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Columns

The Loss and The Key

I have survived both bladder and thyroid cancer. A ruptured appendix many years ago almost did me in, and I received third-degree leg burns in a senseless gasoline fire that could have killed me. Such minor inconveniences are hardly worth mentioning.

The physical pain from the surgeon’s scalpel, and mishaps inflicted by the machinery of man, are nothing when compared with the emotional pain of irretrievable loss.

I experienced that loss on the night of February 15, 1993. My first-born child, son Grady Michael Kindrick, killed himself with a .38 caliber pistol in the backyard of his mother’s home on Harriett Street in San Antonio. He had just broken up with his longtime girlfriend. It was the day after Valentine’s Day. He was 36.

I was working late in my small Action Magazine office on Broadway when I got the call. I was recently divorced at the time. The call was from my youngest of two sons, Steven, who with his older brother Grady had been staying with his mother in what had been our family home. Our daughter Gena, my youngest, was living with her mother Vicky. Grady was living in the home on Harriett Street after separating from the girlfriend, and Steve had recently moved back from Florida where he had been working in the nursing home industry.

I picked up the phone.

“Daddy…”

Steven was hyperventillating.

I knew something was wrong.

“Daddy, you have to get over here. Grady shot himself. He’s dead.”

This could not be. I could not make myself believe this. Some kind of crazy hallucination on Steve’s part. Someone must have given him a laced joint.

I went numb as I drove to my ex-wife’s house. It was close to midnight. I saw flashing lights. Police cars. An ambulance. Two cops were waiting for me when I arrived. One escorted me through the house and into the backyard. I saw Grady on the ground. He had shot himself in the head. His body was covered by a sheet. I think they were waiting for a coroner. At the time of Grady’s suicide, I hadn’t had a drink of alcohol or any drug for three years. Some predicted that I would drink over Grady’s death.

I didn’t want to drink. I wanted to die.

The night of Grady’s death I drove back to the tarpaper shack in Bulverde where I lived alone with my dog. I recall dropping to my knees and trying to look skyward through a flood of tears.

Dear Jesus in Heaven, I prayed. Please bring my boy back and take me instead.

I was raised by a Christian mother, attending services and Sunday school in the Junction First Baptist Church. But I didn’t make a real contact with God until I sobered up in a recovery program which stressed belief in a power greater than myself.

I sobbed and hated the uncontrollable tears. It was years later that I was to take comfort in the words on tears by 19th century writer Washington Irving who wrote: There is a sacredness in tears. They are not a sign of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.

Grady’s sister Gena found his body.

She had been to a concert with a friend when she stopped at the White Room, a nightclub frequented by Gena and her older brother.

Gena recalled: “Me and a friend stopped at the White Room and a guy we knew said Grady asked him for bullets. I have no idea if he got any from him. The bartender gave me a cocktail napkin that Grady had written on, listing all the jewelry he was wearing. I had a bad feeling, so I went home to look for him and found him in the backyard already dead.”

One of the policemen at the scene of Grady’s death put his arm around my shoulders and said, “I know who you are, and I know you might not care for policemen. But I truly feel for you, and I want you to know that this is the hardest part of police work for me. I will say a prayer for you tonight.”

I didn’t get the cop’s name. I never forgot him. My hard shell of resentment for authority was showing its first crack.

While driving away from my former home and the scene of my son’s death, I can recall mental flashbacks which have faded but never disappeared from my soul and my human psyche. I held Grady in the palm of my hand after his premature birth in a Bay City hospital. My first job after college was editorship of a tiny weekly called The Bay City News. Grady weighed 3.5 pounds at birth. Vicky and I were overwhelmed with both joy and apprehension. Would he even make it? By the time he was a year old he was the size of a normal yearling.

The scenes rocketing through my brain on that fateful night were vivid and almost palpable.

Grady on the little stool. He was about 3 then and his hair was curly and golden blond. Short pants and little white shoes. The cutest little kid God ever made. Grady in the visitor’s booth at Bexar County Jail. He brought me soap and tobacco. He was my only visitor when I was locked up. Grady trying to find me a lawyer. He had no money, but he tried. I learned from friends that he worried about me. Grady the night before Willie’s first picnic when Nelson introduced him to his idol–Leon Russell. The memories, the guilt. The physical fight I had with my son. Why didn’t I do better? Why didn’t we go fishing more? Why didn’t I do more? I know now that I was never really unselfish and mature enough to be a real father to my son. I was a friend, a running mate, and a confidant. We loved each other until it literally hurt, but I didn’t know what to do with it at the time.

Grady dropped out of Robert E. Lee High School, later passing a General Education Development (GED) test. He wrote a couple of record reviews for Action Magazine. I could see the talent and the potential, but the kid didn’t get the direction and help that he needed. When I started Action Magazine in 1975, Grady wanted to work for me. I wore turquoise jewelry. Grady wore turquoise jewelry. I wore cowboy boots, Grady wore cowboy boots. Grady helped me with photography and some photo lab work, but the little magazine just didn’t bring in enough revenue for the two of us. He bounced from one odd job to the next, telling me once shortly before his death: “I have never done one damn thing for myself. I have wasted so much.”

A red flag. Perhaps. But I didn’t see it. Who in the hell in my world had ever heard of something called clinical depression?

The bewilderment and sense of disbelief when one loses a child like I lost Grady must certainly have some spiritual connection to God’s animal kingdom. I saw it when my Jack Russell terrier Henry caught and killed a baby redbird that had left its nest in a hanging plant on our front porch. Three other fledglings had apparently left the nest successfully, leaving this last one. It was the baby’s first and last attempt at flight.

I knew the fledgling cardinals were feathered out and ready for flight. I should have locked the dog in the backyard. It was my fault, not Henry’s. Jack Russell terriers are hunters, born and bred to attack and kill. They are lightning quick. When the baby redbird fluttered down on the yard grass, the dog ended its life.

It was a poignant lesson for Sharon and me. The hardest part was watching the adult redbirds after their baby’s death. Cardinals mate for life, both mother and father feeding the young. With nothing but scattered feathers left of their baby, the parents were obviously in a high state of stress, squawking piteously as they flew to their now-empty nest, then to the ground, then back to the nest. They had lost their baby. They were frantic. They could not understand. In their own fashion, I am sure they were crying. I knew the near panic of inscrutable emptiness and the need to cry out. To scream for help.

Since Grady’s death, my faith has strengthened. Although I have not been a regular church man, my Higher Power is the God of my childhood. My God walked on water and raised a man from the dead some 2,000 years ago, and, yes, his name is Jesus Christ. His spirit still saves and heals, springing drunks and dope addicts I have known and worked with from their own furnace of man-made fire. I will never get over Grady’s death; but with God’s help, I have been able to get through it.

I know I will see Grady and other loved ones again. For me, Heaven will surely include the beautiful, burbling clear waters of the South Llano River where I grew up. My wife Sharon and all of my loved ones will be there, and every dog and cat I ever owned will be on hand to greet me. And I won’t be surprised if a certain little redbird is there, sitting safely on a high branch and keeping a sharp eye on Henry the Jack Russell terrier.

As this autobiography winds down, some might wonder why I withheld my son’s death until the last of this project. It was not part of a script. It was part of my personal pain that I put off as long as my mind would allow.

My younger son, Steven Howard Kindrick, died January 3, 2019, from small cell lung cancer. He was born August 23, 1958, in Shannon Memorial Hospital in San Angelo while I worked for the San Angelo Standard-Times. Vicky Kindrick, my former wife and mother of my three children, died of natural causes January 22, 2021, in San Antonio. She was born June 30, 1937.

There were bright spots in the latter days of Action Magazine, three anniversary shows at Texas Pride Barbecue that showcased musicians who ranged from Kinky Friedman and Johnny Bush to Alex Harvey, Johnny Rodriguez, and Darrell McCall. These and hundreds more like them are the artists who graced the pages of Action for 44 years.

The big surprise for me was my inclusion into the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, a huge honor which sees my work included with such Texas writer giants as Larry McMurtry and Carmac McCarthy, as well as musicians the likes of Willie Nelson, Ray Benson, and Jerry Jeff Walker. I graduated from the San Marcos university in 1957 when it was Southwest Texas State College. Sadly, Bill Wittliff, who started the museum on Texas talent, died before I had a chance to meet him. He was the Texas screenwriter who co-produced The Redheaded Stranger movie with Willie Nelson and crafted the screen version of Lonesome Dove.

My entrance into the Wittliff can be attributed to former Express-News music columnist Hector Saldana, now music curator at the Wittliff and leader of San Antonio’s Tex-Mex rock band The Krayolas. I wrote the first story ever printed on the Krayolas when Hector and his brother David were teenagers. Now Hector’s boys are in the band. 

The Wittliff Collections represent a giant museum of works by Texas journalist writers, photographers, musicians, and screenwriters. This vast body of works encompasses the entire seventh floor of the Texas State Alkek Library, and it continues to grow.

My Wittliff exhibit ties in with the outlaw country music outbreak of the 1970s when Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Jerry Jeff Walker, and a few others led a limited exodus of artists from the constraints of Nashville. These were the so-called “outlaws of country music” who traded their traditional sequined coats and ostrich boots for head rags and tennis shoes, who broke from the giant record label sounds and sheen of Nashville, choosing instead to sign with smaller independent labels while hiring their own record producers, engineers, and side men for the recording sessions.

If these were the “outlaws” of country music, then I became the outlaw journalist who hung out with them and wrote about them. My exhibit at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State features me in a Mexican sombrero with a very suspicious-looking cigarette smoking between two of my fingers. Action Magazine copies covering 44 years are stored and on display in my Wittliff exhibit, as well as old columns that go back to my 1960s and early 1970s years as a reporter and columnist for the San Antonio Express and News.

So here we are, maybe at the ending for me and maybe not. Bill Shakespeare would say I seem to have survived the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Bill Wilson would say that God has transformed me from a churlish foul-mouthed Mr. Hyde into a much happier and much more pleasant Dr. Jekyll.

Some refer to this transformation as a spiritual awakening or a psychic change. Sobriety for me means far more than abstinence from alcohol and drugs. Sobriety means sanity, gratitude, and a spiritual way of life that defies adequate description. While my Higher Power is a Jewish carpenter, my state of spirituality goes beyond the structure of organized religion.

I love my wife Sharon and I will tell anyone who will listen that I have a five-foot wife and a kick-ass fairy tale life, all the result of sobriety and my faith in God. I was a deer hunter who now feeds the animals at my kitchen gate. I was a whitewing dove hunter who now grieves the death of a baby redbird. Does this make me less the mucho, macho stud duck image I had painted for myself? I can’t explain it but God can. An old spiritual advisor I had many years ago passed me the key. His name was Jack.

“Get down on your knees beside your bed every night,” Jack said. “Thank God for keeping you sober one more day. Then put your boots under the bed. When you crawl down the next morning to get the boots, ask God for another day of sobriety.”

It works.

Filed Under: Columns

The Miracle of 144th District Court

Bexar County Criminal DA Susan Reed
Bexar County Criminal DA Susan Reed

The sun was shining and the birds were singing as I rode my bicycle on that bright spring morning near my Bulverde home. A year had passed since my last drug bust at the hands of Sumner Bowen and the Alamo Area Drug Task Force, and I had been sober and drug-free for an entire year after joining a popular God-based recovery program.

I had violated a 10-year probated sentence for drug possession with that final arrest, and a probation revocation and sentencing hearing would be the inevitable end to my freedom. I had posted bond, and there was nothing more to do but wait.

Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months as I waited to hear from the court system. Nothing happened as I attended daily meetings in the recovery program. I had heard nothing from my lawyer, and I told myself that I might be off the hook. Maybe my case just slipped through a crack in the legal apparatus. Apprehension turned into relief, and I had all but forgotten about the case when an unmarked sheriff’s car pulled my bicycle over in front of the Honey Creek Grocery Store at the intersection of Texas Highway 46 and Blanco Road.

I was arrested by deputies from the drug task force. My probation had been revoked and I was headed for jail to await a sentencing hearing before 144th District Court Judge Susan D. Reed, the toughest and most uncompromising jurist in the system when it came to drug cases. I was going before the “Hanging Judge,” as Reed was known to the criminal element. For some still unexplained reason, my paperwork had been mislaid until it landed on Reed’s court docket.

The Honey Creek Grocery no longer exists. It was a one-woman enterprise, owned and operated at the time of the arrest by my friend Mary Lou (Kelly) Gibson. Kelly and her friend Marcie Snyder were on the grocery front porch as I was being handcuffed. I recall Kelly wringing her hands in consternation. Kelly and Marcie agreed to take charge of my bicycle since I was headed for jail with no bond in the offing. I gave them a phone number for my son Grady. I also asked them to notify my Bulverde friend Sam Lowrey.

When we reached the Bexar County Jail, my incarceration education was to begin. I was first placed in a holding cell to await fingerprinting and other processing procedures. There was one other prisoner in the little cell, a middle-aged Hispanic inmate who must have weighed 300 pounds. Restroom facilities consisted of a sink and one barren commode sitting in the middle of the room.

I have never forgotten my horrendous introduction to captivity. The big boy was on the thunder mug, emptying his bowels with grunts and groans befitting a dying hippopotamus, and the gaseous stench from that monster shit filled that little holding cell like a Nazi gas chamber.

The prayer I uttered was simple and heartfelt: Oh Lord, get me out of here and I swear I will never do another drug or take another drink of alcohol for the rest of my life.

Everything seemed surreal as I was to spend the better part of a month behind bars. I was being hand searched every time I turned around. Damn it to hell. I was wearing an orange monkey suit and nobody gave a shit about my college degree and Pulitzer nomination. My smart mouth was no asset, and I soon learned the hard way to keep it shut.

The guard searching my person ran his hand too near my privates for my liking.

“I reckon you might be having fun doing that,” I smarted off.

The guard brought his fist into my crotch with sufficient force to take away my breath and any notion I might have had for further wise ass comment. It was an old-fashioned nut cracking worth remembering.

Welcome to the Bexar County Jail, Mr. newspaper columnist.

Social stratification has always been alive and well in the jail. It is a sort of caste system determined by the inmates. When I was jailed in the 1970s, the Texas prisons were over-crowded and many inmates were allowed to serve their prison sentences in county lockups. Hispanics were in the majority, followed by blacks, and then the whites like me who were the third largest in number.

I was one of the oldest of jail inmates at the time, and good fortune or maybe providence from the git-go provided me with a jailhouse angel known by one and all as the Wizard. He was a career Hispanic burglar whose Christian designation was Danny, but everyone in the jail referred to him simply as Wizard. And he looked like a wizard with sharply chiseled features and pointed goatee.       Since I was one of the oldest inmates on the cell block, Wizard christened me Pops and the appellation stuck. In jail jargon, Wizard was known as a “house man.” He had been in and out of jails and prisons for most of his adult life of 35-plus years, and he could get just about any substance delivered to his cell.

Discrimination was rampant in the Bexar County Jail in the 1970s. “Mayata” is the N word in Spanish, and Wizard was the first person I ever heard use it. My jailhouse indoctrination came from a concerned Wizard who took it upon himself to give me all the protection at his command.

Nodding toward a group of black inmates (they usually stayed grouped together when possible), Wizard said: “Pops, you need to know a few things if you are going to survive in here. Shit happens sometimes, and you need to be on the right side. It happens between the Chicanos and the Mayatas. You are a gringo and you white boys are the minority in jail. When the bad shit goes down, you need to be with us Mexicans. Not with the Mayatas. We always win because there are more of us.”

Conversely to the Wizard’s warning, my other good jail friend was a big black guy named Frank. Before the Wizard helped me get commissary money in my jail account, Frank generously shared his much-coveted Bugler tobacco and rolling papers with me. A murder-one parolee, Frank’s parole had been compromised simply because Frank had failed to report in person to his parole officer.

“Damn it, Frank,” I said. “How in hell could you fail to report when it meant you would go back to prison?”

Frank’s answer was almost typical of the jailbird whose apathy probably stems from a life with little hope or meaning.

“Hell, I didn’t go and report because I just didn’t feel like it,” Frank said. “I was out on the East Side frying me some bacon and eggs that morning I was supposed to report, and I just didn’t go in.”

Early on in my incarceration, Frank and I shared a cell, me on the top bunk and Frank on the bottom. I had heard scary tales of sodomy and gang rapes in the Texas prison system. I was nervous and on edge my first night in jail.

All prisoners had been racked up in their bunks when I called down to Frank in a loud whisper. I was jittery at this point.

I was trying to keep things light and in what I hoped would sound like a joking vein when I said, “Hey Frank, you awake?”

“Yeah, what do you want.”

Frank sounded like he was half asleep when I voiced my concerns of the night.

“I’m old and tough, and I would really be an awful piece of ass for anybody who might want to try,” I said.

Frank’s voice was loud enough to be heard all over the cell block.

“Goddamn it, Pops, will you shut the fuck up and go to sleep. There’s some of us in here trying to get some rest.”

The jail had pay phones when I was locked up, and when Wizard’s wife Rose called, he would put me on the line for one of Rose’s encouraging pep talks. I can all but hear her today.

“Everything is gonna be fine, Pops. You and Wizard will be out before you know it. I’m here keeping the home fire going. We will have us a big party at our house. Don’t you fret about it. TDC (Texas Department of Corrections) will be smoother than county, so keep your chin up. ”

The sobriety program that basically saved my life is a program that puts belief in a higher power before self-reliance, and I was intrigued when I saw the Wizard on his knees by his bunk making the sign of the cross.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“Praying,” he said.

“Praying for what?”

“I’m praying to God for help doing my time.”

The Wizard explained that prayer and a positive attitude was all I needed.

“Look Pops,” he said. “You are looking at a 10-year sentence. With good behavior, you might do 18 months, maybe three years at the most. You can stand on your head and spear grapes with your tongue for 18 months. Time is just time. God will help you do it.”

The thought popped into my head and I verbalized it to the Wizard.

I asked him if he had ever considered asking God to remove the compulsion to     “Shit no,” he said. “That’s what I do for a living.”

That’s when the realization hit me.

I didn’t want to do prison time, with or without God’s help. And there I was, all but standing in the shadow of the state penitentiary. I felt like the late Billy Joe Shaver’s Georgia on a Fast Train lyrics: I got a good Christian raisin’ and an eighth grade education, ain’t no need in y’all treatin’ me this way….

It seemed like an eternity before the day arrived for my sentencing hearing in Judge Reed’s court. I was in leg irons and my orange inmate jump suit when a county van transported me from the jail to the courthouse for the 9 a.m. hearing. The only visitor I had during my incarceration had been my oldest son Grady. Grady had picked up where the Wizard left off in supplying me with commissary money for tobacco and soap. Regular jail issue bath soap was like the cheap, scentless little slivers prevalent in flop house motels of that day. With commissary money supplied by my son, I was able to purchase real and wonderfully strong scented Irish Spring bath soap. I have Irish Spring in my bathroom today, an everlasting reminder of where I came from.

When the court bailiff called my case, reality sounded in my brain like a death knell.

I knew this was it. I was going to state prison for 10 years. My little Action Magazine would be no more. Could I survive in the prison population? I didn’t snitch when Sumner Bowen made his offer. If I got shanked to death, then I would get shanked to death. By God, I would not bend over and grab my ankles. My head was processing horror scenario after horror scenario, when the judge asked if the defense had any witnesses to present.

This hit me like a hidden land mine. I didn’t even know that favorable testimony from character witnesses might be possible, that such testimony could even mitigate the severity of a court sentence.

My lawyer friend Alan Brown was with me that morning, working pro bono and as surprised as everyone else when the first wave of volunteer witnesses started coming through the courtroom door. I later asked Brown why he hadn’t mentioned character witnesses to me and his answer was, “I was positive it would do no good. Susan Reed had never ruled for a multiple bond violator on drug charges. It just didn’t happen with her.”

My volunteer surprise character witnesses were entering the courtroom when Susan Reed issued her call for witnesses we might want to present. My first witness was writer friend Joseph Harmes, another member of the recovery group I was in. I was to later learn that it had been Harmes who mounted a telephone campaign through most of the night, rallying other potential witnesses from our substance abuse group who, as it turned out, were willing and even eager to help. They were all ready to testify that I had been sober for a year, and that I was ready to turn my life around.

I never knew the name of the diminutive prosecutor the district attorney’s office assigned to my case. He was short, balding, and snotty as hell, a bantam rooster with a sarcastic leer that looked like it had been stitched onto his mouth with fishing line. The hateful gash all but dripped with vitriol.

I recognized most of my witnesses as they entered the courtroom. My lawyer knew none of them. The courtroom was filling fast as other lawyers and a couple of curious judges joined the audience. The Sam Kindrick Circus was free of charge.

“Who should I call?” Brown asked me.

“Joseph Harmes,” I whispered.

When Harmes settled into the witness chair it was plain that the bantam rooster was in attack mode and ready to denigrate any witness we might call.

“What might I ask do you do for a living, Mr. Harmes?”

“I am a writer,” Joseph answered.

This evoked a veritable cackle from the prosecutor. It was almost a hoot of joy.

“A writer, eh. And would you tell this court, Mr. Harmes, exactly who you write for and where this so-called writing appears.”

Joseph has always had a poker face. And he didn’t move a facial muscle when he answered the prosecutor.

“Yes, sir, People Magazine.”

The rooster was incredulous. He was sneering openly.

“Are you telling this court, Mr. Harmes, that you write for the national publication People Magazine?”

“I do write for People,” Joseph answered. You can verify that by checking the magazine masthead. My name is in it.”

There was a collective gasp from the gallery, and then the courtroom fell silent as an Egyptian tomb.

“Next witness.”

Next came my friend Peter, another recovered alcoholic who, even at that time, was an accomplished upper echelon corporate attorney in the San Antonio and Bexar County legal system. Reed’s jaw seemed to drop when she recognized Peter.

“Don’t you practice law, and haven’t you worked in this court?” Reed asked the witness. “And are you telling the court that you are another of these alcoholics?”

“I am a recovering alcoholic,” Peter said, “and I am here to offer testimony which I hope can help this defendant.”

“Next witness.”

Then came Steve, a broker with the Dean Witter stock brokerage.

Following Steve was Roger, owner of two high-end Mexican restaurants.

The witness after Roger was the owner of one of San Antonio’s largest ambulance and medical supply companies.

If we had been given a month to assemble character witnesses, we could never have gathered together a group of people with the honest and obvious quality to match this bunch of recovering drunks and dopers. More potential witnesses were filing through the courtroom door when Judge Reed called a stop to the proceedings.

With both hands extended toward the audience, witnesses, and lawyers, Reed said: “We will stop all proceedings here. I have heard enough.”

The judge then shocked everyone concerned when she said, “I will take this case under advisement and make a final ruling one week from today.” She then recessed the court, and the rest is history.

She put me back on another 10 years of probation and I was free to go. There was no community service that I knew anything about, but Reed did have me report monthly to the adult probation department for urine samples over what turned out to be seven years.

There were some who believed a benevolent spirit of unknown origin entered Susan Reed’s body that morning, prompting her to cut me loose. My friend Madonna, who worked in the court system and knew Judge Reed personally, said, “I don’t know who that judge was who set you free after three probation violations, but I do know it wasn’t Susan Reed.” Others attributed my third probated sentence to a stroke of raw luck. I have always been prone to agree with those who called my stunning release The Miracle of 144th District Court.

