WAHOO Hullabaloo
by Wayne Saunders
Although the great state of Texas has been upbraided in the last several years for its liberal use of the death penalty, its almost reverential devotion to family and friends has been celebrated even longer. Maybe the two are connected: anyone who distances himself from these sacred institutions is thought to be unable anyway to enjoy the benefits of life that only they can bestow. Signs of Texas family regard are everywhere, and no less evident in the games Texans play. Turn to almost any page in the Texas Folklore Society’s Texas Toys and Games, second edition, by Francis Edward Abernathy (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 1997), and you’ll read oral histories of every kind of folk plaything and competition remembered by every kind of family member and comrade. Look closely at Dennis Roberson’s monumental Winning 42: Strategy & Lore of the National Game of Texas, revised edition (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2000), and you’ll discover a sizable chapter of short biographies of notable players of this famous Texas domino game, most of them embedded in local histories and genealogies that explain why the game can hardly be imagined outside the Lone Star. Pop over to the website, www.wahoogames.com and you’ll encounter dozens of testimonials from satisfied players of WAHOO, a proprietary race game with a board that resembles East Indian PACHISI and a name that resembles an American Indian war cry. Whereas the praises come from as far away as Japan, however, the vast majority hail from Texas and Oklahoma, which can presumably tell a native American when they see one. And almost half the stories, for reasons that are more profound than I am, involve grandmothers.
On the surface, WAHOO doesn’t lend itself to thoughts of grandmothers, or grandmas, or, in a regionalism that surfaces in at least one testimonial, maw-maws. The game is pretty much the same as the original four-player AGGRAVATION, only printed with Indian braves and teepees and mounted in a sturdy wooden frame. In fact, the earliest known WAHOO boards come from the early ‘60s, when AGGRAVATION made its appearance (1962). Chuck Cox, president of the Traditional Game and Toy Company that he started in 1991 to revive the defunct game, claims plenty of oral evidence that WAHOO was played in the ‘50s and maybe even the ‘40s, though he told me privately that the early sets may have been handmade, leaving us to wonder if there is any reason to connect them to WAHOO rather than to its competitor. But regardless of which game came first, the kind of game both are—a simplified, one-die version of American PARCHEESI or a variant of the one-die British LUDO—would almost guarantee their popularity among families, which had already demonstrated a remarkable affection for the genre. If anything, the simpler versions eliminate the complicated BACKGAMMON-like skills useful to PARCHEESI and instead increase the luck-driven melodrama of the games.
WAHOO has built a cultish following that AGGRAVATION, despite its popularity, doesn’t seem to have, maybe because it’s played in a geographic region that needs Indian icons for self-identity. (AGGRAVATION, for all the abstract elegance of its board, is more an agent of comfort than strength.) But besides accessibility and cultural identity, there are the grandmothers. Cox in his website describes two of them, one being his own: “While reminiscing with my grandmother one weekend . . . I asked her if she still had the old WAHOO board we played with as children. And just as she had done so often some twenty years earlier, she walked to the very same spot, reached behind the very same sofa, and pulled out the very same WAHOO board that had helped us entertain ourselves so many years before.” He recounts elsewhere the funeral of a woman whose WAHOO board was displayed next to her casket because it had “provided such wonderful entertainment for her and her grandchildren.” Whereas other family members predominate in Roberson’s stories of the essentially adult game of “42,” grandmothers are perhaps the quintessential nurturers in the extended families that underlie Southern culture and so are the most favorably placed–at least until a couple of decades ago–to find ways of including children in traditions that bind the generations.
Witness James Chapman’s testimony of his grandmother’s devotion to WAHOO, which was so complete that, whenever she lacked the companionship of her children or grandchildren, she would play the game by herself. Mary Alice Nash Chapman died in May of 1977, a couple years before James started cutting and sanding and varnishing plywood to make his own specially designed WAHOO boards for friends and relatives. By now, he told me, he must have made about 150 of them. And many of them figure as prizes in what has become, since 1997, the annual Grandma Chapman Wahoo Competition. Despite its name, it is not a family reunion but an open invitational, which every year draws 35 to 50 or more players to East Texas from as far away as Oklahoma and Missouri, Louisiana and the Carolinas. The ambitious reader may want to note that a prize is given to the player who has traveled the farthest, as well as to the oldest and youngest grandmother and grandfather and, of course, the player who wins the most games. The rules are those Grandma Chapman played by. This year’s contest on May 31st follows those of previous years in being held close to the Chapman brood in a brother-in-law’s church fellowship hall in Kilgore, only ten miles from the homestead in Longview. The overall winner will get his pick of the new crop of boards being readied by James. If you need to know more, you can contact James for details at P.O. Box 535682, Grand Prairie, Texas 75053-5682 or at Dawahooman@aol.com .
Several different companies have made WAHOO, including
Pressman. The proprietary edition is available from Chuck Cox at www.wahoogames.com.
Wayne Saunders is a curator at the San Diego Museum of Man and a games historian who reports from his outlook on the west coast. You can comment on his musings by contacting him through this newsletter.
