His calling

Sporting News, The, Dec 23, 1996 by Jim Dent

One morning, Merrill was making his Christmas rounds at a broken-down home along the river bottoms. Walking through the door with a bag full of toys and groceries, he crashed through the rotted floor.

"A lot of people moved in here to find their dreams at the depot," Merrill says. "And it just didn't open up for them. What we have in Hooks is some people making good money. Then we have people who are completely off the charts as far as poverty goes. We really don't have anything in between. We have squatter's huts right next to beautiful brick homes. You will see broken down trailers right next to some of the finer homes in the community. There is so much poverty around here that even the government doesn't know about a lot of these people. I will show you the barest of poverty."

As the truck bounds through the potholes of Grant Street, Merrill points to a house with a sagging roof and walls that are splitting. When he speaks of the poor and the stricken, the umpire assumes the tone of a revivalist preacher, his voice rising and faring. "Just look in there," he says. "People are actually living in there. They've got to be freezing."

Grant Street is at the center of the Hooks city limits. The street runs adjacent to the only elementary school in town. There is no place to hide the hardships. But Grant Street is not where the poverty ends; it's where poverty begins.

Aiming the pickup truck toward the river bottoms, Merrill begins preparing the visitor for what lies ahead. As the bumpy asphalt strip becomes a dirt road, the land begins to slope gently toward the Red River. A few nice brick homes give way to the trailers and then to the shacks and shanties. Closer to the river are the squatters' huts with dirt floors. The huts have been in Hooks since the end of World War II. Many of the families have little hope of getting electricity, so their homes are warmed by wood stoves. Or they are not warmed at all.

"A lot of people can drive by this and not even worry about it," Merrill says. "I can't. I have to ask why. I have to say, `What I can co?' People will say to me, `Durwood, these people don't want to do any better.' And that might be right. But there are kids involved here. We've got to help the kids.

"What we are trying to do here is break the chain of poverty. If we don't, who will? If we don't help these kids, they will never make it out of here. They've got to have help."

On Christmas morning in 1979, the phone rang at the Merrill home. A call from the Hooks mayor interrupted the opening of packages and the roasting of a turkey. Carolyn Merrill was preparing the Christmas lunch. Mickey and his sister, Maria, were exercising one of the rites of Christmas--the ripping and shredding of wrapping paper. The mayor called to inform Durwood that a family down along the river bottoms was spending Christmas without food or toys. The mother had called the mayor, frantically pleading for help.

Instead of taking care of it himself, the mayor called Merrill. "I guess," Merrill says proudly, "he knew I would take care of it."