It was an act of God, and I have always known it. I have since marveled that the Spirit of the Universe would favor me in such dramatic fashion.

Filed Under: Columns

Near the end

My drinking was in full bloom during my last years with the Express and News. This was during the early 1970s when I was nearing my alcoholic rock bottom.

A typical workday found me arriving for work around 11 a.m. after a full night of heavy drinking. When I was a general assignments reporter for the morning Express, this was the customary time for my shift to start. After I started writing a daily column with hours of my own choosing, I continued to arrive around the same time at the Express and News building at San Antonio’s Avenue E at Third Street.

Across from the newspaper plant, and a block west on Third Street, sat my second late morning home, a grubby beer joint known as The Melody Room Lounge. The Melody Room is mentioned on earlier pages of this work. For medicinal reasons known by every chronic alcoholic, I swung into the Melody for my customary two and sometimes three bottles of beer to quell my morning jitters. Josie the day bartender had the cap popped on the first one before I got settled on the bar stool. She understood my needs, and the second beer was open and sitting on the bar as I finished the first.

I chugged these beers fast before heading for the third-floor city room on the newspaper building to pick up a reporting assignment or to start writing either news articles or my general interest column. Sometimes I failed to keep the first beers down. There would come the usual dry heaves which I would stop with another beer. In those days, I worked on a manual Royal typewriter with an inked ribbon, a vital instrument that transferred my thoughts to copy paper when my hands didn’t shake. That is where the beer came into play. Without the sudden infusion of alcohol, the shakes made it impossible for me to type readable copy. A real alcoholic knows this debilitating condition. Trembling hands are a visible part of the shakes known by every true alcoholic, but the internal shakes are far worse. The nervous system seems to short out; armpits drip sweat, it’s too early in the day to start on the hard liquor, and no real practicing alcoholic will recognize the horror for what it is. Denial is not a river in Egypt, and those screaming internal shakes are real. I always called them the gut jerks. The only way to make them subside, is to add more alcohol.

I never drank on the newspaper property, although I grabbed an occasional beer while on a reporting assignment. The heavy daytime drinking started when I began writing the daily column.

Title of the column was Offbeat, and many of the characters I wrote about were regular denizens of San Antonio’s nightclub scene. The newspaper editors didn’t question my whereabouts so long as I turned in the column by a late evening deadline.

While working on the column I was working my way toward the hard booze which I usually started a few hours after sundown. Before I could eat something and get on to bourbon, vodka, or gin, the dry heaves were a part of my day. I did eat on a regular basis, and a doctor told me this was the reason I never developed liver cirrhosis. When I started spitting up blood, I went to a doctor for treatment of what I thought were bleeding ulcers, but there was no internal bleeding. I had dry heaved so hard that blood vessels in my neck were ruptured and leaking profusely.

Drinking during early nighttime hours was done in various San Antonio saloons and nightclubs such as the old Flamingo Lounge, Black Fox Tap Room, The Burnt Orange Club, Blue Room, San Jacinto Club, Papa Jack’s, The Satin Doll, and others too numerous to list on these pages. Then, after the legal closing time of 2 a.m. for Texas bars, I headed for the after-hours nightclubs owned and operated by the Sfair brothers. Elder brother Phil Sfair owned the Navy Club on Pecan Street while younger brothers Mike and George Sfair held forth a few blocks distance at the Commanders Room on Main Avenue. It wasn’t unusual for these clubs to stay open until almost daylight. Technically, they were in violation of Texas liquor laws, but the Sfairs had political connections which allowed them to operate with impunity. A number of cops and newspaper reporters drank free, ensuring the safety of these nightclubs.

After drinking in other clubs which closed at 2 a.m., I usually wound up in the Commanders Room, drunk but still mobile. When I left, many times with the first light of day starting to break, I was in an ossified stupor but somehow able to drive to my home on Harriett Street. If I stayed in the Commanders Room until after daylight, my custom was to stop for one last drink at Wynn Little’s Blue Room on San Pedro Avenue, about six blocks from my home.

The after-hours clubs operated Mondays through Saturdays. I rested up on weekends, drinking beer at home before venturing out to neighborhood drinking joints where I tried to lay off the hard stuff, sticking with beer in the belief that my body would somehow recoup before the coming Monday. A gallon jug of water always rested within arm’s length of my bed. The alcohol kept me in a near-constant state of dehydration, and I guzzled prodigious amounts of water during night and early morning hours.

Then came Monday and the Melody Room Lounge. Josie would have my medicine ready. The cycle was continuous.

The morning after my firing at the Express and News, I knew that I had to quit drinking alcohol or die. I quit drinking, and as mentioned earlier, I transitioned to cocaine and eventually methamphetamine. My musician friend Ray Wylie Hubbard said it for the both of us. We thought coke would be the answer to our drinking problem. It was not, of course, and the irony of it was that I would eventually find salvation in a God-based recovery program known worldwide. But not before I was near death and on the veritable doorstep of the state penitentiary.

My years in full-blown drug addiction were the blackest, most humiliating, and soul-smashing times of my life. I was destroying my career, my marriage to wife Vicky who never did anything to deserve the humiliation and neglect she got from me, my childrens’ right to a father they might be proud of, and what fell just short of my freedom to walk on Texas soil without chain shackles on my ankles and steel cuffs on my wrists.

My first and last arrests on felony drug charges made headlines in both San Antonio newspapers. The San Antonio Express, the newspaper for which I once wrote a daily column and garnered a Pulitzer nomination for excellence in breaking news coverage, ran my drug busts on the metro section front. The rival San Antonio Light delivered a page-one gut punch after one of the drug busts which I felt certain was designed to deprive me of little reason to keep on living in the San Antonio area. Accompanying that article was a photograph of me in a circuit-riding preacher attire which I had worn in the filming of a failed comedy film titled The Adventures of Jody Shannon.

My role in the movie which never made it past the cutting room floor was that of Preacher Sam, a hypocritical whiskey-drinking dice-shooting, whore-chasing minister who rode a jug-headed mule. The old movie promo shot featured me in flat-brim hat, arms raised in facetious supplication to a deity that didn’t exist in a heaven of acrimonious scorn for Junction hicks who dared, and failed, to hack it on the big city stage.

When that unholy scene assaulted my senses from the front page of the San Antonio Light, my reaction was short and unforgettable:

Fuck! A sense of indescribable pain and the emptiness of total loss. I have never found words to adequately recreate this awful portrait of self-doom. And I have never understood what kept this godawful image from striking me dead in my tracks. I remember saying the first real prayer that ever escaped my lips: God help me. Lord, please help me.

My transition from alcohol to drugs started with speed pill use, a practice that was rampant at the time within the music community. I purchased my dope from two renegade ex-physicians, Steven Pollock and Ted Norris. Pollock grew psilocybin mushrooms and sold them from his north San Antonio home. He died late one night when burglars ransacked his home and shot him between the eyes. There were two strong suspects, but no one was ever convicted of the crime.

Ted Norris would write prescriptions for any drug his customers ordered. When I told him I wanted 100 preludin pills, he wrote the prescription, then asked me how well the super speed worked.

“I’ve never tried those,” he told me. “Save me a pill from your prescription. I might get a script of my own.”

I graduated from pills to powdered cocaine and methamphetamine with someone offering me a line of coke which had been chopped with a razor blade and arranged on a pocket mirror. As was customary in the drug world I was entering, I snorted the line of cocaine with a tightly rolled dollar bill, eschewing any thought of shooting cocaine and later methamphetamine with a hypodermic needle, a practice known as “running the dope,” and a drug culture habit which brought with it the filthy debilitating term which all proper society has come to loathe: “Junkie.”

I was no damn junkie, I told myself. I was a snorter and not a shooter, a user and not an abuser, despite the fact that I was inhaling near the end of my drug addiction career (snorting) in powdered form enough high-grade methamphetamine to kill a moose. The high cost of cocaine soon drove me to the less expensive but equally damaging man-made killer known on the streets as “meth.” And snorting large quantities of cocaine had resulted in geyser-like nose bleeds that progressed to my filling a handkerchief with pieces of nasal tissue I called “coke meat.” Strangely enough, the meth that threatened to wreck my brain had little noticeable effect on my sinus passages. It just burned like hell. By this time, I was escalating my withdrawal from the human race.

There are 3.5 grams in an eighth of an ounce of powdered drug, known on the streets as an 8-ball, and I was consuming almost an eighth of an ounce of meth every two days and sometimes daily when my drug world ended in handcuffs and total demoralization.

Harlon Copeland was the Bexar County sheriff when I was first arrested and jailed on felony possession of methamphetamine charges. A conviction on this charge could result in a prison sentence of from 10 to 99 years. My office was in a strip center on San Antonio’s Wurzbach Road. Just across the street was a topless club known as Baby Dolls.

Sheriff Copeland and his troops hit my office late one morning. The memory of that drug bust is still a surreal media circus which included reporters from what seemed like every TV and radio station in San Antonio. To spice up the morning show was a gaggle of titty bar dancers who drifted over from Baby Dolls.

After deputies came crashing through my office door, Sheriff Copeland appeared in person to oversee all details of what he obviously viewed as a prestigious feather in the cap of Bexar County law enforcement. Copeland kept me handcuffed for almost two hours as two of his deputies called what seemed like every TV and radio station in Texas, plus both the San Antonio Express and News and the San Antonio Light.

“You have written some really bad things about the sheriff’s department for a number of years,” Copeland reminded me. “But we have got you now.”

As his deputies wound up their telephone calls to local media, Copeland stood in front of a large wall mirror I had in my office. When he had his hair combed to satisfaction, the sheriff turned to me and said, “Well, Sam, it’s time for us to go meet the press.”

The parking lot was filled with reporters and camera crews, many of whom I knew personally.

My mood was worse than foul.

A WOAI TV cameraman shoved a microphone in my face and really let me have it.

“You are live on Channel 4,” he said. “What do you have to say?”

It came out before my brain really registered.

“Fuck Harlon Copeland,” I said.

The cameraman recoiled as if from some horrible odor. I don’t know what he said to his live audience.

“Enough of that,” Copeland said. “Now you are going to jail.”

The sheriff escorted me to his personal car. One of his deputies drove while Copeland and I occupied the back seat.

“How do you feel now?” the sheriff asked.

I recall my answer as if it were yesterday.

“I feel like jumping into a big dark hole and dragging you right in behind me.”

This evoked a short laugh.

After that, and as we completed the ride to jail and a booking procedure, Copeland was almost jovial. He told me that he felt sure I would have a good lawyer. He did everything but wish me well.

The circus was over. Copeland got what he wanted.

As I was unloaded at the jail, I will swear that Harlon Copeland gave my shoulder a reassuring squeeze.

I never knew what he was thinking.

It is hard to believe, but I escaped from this arrest with a 10-year probated sentence, thanks to high-powered attorney friends like Alan Brown and A.L. Hernden.

Less than a year went by before I was busted again on felony drug charges, this time in Action Magazine offices I occupied on the main street of Castle Hills. There was no fanfare or media hoopla with this bust. It came at night by members of the Alamo Area Narcotics Task Force, headed by New Braunfels Sheriff’s Department officer Sumner Bowen.

This arrest, I was convinced, would be the end of my life in the free world. My 10-year probated sentence from the Copeland arrest would be revoked, I was almost positive. Sumner Bowen, the task force leader also knew the stakes I was facing when he offered me the chance to turn informant. I will never forget the soul torture generated by the option Bowen offered.

