Judge McCall was president when I arrived at Baylor in 1972. I never spoke to him, though the door to his office in Pat Neff Hall was always open. I never attended one of his weekly “open” lunches at the old snack bar in the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum. But like every other Baylor student, I saw him regularly walk across the campus with that unusual rolling gait of his. By then he was slightly stooped and unassuming, invariably wearing a shapeless dark suit with battered black hat, his pockets always bulging from the pecans he harvested along the route from the Albritton House to Pat Neff Hall.
I particularly remember one fall day, however, when several of us watched as President Abner V. McCall walked slowly past us to his office.
“That old guy,” one of us said, “he don’t even know he’s Somebody.”
Few people have ever risen from more humble beginnings and ascended to greater heights than Abner Vernon McCall. The story of his journey from orphan at the Masonic Home in Fort Worth to President of the world’s largest Baptist school is one of the most foundational narratives of today’s Baylor. In the process, he oversaw the physical transformation of campus and Baylor’s elevation from small denominational college to national academic powerhouse. He was a confidant of the powerful (including President Lyndon B. Johnson) and champion of the dispossessed (as when he oversaw the desegregation of the Baylor campus).
But for all of the near-mythic qualities of McCall’s life, he rarely talked about one of his most intriguing chapters- his time as G-man. Yes, Abner McCall worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation during World War II.
As war was breaking out, McCall was on a one-year scholarship, completing his LL.M. at the University of Michigan Law School. Baylor President Pat Neff invited him to rejoin the Baylor law school faculty, but most of the students had already volunteered for the armed services. McCall tried to enlist and was rejected three times. His vision was bad, he needed extensive dental work, and he was significantly underweight. At 6’2”, McCall weighed less than 120 pounds. Later in life, he told interviewer Tom Charlton (ably assisted by McCall’s long-time friend and aide Thomas Turner) that he tried repeatedly to gain the weight but with disastrous results. Ultimately, through the mechanisms of a friendly doctor, he was accepted into the FBI. By the time the bureau sent him for a physical he was already well into the intensive 16-week training program, a full-time blitz that covered 120 different types of mostly criminal investigations.
The FBI in 1942 was in a difficult position. Despite the bureaus’s well-publicized heroics fighting gangsters of the 1930s, much of its intelligence gathering duties during the war were now assumed by the army and navy into the Joint Intelligence Committee and the Bureau was severely understaffed. McCall, with his new eyeglasses and sporting two law degrees (90 percent of recruits were lawyers, with the remaining 10 percent accountants) was put to work immediately, joining nearly forty other Baylor law grads working for the bureau across the country.* The FBI was assigned domestic internal security– saboteurs and espionage, tracking deserters and chasing draft dodgers, ferreting out corruption in war-related industries, investigating bankruptcy fraud, and occasionally, catching bank-robbers. In addition what he called “Marine-styled” strenuous physical training, McCall received instruction with the infamous Thomposon submachine gun (or “Tommy gun”), as well as various shotguns, rifles, and even what he called the “gas gun.”
“The .38 revolver was your main weapon.” he recalled. “You had to have that with you whenever you needed it, which meant at all times.
The instructions were: Whenever you need it, you’d better have it on and don’t come in here and say, “I didn’t have my revolver with me.””
He also studied jujitsu with trained instructors. “You did a lot of practicing in how to handle people,” McCall said, “how to disarm people and how to subdue a rebellious person and get him, throw him down, and handcuff him.” Other training included lectures on the history of the FBI. Some of the instructions, which McCall termed “a lot of yell-leader-type” motivational speeches, didn’t sit as well. “Another phase of it [that] didn’t particularly impress me was the almost, you might say; worship of J. Edgar Hoover in the educational division of the bureau in Washington.”
Hoover showed up in person twice during McCall’s D.C. training sessions, standing at the back. Agents, McCall said, were under strict orders to never look at the man. On Hoover’s second visit, he was accompanied by the Prince of Wales, Edward VII.
McCall’s first assignment was San Diego. When he arrived in town on Monday with his wife Frances and daughter Anne, he was immediately assigned 40 cases, mostly for men who had not reported to draft offices. The standard workweek, he said, was 48 hours, though all agents were expected to “volunteer” for another 30 hours of overtime. On Friday, the head of the San Diego office called McCall into his office.
“You’re delinquent on all your cases,” the man said. McCall replied, “I put in that full 78 hours and I just haven’t been able to find any of the people yet.” The officer glared at McCall. “You’ve got to put in more time. That seventy-eight hours, that thirty hours volunteer overtime, is a minimum for old, tired agents like me. You young fellows all ought to be putting in forty or fifty hours a week of volunteer overtime. I expect to see you put a little energy in your work.”
The following day McCall arrived at 6:30 a.m. and did so every day thereafter. He didn’t take his first half-day off until he’d been there six months.
