ewing stole everything" — he's said it so often he believes it.

JR to Bobby: The feud Digger Barnes started with our family caused more heartbreak than either of us has time to recount.

Cliff on the enmity between the Barneses and the Ewings: There was never any decency in this feud. It started before JR and it’ll go on after him.

Sam Culver: Not saying Digger really had any cause to hate you so, Jock. I guess you did as fair as you could by him.

Maggie: According to Digger, everything bad is Ewing-made. Digger’s blamed Jock for all the misfortune he ever had. Some of the blame is Jock’s, but not all.

Cliff: Jock said that he had never cheated Digger out of that oil.
Miss Ellie: Jock was telling the truth, Cliff. Jock wanted so much to do right by Digger and Digger would never listen.
Cliff: Old Digger, he was just stubborn.

Miss Ellie: The only one that hurt Digger was Digger himself.
Bobby: Mama, are you saying that Daddy's blameless, that he didn't con Digger out of things that are rightfully his?
Miss Ellie: What I'm saying is Digger would have ended up the way he is even if there had never been a Jock Ewing.

Miss Ellie on Garrison: I never understood why you never liked him.
Jock: It was the other way around. I was the outsider — big successful oil man. He and his buddy Digger Barnes, they resented that.

JR on Garrison: He used to hang around with Digger Barnes, sang the same refrain over and over again — the Ewings stole everything from him.

Jock: Both ran away — Garrison to sea, Digger to the bottle.

Miss Ellie: My brother Garrison and I were very close until he left.

Garrison to Miss Ellie: I just got fed up with it, all the dust and the dying cattle. And all those fights with Daddy. So I just left you with the responsibility.

Miss Ellie: Garrison loved the sea so he joined the merchant marine.

Garrison on Digger: I tried to talk him into going to sea with me.
Pam: I think Digger would have gone if he wasn’t so hooked on oil.

Jock on Aaron Southworth: When Garrison ran away, he was bankrupt. The sheriff was knocking at the door.

Miss Ellie: My family was gonna lose this ranch.

Bobby on the drought of 1988: Mama was saying it was like this way back when she and her daddy almost lost the ranch.

Miss Ellie: Did I ever say anything I didn't mean?
Digger: One time I wish you had, when you told me you were going to marry Jock Ewing.
Miss Ellie: I did what I had to do.

Miss Ellie: I married Jock to save the ranch. It was different then. Sometimes we did things out of necessity, not love.

Miss Ellie on her and Jock: There wasn’t much magic. It was all I could do to get him to marry me.

Miss Ellie: I knew a woman once. Her man couldn’t decide whether or not to do right by her. So she took a horsewhip to him, helped make up his mind fast.

Miss Ellie on JR: I had to take a horsewhip to the boy’s father before he’d do right by me.

Jenna on Jock: Didn’t he love you?
Miss Ellie: Oh yes. And I loved him more than any man I’d ever known, but not at first.

Miss Ellie, on her wedding dress: My daddy had a woman come all the way from Paris with the material for it, and money was hard for him to come by in those days. But he was determined to show all those oil men that a Southworth wouldn’t be put to shame. [Jock] was something, all decked out in formal clothes. He would have felt better in boots and jeans. He kept tugging at his collar, trying to breathe. He was the handsomest man I’d ever seen.

Lincoln Hargrave, attorney, speaking in 1981: You and Jock have been married … forty-two, forty-three years?
Miss Ellie: Forty-five.
Lincoln: Look at all the two of you have built.
Miss Ellie: What have we built — an empire?

JR: Mama, when you married Daddy, you knew that he had oil in his blood and he was the most ambitious man in the state of Texas.

Garrison to Jock: I was in New York waiting for a ship when I read about you and Ellie getting married.

Garrison: When I read she’d married that hard-nosed wildcatter, I didn’t wanna believe it. Guess that must have been the final straw for my old friend Digger Barnes.
Jock: He survived it.

Digger: I never held you responsible, you know that. You did what you had to do and I respected you for it.
Miss Ellie: So did Jock.

Digger on him and Ellie: I wish things could have turned out differently.

Digger to Miss Ellie: I knew you were Jock's girl all along.

Maggie: Digger took off right after Ellie married Jock.

Ray: Miss Ellie would never leave Southfork so Jock married her and moved onto her land. If it ever bothered him, he never let on in any way that I know of and Miss Ellie always used to treat it as if it was their land, their ranch.

Miss Ellie: How smart I was, marrying a man with dirty fingernails.

Jock to Miss Ellie: I can't put into words how I feel about you. You knew that when you married me.

Miss Ellie to Jock: I haven't always liked you, but I've always loved you and always trusted you.

Jock to Miss Ellie: You remember when we first got married? We used to bring a bottle of wine up to the room, spend most of the night talking and carrying on.

Miss Ellie: When Jock and I were first married, we had problems.

Miss Ellie: When Jock and I were first married, he used to threaten to send me out to cooking school.

Jock: Miss Ellie, when I married you, I told you that I account to no woman for my time.

Miss Ellie: My father didn’t give us five years together. Sometimes I think he was right. We were both so headstrong.

Miss Ellie: When I was first married, my daddy didn’t like Jock any better than Digger did.

Jock on Aaron Southworth: Hated all oilmen. He said they ruined the ranges and stank up the air, and he figured the only way to live off the land decently was to raise cattle.

Jock: I never did understand what Southworth saw in those steers.

Gary, Jock and Ellie's son: Daddy loved the land for what he could get out of it. Mama loved the land just because it was.

Jock on Aaron: It was oil he hated, not change.
Miss Ellie: It was the land he loved.
Jock: But he didn't have anything against improvement of the land. Otherwise we'd still be living in that little clapboard house.

Jock: I built the first house Miss Ellie and I ever lived in, after the old ranch house burnt down.

Miss Ellie: Jock built this house when the old one got too small.

Jock: It's amazing how rewarding it can be to build your own home.

Builder: Jock built this house to last.

Miss Ellie: We built a home.

Bobby: This house and its history is what grounds us as a family. It’s our roots.

Mr Sampson, architect, to Bobby: When I designed Southfork for your mama and daddy, I put in all the fire resistant material that was available at the time.

Miss Ellie on the Southfork living room: I love the way this room looks. I guess I always have.

Jock to son Bobby on Section 40 of Southfork: That’s where I first discovered oil, right after I married your mama.

JR: Section 40 sits on the biggest oil pool in Texas.

Jock: Old Man Southworth damn near skinned me alive after he found out what I’d done. Barely tolerated me the way it was.

Ray: Old Man Southworth had you tear down your well and cap it off.
Jock: That's right. He didn't want all this turned into an oil field.

Willie Joe Garr to JR: Your daddy capped that well long before you were ever born.

Christopher Ewing, speaking in 2012: Miss Ellie threw Jock’s rig off the ranch.
John Ross: Eighty years ago, Christopher.

Miss Ellie: My daddy swore there'd never be any drilling on this land.

Bobby on Aaron: He wanted that land preserved for ranching.

Jock on Aaron: He put it in his will — nobody could ever drill on Southfork.

Elena Ramos, speaking in 2012: No-one’s ever been allowed to drill on Southfork.

Bank clerk, speaking to Bobby in 2012: This is the original [safety deposit] box taken out by your grandfather in 1934. It’s been transferred several times since then due to bank sales and mergers.

Miss Ellie: It was my daddy’s wish that Garrison have the ranch. Jock, I never told you how hurt I was when I found out my daddy had made Garrison sole heir. But that’s the way things were done in those days — father to son.

Miss Ellie: I was raised to believe a man should be head of a ranch.

Miss Ellie: Daughters always came second.

Miss Ellie: I always wanted a daughter. Maybe it’s a good thing I never had one.

Miss Ellie on Jordan Lee: I remember back when he was a wildcatter. Wild he was, too. When he struck his first big well, he gave Jock a case of scotch and they spent all night trying to drink each other under the table. Jordan won and he gave me a charm bracelet so that some of his good luck would rub off on us.

 

[Seaviewer]

Garrison: I never really hated this ranch. It was just that I could never live up to Daddy's expectations.

That could very easily have been spoken by his namesake nephew as well.

 

[James from London]

1935

Lil Trotter (née Hunter) on God: I’ve answered to Him all my life.

Aunt Ginny on Medjugorje: I have dreamed about going there all my life.

Lilimae: My mama’s favourite hymn was ‘Rock of Ages’.

Lilimae: If a heavenly angel came down when I was a child to tell me that a daughter of mine was going to be on The Mike Douglas Show, I’d have would have told her she was crazy.

1936

Sid Fairgate: My real name is William Sidney, William after my father.

Lilimae Clements: When I was a little girl, I went to Galveston with my daddy, saw the ocean for the first time. A wave would break and I'd run as fast as I could to get away from it, and then I'd get brave and chase it back out to sea.

Miss Ellie to Garrison: Your ship went down. They said you’d drowned. Daddy died, and then you, both so close together.

Miss Ellie: I thought you were dead.
Garrison: That's the way I wanted it.

Garrison to Miss Ellie: I thought it was best for everyone. I knew you were married to Jock by then and he had the money to save the ranch. I couldn’t come back because I couldn’t face you.

Miss Ellie on Garrison: When he was lost at sea, [Jock] and I had to go to court and have him declared dead.
Jock: That was just a formality. The ranch was tied up in a legal knot.

JR: The ranch went to Mama.

Miss Ellie: Because my father thought that Garrison was dead, Jock and I inherited this ranch, but it was my brother that was the real heir.
Clayton: But why? He wanted nothing to do with ranching.
Miss Ellie: Well, in those days, the ranch was always left to the man in the family.

Miss Ellie on Garrison: Even when I thought he was dead, that day in court when we made it official, I felt I was stealing something from him.

Miss Ellie: My daddy’s will gave the [Southfork] mineral rights to me.

JR, speaking about Ewing Oil and the Cattleman’s Bank in 1986: Fifty years of doing business together.

Bobby on the Cattleman’s Bank: Daddy’s always been loyal to this bank.

1937

Pete Adams on Jason: In 1937, he started his own oil company. It didn’t last very long. He went broke and skipped out of Dallas owing a lot of money, some of which [Jock] made good on. He went to Latin America, worked on several oil drilling operations down there.

1938

Jock, speaking in 1978: In forty years you've never lied to me, Miss Ellie.