The narcotics cop was folksy and congenial when he laid out his pitch. The other officers had left the room. I sat handcuffed with Bowen on another chair directly in front of me.

I will never forget what transpired next. Bowen’s every words were seared into my consciousness like the Ten Commandments Moses received from God.

“I have been reading you for years,” Bowen said. “And I have been a fan of yours for years. I don’t know how you got tangled up with people in the dope world, but I do know one thing. None of those people would do anything to help you. They would never get down for you when it counted. I think it’s about time you got down for yourself. And that is exactly what I am prepared to offer, a chance for you to do something for yourself.”

I knew what was coming next. It was like my mind and body were encased in a steel coffin that I couldn’t open. I had been around the criminal element long enough to know what happens to the informants known as “snitches.” Some die violent deaths, some don’t. Nothing is lower than a scumbag who will send another man to prison just to save his own ass.

“You have a choice here tonight,” Sumner Bowen said. “You can go to jail and then on to prison with your record, or we can go down to Maggie’s for breakfast and coffee, and then you will be free to go on about your life.”

Bowen paused long and hard before he said it: “Just give me the name of the person with the lab.”

He wanted me to give up the individual who manufactured the drugs found in my office.

The so-called “lab” was a small mom-and-pop operation when compared with most meth mills, but it was big enough to warrant the trade-out Bowen was offering.

Strange as it may seem, the image and words of Willie Nelson drummer Paul English were flashing before my eyes and playing through my mind.

Paul was a Fort Worth gangster before he straightened out and joined the Nelson band. He was what they called a “police character” in that day and time.

“The cops didn’t name us police characters,” Paul told me. “We named ourselves characters because we had character. We never ratted on our fellow man.”

I wondered about my own sanity when I rejected Bowen’s officer.

“I can’t do it,” I said. “You can take me on to jail.”

I was loaded into an unmarked police car when Sumner Bowen leaned in an open window to say, “I think you are nuts, but I respect you for the decision.”

Filed Under: Columns

The Fighters

Johnny Hernandez and Bobby Thomas
Johnny Hernandez and Bobby Thomas

I have known and written about all manner of characters over the years.

One of the most notorious was Arthur Harry (Bunny) Eckert, the local pimp and pill head known for killing numerous other denizens of San Antonio’s darker side of society.

Bunny disappeared March 2, 1986, from the Eckert home on Overhill Drive in San Antonio. On that same night, someone killed Bunny’s mother, Lela Mae Eckert. Bunny’s body has never been located. Mrs. Eckert was found in the home with her throat cut.

I think I know who killed Bunny and Ms. Eckert, but no proof of either killing has ever been uncovered. I have heard the two killings were done by two men. The motive was bragging rights for Eckert’s death.

Bunny is an underground legend now, reportedly sleeping with concrete boots in the darkest and deepest part of Canyon Lake in Comal County. Another story has Eckert’s killers disposing of his body with acid.

I was writing for the Express and News when Eckert killed George Gabitch and Champ Carter, both gamblers well known to San Antonio police. I also covered a court hearing for Eckert after he shot gunned to death two black soldiers in an East San Antonio nightclub called the Sat-El-Lite. They were Pfc. Steven Parker, 25, and Pfc. Alonzo Williams, 28.

Eckert was ostensibly defending the honor of a redheaded bartender named Judy Jones when he blasted the two hapless Sat-El-Lite Club victims.

I was in the courtroom for that hearing, and I distinctly recall the exchange between Judy Jones and the prosecuting attorney.

“You saw Bunny Eckert kill the two men,” the prosecutor said to Judy Jones.

“Yes I did,” replied Miss Jones.

“And then what did you say, Miss Jones? What did you say to Bunny Eckert?”

I never forgot her answer:

“Wow, Bunny, you really got ‘em!”

Renown criminal lawyer Fred Semaan represented Bunny in these and numerous other killings, gaining acquittals or dismissals through a variety of nebulous legal defense ploys.

I heard that Eckert killed 14 men, but I never got reliable statistics. The San Antonio Police Department Historical Society records have him down for more than 50 arrests and little jail time. In my first book, The Best of Sam Kindrick, I have Bunny on record for 7 arrests for unlawfully carrying a weapon, 25 arrests for crap shooting, 3 arrests for making threats, 2 assault to murder charges, 6 for possession of drugs, and a murder charge in the killing of gambler George Gabitch.

Testimony showed that Gabitch had been chasing Eckert around a house with a pistol when Bunny gained enough lead to grab his trusty shotgun from his parked car. The blunderbuss roared and George fell dead. I’m not sure, but I believe Eckert killed Champ Carter in a card game dispute.

A district judge told me once that Eckert escaped murder convictions simply because most of the people he killed were so low on the social pole that nobody really cared.

Bunny left San Antonio to spend a couple of years in New Orleans, working gaming tables for mafia boss Carlos Marcello. He returned to San Antonio, where he got into the methamphetamine business, an occupation that netted him at least two prison sentences.

Eckert was born February 14, 1933, Valentine’s Day. When I noted in my daily newspaper column that Eckert was born on the anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago, Bunny called me at the Express News city room to lodge his reasonable complaint.

“Hey, man, what the hell is going on? My mother reads your column religiously, and neither of us can be blamed for me being born on the anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. Give me a break.”

Eckert raced quarter horses, and his friends would attest to his loyalty and generosity.

After being sentenced to federal prison a second time on drug charges, Eckert was allowed to check himself into La Tuna near El Paso after completing a series of medical procedures to remove his acne scars.

He told the feds he would be prompt to start serving his sentence, and they granted him the extra time.

I wrote about it at the time, noting that Eckert said what he meant and meant what he said.

I know he liked me. Knowing my penchant at the time for turquoise and silver jewelry, Bunny sent me a silver and turquoise belt buckle with a bear claw inlaid between the stones. I still have it at this writing. He had one of his working girls deliver the buckle.

Ron Houston was a top DJ on KTSA Radio during most of Bunny Eckert’s run as San Antonio’s most notorious bad boy. Houston was an unapologetic friend of Eckert’s, and he remained Bunny’s friend until Eckert’s presumed murder. When Houston and I were working a morning drive show on KEXL FM, Houston always dedicated a Willie Nelson or Charlie Daniels song to Bunny Eckert on Valentine’s Day.

Houston told me that Eckert had cleaned up his act and was devoting most of his time to the racehorses when he was killed.

The lineup of friends and less than ordinary characters who have crossed my journalistic radar seems endless upon reflection. They range from gamblers to preachers, from madams to lawyers, from outlaws to musicians, and they include other strange, frightening, and beautiful people.

I was fairly new to San Antonio when I met Al Juergens, a rugged boxer and self-taught acrobat who waged and won more fights in saloons than he did in the ring. My first encounter with Juergens was at San Antonio’s old Five Points Cafe, a late-night and early morning hangout for sports figures, newspaper people, and late-night drinkers.

I was introduced to Juergens by Dan Cook, sports editor of the San Antonio Evening News at that time, and the three of us were sitting at a table when two cops entered the restaurant and ordered Juergens to stand up.

“It wasn’t me,” Al protested. “I have been right here sitting with these newspaper reporters, minding my own business and waiting for breakfast.”

I noticed that Juergens had skinned knuckles on his left hand, but none of us said anything to the cops. We learned later that someone had knocked a truck driver cold during an altercation in the parking lot. The police were all too familiar with Juergens.

The ring wars between Al Juergens and a double-tough Mexican fighter by the name of Santiago Gutierrez distinguished the colorful Juergens among other fighters. His major weapon was an explosive left hook that left most of his opponents down and senseless on the ring canvas. Juergens had curly black hair, thick eyebrows crisscrossed by scar tissue, and a nose that had been rearranged multiple times. Juergens had ropy arm and leg muscles and a rub board belly. The fighter displayed no discernible fear. He was a classic brawler who would take two punches to land one of his own, and I don’t think Juergens was ever knocked out in the ring.

No matter how the fight ended, whether it be knockout or referee decision, Al Juergens performed his signature back flip in the center of the ring, followed by a simulated “bird” for his many detractors. Juergens couldn’t flip the finger with boxing gloves on both hands, but he got the message across by jamming one fist high into the air with vigorous pumping motions that were painfully unmistakable. Fuck you, and you, and you, and you…while the boos were all but deafening.

In San Antonio, most of the fighters were of the Mexican-American persuasion, and the vast majority of fight fans who attended the boxing matches in San Antonio’s old Municipal Auditorium were Hispanics. They didn’t like Al Juergens, and the acrimony was mutual. Al didn’t like his brown-skinned opponents.

A natural welterweight, Al was fighting out of his weight class in his battles with the larger Gutierrez, a true middleweight. There were no more Texas welterweight class fighters left that Juergens hadn’t already whipped.

Juergens and the larger Gutirrez had several fights, the number I cannot recall. Juergens may have won one of them. I know they fought to a draw at least once. But Gutierrez won more of the battles on points. Neither Al Juergens nor Santiago Gutierrez ever scored a knockout over the other. They literally fought to a bloody standstill every time.

Just days before the first time I ever saw Juergens in the ring, I can distinctly remember the newspaper headline: Fighter jailed for theft of vitamin pills.

Al had dropped a bottle of vitamin pills into his coat pocket while visiting the Walgreens on Houston Street. A store clerk summoned a beat policeman who promptly arrested the fighter.

Juergens posted bond after a petty theft charge which was eventually dismissed when Al successfully argued that he had innocently dropped the pill bottle into his pocket. Al said he had other merchandise in his arms at the time, and simply forgot the pills in his pocket when he was checking out at the drug store cash register.

The judge believed him and the theft charges were dropped, but not before the newspaper headlines broke the day before Juergens was to fight at the auditorium.

This was the first time I ever saw Al fight. I don’t recall the name of his Mexican-American opponent, but I remember Juergens winning by a knockout. I attended the fight with sports editor Dan Cook, and what I remember with clarity was the crowd chanting something in unison I couldn’t understand.

“What are they saying?” I yelled at Cook.

The chant was a roar.

“They are saying vitamin, vitamin, vitamin,” Cook said.

Those San Antonio fight crowds loved to hate Al Juergens, and he wasn’t about to disappoint them. After what I always referred to as the vitamin fight, Juergens performed his customary back flip in the center of the ring and then shot his boxing glove “bird” to the derisive crowd.

I was both amazed and impressed, and I watched every San Antonio fight Al Juergens had from that day forward. That nobody ever killed him remains a mystery to this day.

For reasons known only unto him, Al Juergns moved from San Antonio to Belleville, Illinois, and it was years later before I was to hear from him again. I was working an air shift on KEXL FM radio when — out of the blue — Juergens called from Illinois on the telephone. He was excited.

“Man, am I glad that I found you,” he said. “I am coming back to San Antonio with my new invention that is going to make us both millionaires. I will have it with me the next time I see you. Believe it or not, but I have invented a device that will enable a gasoline engine car to run on water. I know it sounds crazy but it works. I thought of you when I came up with the invention. You can help me promote it. A water powered car. We are going to get rich.”

That was the last time I heard a word from Juergens. And I never saw him again.

I always wondered if perhaps Santiago Gutierrez might have hit Al in the head one time too many. I have hoped not. Those back flips and boxing glove “birds” are among my most cherished memories. Vitamin, vitamin, vitamin…There was only one Al Juergens.

Unlike Al Juergens, Bobby (Kid Death) Thomas was no skilled ring warrior, but he was a seemingly indestructible character whose relatively brief and spotty boxing ring career followed survival episodes which included second and third degree burns over 65 percent of his body in a drag racing fuel explosion; broken neck, and both arms, and one leg in a fall from a second story roof which bordered a 60-foot canyon; and a point-blank .357 magnum gunshot to the gut that resulted in surgeons removing part of his pancreas, spleen, and all of one lung.