“Everyday was just running day and night trying to keep up,” McCall said. “The FBI handled 600,000 draft-dodging cases. I don’t know how many deserters we chased down and prisoners of war that got away.”
McCall said that most of his 40 cases involved tracking Mexican American men who held dual citizenship. When they received their draft notices, many of the young men simply walked back across the border to Tijuana where agents couldn’t arrest them. MCall’s next assignment was as the FBI’s liaison with the Office of Naval Intelligence, the G-2 section of the War Department, the San Diego police, and the sheriff’s departments, sharing information on organizations sympathetic to the Nazis, the Klan-related Knights of the White Camellia, or even the American Communist Party. These assignments also involved some surveillance work.
At one point, he was called back to Washington D.C. where he joined a surveillance team investigating a suspected spy ring of 30-35 people.
“The FBI put about, oh, four to eight agents on every person and followed him day and night under instructions not to let them know that you were following them,” McCall said. “And to follow a person, we’d have eight hours on and eight hours off. Spies don’t spy every day. They may do something of espionage maybe once every six months or every month, but you [had] to follow [these men] all the time.
“And they meet a lot of people and they move around. Some of them move around a lot, so it’s a very dreary, monotonous thing to follow a fellow: he goes in and has a cup of coffee right then and try to pay the thing and get out about the same time he gets out. You can’t hang right there on his neck ‘cause he’ll see who you are. So you’ve got to stay away. It’s hard; it’s really boring.”
While in Washington, McCall was assigned to a man who lived on the edge of the District and daily walked 40 blocks to work in the foulest, most freezing weather imaginable. McCall called him a “fresh-air fiend.” Despite the man’s epic walks, he never appeared to meet anyone—much to McCall’s increasing frustration. “Several times I was tempted to pull out my gun and shoot him right there in the middle of the park and leave him in a snowbank.”
During the oral history interview, there is a slight pause at this point and the listener can imagine McCall snorting in disgust.
“All this James Bond thing, that’s a bunch of baloney.”
Over the next few years, as was bureau custom, McCall was reassigned multiple times, from Salt Lake City to Phoenix, back to Washington, then Oklahoma City. The constant moves—as well as his 80-hour weeks—placed increasing stress on McCall’s growing family. Finding an appropriate apartment grew increasingly difficult as the war wore on. In San Diego, with its giant naval facilities, the McCalls struggled unsuccessfully for weeks to find suitable housing.
At the time, McCall was working on a case involving the theft of government property at a defense plant. A young man had stolen some electric tools and McCall found both them and the man at his apartment. It was common in such cases for a judge to offer an offender the chance to enlist rather than face charges. The young man eagerly agreed to the deal.
McCall said he immediately drove back to the man’s apartment complex and found the landlord.
“I said, ‘I would like to have this apartment.’ She said, ‘It’s occupied.’ I said, ‘It won’t be occupied long’ and told her why. She said, ‘Well, if he gives it up, you can have it.'” With the blessing of the judge, the hapless young man was inducted into the military on the spot—and the McCalls had their apartment.
Not all cases ended peacefully. While in Salt Lake City, McCall tracked a violent bank robber who had escaped from prison and fled to the mountains of southern Utah. The man was a survivalist familiar with the mountains, armed and dangerous. McCall joined a task force that included other agents, members of the Utah Highway Patrol and even an experienced mountain guide.
After days of hiking in the rugged terrain of the Pine Valley Mountains, the two agents and the guide tracked the man to an isolated peak. McCall was exhausted, cut and bruised from the thick underbrush, and extremely thirsty. Eventually, they heard what their guide said was the sound of a small waterfall nearby. McCall was armed both with his service revolver and his favorite shotgun. Painfully, he picked his way down another steep ravine towards the sound of the water. To support himself, he hung by a thick vine along the ravine wall.
When the underbrush suddenly cleared, he saw, just ten yards away, the fugitive.
“And like a good FBI agent,” McCall said, “I identified myself: ‘I’m with the FBI! Give up!’ And he didn’t give up.”
The robber darted back into the heavy brush. McCall, still desperately holding on to the vine, dropped his shotgun and pulled his .38 revolver. The bank robber ducked behind a small ridge and opened fire. McCall was literally dangling by one arm and dangerously exposed — but managed to return fire.
“If he’d have known how to shoot, he’d have shot me off the side of the mountain,” McCall said. “But he’d ‘pluck,’ which you don’t do when you’re shooting. That’s what the cowboys do in the movies — they pluck down. If you’re going to shoot a pistol or a revolver, you level it up and squeeze it; you don’t pluck it. He was hitting all around me, but he wasn’t hitting me.”
