The de-evolution of toughness
Even at 62, Ross Taylor is a tough guy.
The wedge-shaped silhouette of his youth has flattened out a little, but even now he has shoulders like an overstuffed recliner. Even now, to understand what he means when he says he came “this close” to beating the tar out of some tailgating punk on the interstate, you have to measure the distance by pressing your thumb and index finger together until your nails turn white.
Yo, scrawny kid, in the Japanese car with the coffee-can tailpipe and the “No Fear” window sticker, you and your middle finger were one arthritic hand away from becoming a two-bit antagonist in someone else’s movie.
“My old man was 56 years old, the last scrap he got into,” Taylor said. “He was what you would call a saloon tamer. I remember some guy pulled a knife on him, once. Dad just beat the crap out of him. Somehow the guy got away and Dad said, ‘I still wanted to wear a whole bunch of height off him.’ “
Guys like Taylor, guys who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, have a hard time understanding the violence of today’s youths. The hair-trigger tendency to use knives or guns, the willingness to target the weak and the innocent as well as the strong, baffles them. This is why Taylor, a West Valley High School grad, and Dennis Bonnett, a Central Valley High school grad, seemed like the guys to talk to after Bradley Legg, a spectator at a fistfight in Spokane Valley early Tuesday morning, was shot in the stomach. Bonnett and his older brother, Doug, ruled the roost at Ron’s Drive-In during early 1960s, roughly a mile west of where Legg was shot.
The fight, according to police, was over a girl. Legg told his father the dispute started at a late-night house party and ended behind Yoke’s Market at 15111 E. Sprague Ave., where two men had arranged to slug it out. Both men showed and a crowd had gathered, but before the fight could begin, a car pulled up and a passenger with a handgun fired several shots into the air and two into the crowd. Legg, a 21-year-old manager of a tuxedo rental business, is expected to recover.
Police believe the shooter was 20-year-old transient Aaron Michael Angstrom, whom they arrested Thursday in the 2900 block of East 15th Avenue.
In Taylor’s youth, pulling a gun or a knife was unacceptable, nearly unthinkable. Guys who did were considered lower than barnyard excrement, not the bull kind, the chicken kind. Once local toughs caught wind of someone being threatened with a weapon, it didn’t even matter if they knew the victim. They just made a point of beating the hell out of the offender whenever he was spotted.
“My whole generation, the scrappers I know,” Taylor said, “would look at it as pretty cowardly to pull a gun or a knife. There was an honor to fighting. If you wanted to have a great moment of discovery, you could go to the Top Hat drive-in and find a candidate to introduce you to the dukesmanship.”
The dukesmanship, as Taylor puts it, was a brutal dish served at drive-in restaurants from Spokane Valley to Spokane’s North Side. More filling than a knuckle sandwich, it was the kind of meal that stuck to your ribs for days and days, making breathing insufferable. At Ron’s Drive-In at the corner of Sprague Avenue and Houk Road, the Bonnett brothers, Doug and Dennis, served it.
Guys from other neighborhoods would roll through Ron’s parking lot in a clockwise direction against the grain of the drive-in traffic, eventually stopping in the back to square off against the toughest patron Ron’s had to offer. Occasionally, Ron’s owner Joe Genova, a medium-sized man, would break the fights up, telling the combatants to “go find a girlfriend.”
“It was an honor thing and there were no hard feelings,” said Bonnett, now 61. “Either you got your butt whopped or you whopped somebody. Later, you could have a Coke together. But today it’s pretty scary. I don’t know where these kids get this kind of violence.”
Back in the day, Bonnett and Taylor agree, there were rules to being a tough guy. You left alone the kids who didn’t want to fight. And, you took care of any bully picking on the “good” kids. For Bonnett, that code of conduct had been handed down in a Billy Goat Gruff fashion through five older brothers, Hank, Monte, Norm, Junior (whose real name was Erva), and Doug.
Taylor learned the code on Spokane’s east end. He grew up on the southernmost end of Park Road and ran with an older group of kids he met at rough and tumble Libby Junior High School. They weren’t innocent. As young as 14, Taylor was heading to skid row with his mates, Tex Alexander and Gary Bleck, to find a bum to buy them beer. Each boy would bring a glass gallon jug for the bum to fill at a rundown tavern. Occasionally, a bum would try to stiff them and they’d have to track him down and beat him up.
After scoring their pails of ale, Taylor and his crew would head to the Top Hat drive-in, an all night restaurant on the northeast corner of East Sprague Avenue and Crestline Street, where carhops dressed as majorettes attached trays of food to open car windows. He wasn’t there every night, but Taylor was around enough to know every car by the sound of its engine and who among the guys standing around with chips on their shoulders was the real deal.
“It was a hell-raising place,” Taylor said. “In the summertime, on a Friday or Saturday night, there was just that blue haze and a stench from all the tire smoke from guys peeling out. And the fights, these guys would go toe to toe, and take turns slugging each other in the face.
“I tell you. I don’t know if the guys now would have stood next to some of those bad motors of yesteryear. Those guys were really, really, really tough.”