I was there for most of it. Bobby was my friend. He always called me “Sambo.”

Bobby was a drag car builder and racer in his younger days, but he can best be defined as an unrepentant scam artist with a vivid, imagination.

When I first encountered Bobby Thomas he was selling what he purported to be baby polar bear skins. The juvenile “polar bear” hides, priced at $200 apiece, were the size of sheep skins because that is exactly what they were. Bobby was hawking them in San Antonio nightclub parking lots. I don’t know where he got the sheep skins.

Thomas discovered that he could run an ordinary sheep skin through the neighborhood laundromat’s deep cleansing and high-temperature drying processes with amazing results. The lanolin-free sheep hides came out as snow white and fluffy as any baby bear that ever came frolicking out of the land of the midnight sun.

I don’t know how many of the bogus bear hides Bobby managed to sell. He wouldn’t say when I asked him about it.

The patchwork of burn scars that were visible on Thomas’s arms and neck did little to detract from his movie star looks. He looked good even when he lay half dead on a hospital gurney.

Bobby’s older brother Roy Thomas recalled the nitromethane explosion that left the younger Thomas minus one ear and with second and third degree burns over 65 percent of his body. Roy and Bobby were operating a drag race shop at the time — Thomas Brothers Perfection Enterprises on San Antonio’s Basse Road — but the racing fuel mishap happened in their mother’s front yard. The can with highly sensitive nitromethane got bumped and up it blew.

“Bobby saw it coming,” Roy told me. “He stepped in to shield two of our little nieces at the time. They were 4 and 5 years old. The kids were unhurt but Bobby was engulfed in flames. One of his ears was burned completely off.”

The fire was before I met Bobby Thomas, but I knew him well when he fell from a huge two-story roof and to the bottom of a 60-foot canyon in the Bulverde area where we both lived at the time.

Bobby was either leasing the house or using it with permission of the owner, I was never sure which. I do know that he was repairing wind damage on the roof when it started raining, causing him to slip on the wet aluminum roof and plunge from the house top to the canyon floor far below.

After a relatively short hospital stay, Thomas was released with a metal hoop contraption bolted to his vertebrae and completely encircling his head. He looked like a Star Wars nightmare.

I saw the doctor’s official report. Bobby Thomas suffered a fractured neck, fractured right wrist, fractured left elbow, fractured right knee, and two broken ribs.

Bobby’s entrance into the world of professional boxing came through trainer and boxing manager Tony Ayala. The father of an entire stable of fighters that included world featherweight contender Mike Ayala, Sammy Ayala, and Tony Ayala (Little Tony) Jr., Big Tony, as he was known, took a fancy to Bobby Thomas. The elder Ayala took Thomas into his stable of fighters, carefully selecting opponents he knew Bobby could beat.

“It wasn’t that Bobby had great potential as a fighter,” Tony Jr., told me. “The old man liked him because he was tough, more than a little bit crazy, and an Anglo who could expand on the Ayala Mexican family fan base.”

Big Tony could pick the under-card opponents for an Ayala fight until Mike Ayala landed a world title fight with featherweight world champion Danny (Little Red) Lopez, one of the greatest boxers to hold the world title in that weight division.

Bobby wanted to fight on the undercard against Dennis Haggerty, a fighter from the Lopez camp. Big Tony was against it. He knew nothing about Haggerty but suspected he might be formidable as he was part of the Danny Lopez package. Bobby all but begged Ayala to put him on the card, a decision Big Tony finally made with much trepidation.

I was there for the title fight. It was April 10, 1979, and the old HemisFair Arena was packed to the scuppers for what Ring Magazine later dubbed one of the greatest fights of all time.

Mike Ayala put up a fight for the ages, falling in the 15th round to a thunderous Lopez knockout right. When Mike finally hit the canvas most of the under card had been forgotten, including Dennis Haggerty’s defeat of Bobby Thomas, a knockout after 45 seconds of the first round which left Bobby with a broken jaw.

I asked Bobby about the ignominious knockout and his answer was vintage Thomas: “It was no knockout, Sambo. I have never been knocked out. Knocked stupid but never out.”

Bobby was to appear on a few more Ayala fight under cards, but the fistic fiasco which was to garner the most attention unfolded in a circus tent on the fairgrounds at Fredericksburg, Texas where actor Guich Koock hosted what he called The Luckenbach World’s Fair at Fredericksburg. This was a follow up to the original Luckenbach World’s Fair which was hatched by Koock and Hondo Crouch, who were originally co-owners of Luckenbach.

Entertainment for the Fredericksburg outing included a motorcycle daredevil who called himself Even Steven, and what was to become known as The Great World’s Fight, a dubious appellation I hung on a contest of brainless brawn between Bobby Thomas and martial arts participant and instructor Johnny Hernandez.

There was bad blood between Thomas and Hernandez from the outset, probably the result of some long-forgotten barroom imbroglio. It was during the buildup for The Great World’s Fight that Bobby crowned himself “Kid Death,” a misnomer if there ever was one. “Sambo,” Thomas told me before the opening bell, “you are getting ready to see Kid Death kill a big Mex.”

Nobody killed anybody, and the nearest we got to the great beyond under that circus tent was from spectators who all but laughed themselves to death before the Great World’s Fight came to a merciful end.

It was billed as a battle to the end, when one of the fighters was unable to continue. Referee was Jimmy Parks, an attorney and onetime amateur boxer whose sole duty was declaring a winner.

Hernandez, who outweighed Thomas by a good 50 pounds, showed up with his fists heavily taped and with objects of unknown identity under the tape. Thomas was wearing weird-looking work gloves that bulged with what we were to later learn was a form of powdered lead.

Thomas and Hernandez flailed away, neither landing a decent punch. Bobby couldn’t keep up his guard, probably because his lead-weighted gloves were too heavy for him to hold up. The heavier Hernandez finally prevailed when the self-anointed Kid Death could no longer muster enough wind to stand upright on his feet.

Referee Parks called it for Hernandez.

Bobby’s response to this one was predictable.

“Sambo, this one will be finally decided when I catch him on the street.”

The caper that almost cost Bobby Thomas his life came outside of a San Antonio discotheque known as Sugar Daddy’s.

Trouble had been brewing for some time between Thomas and Ernie Hoessley, owner of Sugar Daddy’s and other nightclub establishments. I don’t recall Bobby’s take on the beef, but my friend Joe Cardenas said Thomas had threatened Hoessley in some sort of protection racket attempt.

Bobby took a .357 Magnum slug to his gut while approaching the front door of the nightclub on a late morning. The word quickly spread that Ernie Hoessley had shot Bobby Thomas, but that is not what happened. Bobby was shot by a Hoessley lieutenant and Sugar Daddy’s door man we all knew only as Little Rudy. The last name slipped my mind, but I recall Little Rudy as a congenial sort who most of the disco customers liked.

I was in my office on Broadway the morning Thomas was shot. It was only about a half mile to the Baptist Hospital emergency room where he was rushed. I don’t recall who called me, but I can distinctly recall what transpired that morning.

When I walked into the hospital emergency room, nobody tried to stop me. Bobby was on a gurney, bathed in his own blood and as white as one of his bleached “polar bear” skins.

Somehow, he recognized me.

“Sambo, come closer.”

His lips were blue. His eyes were sunken. His voice was a raspy whisper, but I will never forget the exact words that escaped his mouth.

“Sambo, they dry-gulched me.”

Those were his exact words. I have never forgotten those words or the last ones he uttered before I left that emergency room.

“Sambo, tell Ernie that vengeance is mine.”

Thankfully for all concerned, Thomas never followed up on the threat. The years slipped by and the next time I saw Bobby was many years later outside of The Cove nightclub on Cypress Street.

“Sambo,” Bobby said. “My kidneys are playing out and I know I won’t be around much longer. I was always glad to have you for a friend.”

Bobby’s kidneys quit on March 28, 2015. He died in his mother’s apartment at the age of 68.

Filed Under: Columns Tagged With: Al Juergens, Bobby Thomas, boxing, Bunny Exkert, George Gabitch, Johnny Hernandez

Hondo Crouch

Hondo Crouch
Hondo Crouch

Ask me if I knew Hondo Crouch, and you might get a half-straight answer or a half-crooked one.

I don’t believe there was ever a man, woman, or child who knew Hondo a hundred percent or from gizzard to craw.

He was the clown prince of Luckenbach, the inimitable Hill Country Imagineer, and a genuine enigma if there ever was one.

Although many never knew it, Hondo Crouch was one of the greatest showmen this world has ever known. Hondo was also an accomplished writer.

I cried the morning Hondo died of a heart attack. That was September 27, 1976. Tex Schofield called with the bad news. Hondo was only 59. He was my friend and beer drinking buddy who fired my imagination every time I got around him.

Hondo never appeared in a photograph looking bad. There was no such thing as a bad photo of John Russell (Hondo) Crouch. His silvery white hair and beard did not denote advanced age with Crouch, nor did his other “old man” trappings. Hondo wore jeans stuffed into the high tops of cowboy boots, and sweat-stained moderate brim western hats that looked like they had been laying out in a sheep pen.

Hondo Crouch was an all-American swimmer at the University of Texas who never wanted to grow up. And he never did. His skin glowed with apparent health and his blue eyes twinkled with mischief. Hondo was the Hill Country raconteur who whittled and carved on wood, played pranks on friends and strangers alike, and turned a broken-down Central Texas general store and beer joint with separate dance hall into the town of Luckenbach, a magical place which inspired the Willie Nelson/Waylon Jennings hit song Luckenbach Texas.

The song will forever remain a part of the Hondo Crouch and Luckenbach legend, right along with Crouch soliloquies like Luckenbach Moon and Luckenbach Daylight. By the light of a campfire and moonlight, Hondo would regale his audience with a goose bump raising Luckenbach Moon dissertation that would stay with them for the rest of their natural lives. I could never forget a “moon that makes haunted houses uglier and ugly girls prettier.” Nor “a moon that makes little animals see farther and feel closer together.”

I met Hondo Crouch in 1967 at the first World Championship Chili Cookoff in the West Texas ghost town of Terlingua. It was a hokeyed-up contest between New York author H. Allen Smith and Texas journalist Wick Fowler to see which contestant cooked the best chili.

The chili, of course, had nothing to do with this great display of insanity and self-grandiosity by some of the world’s most shameless narcissists. We were there along with a defrocked Catholic priest, a Hollywood starlet who ran half-naked through the old silver mining town’s main drag, two wetback whores (known today as illegal immigrant ladies of ill-repute) from the Mexican border town of Ojinaga, Mexico, a bull rider, chili chefs with handles like Allegani Janie Schoefield and Yeller Dog Marsh, and Luckenbach founder, mayor, and grand pooh-bah Hondo Crouch.

I will never forget that windy raw morning in Terlingua. A cold norther with plenty of snap was whistling through the Chisos Mountains of the Texas Big Bend when I first laid eyes on Hondo Crouch. People were gathered around fires for warmth and everyone I saw was wearing coats or jackets. Everyone but Hondo.

Crouch was wearing cowboy boots, his trademark short-brimmed felt with grease creases and goat barn stains, and a set of old-timey long johns with the classic trap door seat flap for emergency dumps.

Crouch may have been chewing tobacco that morning. I am sure that he was drinking a Schlitz beer from a can.

I’m not sure which of us started the introduction. I do know that we seemed to click. Hondo had some bacon fried and he was frying an egg when I walked up.

He asked me if I would care for an egg or a cold beer. I settled for the beer.