Blackie Callaghan: Beth Anne Templeton — the prettiest thing in Tulsa. She had thick black hair, big round blue eyes and the tiniest little feet you ever wanted to see on a human being.

Blackie’s daughter Meg, looking at a photograph of Beth Anne: The love of Blackie’s life, taken in 1930-something, right before she and Blackie had a huge fight and Blackie married Mama instead. He never saw her again.

Lucy Ewing: Grandma Moses wasn’t just somebody’s grandmother. She was a very famous artist who didn’t get started till she was around ninety.
Alex Barton: Actually, she was seventy-nine when she sold her first painting.

1939

Pete Adams on Jason: Came back to Dallas, 1939.

Extract from a signed legal document, dated February 26th 1939: “It is hereby agreed that all revenues and profits in the oil field now known as Ewing 23 will be shared equally by John Ewing and Willard Barnes and their heirs in perpetuity.”

Cliff: They probably signed it when Digger was drunk and then forgot all about it.


Jock: Digger and I signed a lot of papers.

Cliff: Jock Ewing must have signed enough papers during his lifetime to fill a railroad car.

Miss Ellie: [In 1939], Ewing Oil paid off the mortgage on Southfork.

Jock: It was my life, my sweat and my money that saved this ranch.

JR on Jock: He saved this ranch from the auction block when [Miss Ellie]’s daddy went broke.

John Ross on Jock: He made us rich and saved Southfork.

Miss Ellie: JR, Ewing Oil was a part of my life before you were born. It saved this ranch and it’s the backbone of our family fortune.

Miss Ellie: Ewing Oil has always been just a business, no more no less.

Sue Ellen, JR’s wife, speaking in 1985: I don’t think I have to take a backseat to Ewing Oil in JR’s life. You never did for Jock.
Miss Ellie: Oh yes, there were times that I did. But for the most part, I fought with him side by side for the things that we believed in.

Donna Krebbs, speaking about her marriage in 1984: How much am I supposed to give up of what I want?
Miss Ellie: I don’t have the answer to that. It’s something that my generation never had to deal with. When I married Jock, I had his children and I took care of Southfork and I was very happy doing it.
Donna: That’s right, Miss Ellie, because you were the glue that kept the family together.

Miss Ellie to John Ross: Your granddaddy in his own way was a very difficult man to live with. The oil business was always first with him for a very long time [but] no matter how bad things got, your granddaddy was the only man for me so we stuck it out together. It wasn’t always easy, but we did it.

Bobby: Mama had this card. She had it in a frame, always kept in on her desk. It said, “My friend is not perfect. Nor am I. But we suit each other admirably.”

Miss Ellie: Jock and I made a good marriage.

Jock, speaking in 1978: We’ve had a good life, Ellie.

Clayton: Jock had a lovely and devoted wife by his side. He was a lucky man.
Miss Ellie: I think I was the lucky one.

Miss Ellie: My sons had the finest father and I was married to the finest man that God ever put on this earth.

Miss Ellie: Jock was everything. He was my life.

Miss Ellie: I was one half of a couple for so many years.

Clayton on the Ewings: This family wasn’t built on wealth. It was built on character.

Miss Ellie on being pregnant: I remember with my sons, the energy I had! To me it was a miracle, for my doctor it was a medical condition. You would have thought I caught something.

Miss Ellie: Then I had JR. Somehow children make it all seem more permanent.

JR: Mama should have had her tubes tied together right after I was born.

Miss Ellie: JR, I gave birth to you, I nursed you and sometimes I spanked you. I tried to change you a thousand times, but you’ve always been what you are — my first baby.

JR on Jock: Once he said, “You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Digger Barnes.”

Miss Ellie to JR: Junior, you were born old.

Sue Ellen on JR: He’s a natural born fighter.

Miss Ellie on JR: A natural born businessman.

KGIM news reader: JR Ewing was born in Dallas.

Fred, computer expert at Graison Research: Place of birth — Dallas?
JR: Braddock.

JR: Southfork is my home. I was born there.

JR: Southfork isn’t just a piece of dirt. It’s as much a part of me as my blood and my bones.

JR: I’ve lived all my life in Dallas.

JR: Oil is my birthright.

Drew Ramos: The Ewings aren’t the only ones with a birthright.

Miss Ellie, holding a pair of baby booties: Can you believe that JR was once little enough for these?
Lucy Ewing: Yeah, but I heard his little booties had spikes!

Lilimae, speaking to Jason Avery in 1982: When I was a girl your age [ten], we lived at the edge of this big old swamp.

Lilimae: A trot-line is a fishing line that’s strung across a riverbed, lies on the bottom and there’s a hook every foot or so. I never did like trot-lines. People didn’t intend for them to be cruel, but they are. You put them in for catfish. Every time you pull them up, you find fish hooked every which way, or a turtle snagged, swimming, swimming, never getting anywhere, or even a mud hen caught, couldn’t get up for air. Well, I used to pull up trot-lines whenever I could get away with it and I would throw the dead ones away and let loose the wounded ones.

Lilimae: When I was a girl back in Tennessee, I’d see every one of Andrew Douglas’s pictures. Sit through them all day long. Andrew Douglas’s movies were so romantic — and cry? Oh, I’d need three hankies!

Lilimae: Here's a song my mama used to sing to me when I was a girl. "Who's going to shoe your pretty little feet, who's going to glove your hands? …"

Lilimae on playing the autoharp: I never took a [music] lesson in my life, no classes, no nothing. Just came to me as natural as singing comes to birds.

Clayton: I used to sing a little when I was younger. As a matter of fact, my mother had quite a lovely voice.
JR: And your sister Jessica?
Clayton: She played the piano, and quite well too.

Clayton on him and Jessica: We never spent a lot of time together.

Jessica Montford (neé Farlow): When Clayton and I were growing up, he was not only my big brother, he was like my father a lot of the time. Daddy — he was always busy with Southern Cross and the refineries. He didn’t have much time for a girl.

Clayton to Ray: Southern Cross was a very successful breeding ranch before you were born.

Jessica, speaking to Ray in 1984: You remind me of [Clayton] when he was younger. You’re both strong and silent men, men of the fields, men of the soil.

Clayton: I was raised to believe there’s a right and a wrong.

Jessica on Clayton: He’s always been an honourable man.

“Rabbit” Hutch: Remember that time down in Tulsa you took on that drunk who wanted my scalp for a keepsake?
Clayton: He almost took mine instead!

Curly Morrison: Old Clayton, he was the scourge of San Angelo. There wasn’t a girl in town didn’t have her bonnet set for him.

Clayton: I did kick up my heels a little bit in the old wildcatting days.

Kimberly Cryder on her father, Dr Herbert Anderson Styles: Styles is from Austin. He was a handsome man with a big powerful voice, a man who could do anything — wildcatting, hunting. He was a great horseman.

JR: They tell me you were quite a sharp man in your younger days.
Dr Styles: I was strong, ruthless.

Carter McKay: Dr Styles and I had been friends all of our lives.

McKay on Dr Styles: I always liked him.

McKay: I’ve never been one for much socialising. I’ve always been what you might call a bit of recluse.

1940

JR: Tradition has always played a big part in the Ewing family.

JR: We Ewings have always run a very conservative operation — solid investments, well-surveyed fields, that sort of thing.

JR, speaking in 1990 about Jock’s first oil well in Pride: They were taking oil out fifty years ago and I know damn well they didn’t get all of it.
Clayton: The boys tell me that too much oil was taken out all at once.

Lilimae, meeting Pete Mackenzie in 1982: This can’t be Mack’s daddy!
Mack Mackenzie: My mother swore he was in town at the time.

Mack on his father: He used to do "a little of this, a little of that.” A salesman I guess, mostly.

 

[Seaviewer]

Miss Ellie on Garrison: When he was lost at sea, [Jock] and I had to go to court and have him declared dead.

And then she had to do it again for Jock himself. Mistake both times?

 

[James from London]

1941

JR: The Ewing family has always backed a strong military.

Pete Adams on Jason: Enlisted in the navy in 1941. After boot camp, he served in the Pacific. Got a couple of decorations.

Arlen Ward: Rabbit, don’t I recall how you were a pharmacist’s mate when you were in the navy?

“Rabbit” Hutch: Yeah.

Jessica Montford, speaking about Dallas in 1983: The last time I was here, I was getting ready to graduate from middle school and Daddy brought me up here to buy my graduation dress. I didn’t even know Southfork existed then.

Marion Patrick “Mack” Mackenzie born 23/7/41

Invoice from Cantrell and Guy, attorneys at law:
“Date: September 20, 1941
Client name: Aaron Southworth
Client address: Southfork Ranch 3700 Hogge Rd., Parker, Texas
Re: Southfork Ranch Trust”
Bobby: This is an invoice to my grandpa and it mentions the establishment of a trust separating the mineral rights from the land rights of Southfork. The lawyer was an old hunting buddy of Grandpa’s.

1942

Gary on the Ewing fortune: I was born into it. It had nothing to do with me.

Garrison on Gary: You named him after me.
Miss Ellie: I never knew how alike the two of you were. Both wanderers, both drifters.

Miss Ellie: I always thought Gary inherited [his love of the land] from me.

Miss Ellie: JR was so quiet, so shy. When I took him shopping, he held onto my skirts so tight. I think Jock scared him at first, and then when Gary came along, Jock just took over raising JR. “Make him a man’s man,” he said.

Miss Ellie: You were a small child when I stopped interfering in your life, JR.

Miss Ellie to JR: I gave you up too soon. I should have held onto you a little longer.

Ann Ewing (neé Smith, ex-Ryland): Bobby said Miss Ellie never had a chance with you. Jock snatched you up as soon as you could walk to teach you the oil business.
JR: Daddy had a different parenting style, that’s for sure.

Miss Ellie: Jock and JR used to go off together.

JR: Daddy took me out [hunting], oh, just when I first started walking. He could find his way through the woods and swamps, across deserts.

JR: I tagged along with my daddy to the office — oh, ever since I could barely walk. I loved it.

JR, speaking to John Ross in 1982: Your granddaddy used to take me to work with him when I was not much older than you are right now [three].

JR: Ever since I was a little boy, Ewing Oil has meant so much to me.

Miss Ellie, speaking about John Ross in 1982: He's sitting in your daddy's chair, JR, just the way you used to.

