The Birdman of the Border - A Halloween Story

The radio station was a 5000-watt, directional AM, serving the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. We liked to think we rocked the border from the beaches of South Padre Island to the brush country near Laredo. I was a one-man news department, pulling wire copy, calling around to cop shops, and trying to build sources to get stories of interest and importance to the two-dozen communities lining the big river. Like every young reporter, I was looking for my first important scoop. I wanted a break early in my career, maybe like Dan Rather's when CBS News discovered his work while he was reporting on Hurricane Carla in Houston.

There were hurricanes in my future, but the biggest story early in my journalistic endeavors arrived on wings in the form of an outsized bird terrorizing the Texas-Mexico border. Because New Year’s Eve did me the great disservice of arriving in the middle of the week, I was working when a call came into our radio newsroom that made me wonder if the man on the other end of the line had indulged in too much celebratory mescal. Instead, I recognized the voice of a police officer I had been cultivating as a source of information. Officer Arturo Padilla was almost breathless, sounding like he had just finished a sub-four-minute mile while trying to describe a great, winged creature out of a B-movie horror film.

“I’m telling you,” Padilla said. “This bird’s wingspan was twice the width of our cruiser. There’s no bird down here, or anywhere else that I know of, that big, and you can talk to my colleague if you don’t believe me. We stopped and got out to look at it, but then it saw us and turned back, flying right at us. We got in the car and got the hell out of there.”

Padilla’s partner, Officer Homer Galvan, described the bird as a giant silhouette against the sky, but both estimated the creature to be about 5 feet tall with a wing span of 12 feet. Size was not the only feature that put a fright into the cops. The bird had bright red eyes, facial features they said looked like a monkey or a gorilla, and a bald head.

I figured they were tired cops rolling up and down the border highways while drunks were out celebrating, and the officers just got weary-eyed. Regardless, I ran a clip of my interviews during the morning newscast, and the call-in lines at the station lit up with people insisting they, too, had seen the giant man-bird. An equal number wanted to just make fun of the cops, which was also my first inclination. Law enforcement was not the only source of information, though.

Two girls, 14-year-old Jackie Davies and her 11-year-old cousin Tracey Lawson, said they encountered the unusual being playing in the back yard of Lawson’s parents’ home near Harlingen, Texas. They later pointed to an irrigation canal about 300 feet distant. Tracey said she had run into the house to get binoculars and when she came back and looked through the lenses, she saw, not a big bird, but a monster with an otherworldly gaze. Not far away, another Harlingen resident, Tom Waldon, found unusual three-toed tracks measuring 8-inches across in soft dirt next to his home.

A few weeks later, Armando Grimaldo of Raymondville said he heard a loud, flapping sound and a weird whistle while going for a walk near his residence. When he looked around to find the source of the noise, he said he was clasped on the back by large talons, claws that tore apart his shirt, dug grooves in his back, and made him fall to the ground. After seeking protection behind a nearby tree, he watched the giant bird fly off. Grimaldo went to the hospital and received stitches to close his wounds after neighbors found him lying on the ground, screaming and shaking after being assaulted by what he described as a creature with leathery, bat-like skin and the face of a gorilla.

Opportunities come in many forms, including, I figured, the shape of a mysterious, gigantic bird. The story would not die. Even though the witnesses had clearly been frightened, their narratives were hard to take seriously as a journalist. I tried to convince a radio DJ, who had called from Los Angeles, that I saw the big bird buzz a donut shop as I rode my motorcycle to work through the morning dark. Making fun of the madness changed nothing, however. The headlines kept being printed, and I continued doing interviews for broadcast. One paper used huge block letters at the top of the front page that said, “Horrible-Faced, Big-Eyed Bird Described by Brownsville Man,” and another Valley publication said, “Encounter with Big Brown Bird Scary Experience.” A Brownsville man told the local newspaper that the big bird had tried to pick him up and fly away with him as prey and he showed investigators a feather that was about three feet long.

I knew I had posted myself in an unusual journalistic situation at the bottom of the U.S. but I had not expected mythological creatures as part of my editorial content. The station general manager, Charlie, had lectured me the day I arrived about what qualified as news on our broadcasts.