The legend of Hondo Crouch and Luckenbach has been told and retold through the years. John Russell Crouch was “the swimming cowboy” from Hondo, Texas. At the University of Texas where he earned all-American honors as a swimmer, Crouch met his bride-to-be, Helen Ruth (Shatzie) Stieler, daughter of Adolph Stieler, once labeled the goat king of the world by Life Magazine and the American Sheep and Goat Raisers Magazine.

In 1942, Stieler owned 38,000 goats, 20,000 sheep, and 1,000 cattle grazing on 90,000 acres in Kendall, Kimble, Kerr, Gillespie, Blanco, and San Saba counties.

The headquarters has always been Stieler Hill on the Stieler ranch between Comfort and Fredericksburg where Stieler’s daughter and other members of her family live today.

So the swimming cowboy from Hondo, Texas adopted to the nickname Hondo with little trouble. He never did fit well in the big money ranching world he married into.

For a time, Hondo worked in his father-in-law’s Comfort Wool and Mohair Company, but his heart was never in it. While Adolph Stieler made his fortune with hard work and natural skills of a stockman, Hondo never seemed to get serious about anything more than what appeared to be his own brand of tomfoolery.

In her book Hondo My Father, daughter Becky Crouch Patterson describes her father as “a mystery, a frustrating puzzle.”

I recall one lazy summer afternoon when I was hanging out and drinking beer with Hondo at Luckenbach. With no warning, Hondo grabbed my arm and said, “Come on. I want to show you some fun.”

He invited me into his battered old pickup truck and away we went down Ranch Road 1376. Hondo stepped on the gas and we were soon hitting 40, 50, 60, and then 70 on the rolling ranch road hills. It was almost scary as the rattletrap pickup topped what must be the highest hill on that stretch of road.

Hondo suddenly killed the engine.

We were coasting fast. Down the big hill and up a smaller one before the truck started to lose momentum.

As the truck slowed, Hondo put one of his booted feet on the dash. He was totally relaxed and grinning like a possum as the vehicle finally came to a creeping stop.

“We just covered a whole mile and several yards running in Mexican overdrive,” Hondo said. “It saves gas and it sure is a lot of fun.”

Hondo wrote over 600 columns for the Comfort News under the made up title Cedar Creek Clippings and the pseudonym Peter Cedarstacker. With Hondo’s permission, I reproduced a number of the columns in Action Magaine. They were parodies or satires of the life and times of country folk from that area, including a family of fictitious cedar choppers and their grubby little boy Jay Elbie.

“And when it was cold and nasty,” Peter Cedarstacker wrote, “little Jay Elbie’s nose kept sticking together.” Or when “Uncle Undo died in a red ant nest” it was really bad.

A month before Hondo died, Bob Hope appeared at a benefit at the Nimitz Hotel in Fredericksburg. In the middle of Hope’s talk, Hondo walked onto the stage and handed Hope a note which brought tears of mirth to the world renown comedian’s eyes.

The note read: “Your fly is open.”

Representing what he facetiously referred to as the Luckenbach Chamber of Commerce, Hondo then presented Hope with an ax handle in lieu of a golf club with this forgettable punchline: “Sorry it doesn’t have a head on it. You see, it’s hard to get a head in Luckenbach.”

Humorist and radio personality John Henry Faulk saw in Hondo what I always saw–a keen mind working behind a facade of country boy bullshit.

“He would act as if he was just an old tobacco chewing country boy who didn’t know nothing,” Faulk said, “but he was actually very intelligent and well informed. He took the character he played seriously–too seriously I always felt, because he never stepped out of character. It became real to him.”

Always the entertainer, Hondo played guitar and sang Tex-Mex ballads in South Texas Spanish that endeared him to crowds and professional musicians. Hondo was very close to Jerry Jeff Walker, a frequent visitor to Luckenbach who recorded his live “Viva Terlingua” album with the Lost Gonzo Band in the Luckenbach dance hall. And for reasons I never knew, Hondo turned down an invitation to appear with Walker at a Carnegie Hall performance. Hondo was booked to appear on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson when he died.

Jerry Jeff Walker was a familiar figure around Luckenbach. I know that Hondo was a father figure for Jerry Jeff. Walker loved Crouch and Hondo showed signs that he felt the same.

We used to sit at picnic tables behind the Luckenbach store, drinking and listening as Jerry Jeff crafted songs. I was there when Walker wrote his song Night Riders Lament. We drank and argued and cussed each other that evening and night about nothing until neither of us could stand on two feet. I think one of us had a bottle of mescal. Walker and I were bowed up at each other and too drunk to even get up from the picnic table bench when Hondo came walking out of the store.

“Well, well,” Hondo said. “I can see that this is really gonna be a bloody one. Now both of you need to crawl over to your trucks and sleep it off. We will have no fist fights at Luckenbach.”

I awakened in my truck the next morning, hungover and dog sick. There was dried vomit in my beard and a pounding in my skull like a blacksmith’s hammer meeting cold rebar on an anvil. Dried vomit really stinks. Only a real alcoholic would take another drink of alcohol after a night like that, yet here we were that afternoon. Me and Jerry Jeff. Slugging down one beer after another to calm the shakes, and without any memory of what the hell we were arguing about the night before. As Hondo Crouch would put it, probably just a big old nuthin.

Nobody really knew what made Hondo tick, but he had theatrics in his blood. The world was Hondo’s stage, but he did make more formal appearances. He appeared on the TV series To Tell The Truth as the humorist owner of a Texas Town the size of a flyspeck, and he had a film performance in Pony Express which was in the can when he died.

Hondo was the leader of a theater troupe known as The Crazy Comfort Bunch. They played in villages like Comfort, Waring, and Grapetown, and Hondo was the star of a homemade movie that Rex Foster produced. Title of the film was Blank Dank. It featured Hondo playing all seven roles.

“I never got on a stage,” Hondo was fond of saying. “Stages just seemed to get under me.”

Luckenbach was always a waiting stage for Hondo, although his self-deprecating manner suggested otherwise. Luckenbach’s population was listed as 3. The town had one parking meter that didn’t work. A mail box on a pole was designated for “air mail.” Every promotion Hondo hatched up was a spoof of somebody or something, although Crouch’s motto was “Everybody is somebody in Luckenbach.”

The first Great World’s Fair at Luckenbach drew a crowd. So did the chili cookoff for women only, a day of celebration to welcome the return of the dirt daubers, and the non-buy centennial which featured a bad taste award.

At the Great World’s Fair at Luckenbach, Hondo was introduced as mayor. He wore a black wig, a top hat, and a buffalo hide coat for the occasion. Events at the fair included armadillo races, tobacco spitting, chicken flying, and cow chip throwing. Special guests who were invited included Eizabeth Taylor and the Prince of Wales. Of their absence, Hondo said “I guess they decided to stay home.”

Hondo attracted people like a magnet picks up horse shoe nails. Hardly ever did I see Hondo when he didn’t have a beer in his hand, yet I never saw a drunken Crouch. If a cowboy hobo could look dapper, that was Hondo. He had every situation under total control, and I never saw Hondo upset, rattled, or out-of-step until that black day at Luckenbach when the British Broadcasting Corporation people rolled into the tiny town. The great Luckenbach catastrophe was about to happen, the one harrowing day that saw Hondo Crouch completely lose his composure and ability to even express himself.

The BBC, I was soon to learn, wanted to film a mini-documentary on Luckenbach. The scenario had already been set with Hondo having a major role in the planning. I don’t know how he hooked up with the BBC, but he obviously did. In London with the main office we were soon to learn.

“We are going on British TV,” Hondo said in a telephone call to my office in San Antonio. “I want you here for the filming. We start at first light tomorrow.”

Hondo was geared up for this one. The excitement in his voice was electric. He had already selected the players. I must have been about the last one contacted. I had never seen Hondo excited about anything before, but this British television thing had him all but vibrating in his boots.

Our British film debut would include Hondo, Jerry Jeff, syndicated cowboy cartoonist Ace Reid of Kerrville, magazine publisher and Hondo crony Sam Kindrick, and Luckenbach fixture and gadfly Rusty Cox, probably the biggest Jerry Jeff Walker groupie who ever lived.

The British film crew arrived in Luckenbach at the crack of dawn. They included a redheaded, freckled, and slightly dumpy female reporter and two male sound camera techies. The techies called the woman reporter “Birdy.”

It soon became obvious to most of the parties on hand that Birdy was in charge. Most of the parties included everyone but cowboy cartoonist Ace Reid, who was driven from Kerrville to Luckenbach by someone in a really sorry looking station wagon. The first indication that we were in for a horribly miserable day came when Ace tried to exit the station wagon. He was typically skunk drunk, even at that early hour, and he missed while attempting his first step from the vehicle. Ace had a half-empty pint bottle of whiskey in his hand when he went sprawling head-first across the Luckenbach store parking lot, a stream of barn yard obscenities pouring from his mouth. I recall some broken whiskey bottle glass, a couple of empty beer bottles, a wad of rusty baling wire, an old copy of the Goat Gap Gazette, and other trash spilling out of the wagon with Ace.

This was the British Broadcasting Corporation’s welcome to Luckenbach, Texas.

Then came the real fun as Birdy outlined our main screen scene for the BBC. She had prepared a largely unrehearsed scenario that had Walker picking and singing with the rest of us telling quaint Texas tales as we laughed and joshed with Hondo and one another around the Luckenbach Store bar area.

Birdy wanted a couple of trial runs prior to the actual filming.

I sensed trouble as our cast of characters gathered around Walker. At this point, Jerry Jeff started acting like Jerry Jeff.

“We can’t rehearse this stuff,” Walker told Birdy. “We are not actors.”

Birdy needed a guitar player who could sing Texas ballads.

She beseeched Hondo for help.

Her British accent sounded like a foreign tongue in these prickly circumstances.

“Come on, Jerry Jeff.” Hondo was all but begging. “Let’s hear something.”

“Come on Jerry Jeff,” pleaded Rusty Cox. Rusty could see his one chance for TV stardom evaporating before his eyes. He was clearly distraught.

“Fuck this British TV business,” Walker said. “Who wants to be on British TV?”

Everything was going downhill at this point. Nobody knew what to do or say. We had moved out of the store when Birdy chirped bravely in her strange little British accent.

“What is this?”

She had plucked a strand of Spanish moss from the lower limb of a Luckenbach live oak tree.

Poor little Birdy. She was desperately trying to keep some form of dialogue alive.

“That there’s Spanish moss, lady,” drawled Ace Reid.”

“Oh, my,” said Birdy. “What is it for?”

“Well, ma’am,” Ace said, “the Comanche Indian squaws used to poke it up their pussies when they was menstruating.”

Birdy paled and looked like she might faint away.

Hondo made a sound like a mortally wounded little animal. Then he said, “Aww Ace, aww no.” Hondo was bent over like he might have drank poison.

Birdy was headed for their rented car. The Brit camera crew was packing their equipment. No British TV for us.

Jerry Jeff said, “Fuck it,” and headed home to Austin.

Hondo was not the “Clown Prince of Luckenbach” on this black day. He looked to me like he was going to cry and I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.

I felt like crying myself just watching him.

Filed Under: Columns Tagged With: Hondo Crouch, Jerry Jeff Walker

Me, Willie, Texas Girl, and the Devil

Texas Girl Willie
Willie on the cover of Texas Girl

This is about Willie Nelson, Texas Girl Magazine, and my face-to-face meeting with the Devil in Jackson, Michigan. It will all be part of the book I am writing which will be titled The Outlaw Journalist.

I took my two sons, Grady and Steven, to Willie Nelson’s first July 4 Picnic at Dripping Springs. That was in 1973.

I was present during planning stages for the epic cow pasture blowout, so I had knowledge in advance of the surprise rock superstar who was to appear. The scheduled lineup included Willie, Waylon Jennings, Tom T. Hall, Kris Kristofferson, Loretta Lynn, Tex Ritter, Rita Coolidge, Charlie Rich, and Hank Snow. Nobody in the country would have suspected that Nelson would have Leon Russell as a surprise guest on that first July 4 picnic in 1973.