JR: All my life, I've wanted control of Ewing Oil. I never doubted for a day it wouldn’t be mine.

JR: All my life, I’ve known I was invincible.

JR: I’ve been special my whole life. There isn’t anything I wanted I didn’t get.

JR: I’ve never lacked self-confidence.
Stephanie Rodgers: Arrogance, I think, is a more suitable word.

Miss Ellie: JR has always been difficult. There were times when even his own father couldn’t control him.

JR: Daddy always said I had the Devil in me.

JR: Daddy, I always tried to please you. Always tried to do what you wanted me to do. Always tried to be the man you wanted me to become.

Sue Ellen to John Ross: Your daddy always was an optimist.

JR: I’ve never been a sore loser.

Miss Ellie: I guess that’s why I fussed over Gary so much, because Jock had JR.

Miss Ellie: I always did what I thought was best for my [sons], but what I thought was right and what was right weren’t always the same thing.

JR to Miss Ellie: You always had a knack for doing the right thing.

Bobby: Mama and Daddy always came at the top of JR’s list. They were always the most important thing in his life.

JR on Miss Ellie: She always got up bright and early, ever since I can remember.

Jock: It was wartime. Back in those days, everybody went a little haywire.

Miss Ellie: We were so young then. Somehow, you think you just can’t die.

Sarah Ewing: Our former name was Friedman. My family had been in hiding from the Nazis since 1942.

Lilimae: During the war, they had a slogan — "Eat a bigger breakfast, do a better job."

Polygraph expert: Did you serve in the second world war?
Arlen Ward: Damn straight.

Ruth Sumner: I knew what I was doing.
Greg Sumner: Sleeping with Paul Galveston while my father served his country?
Ruth: We were all in love, the three of us. I married the romantic one, Sumner, who flew planes; Galveston built them. It worked.

Laura on ‘Now, Voyager’: That’s what my mother would call a three-hankie movie.

1943

Greg: Damn that Paul Galveston. That guy never gave me anything but trouble.
Ruth: He gave you life, Gregory.
Greg: You may recall, Mother, that that was an accident, not a gift.

Paula Vertosick: Gregory Sumner, born 1943.

Karen Mackenzie, speaking in 1987: We weren't expecting you.
Greg: Story of my life.

Paige Matheson: “Sumner” — what, the man was born with only a last name? His mother probably called him Sumner.

Paige: Were you born messy or did you have to work at it?
Greg: Actually, it’s a gift.

Claudia Whittaker, Greg’s half-sister: Where did you get such a sick, warped sense of humour?
Greg: Genetics.
Claudia: Boy, am I glad Paul Galveston was your father and not mine.

Ruth on Greg: He’s always behaved like a thoughtless little brat — inherited from his father, I believe.
Greg: Oh you’re too modest, Mother.

Ruth: Paul Galveston was your father.
Greg: Not to me he wasn’t.
Ruth: They [Galveston and Sumner] were both your fathers.
Greg: I see. The men in your life were interchangeable parts.
Ruth: They were both your father, Gregory. Your genes and your upbringing — you were brought up to be powerful.

Greg, speaking to Val in 1992: So what do you want me to do — talk to you about my repressed childhood?

Paul Galveston to Greg: I was never there to play ‘This Little Piggy Went to Market’ when you went to bed.

Mary Frances Sumner to Greg: Good thing this man [Paul] didn’t actually raise you. He would have been a horrible model for a boy to grow up with.

Greg on Paul: He was a lousy father, but he did one smart thing. He got other humans to raise me. For the most part, they did a pretty good job.

Karen Fairgate-Mackenzie (née Cooper): I'm from New York.

Mack to Karen: I don’t know how the world knew what it was doing until you came along.

Lilimae: My daddy told me to take typing in high school.

Lilimae: Elwood P Watkins, a mesmerist, who played the old key circuit in my home town, once asked me to join his act. Wasn't Elwood handsome? None of us girls could take our eyes off him when he performed.
Chip Roberts: I bet he only had eyes for you, Lilimae.

An extract from ‘Nashville Junction’, Val Ewing’s novel based on Lilimae’s life as a young woman: “Verna took comfort in the refuge of the old gable as she listened to the gentle pelting of the rain against the wooden shingles and looked out at the land on which she had grown up. She knew that her only hope was in escape.”

Lilimae: When I was about fourteen, I ran away from home without so much as a wave good-bye. I put all my belongings in an old cardboard valise and thumbed a ride to Nashville. I was going to try out for a local pageant there. [Sings:] “A pretty girl …” Well, when Mama saw the valise was missing, she was sure something awful was happening to her Lilimae. She called the sheriff, he called out the car and before I knew it, I was being escorted home. Mama was hugging me and crying and praising the Lord for my deliverance and I’d only been ten miles away.

Lilimae: Camomile. My mama always said it was a necessary beverage at the end of the day.

Lilimae: My mama used to say to me, “Lilimae, Mr. Right is waiting for you.” Oh, I hated that.

Lilimae: Did I ever tell you about the time I ran away to the woods and met the Lizard Man? It was the summer after my mama ran off with the minstrel show and my daddy sent me to live with Aunt Idabelle and Uncle Horace and Aunt Idabelle’s sister Queenie. Aunt Idabelle was an old prude, but Queenie — oh, didn’t we make a pair? Well, one day we found a bunch of love letters up in the attic that were written to Aunt Idabelle by a flier who was killed in the war. This was long before she met Uncle Horace.

Val on Lilimae: She never grew up.

Gary on Lilimae: A little country Peter Pan who married [Val's] daddy when she was fourteen.

Lilimae: Val’s daddy, Jeremiah, he was an awful lot older than me. He and my daddy was friends. Jeremiah was a good man, but he was put off by my spirit. I was a fiery one, I was.

Gary on Jeremiah and Lilimae: He was an old man already. Probably treated her like the little girl she was until [Val] came along.

Val: I don’t ever remember you fixing chicken and dumplings.
Lilimae: Well, of course I did, every birthday and special occasion since before you were born. Your Uncle Billy ate so much one time, he fainted. We all thought he’d had a heart attack.

1944

Pete Adams on Jason Ewing: 1944, he was thrown in the brig for alleged black market activities.

JR on Jason: I vaguely remember him. I doubt if Bobby or Gary would though.

JR: I haven’t laid eyes on Uncle Jason since I was a kid.

JR: Daddy and Jason never saw each other again.

Cliff on Jason: What did he turn into? A drifter and a dayworker living anyplace he could while the Ewings just got richer and fatter.

JR: It was my grandfather Aaron Southworth’s favourite gun — an 1892 six-shot Colt, a double action 38 service revolver. The president of the company [had] presented it to [him]. My grandfather was dying. He wanted my daddy to have it.
Assistant DA Sloane: You were there on that occasion?
JR: Yes. He wanted my father to know he had finally been accepted into the family.

Assistant DA Sloane: It must have been a very special gun to your daddy. He probably kept it well oiled and clean all the time.
JR: He did.

JR to John Ross: Your granddad gave me that shotgun. Taught me how to shoot on that.

JR: My daddy taught me how to hunt.

JR: My daddy taught me [to swim].

Jock: I used to spend a lot of time with JR, fishing, hunting, when he was a kid, and one thing I drilled into him was how to signal for help if he was ever out alone, lost or hurt — three of anything: shots, fires, mirror flashes.

Greg: I’ve been working ever since I could walk.

Harlan McManus, motel proprietor: Whereabouts are you from?
Val Ewing: Tennessee, originally.

Lilimae: You come from Husky Corners, Valene.

Val: I come from a tiny community.

Michelle Stevens: You were from a small town? So was I.
LeeAnn De La Vega (née Nelson): I bet your daddy wasn’t a Baptist school teacher. Let me tell you — that was one strict man.

Lilimae on childbirth: At home they used to say, “If you keep a knife under the bed, it cuts the pain in two.” I was in labour a long time.

Lilimae on Val: I was just a baby when she was born.

Jill Bennett on Val: She was born having a hard time.

Lilimae to Val: You slept through the night almost from the day you were born.

Lilimae: There's a little trick my mama taught me. You got to face the crib in the right direction — head towards the moon and little feet facing the North Star.

Lilimae: It’s my firm belief that cribs bring bad luck.
Val: Is that a family superstition, Mama?
Lilimae: Family? No, I learned it from experience.

Val, speaking about her babies in 1985: Mama’s trying to get them to eat their squash like she did with me when I was little.

Lilimae: The "choo choo” always worked with you.
Val: It never worked with me, Mama.

Lilimae: My daughter wouldn’t have won any prizes for neatness when she was a baby.
Val: You always said I was a perfect child.

Val on treating an ear infection: My mama used to put hot salt packs on them.

Lilimae on her husband Jeremiah: When Valene was born, she kind of took him by surprise. He never knew he could love anybody so much.

Lilimae on Jeremiah: He never had much love for me anyway, but after Val, well, it was just them … and me. But that didn’t mean I didn’t love [Val] because I did. I just felt squeezed out.

Gary on Lilimae: The little girl was replaced by a real little girl. You [Val] got all the attention she used to get. If I'd have been Lilimae, I think I might have looked for attention someplace else — maybe by singing.

Lilimae: When Valene was a baby, she could listen to my singing all day. Had no choice, come to think of it. I was always singing. My music always gave me pleasure and I needed pleasure. I needed to feel important, I needed life, and if I’d had my own life, I could have given more to [Val] and to Jeremiah.

Lilimae on Val: [‘Shady Grove’] was one of the [songs] she liked best.

Laura Avery to Meg: Your grandma was something else. She went to college. She had a career when nobody else was doing that.

Miss Ellie on New York: I haven't been there [since] our tenth wedding anniversary.

Alex Georgi, speaking in 1990: It would be immensely helpful to have the [Sumner Group] revenue projections for next year.
Linda Fairgate: It would have also been helpful to the Germans to know the date and hour of the Allied Invasion.

Miss Ellie: Jock was in the airforce. He’d been overseas for years. We hadn’t seen each other in such a long time.

Miss Ellie: Evidently, Jock and [Tom] Mallory served together in England during the war. Jock never liked to talk about the war years much.

Miss Ellie, looking at an old photograph: Here’s Jock with his fighter’s group in England.
Father Mallory, Tom Mallory’s son: There’s my father there, the one with the big smile on his face.