“The guide was forty or fifty yards behind me. He found a place where he could lean against a tree, level his rifle, and shoot. About the third or fourth time that fellow stuck his head up, [the guide] shot him in the head and knocked him back into the stream.”
“It was a pretty good-sized mountain stream, swift and deep. I jumped in and got [the body] and pulled him against the bank and we finally got him out of the water. It took us quite a while to get him back down the mountain.”
McCall later told Turner that he actually felt sorry for the robber and hated to see him killed — mainly, though, because of the arduous task of dragging the dead body back down the mountain.
In Abner McCall: One Man’s Journey, McCall told his friend Angus McSwain that he spent months writing reports on the incident — mostly trying to justify why he had not also recovered the robber’s pistol at the same time in the cold, deep stream. “Apparently,” Dawson noted wryly, “the bureau was worried less about the fact that McCall had been in danger of being killed by the bank robber than it was about the loss of the robber’s pistol.”**
While McCall later said that his experience in the FBI was mostly positive, one aspect of his job clearly troubled him … to the point that it helped hasten his departure from the bureau at war’s end. Like many agents, he was assigned to work cases related to the Nisei, a term used to describe Japanese Americans, some of whom had been in the United States for several generations. From Salt Lake City, he dealt with the massive “relocation center” in the desert near Delta, Utah. These featured hastily constructed, badly built barracks, un-airconditioned and often dangerous, where thousands of these American citizens were cosigned.
“They were, in effect, prisoners there,” McCall said, “with military guards around them. Still, the U.S. government would draft the young men when they got to be 18. They had to register for the draft, then [the U.S. would] call them up. Some of them went on in and fought. One of our Baylor graduates in the law school, Takashi Kitoaka (LL.B. ’40), was wounded several times in Italy and was one of many [Nisei] who made a tremendous record for themselves. They probably had a higher rate of casualties than any military body the United States.”
Still other Nisei, angered and hurt over their loss of rights as Americans, wouldn’t register and the United States duly filed draft-dodging charges against them. It was the FBI’s job, McCall said, to arrest these young men and bring them back. Once apprehended, many contested their arrests and bail bondsmen charged exorbitant sums. The young men, returning to their relocation camps with their parents, who had been forced to sell their businesses and property for pennies on the dollar, were often bitterly resentful. Then, when their parents urged their sons not to respond to draft summons, the government charged the parents with sedition.
“This was the only thing I did in the FBI I thought was just wrong,” McCall said. “And many agents thought that. This was bad.”
McCall met repeatedly with the parents who had urged their sons not to register. “I’d tell them, ‘You don’t have to talk to me at all. I’m with the FBI. If you do talk to me and tell me that you urged your son not to respond to the draft, I’ll have to arrest you for sedition. But if you just tell me you don’t want to talk to me about the subject and you want to keep your silence, then as far as I’m concerned, that’s it.’ And I never had any of them want to talk to me about the subject. I never made a case against them. “I think that that’s one of the sorriest chapters in the history of the United States. We called them ‘relocation centers’ but they were concentration camps.”
** Anne, Bette, and Kathleen, McCall’s three daughters, are convinced that the missing item from the deceased bank robber was not his handgun but a hand-made camouflage survival vest with many pockets. Kathleen said she vividly remembers her father’s stories, saying that Hoover particularly wanted the blood and gore-damaged vest as an FBI “trophy.” They concede that it is possible that it may be that the pistol and the vest were lost together. Bette admits, however, that her father had an “steel-trap” memory. The oral history interviews at Baylor took place from 1972 to 1994.
While in Phoenix, one of McCall’s duties was to track escaped German prisoners of war from the massive camps in southern Arizona, including the famed Papago Park POW camp. In one particularly spectacular escape, nearly thirty German officers slipped out of Papago Park on Christmas night. McCall, whose family was back in Longview for the holidays, was the only officer on duty. It took the bureau forty days to eventually recapture all 25 of the escapees.**
It was in Phoenix that one of McCall’s most frustrating experiences in the FBI occurred. As the officer on duty, he received a call from nearby Glendale. The voice was barely a whisper: “I’m in the back of the bank. There is a fellow up front robbing the bank. Can you get out here?”
McCall sprang into action. He ran to the vault at the bureau’s office, grabbed a shotgun (“I always liked to carry a shotgun. I didn’t have much faith in a machine-gun or a rifle, but a shotgun intimidates people and you can’t hardly miss people with it.”) and a box of .00 shells and headed to the door.
But before he could leave, the man assigned to the vault — McCall described him a “super-janitor” — grabbed McCall by the arm.
“Wait a minute,” the super-janitor said. “Sign out.”
“There’s a guy in there robbing the bank!” McCall shouted.
“I can’t let any firearm out of here without you signing for it.”
After McCall scribbled down his name and turned to leave, the super-janitor stopped him again.
“Put the serial number down on that thing.”