I knew that Nelson and Russell had been friends for years, and I knew in advance that Willie was planning to spring rock star Leon on the country music crowd at Dripping Springs.

In 1973, Leon Russell was a rock-and-roll god, a much bigger draw than Nelson at the time, and my 16-year-old son Grady’s absolute musical higher power. Grady played nothing but Russell on his record player, and his room in our San Antonio home was a Leon Russell shrine, with Russell photographs and posters on all four walls and even the ceiling.

Without breathing a word about Russell to my kids, I invited both of my sons to ride with me in our old Chevrolet truck to the concert. Steven, my younger boy, was all for any sort of adventure, but Grady was unimpressed. “Shit-kicker country,” I recall Grady’s response. “I don’t want to go.”

Grady was sewing brightly colored patches on his pants during those days. He wore his brown hair shoulder length. He wore elephant hide cowboy boots I bought him. His left ear was pierced, and he was wearing a small ear stud.

It didn’t take too much for me to convince my 16-year-old son that even a country music outdoor concert with thousands projected to attend would be worth checking out.

His 15-year-old brother was gung-ho from the outset. We pulled into the Dripping Springs Haribut Ranch on the evening of July 3, 1973, to find people gathered around two or three campfires. Darkness was falling fast, but we could easily make out features of those around the fires.

I could hear Nelson’s distinct voice as we crawled out of the truck. He was sitting on a log near one of the campfires, and the man sitting across from him had his back to us. Willie was playing his battered Martin guitar Trigger. The two of them were singing the old Willie tune “Family Bible.”

When I spotted the cascade of waist-length golden blond hair, I knew instantly who was singing with Nelson. Leon Russell had arrived. Good spirits were in the atmosphere on that warm July night. We could all feel it.

When they finished the song, I distinctly remember leading Grady up to the campfire. His brother Steven had wandered away. I knew Leon from a previous meeting, but Grady had never before laid eyes on his rock idol from Oklahoma.

Nelson seemed to grasp the moment. When I introduced my son, Willie shook Grady’s hand and then turned toward Russell. “I want you to meet my friend Leon Russell,” Willie told my kid. Then to Leon, he said, “This is Sam’s son Grady.”

Leon promptly reached out and grabbed Grady’s hand. “Mighty pleased to meet you, Grady,” Russell said in his inimitable Oklahoma drawl. “I hope you enjoy the music and have a good time tomorrow.” I don’t recall Grady’s mumbled response to his idol. I will never forget the look of incomprehensible shock and joy on my kid’s face. His speech was frozen. He looked at me and smiled for a split second. He knew his old man had pulled off this impossible scenario for him. Leon Russell seemed to sense it too, something spiritual and really special.

I have no words to explain the love I felt at that moment for my son. And for the long-haired Oklahoma rock star who reached out to my kid. I became a Leon Russell fan for life.

That first Willie concert was the beginning of an era, the birth of redneck rock, a cultural awakening that was felt all over the South and beyond. The hippies and the rednecks would lay down their arms and light up the joints of peace. I looked out over that great roiling sea of youthful humanity on the morning of July 4, 1973, and what did I see? I saw a cloud of marijuana smoke. I saw a huge sign that read “E Pluribus Willie,” and I saw more naked titties than one could imagine existing in one Texas cow pasture at one time.

Another significant chapter in my life was beginning to unfurl. That next chapter would prove to be rowdy and exciting, very dangerous, exhilarating at times, heart-breaking, educational, and scary as hell. That first Willie July 4 concert drew a crowd estimated at 40,000. I had my boys at the first four — Dripping Springs, College Station, Liberty Hill, and Gonzales. The crowds swelled exponentially. The Gonzales turnout was estimated at 80,000, and I lost count as Nelson moved the show to other states before returning to the Austin area.

I met Willie’s two older daughters, Lana and Susie, at Dripping Springs when they were teenagers. His son Billy I met later. These kids were all by Nelson’s first wife Martha, a lady I never met. The only Nelson wife I was to know was Connie, the blond beauty and mother of two of Willie’s girls, and who remains my friend today.

There was driving rain at the Gonzales picnic, and it was here that I met David Alan Coe, self-described “Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy and Death Row Killer.” I was intrigued by the big tattooed entertainer, and we were to become friends as we remain today.

David Alan Coe is one of the most talented people I have ever known. David Alan and I exchanged books — “The Best of Sam Kindrick” for Coe’s “Ex-Convict.”

The Coe book features a young Coe mug shot from an Ohio State penitentiary, and detailed survival instructions for anyone preparing to enter a penitentiary. It tells you when to talk, when not to talk, and how to survive with the worst of the worst.

“The key to prison survival,” Coe told me, “is learning how to mind your business.”

The Bandidos Motorcycle Club outlaws were starting to hang around Coe shows at that time, and the one on Coe’s tour bus when I climbed on that day in Gonzales was a surly San Antonio biker called Deadweight.

I had never been a Deadweight fan, and he wasn’t crazy about me either. Someone had shot him in the belly, and surgery had left him barely holding his guts in place on that muggy day in Gonzales. He smelled about as bad as he looked, and the two of us were exchanging minor unpleasantries when Coe pitched me a glass container of cocaine in a sack which also held a mirror and a soda straw. “I’m going to change for the show,” Coe said as he headed for the bus sleeping quarters. “I hope you boys can cool it. Deadweight is so fucked up with bullet holes he can barely walk.”

Deadweight saw Coe hand me the bag. He was duly impressed. “You and David Alan must be really tight,” the biker said. “I can hardly believe he would turn his back on you with you holding his personal stash.”

After that, Deadweight and I were civil to each other.

In those early years after my firing at the daily newspaper, and while I was still holding my air job at KEXL FM, I hatched the crazy idea of starting my own improbable publication, a small tabloid that I would name Action Magazine. I wanted to focus on the Texas outlaw music explosion out of Austin, from Austin’s Soap Creek Saloon to the Armadillo World Headquarters where Willie Nelson was sharing the stage with everyone from Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jew Boys to Commander Kody and the Lost Planet Airmen. Yet I didn’t want to be limited to only music. I wanted my publication to literally cover the action, whether it be talented musicians or colorful preachers like Bourbon Street Chaplain Bob Harrington, bare-knuckle street fighters like Bobby (Kid Death) Thomas, or shotgun-packing pimps and infamous killers like Arthur Harry (Bunny) Eckert.

Action Magazine ran no record reviews. I never wasted my time in the pretentious business of passing judgment on someone’s music. I wrote more about the musician than the music. I wanted an honest balls-to-the-wall publication that would kiss no corporate asses or take any prisoners. And that’s exactly what I told Lone Star Brewing Company president Harry Jersig when I made my pitch for a back-cover advertiser.

I noticed a thin smile on Jersig’s lips while I was talking. I didn’t have a dime to my name and Jersig knew it when I outlined what I had in mind. He was already in tune with Willie Nelson’s growing impact on the burgeoning Texas music scene. I knew that Jersig had little use for the Express and News, and I knew that his music advertising promotions man Jerry Retzloff liked me. Retzloff was also connecting with an exciting new breed of new age musicians like Jerry Jeff Walker, Marcia Ball, Ray Benson, Janis Joplin, and Asleep at the Wheel, Willis Allen Ramsey, Rusty Wier, Ray Wylie Hubbard, B. W. Stevenson, and numerous others. “I will write about these people and more,” I told Harry Jersig. “I want to sell you the back cover of what is now a non-existent magazine.”Jersig wrote me a check for a thousand dollars on the spot, and the rest is history.

That first little 12-page issue of Action Magazine was printed March 25, 1975. It featured Willie Nelson on the front cover and Lone Star Beer on the back cover. And Lone Star was to stick with me for years to come.

Talk about pathetic defiance. I actually pitched a bundle of 50 copies of that first issue of Action Magazine through the front lobby door of the 8-story Express and News building on Avenue E. I think I also yelled “Fuck you Charlie” at the top of my lungs.

I felt like Daniel standing naked in front of the lion’s den and shooting the finger with both hands. I know I was as crazed and out of control as a Hunter S. Thompson dope dream.

No, by God, I would take no newspaper job in Houston. I would stay in San Antonio and haunt Charlie Kilpatrick until the day one of us died. He died June 27, 2013. And Daniel finally relaxed the double “birds.”

Charlie’s daughter Kye is a classy lady who was nice to me one time. In the recovery program which eventually saved my life, I learned that resentments are my number-one offender. I have still got my share of resentments, but I finally let Charlie go before that resentment killed me, and I wish his daughter and the Kilpatrick family nothing but the best.

When I told Willie Nelson of my plans for Action Magazine, he encouraged me. “Give the musicians who have never been written about a shot,” he said. “There are some good ones out there who have never had any recognition in print. Give them all some ink when you can.”

Those early issues of Action Magazine featured only one colored ink, red on the magazine logo. The four-color process necessary for full color required publishing film separations which were more than I could afford in those early years.

“Print them all in black-and-white,” Willie said. “The black-and-white papers will appeal to the poor people.”

The first run of 8,000 copies of the Action Magazine tabloid was printed on a web press at San Antonio Press, which was then located on Fredericksburg Road and owned by the Medellin family. Jose Medellin headed the business with assistance from his two younger brothers. Luis and Raul.

Most web presses around Texas in those days required service by Chicago and other east coast technicians, but not San Antonio Press. Joe Medellin worked on his own equipment, and I can recall him in those early years, crawling wrench-in-hand from under one of the big iron monsters. I can remember Joe smeared with printers’ ink from head to foot. He even had it in his eyebrows. He had it in his blood as well.

I know the excitement. The big newspaper web presses used today rumble and roar like a freight train. When they hit full speed and printing velocity, literally shaking the building, I never fail to feel a goose bump playing along my spine.

Action Magazine would never have been if not for Jose Medellin. Joe has a heart and a soul and I will love him forever. He carried me with no charge for printing over a few tight spot early months and the better part of one year, and I know he never did get paid in full for all he did.

In later years, Joe’s brother Luis became the company head. He, too, was kind to Action Magazine. Other printers made lower bids for my business over the years, but I remained with the Medellins until they sold San Antonio Press.

With help from my son Grady, I delivered those first free-distribution magazines to nightclubs, restaurants, ice houses, and other people spots.

Grady never finished high school, insisting upon working for me and passing his GED test in the meanwhile. We were not well-received by all. Cappy Lawton ordered Grady out of one of his restaurants when the boy tried to deliver the magazines, and I took rejections involving my son personally.

I recall refusing later to do radio commercials for the Lawton eateries when I was on the air at KEXL. I will never forget the response I got from musicians who were to grace the pages of my little rag over the next 44 years. I became very close friends with Johnny Bush and Augie Meyers. They have remained close through the years. Others I formed friendships with include Gary Stewart, Doug Sahm, Darrell McCall, David Alan Coe, and many hundreds more.

I feel like I helped raise Dub Robinson, Randy Toman, and Robert (Cotton) Payne of the old Drug Store Cowboys group. We shared an office at one point. And I was there when Claude Morgan formed his Buckboard Boogie Boys group with fiddler Ron Knuth, drummer Larry Robison, and bassist Larry Patton.

These three had been part of Hank Williams Jr.’s band, all finding themselves out of work when Williams was seriously injured in a Montana hunting accident. I met and interviewed the legendary Ernest Tubb at the Kicker Palace in Poteet. In discussing various country musicians during the course of the interview, the Texas Troubadour had little good to say about David Alan Coe, who had mimicked Tubb in a song Coe called If That Ain’t Country.