Father Mallory: My father used to regale me with tales of himself and Mr Ewing. They were in the air corps together. I believe he was known as “Whoopee Cushion” Mallory in those days.

Clayton: After all I’ve heard about Jock, Mallory’s very unlikely character for him to become friends with.
Miss Ellie: I suppose politics and war make strange bedfellows.

Sarah Ewing: In 1944, Jock, Tom Mallory and two other men were returning from a bombing mission in Germany. Their plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire.
Miss Ellie: And it crashed in Holland — Jock told me some of this story — and it landed in a town called …
Sarah: Tilburg.
Miss Ellie: Yes, and a Jewish family took them in and saved their lives. It was you.

Miss Ellie: The two other men died in the crash, as I recall.
Sarah: And Jock was near death.

Sarah: When we sheltered Jock, he thought he was dying so he wrote two letters which he then gave to me for safekeeping. One was to you which, unfortunately, I lost, but the other still exists.

Miss Ellie to JR: When your daddy thought he was dying, he wrote this to you. You were the only son he had then and you were very, very special to him.

Jock’s letter to JR: “John Ross, as I write this, I know I may never see you again. I had hoped to have many children to follow in my footsteps, but that will not happen now so I pass the torch to you. The future of the family and Ewing Oil is in your hands. I know that you’re too young now to fully understand what I’m about to say to you, but in time you will. There’s certain things that I’ve always held true and I pass them on to you. Any man can win when things go his way, it’s the man that overcomes adversity that is the true champion and when your back is to the wall, remember that a cornered animal is the most dangerous. Keep your friends close but your enemies even closer and when things look darkest, remember your heritage. Never stop trying. Never let the bastards get you down. The Ewing name and our company can’t stop with me nor you. Perhaps, with God’s grace, I may be back to stand beside you as one day you will stand beside your son and pass the torch to him. Should that not happen, I want you to know that I love you and I will forever. Your loving father.”

Sarah: I did what I could [for Jock] under limited circumstances.
Miss Ellie: You saved his life.
Clayton: At great risk to your own, I would imagine.

Miss Ellie: Jock told me that you helped him get out of the country.
Sarah: No, my husband and my brother smuggled Tom and Jock to the coast of the North Sea. Others helped them get safely back to England.

Sarah: Jock used contacts within the resistance to fly back to Holland. We were still in hiding and each day brought the Nazis closer to us. It would only have been a matter of time.
Clayton: Jock smuggled you and your family out of the country?
Sarah: He flew us back to England right under the noses of the Germans. He saved not only my husband and myself, but also my brother and his wife and their son Stanley.

Sarah: Jock was posted back to England before we had a chance to say goodbye and thank you.
Clayton: When did you get over here [Montana}?
Sarah: A few months later. Tom managed to get papers for us. We wanted a new start, new identities, but he also left England before we had a chance to tell him of our new name.

Sarah: Ewing and Mallory are not our real names. We took them in honour of the men who saved our lives.

Miss Ellie to Sarah: So you settled here and never made contact with [Tom] again.

 

[James from London]

1945

Miss Ellie, speaking in 1979: JR hasn't behaved this well since he was six years old.

Gary on Abby Fairgate Cunningham Ewing Sumner: She could make the rape of Poland look like a Sunday school picnic.

Pete Adams on Jason: He was discharged [from the navy] in 1945.

Jock: I was in the Army Corps. I served in London and I had an affair with an army nurse named Margaret Hunter. She knew about Ellie. I knew about her fiancee, Amos Krebbs, but it was war time and our feelings were — well, let’s just say we were two lonely people.

Amos Krebbs: You were in love with [Margaret], weren’t you?
Jock: It was special.

Ray Krebbs, Margaret’s son: She used to talk about those nursing days a lot. Seemed like the only time in her life she ever felt useful.

Jock on Margaret: I was sent to France and she was shipped back home. We said good-bye. We knew it was over. We thought that was the best thing to do. We never kept in touch after that.

Amos on Margaret: There I was — good old 4F Amos Krebbs. I had to wait till the whole war was over before she’d come home to Kansas, and then I had to put up with the fact that she’d fallen for some Texas colonel.

Amos to Jock: I know she was in love with you. She never let me forget it.

Ray: Mama told you about Jock Ewing?
Lil Trotter, Margaret’s sister: About meeting him in England and all during the war? Oh yes, she spoke of him with genuine admiration.
Ray: Admiration?
Lil: Well, maybe it was a little more than admiration — love, maybe.
Ray: Mama was in love with Jock.
Lil: I thought that might have been. I often wondered if she married Amos because she was missing Jock so much.
Ray: That may have been.

Amos: When I married her, Margaret was already pregnant.

Jock: As soon as I got home, I confessed [the affair] to Miss Ellie.

Jenna: What happened when Jock told you about him and Ray’s mother?

Miss Ellie: That was a terrible time for us. He regretted that it happened.
Jenna: You must have forgiven him eventually?
Miss Ellie: Yes, I did.

Jock: What I didn’t know was I had fathered a child by Margaret.

Lil to Ray: Lord bless your mother, she never said a word.

JR on Ray: Daddy’s big mistake — a half-breed, born on the wrong side of the blanket.

Garnet McGee, speaking to Ray in 1978: You were born poor. Intend to die that way too?

Lil on Margaret: She had a hard time with Amos Krebbs, harder than she deserved. I never thought that Amos Krebbs was the right kind of husband for [her]. He certainly wasn’t the right kind of father for Raymond. I told her that. I told him that, too.

Ray on Lil: She loved my mother a lot.

John Ross on a two-cone drill bit: My granddaddy used this very bit to get his big well in 1945.

Maggie Monaghan on Digger: When he finally came back, he had Becky with him.

Maggie on Rebecca: She wasn’t from around here. Never did get it straight exactly where she was from — Oklahoma, maybe, or Tennessee.

Pamela Barnes, Cliff’s daughter, looking through his safety deposit box in 2013: Grandma Wentworth’s engagement ring, the one that Digger gave her.
John Ross: Not too shabby for Digger Barnes.

Maggie on Digger and Rebecca: He married her on the rebound, we figured. I think he grew to love her. He seemed to.

Cliff on Digger: He loved Mama.
Pam: Did he? He never says that. When he speaks of her at all it’s with a kind of reverence, but not the kind of passion he seems to feel for Miss Ellie.

Miss Ellie to Pam: I only met your mother a few times. None of us knew Rebecca very well.

1946

JR, speaking to John Ross in 1986: I wasn’t much older than you are now [seven] when [Jock] started taking me out in the field, teaching me how to run an oil company.

Miss Ellie to John Ross: Of all the boys, your daddy was the one who always wanted to go out into the fields with your grandpa Jock. He loved the oil business. I guess that was partly because he always wanted to be his daddy’s favourite son.
John Ross: And was he?
Miss Ellie: Oh, your grandpa loved all his boys, but it was your daddy he taught the oil business to.

Bobby: JR was the oilman. He was the one that was always supposed to follow in Daddy’s footsteps.

JR: Hell, I’m an oilman. Always have been, always will be.

John Ross, speaking in 1986: How would you feel about me coming to work at Ewing Oil full time?
JR: I said the same thing to my daddy when I was your age.
John Ross: And when he finished laughing, what did he say?
JR: He said I was rushing into things and I had a lot of growing up to do first. I was disappointed, but your granddaddy was right. He knew how much the oil business was going to change before I was ready to take over Ewing Oil. He also knew that an education would prepare me for those changes.

John Ross, speaking in 1991: School can’t teach me how to run an oil company.
JR: Well, where do you think I learned?

An extract from Margaret Krebbs’ diary, dated October 19th 1946: “Raymond’s first birthday. I feel so depressed today. Jock, if you only knew how much your son and I miss you. I long to talk to you, to see you, but I won’t come between you and your family. I cannot.”

Amos to Jock: She never really did get over you.

Amos on Margaret: I was kind of angry at one point there. That’s how come I happened to steal [her diary].

Cliff: I had an older brother, Tyler. He died when he was six months old.

Jessica: Daddy died and Clayton took over Southern Cross. After a while, that ranch meant everything to him.

Clayton: All my adult life, I’ve been in charge. I’ve lived on my own land and in my own house.

Clayton: Jessica was a pretty wild kid when she was young. It was always hard for her to keep her emotions in check.

Jessica: I did grow up a little wild. I was the talk of San Angelo.

Jessica: Folks used to say I wrestled mountain lions down in San Angelo.

Clayton on him and Jessica: We were close at the time and I could kind of look after her and protect her from — well, from herself actually.

Clayton on Jessica: I pulled her out of a lot of scrapes when she was younger.

Jessica: There was more than one party Clayton had to rescue me from.

Jessica, speaking to Clayton in 1984: You look like you used to when you caught me sneaking in from a late date.

Clayton: I guess I’ve always been uncomfortable around Jessie.

Jessica to Clayton: I knew dear Rabbit from our days at San Angelo. I bet you didn’t know he had a crush on me in high school.

Jessica: When Clayton married Amy, I felt like I’d lost my best friend. Everything between us changed. Oh, I know that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I mean, a married man doesn’t have much time for his kid sister anymore, especially as she’s the wildest girl in San Angelo.

Clayton: I loved Amy.

Harry McSween on Clayton: His wife was enormously wealthy in her own right. The family left her a trust fund with more money than the Farlows ever had.

Clayton: After Amy and I got married, I really didn’t have the time for Jessica and I guess she felt that because she really started to let loose and one day she came home pregnant.

Clayton on Jessica’s son Steven, aka Dusty: I never knew who his father was and I’m not sure that Jessie did either.

Jessica: Atticus [Ward] is Dusty’s father.

Jessica on Atticus: He wanted to marry me after I told him I was pregnant, but [Clayton] wouldn’t give us the time.

Ray, speaking about Jessica’s pregnancy in 1984: Thirty, forty years ago I guessed that caused quite a scandal.
Clayton: It would have, but we agreed upon a plan. Amy and I took her on a long trip overseas so she could have the baby in peace.

Jessica to Clayton: Who banished me to England in the first place? You!

Clayton, speaking in 1984: Jessie left San Angelo thirty years ago and she hasn’t been back very much. My sister was a dreamer. Texas just wasn’t big enough for her. She had her head full of a lot of crazy notions, travelling all over and meeting all kinds of people.