It took McCall, whose eyesight was never good, “three or four minutes” to locate, read and write down the serial number. He again started for the door, but the super-janitor stopped him yet a third time.
“Wait a minute, you got that box of shells,” the man said. “Sign out for that box of shells.”
“And so by the time I get to Glendale,” McCall recalled, “the guy’s already robbed the bank and gone.”
Fortunately, McCall and his fellow agents managed to catch the bank robber just a few miles out of town. Once the man was secured, McCall stormed into his supervisor’s office.
“You need to have somebody in an emergency,” he shouted. “If somebody’s in the front door kicking the door down going to kill us all, he wouldn’t let us have a gun until we signed out and found the serial number and signed it out on that gun!”
*** Their father also told Anne, Bette, Dick and Kathleen a story about another German POW camp in Arizona where the prisoners quietly circulated a forbidden map of the state, showing the course of the Gila River. “They assumed that if they escaped, they could reach the river, find wood to build a raft, and float into Mexico– from whose coast they could be picked up by a German submarine. Imagine their chagrin in discovering that the Gila River was only a dry riverbed most of the time and totally devoid of any raft-building material. After several days in the blazing Arizona sun without drinking water, they were happy to be found and returned to the POW camp.”
At war’s end plus six months, McCall resigned from the bureau. “I found out I didn’t want to make a career out of the FBI,” McCall said. “My family hadn’t ever been with me in Oklahoma City, so I decided I was going home. I told them that I was going to go home and sit down for a while. I’d lived two out of every three weeks out of a suitcase somewhere.”
The FBI, however, had other ideas. The Oklahoma City bureau chief, who McCall said talked like the famously bombastic Gen. George Patton, called McCall into his office.
“The war’s not over,” the bureau chief raged. “We’re threatened just as much by Soviet Russia and the Communists today as we were with the Nazis when the war started. You need to stay in here. You are, in effect, deserting in battle.”
But after three and a half years, McCall had had enough. While he said he believed that the FBI’s efforts had been “essential” during World War II, he told his Baylor interviewers what he thought of Hoover’s “excessive zeal” and lamented how the bureau had ignored the civil rights of its citizens during the war, especially Japanese-Americans.
“I think most of the people in the FBI felt like that this job has got to be done,” McCall said. “But most of them, like me, when they got to looking back — and I had been going day and night, day and night, most of the time six and seven days a week — well, I was worn out.”
After the FBI, McCall eventually returned to Waco, became Dean of the Baylor School of Law and, eventually, President of the university. Interestingly, a quick scan through his published speeches and writings reveals scant few references to his tumultuous time as a G-man.
Toward the end of 2019, three of McCall’s children, Bette Miller, Richard “Dick” McCall, and Kathleen Sigtenhorst gathered and, as they often do during family gatherings, memories and stories of their larger- than-life father came up. The fourth sibling, Anne Chroman, called in with her recollections as well. Bette said they all agreed their father virtually never spoke about his experiences in the FBI, save for his account of the shoot-out in the Pine Valley Mountains.
“This story, with lots of colorful details and animated recounting, was a frequent bedtime story request from us children in later years,” Bette said. “My after invented a “bad guy” named Low Louie Low Crouch and a sheriff named Sure-Shot Shamburger to populate many of his tales. Shamburger’s name, by the way, was taken from a friend of his, Dr. William Shamburger, pastor of First Baptist Church of Tyler.” While McCall loved to tell stories of his days at the Masonic Home, he rarely mentioned the FBI. Perhaps it was because, Bette said, like many veterans, he “pretty much came home and wanted to get on with life and forget about it.” They wanted, she said, to “put it behind them.” It was, after all, an exceedingly tumultuous, sometimes dangerous, and always unpleasant life. Perhaps McCall’s reticence to speak about his activities may have been yet another reason. “He saw it as not the main rack of his life. It was off on the side-rail somewhere that he had to do, because he wanted to do his duty to his country.” The McCall children say their father kept in close contact with every child at th eMasonic Home– most of the whom went on to have extraordinary lives and careers of their own– and told countless stories about his days with his brothers in Fort Worth. But according to Bette, the family never met a single FBI agent who their father had worked with.
“That old guy,” one of us said, “he don’t even know he’s Somebody.” And he truly was.
Obtaining housing in Salt Lake City was just as difficult for the young G-man and his family as San Diego had been. So in his few hours off, McCall once again went in search off, McCall once again went int search of a suitable apartment:
“[My father] encountered a landlady who refused to rent to a couple with a baby. He began talking with her about the war, and at one point he quoted some lines from Lord Byron’s The Destruction of Sennacherib: The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea. When the blue wave rolls nightly o’er deep Galilee. ‘I like a man who knows his Scripture!’ exclaimed the landlady and rented him the apartment.”
-Bette McCall Miller