“All right,” he said, after taking the wet, unlit cigar out of his mouth, spinning it around for examination. “We’ve got a good congressman and mayor down here, and they pretty much run things. Leave ‘em alone. I don’t want any poly-tics on my air. Ribbon cuttings, only. Then get ya some car crashes, stabbings, robberies, drug arrests, that kind of thing from the cops. I don’t mind that on the air. But I don’t need any big expose’s or any of that crap scaring my advertisers. You got me?”

I had him, and immediately wondered how I had ended up in a frighteningly precarious position such a long way from home. When the bird-man story landed, though, I did not hesitate to seek a way to profit from bringing national attention to our little radio outlet. The program director, known on the air as T.K., had suggested we record a .45 rpm record about the big bird phenomenon. The concept was to be an interview with the elusive creature using a production technique that had shown success during what were called “flying saucer interviews.” During the height of various UFO flaps in the 70s, a few clever DJs used short clips from popular records to answer questions put to imaginary aliens who had exited their craft and agreed to be interviewed.

The idea seemed perfectly stupid to me, which meant it was destined for success. We cut the record clips together with the voice of one of our announcers asking questions of the bird and I wrote a narrative for the “B-side” of the record called, “The Legend of the Big Bird of the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.” Short and snappy, right? Charlie took the recording to Nashville and had it pressed into 20,000 45 rpms and had them distributed throughout the Valley. Every one of them was sold in a few weeks, but T.K. and I never heard how much cash they generated. Whatever that dollar amount might have been, it went into the station’s bank account, or maybe Charlie’s. We saw not a dime. Ratings for the station were their highest ever, though, and I had managed to win our first broadcast journalism award from the BirdmanAssociated Press. I thought it was time to ask for a raise. I petitioned Charlie for an increase in pay and he agreed, without argument.

"The idea seemed perfectly stupid to me, which meant it was destined for success."

“I’ll see there’s a little something extra in your next pay envelope,” he said.

His description had been painfully accurate. My salary was only $160 a week, and one of those checks went to his account because we were renting a manufactured home from him for, coincidentally, $160 a month. The tiny box with Astroturf carpeting had been placed on concrete piers beneath the radio towers. When I opened my next check envelope, I looked at the numbers and did not recognize a change. Fortunately, Charlie had written out the math for me in red pencil on the back of the stub for the pay voucher.

“.05 per hour x 40 hours = $2.00 per week x 52 weeks per year = $104.00.”

Initially, I laughed, thinking he was kidding and would give me a decent check when I walked into his office to complain. This was funnier than the Birdman, stories or the flying saucer interview record.

“Are you serious, Charlie?” The boss man did not look up from whatever he was reading. “This raise on my check? A nickel an hour? You’re just messing with me, right?”

“I thought you wanted a raise.” He looked up, so I no longer was staring at the shining top of his bald head.

“I did. Not an insult.”

“You’re saying you don’t want it, then?”

“I want a real pay raise. You know, one that says my work and the impact I’ve had on revenue and ratings is appreciated. That kind of a raise.”

“That’s what I gave you.”

“No, you didn’t.” I found myself looking out the window at the orange trees and the sunshine and wished to glory hell I was not in this man’s office. “Tell you what, Charlie. Looks to me like if all you can afford to give me is a nickel an hour increase, the station must be in dire straits and you all must need that nickel worse than I do. Why don’t you go ahead and keep it?”

He shrugged. “Okay. I will.”

Without ever taking the cigar out of his mouth, Charlie went back to whatever he had been reading. My next paycheck returned to $160 a week before deductions, instead of the $162 he had offered. The dreams I had envisioned for using the extra two dollars each week had all been dashed by my intemperate attitude toward my gracious employer. There were cheeseburgers I would never come to know. Using my nascent analytical skills, though, I reckoned my future was elsewhere and ended up with my first TV news job up the river in Laredo. I was fortunate in the ensuring years to cover many fascinating and even confounding news stories in locations around the world, but none that baffled me more than the mysterious big bird.

And nickel-an-hour pay raises.