1947

Mack Mackenzie on his father and uncles: They were brought up in a Depression, fought a war. They knew how to be grownups. They knew how to get older. After what they went through, they almost looked forward to it.

Ginger Ward, speaking in 1982: Why do you call Mack Pat?
Pete Mackenzie: Because I’m Mack. Mackenzies are always Mack. When Pat was a boy, he was Little Mack and I was Big Mack.
Mack: That was before his name became famous for that special sauce on a sesame seed bun!

Mack: When I was six years old, I was running through the house. I knocked over a lamp and it broke and my dad beat the hell out of me. He just didn’t spank me, he hit me with his fists, gave me two black eyes. I was six years old and I told my friends that I fell off my bike.

Pete Mackenzie to Mack: You’re stupid. You always have been. You never could touch me.

Sid Fairgate: I remember my own father. He used to have this attitude like I owed him something. Even as a kid, I figured that was wrong. I figured that he had it backwards, that it was fathers who owed their kids something.

Taylor “Guzzler” Bennett: I never had any brothers or sisters. My mama died when I was a little boy. It was just Daddy and me. He was not an affectionate man.

JR to his mother-in-law Patricia Shepard: I suppose you think Sue Ellen’s descended from royalty on your side of the family — or maybe her daddy’s?

Sue Ellen: The only thing I remember about my daddy was the smell of liquor on his breath.

Ann Ewing on Harris Ryland: His father committed suicide before he was born.

JR: When I was eight years old, I asked my daddy for a horse and he said when I came up with the money, he’d sell me one. So all that summer, I worked in the oilfields, digging trenches and such, twelve hours a day, and true to his word, Daddy sold me a horse. I learned quick enough that horse was blind. Now I loved my daddy and I respected my daddy, but most importantly, I feared my daddy.

Christopher Ewing on Jock: Everybody said that he was an ass-kicking, hard-drinking son of a bitch.

JR on Jock: He was the original hardball player. You remember what happened to people who got in his way?
Bobby: If he was going to run somebody over, he’d at least warn them to get out of the way first.
JR: Maybe that’s the way you remember it, but it wasn’t like that in the early years.

JR: Mama, you don’t know the half of what Daddy did when he was running Ewing Oil. Now he was a fair man, but he was tough and ruthless when he had to be. He brought strong leadership to the company and strong leadership to the family.

Tom Owens to Jock: You came to my farm personally. You tried to get me to sell. When I wouldn’t, you spread some money around. Suddenly nobody would buy my crops. You crushed me like a bug, took everything.

Jock: Back in those days, I ran roughshod over a lot of people.

Tom on Jock: He destroyed me.

Tom: My boy and I had to start all over again from nothing in Landowne.

Dr Harlan Danvers on Jock: He’s a tough man. He always has been.

Sue Ellen Ewing: JR’s daddy used to run Ewing Oil using the three Bs — booze, broads and booty.

Mr Harrigan, editor of the Navarro Sentinel newspaper: I’ve lived all my life in Navarro County. People treated Ewing Oil fair and square. Of course, one hand washed the other. I’m not denying that.

Judith Ryland to her son Harris: Your grandfather had a saying, “Money and morality are like two cars on a one-lane road. When they meet, morality’s gonna end up in the ditch.”

Miss Ellie, showing the charms on her bracelet: Here’s the one that Seth Stone gave me when he left Texaco and went independent. And Andy Bradley gave me this one, and Jock even added to it.

Bobby to Marilee Stone (née Hurst): Your family and mine go back a long ways. You might have made Seth president, but everybody knows it was your daddy first and then you who built that company and amassed the fortune.

Jock, speaking about Jeb Ames and Willie Joe Garr in 1979: They're about as trustworthy as two stepped-on rattlesnakes.
JR: Well, sir, you're the one who brought them in as partners up at those two fields in Galveston.
Jock: No, I brought their daddies in. Men you could trust with a handshake.

Marilee Stone on Jordan Lee and Andy Bradley: Stonehurst has been partners with them for a long time.

Wade Luce on Wade Luce Oil: I invested a lot of my life into that company.

Jordan Lee on the Dallas oil cartel: Together we’ve always been able to keep the major companies at bay.

Clayton, looking around the Southern Cross: The old ranch house just down there near those trees, big rambling building — that’s where Steven was born.

Donna Krebbs: I thought Dusty was born in San Angelo.
Clayton: That’s what we wanted people to think, but he was born in London.

Clayton on Jessica: She can appear to be normal for long periods of time and then suddenly fly into a murderous rage. The first time it really surfaced was after Steven’s birth.

Clayton: After the birth, Jessica went into an emotional depression that was so bad we had to put her in a rest home, a place to see that she got proper care. Amy and I kept Dusty. That’s what we had agreed upon.

Miss Ellie on Jessica: Did she resent you from taking him away from her?
Clayton: I didn’t think so. We had agreed that Amy and I would take the baby but I guess, deep inside, she resented it.

Clayton on Dusty: We never adopted him legally, but we got a birth certificate that named us as parents and we took him back to Texas.

Clayton on Dusty: I never told him that he was not my real son.

Ray: After Jessie got out of the rest home, she was all right?
Clayton: We assumed so. She responded to the treatment beautifully and actually by the time she was released, Amy and I were back in Texas.

Miss Ellie on Jessica: You thought she’d recovered?
Clayton: Yes. Everything was fine.

Jessica on Dusty: All those years, Amy had him instead of me.

Judith to Harris: You had trouble sleeping since you were a baby. I cannot count the nights you would fuss until I gave you my breast.

 

[Seaviewer]

JR on Ray: Daddy’s big mistake — a half-breed, born on the wrong side of the blanket.

I've always been a bit puzzled by JR's insistence on calling Ray a half-breed. I know it's used as a general derogatory term but it makes little sense in that he's as much a Ewing as any of them - just not a Southworth.

 

[James from London]

1948

Digger to Cliff: My whole life, I never got one thing I wanted — except you.

JR on Cliff: I think that boy was born without any manners whatsoever.

Cliff: I was born to be dumped on by the Ewings. As a matter of fact, sometimes I think that the good Lord put me on this earth for that specific purpose.

JR on Cliff: He’s hated this family since the day he was born.

JR on the Barneses and Ewings: There’s been bad blood between our families for as long as I can remember.

Cliff: I think JR and I would have hated each other no matter what our names were.

Laura Avery, born 1948

Mary Robeson on Laura: Even as a baby, she had that quality. She hardly ever cried.

Mary on Laura: She’s my daughter.
Greg: You didn’t raise her, you didn’t clothe her, you didn’t feed her. Your daughter? Laura didn’t even know you existed.

Mary: I had my daughter torn away from me.

Mary: I was cheated out of my child.
Greg: Nobody cheated you out of anything. You were a drunk who abandoned your daughter.

Pat Knelman on Mary: The welfare people took her little girl away from her, said Mary wasn’t a good mother.

Mack, speaking to Mary in 1992: You were an unfit mother.
Toni Fields, attorney: That is not for you to decide.
Mack: I didn’t decide it. The court did, long before I knew her or Laura.

Mary: Laura was taken from me when she was an infant. She was stolen by a crooked bureaucrat in a state adoption agency in Florida.

Mary: That social worker stole her and sold her to that married couple out of state.

Gary: Mary Robeson was not Laura’s mother. She was her aunt. Laura’s real mother died in childbirth.
Mack: Mary’s real name was Loretta.

Karen on Laura’s adoptive parents: They must have taken pretty good care of her because she often talked about her happy childhood.

Laura: Meg happens to be my mother’s name.

Ben Gibson: Mom was [called] Betsy.

Ben: I was born on a little farm outside of Steubenville, Ohio. Dean Martin was from Steubenville, you know.

Amos Krebbs on Ray: I raised him for three years.

Ray: You ran off on me and Ma. You never come back once, never sent a letter, postcard even, not a dime.
Amos: I didn’t have one to send. I tell you, things just wasn’t good for me.
Ray: Basically, you just never gave a damn.

Clayton on Jessica: She had her head full of a lot of crazy notions, travelling all over and meeting all kinds of people.
Miss Ellie: Lots of girls dream like that.
Clayton: Jessie achieved a lot of it.

San Angelo newspaper headline: “Local Girl Marries English Lord — Jessica Farlow Becomes Lady Montford”

Clayton on Jessica: She married a nobleman, an English lord named Henry Montford, and settled down in England. I never saw her for years.

Miss Ellie: As close as you and Clayton apparently were, I am surprised you married an Englishman and lived over there.
Jessica: Well, things change.

Jessica on the Montford family sword: It belonged to Henry’s great grandfather. It hung over the mantle in our home.

Jessica on the English: I never did take to their tea drinking and little watercress sandwiches. I guess you can take the girl out of Texas but you can’t take Texas out of the girl.

Jessica on her and Atticus Ward: We kept in touch through the years.

1949

Angelica Nero: When he was twenty-one years old, Dimitri [Marinos] inherited his fortune. He ran wild all over the world, jet-setting from here to there, from there to Texas. He was making oil deals and connections with everyone.

Sid Fairgate: When I was a kid, we were taught that marijuana led to drug addiction.

JR: Drug dealing is a nasty business. In my day, people used to think that only hardened criminals did something like that.

Al Baker: In our day, people thought Carmen Miranda was outrageous.
Lilimae: I had a pair of platform shoes this high!

Lilimae on her autoharp: Granny gave it to me the day she died and I’ve had that old autoharp with me ever since, through good times and bad.

Lilimae: As a teenager, I stole the O’Reillys’ DeSoto, went down to Port Arthur for that talent contest.

Sylvia Lean: My mother wanted to be a star.

Sylvia: My mother said she was doing it for me, but I would never have been a dancer if my mother hadn’t have pushed me. I think the happiest night of her life was when I played the old Lyric Theatre in Baltimore. She brought the whole neighbourhood.

Mack: When I was in school, there was this other kid who was this wonderful clarinetist and he practised all the time and his mother used to push him and push him. We were always getting these invitations to Daniel’s recital. He had these collections of these little figurines, like of Beethoven and Mozart. We’d snap the noses off them when he wasn’t looking.
Karen: You were rotten kids.
Mack: We might have been rotten, but we were normal.

Sid: When I was at school, everybody else was into jitterbugging and sports and listening to crooners. Me, all I cared about was building model aeroplanes and model cars and messing around with my brother's hot rod. But they all used to laugh at me, think I had a nut loose somewhere, so I tried to be like everybody else. I played sports, it was fun, but what I really wanted to do was get my hands on an engine. Then I decided, "What the heck? I think I'm just going to be myself," and it worked out pretty good.

Karen: I used to stare at the clock, my teacher’s clock, in the second grade. Waited for the recess bell. She always used to say you couldn’t see the big hand move.

Greg to her sister Claudia: I forgive you for everything between the ages of two and seven.

Greg to his niece Kate: When your mother was around nine years old, she refuses a second place ribbon in a science fair because she knew the kid who won had cheated. It was either first place for her or nothing. She always had to be right.

Greg: What was that song that the old lady used to sing us to sleep with? It had fruits and apples in it.
Claudia: Oh yes, she used to sing it to you — “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me.”

Claudia on ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree’: My mother never sang it to me. My mother never sang anything to me, period. I used to hear her, though, singing it through the wall at Greg, singing him to sleep every night, while on the other side of the wall, I cried myself to sleep because I didn’t exist for my mother.

1950

Bobby James Ewing, date of birth: 16 Feb 1950
Place of birth: Southfork Ranch, Texas

Bobby on Southfork: I was born in this house.

Bobby on Southfork: It’s where I was brought up.

Bobby: Southfork is the only home I’ve ever known.

JR to John Ross: Your granddaddy used to tell me that Ewings pass down brains and brawn to their sons.

Bobby: Maybe there are more of Mama’s genes in my blood, the Southworths, than there are Daddy’s.

JR to Bobby: You were [Daddy’s] favourite from the day you were born.

April Stevens to Bobby: You’ve been rich since the day you were born.

Casey Denault on Southfork: People are born into a place like this, I guess. They sure are different from the rest of us.
Lucy: That’s not true. Other than the fact they’ve got a lot of money, what’s so different?
Casey: If you don’t know, I can’t explain it to you.

JR: If anyone was born to be a Ewing, it’s you, Jenna.

Abby Ewing (née Fairgate, ex-Cunningham): I wasn’t born rich, you know.

Sid on Abby: When she was born, I was fourteen years old.

Anne Matheson (née Winston): Me, the little rich girl who always had everything handed to her.

Eric Thomas, attorney, to Anne: In the forty years Buchanan, Rondale & McKee handled your father’s business, we always gave him our utmost consideration. He even accused Mr Buchanan of being too conservative, but we thought it better to act on the side of caution.

Donna: My mama and my grandmama always said that that [a dirty nappy] was the sign of a thriving little kid.

Cliff: There was a girl between Pam and myself. She died before she was a year old and we never found out why.

Pete Adams on Jason Ewing: 1950, he showed up in Oklahoma City married to a woman named Nancy Shaw.

Miss Ellie: Jock always said that Jason was hopeless in the marriage department so I’m not surprised that he married late.
Jamie: I hear tell that Mama did plan it some.

Pete Adams on Nancy and Jason: She had some money which he used to set up another company which also went broke. He kept moving around after that.

Angelica on Dimitri Marinos: Around 1950, a grubby little man by the name of Jason Ewing approached him with a get rich quick scheme. He wasn’t interested in Jason or his deal, but then he met Jason’s wife. Her name was Nancy Shaw Ewing. He fell in love with her and they had an affair while Jason was piecing together a deal. She became pregnant with his child. He wanted her to divorce Jason and marry him, but she wouldn’t. Despite Dimitri’s wealth, she was in love with Jason and actually, she was ashamed of her indiscretion.
JR: What did Jason have to say about all this?
Angelica: He never knew. Then they moved to Montana and Dimitri finally went back to Greece.

Bobby, speaking about Ewing 23 in 1980: An old Ewing Oil field down in East Texas, shut down about thirty years ago. There was still a lot of oil down there. With prices so low back in those days, it wasn’t worth bringing it up.

Jock: Back in those days, we had day workers working in the field, a lot of them.

Richard Avery, speaking about Laura’s father Hank in 1980: He bought [his house] for a song thirty years ago.

Hank, Laura’s father, speaking in 1980: You make ends meet by making ends meet.
Richard: That was easy to say thirty years ago. You don’t support a family.
Hank: I did, and I never owed one penny all that while.

Val, speaking in 1979: I've never seen the ocean or an ocean beach in all my life.

Val: All my life, I’d wanted to [see the ocean], even when I was little. I knew that the ocean would probably be the biggest and the most beautiful and most powerful thing I’d ever see. I thought just by being close to it, it would just make me better, make me think clearer and feel deeper and just know more.

 

[Franko]

Up until now, I'd never considered that (the characters of, not the actors playing them) Cliff Barnes and Laura Avery are the same age, as are Abby and Bobby.

 

[James from London]

1951

Mack: You knew in the third grade that you’d be president.
Greg: Everybody in the third grade wants to be president.

Paul Galveston: You’ve always been smart. You’ve always understood power, Gregory, and craved it.

Greg: I have a cross-stitched sampler. It says “Never assume”. My mother made it for me when I was a little boy and it’s proved to be a good rule to live by.

Greg on Ruth: She was a lousy wife and a crummy mother.

Greg to Ruth: You always were a great judge of character.

Greg: I’ve always been a guy who hated surprise parties.

Mack: I always liked those models when I was kid of the big sailing ships.

Mack on his father: When I was ten, he came home and started kicking me in the stomach. I didn’t know why. I never found out. But I told myself that, well, he’s just letting off steam.

Deputy Sheriff Newly on Hutch McKinney: He was foreman on the Southfork for a couple of years. He had a bad temper. He was a touchy guy. He used to get in fights all the time.

Digger: We were living in Braddock, maybe a mile from Southfork.

Rebecca: The way Digger used to go on about his problems with Jock …

Digger: I tried to kill Jock Ewing once or twice, but I bungled it. See, I can drill but I can’t kill!

Jock on Digger: Couldn’t even kill me the time he tried.

JR: Digger Barnes did try to kill my daddy and that’s no tall tale because I was there.

JR: I don’t know why Daddy put up with Digger. I asked him once, more than once. “He’s a drunk,” I’d say, “a failure, a man who tried to kill you. Why don’t you just snuff him out?” Daddy would look off into space and remember and say he didn’t know where he’d be if he hadn’t met up with Digger Barnes. “Nobody does it alone,” he’d say.

Miss Ellie: You know what Digger was like — drunk so much of the time and disappearing for months.

Maggie to Pam and Cliff: You know Digger — your mama probably did like I used to do, just emptied his pockets after a drunk, figured he'd around to sorting it out afterwards.

Engraving on Hutch McKinney's belt buckle: "To HM, with love RB."

Pete Adams on Jason: He had a son, Jack, who was born in 1951 in Montana.

Harry McSween on Jack Ewing: He’s a natural born drifter.

Jamie Ewing, Jack’s sister: He’s a natural born con artist.

Angelica Nero on Dimitri Marinos: He kept track of [Jack and his mother Nancy] regularly and sent them money all the time, which she never refused. He never had another child.

1952

Johnny Rourke: Didn’t Lucy and Ethel once get locked in a meat locker?

Punk Anderson on the Oil Baron’s Ball: I haven’t missed a single one of these things since we got started.

JR, speaking about the Oil Baron’s Ball in 1982: The Ewings have never missed one yet.
Miss Ellie: Your daddy always enjoyed it so much.

Brooks Oliver, attorney, speaking about Franklin Horner of the Cattleman's Bank in 1983: The witness has known [Jock] for more than thirty years.

JR on Franklin Horner: I never did like that penny pincher.

Deputy Sheriff Newly on Hutch McKinney and Jock: There was bad blood between them. They hated each other’s guts.

Jock: I found out that Hutch had been cutting steers, selling them and getting kick back on the feed money. Maybe he’d padded some other bills too, I didn’t have time to check. He’d been up at Two-Stick Pasture all day and I just couldn’t talk to him, but I knew that he and some of the boys liked to stop by the Braddock Saloon and have a few belts after they’d finished work — it was the only saloon in town at the time — but by then I was so damn mad, I couldn’t wait for him to get back to the bunk house so I drove into town to meet him. Well, I got there a little early and had four or five belts before Hutch arrived. He was surprised to see me.

Verno Ferris, Braddock local: It was 1952. Eisenhower had just beat the pants off of that Stephenson guy. It was a couple of weeks after the election. Some of us were still celebrating.

Ferris: Right there in the bar, Jock fired [Hutch]. He ordered him to leave the ranch by morning, or he was going to kill him.

Jock: Then all hell broke loose.

Ferris: Hutch McKinney and Jock Ewing almost tore the place apart.

Jock on Hutch: He picked himself up and left.

Virgil Tuttle, ranch worker on Southfork: Old Hutch, he started coming in the bunk house. He went over to his bed and he spread out, and in no time at all, he’s snoring. When old Hutch gets to snoring, I could tell you stories. About midnight, the door of the bunk house flew open and Jock Ewing come in.

Jock on Hutch: He was asleep in the bunk house with an empty jug of gin beside him.

Virgil on Jock: He went over and pulled old Hutch right out of the bed, and he warned him what would happen if he found him on Southfork — he’d kill him.

Jock on Hutch: I jerked him outside and we went at it again.

Virgil: I figured I best stay put.

Jock: I guess I just lost all control, I was so damn mad.

Virgil on Jock: He came in to wash up. He had blood splattered all over him.
Assistant DA Sloane: Did you ever see Hutch McKinney again after that night?
Virgil: Never did.

Jock on his Colt 38: I noticed it missing one day.

Sloane on Jock’s gun: Any mention of it when it went missing?
JR: No. Well, I don’t remember. I was just a little kid at the time.
Sloane: Did you see that gun again after it disappeared?
JR: No.

Jock on the gun: I thought I lost it. That’s the reason I never said anything. I guess McKinney stole it.

Digger: I was drinking. It was another of those three-day benders. I came home to your mama, Pam, Cliff, like I always did. Only this time, it wasn’t the same.

Digger in 1952: Hey, what are you doing here, McKinney?
Rebecca: Digger, Jock fired Hutch. He’s leaving Dallas. I’m going with him. I’m in love with him.
Digger: You’re pregnant. What about my baby?
Rebecca: Digger, Hutch is the daddy.
Digger, striking Rebecca: You whore!
(Digger and Hutch fight.)
Hutch, pulling Jock’s gun on Digger: Say your prayers, Digger.
(Rebecca knocks the gun from Hutch’s hand. Digger picks it up.)
Hutch: Don’t shoot!
(Digger shoots Hutch.)

Digger: I dragged him outside, put him in my car. I buried the body in the first open space I saw. I realised later it was a section of Southfork.

Digger: I took Becky and Cliff and we moved to Corpus Christi.

Pam on Digger: What about afterwards — after what happened with Hutch McKinney? Did he still love [Rebecca]?
Maggie: He never talked about that. He was upset about something, that's all I knew.

Corpus Christi resident on Rebecca: She was a nice woman and beautiful. She was pregnant. Big with it, she was.

Pam to Digger: What about the baby?
Bobby: The baby McKinney fathered.
Digger: I always loved you, Pam. Just like you were my own.

Pam’s date of birth: 04-10-1950

Pam’s place of birth: Dallas, Tx USA

Bobby: Jean was Pam’s middle name.

Pam: I'm born and raised in Texas.

Miss Ellie on Pam: It’s as though she were born for [motherhood].

Digger, looking at old photographs: That's you, Pam, at three months.

Gary to Bobby: You were always a messy kid, with milk down the front of your pyjamas.

Miss Ellie to Gary: The first time I found you here [the Southfork kitchen], Bobby was in his high chair and you were feeding him a graham cracker.
Bobby: In my jammies with the buttons on the back.

Bobby to Jordan Lee: I’ve known you my whole life.

JR on Bobby: You were always his favourite, Jordan.

JR: Jordan, we've been friends for a long time.

Jordan to JR: We haven’t exactly been bosom buddies over the years.

Bobby, speaking in 1991: Most of those old oil giants are gone now.
JR: Yeah — Daddy, Seth Stone, Jordan Lee, even old Digger Barnes. They were young, vital men when we were kids. They were the ones who made the Texas oilman a legend around the world. I tell you, they were there before OPEC, offshore drilling, supertankers and all that stuff.

Cliff: You ever work in Louisiana?
Dandy Dandridge: Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, everywhere — except offshore. Offshore ain’t for me. I figured He wanted us to work on water, He’d have webbed our toes.

Eric Fairgate, Sid’s son: Dad didn’t go to college.
Joe Cooper: Well, Sid had a special talent. He knew more about engines than most engineers.

Lilimae: Education's a wonderful thing, Val. Lord knows, through no fault of my own, you didn't have much of a one.

Lilimae: Val’s always loved to write. Never been much of a talker, but she always loved to write.

Val on a fictionalised version of herself: She’s just a plain country girl from Tennessee. She’s intimidated by the situation. Words didn’t come easily.

Extracts from "The Runaway", a short story by Valene Ewing: "Everybody in my dusty little Tennessee town knew each other from the day they were born. That is why I was so startled to see this tall stranger without any shoes on standing in my mother's kitchen … As I closed my eyes in bed that night, that wonderful feeling told me I had made a friend."

Val on the man in her story: He became a real good friend of our family and I saw him all the time after that.

Val: Mama and me, we were never close.

Gary to Val: You got all the attention she used to get, right? Maybe she felt shut out by you and your daddy, and she figured the only way to get close was to make herself a star.

Lilimae: I set my mind on being a star. I chased my musical dreams my whole life. It was always just around the corner.

Val: Mama, you have been trying to make a go of your music as far back as I can remember and nothing's ever happened.

Lilimae: I used to be a singer — country and western, some religious. I even wrote my own songs.

Val on Lilimae: She left my daddy and me for weeks [at a time], while she went off chasing that dream of hers of becoming a professional singer.

Val: When I was growing up and my mama kept going off and leaving me to follow her dream and become a star, I felt sad and I felt lonely and kind of hurt.

Val on Lilimae: She didn't even sing me ‘Little Maggie’ [before she left].

Lilimae: I may have left Valene from time to time, but she was always with her daddy who loved her.

Lilimae on her singing career: I always kept at it. You make sacrifices for your talent. Talent is God-given so you have to do it. Sometimes your family doesn't understand that. They don't understand that you're doing it for them. It's true, Val. You never knew that it was for you, did you?

Lilimae: Packing for the road is never easy, I remember. First you have to pack for hot weather, then for cold weather, all that jumping around, and laundry is never easy.

Lilimae: I remember how it was when I was performing. The first place any strain or tension always shows is in a singer’s voice.

Lilimae: I remember when I was in Nashville, bass players were always late for some reason. I never knew why. Someone once said it’s because, and I think this is a silly reason, it’s because their fiddles are so big.

Lilimae: I've been in the Bayou, I've been all over. I played Louisville once with Mother Maybelle.

Lilimae: I toured at one time with Maybelle Carter, back in Tennessee.

Gary: Did you tour with the Carters?
Lilimae: Almost. I'm afraid I was poorly managed at the time and my manager ruined the arrangements.

Lilimae: I sang with the Carter Family — Mother Maybelle Carter and all the Carters. ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken’, that was their big song.

Kenny Ward on the Carter Family: ‘Circle’ sort of became their theme and when they'd perform, they'd have the whole audience join in and sing with them.
Lilimae: Yeah, Mother Maybelle used to do that. She'd have the words all printed up and pass them out, especially when there were people of all ages because that's what the song's all about, generations.

Lilimae: With me, it's always been family first. I gave up a singing career with the Carters.

Lilimae to Val: Your papa’s insurance didn’t hardly pay for [his] funeral. I couldn’t even pay for your board with any neighbour folk.

Lilimae: I can't help but think back to some of those Christmases we all had back in Tennessee — everybody altogether, singing, praying, and the presents, simple, humble, handmade mostly, but they were wonderful, so personal. I sometimes think they meant more to people.

Val on Lilimae: When I hear her talk about those dear sweet Christmases that never were, I just want to throw up.

Val: That Christmas when Daddy died, I was with some neighbours and Mama swore up and down that she would come to Aunt June’s to see me, if they could just get me there. So they carted me one hundred miles to Aunt June’s, just to spend Christmas with Mama. She never came. Best she could do was send a patchwork quilt for me, store bought. I have hated patchwork ever since.

 

[Seaviewer]

Interesting stuff on the Carter Family, who of course figure prominently in the Johnny Cash bio I just read.

 

[James from London]

Interesting stuff on the Carter Family, who of course figure prominently in the Johnny Cash bio I just read.

And of course a couple of Cash songs appeared on the soundtrack of New DALLAS, which I guess means that the Carter-Cash/Ewingverse circle is indeed unbroken.

 

[James from London]

1953

Barbara Southworth died 1953

Karen: Have you ever seen that picture of Sean Connery in a bathing suit when he was a contestant for Mr Universe? I think he was about twenty-five years old then. That’s my type.

April Stevens on Cary Grant: I think he was the greatest-looking man that ever lived.

Greg: Once upon a time, there was this blond-haired, blue-eyed fighter pilot who was, in reality, my dad and one day, he took me in his plane up into the sky and it was the single most exciting experience of my life and I’ll never forget it — my dad and I flying across the sky. He was my hero. As it turned out, it was kind of like a farewell flight, see, because the next morning he got up real early and he packed his bags and he kissed my mother and me good-bye, and he flew off to Korea where he was killed over the Yellow Sea. A couple of days after we got the news, this strange guy shows up at our house. I was laying around my room, you know, crying, feeling sorry for myself because my dad was just killed, and I heard this noise coming from my mother’s room. Of course, being ten-years-old, I assumed she was crying too so I got up and went to her door to console her and I realised that she wasn’t crying at all. Actually, she was giggling and the strange guy was lying on top of her and they were kissing. You see, this strange guy and my mother had been having an affair behind my father’s back for years. They sat me down, the two of them, and my mother, with these giant tears in her eyes, tells me how much she loves this strange guy and how, finally, we could all live happily ever after together, and that I would someday learn to love this strange guy. Well, she was wrong because I never learned to love him, but I learned to hate her because the two of them took away the memory of my father. Like that, my hero went up in smoke. The next morning after breakfast, I was sitting out in the yard and this strange guy comes out and he sits down next to me under this giant elm tree where I used to sit and talk to my father, and he starts talking to me but I’m not listening to him. All I’m thinking is, “I want to kill this guy because he’s sitting in my father’s place", and all of a sudden just out of the blue this guy starts hugging me and kissing me and telling me with tears in his eyes that he is, in fact, my real father — this strange guy who the night before is lying in bed with my mother, kissing her, is now in the yard, kissing and hugging me and telling me that he is, in fact, my real father. You know who this guy was? Paul Galveston.

Greg to Paul: Did you know that I hated you? Of course you did. I probably even hated you before I knew who you were.

Paul: I was never much for introspection. Only leads to more questions. Always thought there was better things to do than ask questions.

Ruth: You’ve never really forgiven me, have you?
Greg: You never asked to be forgiven, Mother.
Ruth: No, I didn’t. I didn’t care.

Ruth on Paul’s signet ring: He always wanted you [Greg] to have it.

Mary Frances: Paul Galveston only sent you money. You didn’t have a father, just cheques in the mail.
Greg: Maybe I was better off not seeing him.

Greg on Claudia: I don’t think I’d be where I am today if it wasn’t for sis. She toughened me up. When I was a kid, I injured my leg. I had it in a brace. She locked the brace. I couldn’t walk.
Claudia: We were just kids then.
Greg: Tip of the iceberg, tip of the iceberg.

Greg on Claudia: She used to steal my baseball cards and I used to glue her diary shut.

Claudia on her and Greg’s relationship: It’s really Mother’s fault. She always pitted us against one another. Maybe it gave her some kind of perverse pleasure, I don’t know.

Claudia on Ruth: She loved you [Greg] a lot more than she loved me. It’s because she loved Paul Galveston a lot more than she loved my father.

Paula Vertosick on Greg: Educated in boarding schools.

Greg: I had a paper route and then worked for the milkman.

Greg, looking round Sylvia Lean’s small apartment in 1986: I grew up in a place just like this.

Greg on Mack: This is a street kid from New York.

Mack: My father was Scotch Irish, my mother was Italian and believe me, it wasn’t easy.
Karen: Why? That doesn’t sound like such a strange combination.
Mack: In my neighbourhood it was. The Irish were on one side, the Italians on the other. The Italians would call me a mick, the micks called me a wop. All I could do was stand on the corner and have fights with myself.

Mack on Mr Belvedere’s Mini Mart: This reminds me of a deli that was on the block when I was growing up in New York called Lazorro’s and I played Zorro because I was always ripping off apples and carrots and stuff.

Mark St Claire: As a child I had asthma. I never learned to fight.

JR, speaking in 1985: The last time I was scared, I was fourteen years old. I was facing down a wounded mountain lion and I walked away without a scratch.

Karen: When I was a little girl, I thought God couldn’t hear me unless I radioed in. I mean, He was so far away. I used to say, “God, come in — one, two, three, four, five. Roger.”

Olivia Cunningham, speaking in 1986: Sometimes I wish I could stay a kid.
Karen: You know something, sweetheart? Sometimes I used to wish that too.

JR to McKay: Didn’t your mama teach you to knock?

JR to Bobby: I know you were taught to knock. I was there.

Bobby: By the time I was three years old, I knew the Red Files meant current and important.

Bobby: Daddy has wanted a refinery for as far back as I can remember.

Bobby to JR: Ever since I can remember, all you ever thought about was running Ewing Oil.

Pam to JR: Ewing Oil, the only thing you’ve ever really loved.

Bud, of Bud’s Automotives, on Jock: You know what good care Mr Ewing took of his car.
Miss Ellie: He did take a lot of pride in it.

Gary: Daddy always had the biggest model, the biggest car. American, of course.

Gary on the Ewing fortune: It never seemed like my money.

Ray: I never used to think a man needed more money than he could roll up and stick in his pocket.

Cliff: I've been blinded by money all my life — I guess maybe because I never had any.

Val: All I've ever really had are just hand-me-downs.

Garnet McGee to Pam: When you grow up like we did, dirt-poor, never one single thing of your own — not a blanket, not a dollar toy — it ain't easy being satisfied.

Garnet, speaking to Pam in 1978: Never would have thought you'd do so good for yourself, starting out the way we did.

Rebecca: You were a happy baby. You giggled and laughed. You were never a howler.
Pam: When did I start walking?
Rebecca: You were young, just ten months. I remember we were all in the living room and you just stood up and walked clear across the room to Digger, just like that.

Cliff to Rebecca: I remember you liked liquorice.

Val on Christmas 1953: I remember stringing popcorn and hanging it on the tree, and I remember Mama and me baking fruitcakes from Aunt Edna’s own special recipe. Mama was so strict about every detail. Once a year she was a homemaker, so we had to do everything just perfect. I still remember how delicious those fruitcakes tasted. It’s probably because Mama and I baked them together. I remember how Mama turned all the compliments to me — I’d done everything just right, you know, and I’d insisted on doing it a certain way — when it was really all her. She made me feel so proud of myself. That night, we stayed up all night talking. I was just a little girl, I was probably seven or maybe eight, but Mama talked to me like I was a woman. She asked me about my ambitions and my goals. I didn’t have any, but she said I would real soon. She told me about her dreams, what her life was like. I thought being a grown up was the most exciting thing in the world.

Karen: I remember what Christmas was like when I was a kid. All my family was together — aunts and uncles, grandparents.

Paige on Greg: He probably got lots of coal in his stockings when he was a kid.

1954

Corpus Christi resident on Rebecca: One Christmas, I went to visit my brother in Galveston. I stayed a few weeks, came back and she was gone. The whole family, gone. Nobody knew [where]. I asked, but nobody knew.

JR on Rebecca: Another drunken slut who ran away.

Rebecca: I was seventeen. I could barely read or write. I wasn’t ready to be a wife or a mother. And Digger, Digger was destroying me. I didn’t want to leave you, but I had to save myself and somehow I found the strength to do it.
Pam: Mother, you’ve always had strength. You proved that when you left your children to go out and start a new life. It’s a cold, calculating kind of strength.

Rebecca: I closed a door in my mind. I sealed off a part of my life — the awful, awful pain of having to abandon my own flesh and blood.

Cliff to Rebecca: You ran out on me. I was barely five years old and you pretended to be dead. You left me with a baby sister and a drunken father. Why?
Rebecca: It’s so hard to explain.
Cliff: I can imagine it’s hard to explain. A mother running out on her own two kids? I don’t know how in hell a woman could do that. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be five years old and to be told that your mother’s dead?

Pam, speaking in 1981: I think in one way, I've been feeling [empty and worthless] all the way back to when I was a little baby and my mother left me. Why did she do that, leave a little baby? What did I do to deserve that?

Pam to Rebecca: When Digger told us that you died, I could never really accept that. I used to think about you every day, my mother who died and went to Heaven, and I used to wonder what you were like, what you smelled like. Sometimes I even thought I could remember.

Pam on Rebecca: I always thought that I loved her even when I thought she was dead.

Cliff, speaking in 1981: I don’t care whether my mother is alive or not. I mean, at one point I might have, when I was growing up and I needed her. Where was she then?

Pam on Rebecca: Someone saw her in a small town [Kingsville], just thirty miles south of Corpus Christi. It was three months after Digger said she died.

John Mackey, private detective, on Rebecca: She worked as a waitress for a while at Jerry’s Coffee Shop. She met a travelling salesman. They left Kingsville together.

John Mackey on Rebecca: She must have changed her name every twenty minutes back then, the last being Rebecca Burke.

Digger, looking at old photograph: Cliff, there's you in your little sailor suit.

Mandy Winger, looking at an old photograph: Is that you?
Cliff: Yeah, I was about six.
Mandy: You were kind of cute. Is that your mother?
Cliff: No that’s my Aunt Maggie. She’s the one who raised Pam and me.

Maggie on Digger: He turned up on my doorstep with you two [Cliff and Pam] saying Becky was dead. He left you, these trunks, and off he went again.

Cliff to Pam: You babbled all the time. Aunt Maggie couldn’t shut you up.

Wally Kessel, rancher: Cliff, I've known you since you were a little boy.

Miss Ellie, speaking to Bobby’s son Christopher in 1986: When your daddy was your age [four], his favourite thing in the whole world was my soup.
Christopher: What else did he like?
Miss Ellie: He liked my chilli and he liked hot dogs and broccoli, but mostly he liked growing up around here at Southfork with all his family around him.

JR on Miss Ellie: She doted on that boy [Bobby] something fierce. I spent a lot of my life hating how much she loved him — wasted years.

Mack: When I was thirteen, my dad hit me so hard he knocked out a molar. At first I blamed myself. It had to be me — this was my dad and your dad just doesn’t beat you without good reason. If I was a better kid, maybe he wouldn’t get so mad.

Mack: My old man was tough and he was wrong and he made mistakes.
Karen: What did he do?

Mack: It’s not about what he did. The gory details are almost boring. It’s about the way he made me feel. He made me feel like I couldn’t do anything, and what I thought and felt didn’t matter — or I guess that I wasn’t worth anything. And I think that young people need encouragement. It’s like a plant needs sunshine. Not enough sun, it’s worse than getting smacked around, which he was also good at.

Sue Ellen: You were helping me get ready for one of my birthday parties. I think it was my seventh. I wanted to wear my yellow dress. You had something else in mind. I know it must seem insignificant to you now, but it wasn’t then. Do you remember?
Patricia: Blue and white dotted Swiss. Oh for heaven’s sake, what does it matter what happened when you were seven?
Sue Ellen: I know you always meant well, but you never let up and you never listened.

Richard Avery on Kenny Ward: Born and raised on a surfboard, right here in California.

Richard to Kenny: Were you born in a circus?

Richard: All my life, I wanted to be a lawyer.

Richard: My father wanted me to be a lawyer. It was expected of me. Where I was brought up, the only way to become respectable, to make any money was to be a lawyer.

Richard: I never wanted to be a lawyer in the first place.

Mack: I always wanted to be a Wall Street lawyer.

Richard: I know about food. I've always wanted to do something about it.

Greg: I wanted to be King. See, there are two kinds of people in this world, those who get things done and those who have things done to them. I figured if I was King that I could use my power to make this a better world, like all eleven year olds think they’re going to do when they grow up.
Laura: Well, some of those eleven year olds, when they grow up, do make it a better world.

Greg: I never learned much about music when I was a kid. I learned about economics and corporate politics, never music, and I always wanted to be a conductor.

Pam: All my life, more than anything in the world, I have wanted a child.

Donna: I always wanted to be a mother. I thought it was the most important thing in the world.

Ray to Jenna: All I ever wanted was a home and a family. Really, that’s all you ever wanted.

Cliff: All my life, I have had one drive and that’s to be the winner that Digger wanted me to be. That has been the most important thing in my life. I’m not saying that that’s right, but that’s me.

Gary: All my life, I’ve drifted into things. I’ve let things happen to me without thinking about the consequences ahead of time.

Karen: I always wanted to be Mata Hari.

Sid: I always wanted to be a race car driver. I wanted to build my own cars and race them.

Susan Philby (ex-Fairgate) to Sid: First time we met, you were working in a service station, lying on the ground under some old jalopy. I had to be towed in, remember? And there you were under that jalopy, just my speed — handsome, strong and utterly unacceptable to my mother. I would have crawled under that car with you right then and there, but you weren't that easy. Then finally I got you into bed, but I wasn't used to what you gave me — sweetness, gentleness, that purity of yours. The modesty and goodness — you made me feel worthwhile. If only we could have made love every minute of every day, everything would have been wonderful.

Susan: You always had trouble saying no to me, remember?
Sid: I remember.

Susan to Sid: We always loved the daytimes, remember? It was our time.

Susan to Sid: I always did know you had potential. I suppose I was the first one to realise it, wasn't I?

Susan: She wore me down, Sid, my mother.
Sid: Yeah, and your mother could do that.

Paul Galveston, speaking to unidentified business associates in 1984: For thirty years, you’ve come to me with your most delicate problems. I’ve always got you what you want.

Ruth on Paul: I remember once he didn’t even return my phone calls for over three weeks. Turned out that time he was holed up at Blair House planning fall out shelters for federal office workers. Paul used to do a lot of government construction.
Gary: His first millions came from that.

Mack: Hearst, Howard Hughes — Galveston was hanging out with those big guys.

Jean Hackney, spy: Howard Hughes at least had an entourage that we could infiltrate.