“I think he’s a disgrace to country music,” Tubb said of Coe. “He can sing a little, but all that long hair and tattoos and cheap-looking Indian jewelry has no place.”

Then Ernest Tubb stared straight into my eyes and I will never forget his words: “And you could do with a haircut yourself, son.”

During the mid-70s and 1980s, I had frequent interaction with Willie Nelson and that unlikely gaggle of followers and hangers-on who were to establish themselves as The Willie Nelson Family. Willie paid some of them, some he just fed. Others just followed along. But a T-shirt emblazoned with the Willie Nelson Family stamp would gain you access to the hallowed halls of a Nelson tour bus, various backstage sanctuaries, and hotel suites where marijuana smoke hung like a Gulf Coast cloud bank.

When Willie moved into his Pedernales Country Club holdings near Austin and purchased a pool hall on South Lamar Street he called Willie’s Pool Hall, we had a new center for the universe. This was in the 1970s when South Austin was the place, Willlie’s was booming, and Manny Gammage was attracting national attention with his Texas Hatters on South Lamar. Willie Nelson, David Alan Coe, Rusty Wier, and other figures of prominence were wearing the hand-blocked Manny Gammage hats with the distinctive curl brim. I always wanted one but could never find the bucks when I was in Austin.

Willie and his sister Bobbie Nelson were both raised by their grandparents in Abbott, Texas. Willie’s mom left shortly after he was born. His father Ira was an automobile mechanic who came back into Willie’s life to help out around the Austin pool hall.

I did an early Action Magazine article on Pop Nelson. Everyone called him Pop. Willie’s stepmother was known as Mom Nelson. Willie called me when the story on his father was printed. He never mentioned anything about the father waiting until his son was established as a music star before coming back into Willie’s life.

“I want to thank you for writing about my dad,” Willie said. “It means a lot to me.”

Asked once about Willie’s long-haired outlaw look, the father said, “With the money he is making today, I think it would be fine if he grew his hair down to his shoe tops.”

To know Willie, to know the real Willie Nelson, I think it is important to study what he never says. His lyrics have established him as a world-class poet with the guts and gall and compassion and love to show most of his soul to the world. He raises millions for farmers. He rescues and shelters old and abandoned horses. His respect and genuine love for fellow musicians is a given. His insight is stunning. But an aura of mystery has always been part of Willie’s psyche. I think it must have something to do with humility. He doesn’t talk much about death. When someone noted Willie’s absence at our friend Hondo Crouch’s funeral , someone close to the Nelson camp said Willie was “close by,” quietly paying his respects in a parked automobile. I never knew this for fact but I never doubted it.

I was especially fond of Paul English, the Nelson drummer who dressed in black, often with a satanic cape and cowboy boots with silver pointed toe guards. Paul was a former Fort Worth pimp and gangster who talked nasally through a nose that had been broken more than once.

A fierce and dangerous bodyguard who would have defended Willie with his life, Paul English was inspiration for the Willie Nelson song Me and Paul. We were at John T. Floore Country Store in Helotes when Willie sang this one before a live audience for the first time. It details his trials and tribulations on the road with his former gangster drummer, with one verse encapsulating it all.

I had already heard the story. There had been a bomb threat at the Milwaukee, Wisconsin Airport, and Paul’s sinister appearance had resulted in the entire band being temporarily detained.

“I wrote a song about Paul,” Willie told me that evening at Floore’s. The verse about the airport incident goes like this:

At the airport in Milwaukee They refused to let us board the plane at all; They said we looked suspicious, But I think they wanted to pick on me and Paul.

I wrote a cover story for Action Magazine on Paul English. The cover photograph was of Paul in his black attire and holding a stuffed devil in his lap.

“Willie saved my life,” English told me. “I was living on borrowed time in Fort Worth. There had already been two contracts on me. I was a shuffle drummer and Willie took me in. We have been brothers since that day. I would lay down my life for him.”

The Willie Nelson tour I went on was a tour of state and county fairs in the early 1980s, starting in Mississippi and concluding somewhere around the Great Lakes. Willie flew me back and forth from various tour engagements to San Antonio so that I could work on Action Magazine.

Poodie Locke was the stage manager back then, while David Anderson was the road manager on that tour. I was in for an education which was to include the most harrowing drug scare of my life.

Nelson was getting hot during those days. His Redheaded Stranger album was on its way to turning platinum, and strange pale-skinned Northerners in states like Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin were out on summer afternoons in straw cowboy hats and Wiillie Nelson T-shirts.

I don’t know how it is today, but Chicago was an exciting otherworldly metropolis with an Al Capone aura that made me feel like I needed a tommy gun for safety.

I recall we were milling around in an outdoor city park shortly before Willie’s show on Navy Pier. Uniformed Chicago cops were standing hock to hip with husky dudes in black T-shirts who were snorting rock cocaine off knife blades in plain view. Nobody was attempting to hide anything from anybody. They were spooning the dope out of plastic bags with little thought to hundred-dollar cocaine rocks that fell and bounced unnoticed on the ground.

They were freely sharing the coke with any of us who were interested. Cops were interspersed among the official-looking cats in the black shirts. It was obvious that they were Willie fans and eager to make the Texas visitors feel at home. Jayne Byrne was mayor of Chicago at that time, and one of the cops had a message for me.

“Hey,” he said in that strange Chicago accent. “I hear you are a writer in Texas. You ought to write something about this fucking bitch mayor we got up here name of Jane Byrne. This fucking bitch wants to take our guns away when we are off-duty. Hey, this is fucking Chicago, man. A Chicago cop without a firearm is dead meat. You really should write something about this dirty fucking bitch.”

The Navy Pier chicken wire phenomenon was mentioned earlier — women crawling like monkeys up a chicken wire shield in front of the Nelson stage on Navy Pier. But I was soon to learn that the Willie appeal ran far deeper than a surface of starstruck women.

Songwriters the country over were taking notice. The Nelson lyrics were galvanizing the same type songsmiths and storytellers who once sat at the feet of Hank Williams. I was soon to see it firsthand. As the tour moved through one Wisconsin city, the bus air-conditioner went on the blink. Those were the days when a tour bus had windows that opened manually.

The road crew had the bus windows open when I saw something sail through. Then I saw another object sail into the bus. I heard clicking and clinking sounds, almost like hail or sleet was hitting the bus. Objects were hitting and bouncing. Then something landed in my lap. What the hell? It was a cassette tape in a plastic container. Willie’s stage manager Poodie Locke explained. “These are cassette tapes of original songs,” Poodie said. “Those are songwriters out there trying to get their original songs into the bus in the hope that Willie might hear one and want to record it. It happens a lot. Sometimes they try to throw the tapes on stage during a performance.”

I asked Locke if Nelson ever listened to one of the songs. Did he ever record one? “It ain’t done that way,” Locke said.

This was around the time that Nelson decided to quit doing hard drugs and stick with marijuana. He demanded the same of his musicians and road crew. He was more than adamant, posting signs on the tour buses which read IF YOU’RE WIRED YOU’RE FIRED.

Some members of the “Willie Nelson Family” dutifully stopped the dope. Others hid the cocaine, pills, and methamphetamine from Willie. I was snorting both coke and meth at the time, and I refrained from comment when Willie suggested that it might be better if I followed suit.

“I talked it over with the boys,” Willie said. “They have agreed to pull up.” Such was the tour bus climate that summer when we pulled into Jackson, Michigan. Willie was scheduled for two performances at the Jackson County Fair, one in early afternoon and the other a night show.

The afternoon show was well under way, and some of us were still on the bus, smoking weed and just kicking back.

Poodie Locke was still on the bus as was Don Bowman, a country comedian who was opening for Willie, and roadie Billy Cooper, a longtime friend of mine. The only other person on the bus that afternoon was a woman who, we later learned, owned a massage parlor in Jackson. She was a big woman with curly red hair and wearing a lot of costume jewelry. She had no official authorization for being backstage and on the tour bus, but there she was. And such is a common occurrence amid the hustle and bustle of setting up and tearing down for a road show. Someone just winds up backstage and nobody really knows how they got there.

The big redhead was laughing and joking like she belonged, and I gave little thought when she produced a little silver pipe and passed it to Don Bowman. Like the rest of us, Bowman assumed the pipe contained marijuana as he took a hit and passed it on to Cooper. I had barely inhaled one lung full of smoke when I knew something was direly wrong.

I was starting to rise up toward the roof of the bus when I saw Billy Cooper’s anguished face. His eyes were as big as banjos. I looked down at Bowman and saw that he was rigid as a fireplace poker, grinning like a vapid Mardi Gras mask with drool dripping out of his mouth.

“It’s the pipe,” Billy Cooper cried. “The pipe, the fuckin’ pipe.”

Poodie Locke was a big guy in cowboy boots. He didn’t smoke the little silver pipe, sensing almost instantly what was happening. As my body rose up through the roof of the bus, I remember Poodie grabbing the female massage parlor owner by her tangle of red curls and literally dragging her off the bus and across the gravel parking lot.

I remember the woman howling at Locke. “Those guys knew what they were smoking.” Willie might have been a recipient of the evil pipe and Locke knew it. Poodie was still dragging her by the hair of her head as I floated on up out of the bus for at least a mile where I was to meet the Devil.

The Devil and I were high up above the county fair and the stage where Willie was playing. I never saw anything or anybody as horrible scary looking as this sonofabitch. He had long sideburns, pimples on his face with purple pus running out of them, and long rotten fangs that made him look sort of like a walrus with cavities wearing a straw cowboy hat. And I will swear to this day that the Devil had a hand-tooled leather hatband that read E Pluribus Willie.

Suddenly, and without warning, the Devil was gone and I was back on the tour bus, shaking like a dog passing razor blades, and clinging to Cooper and Bowman like they were my mothers.

We were all scared shitless and it seemed only reasonable that we lock the bus doors. The terrifying thing about being this scared is that you don’t know what you are scared of. Fear becomes terror.

Don Bowman seemed to have some measure of wits intact when he suggested we eat something. “We get something to eat and we might come down off this shit,” he said. Cooper agreed. I looked out the bus window and could see lighted carnival rides down a small hill. I didn’t see the Devil anywhere, but I knew he was out there somewhere. I was still terrified, but I volunteered to go for hotdogs.

With Bowman and Cooper locked in the bus behind me, I ran down the hill and found a hotdog stand. With a dozen hotdogs in a sack, I ran back to the bus like the hounds of hell were barking down my shirt collar. We gobbled down those hotdogs like contestants in a hotdog eating contest.

We were still scared out of our skins when Nelson and the band returned to the bus. The band members were pounding on the side of the bus and yelling like hell when one of us finally unlocked the door. I don’t recall what he said, but Willie wasn’t happy about being locked off his own bus.

We never learned exactly what was in the little pipe, but most of us figured it was a pure form of angel dust, the street name for phencyclidine (PCP). I later looked it up. It is known for producing severe hallucinations, and one semi-official source designates it as “the scariest motherfucking drug on the planet.”

I have never fully accepted the possibility that the Jackson Devil was a hallucination. I looked into his yellow eyes and smelled his fetid breath. I saw his hatband and I could read every word on it. Cooper, Bowman, and I suffered pounding headaches for two weeks after the Jackson show. This was the last Nelson road tour for me. The next close contact with Willie came in December, 1979, when I did a cover story on Nelson for Texas Girl Magazine.

To read the article, Google Willie Nelson interview; Texas Girl. The article is a general feature on Willie, combined with the new magazine’s statewide search for the most beautiful girl in Teas. With headquarters in Houston, the slick new enamel-cover magazine had everything necessary for success but enough seed money to get it over the initial hump.

Printer friend Joe Cardenas was an early consultant with the Houston publisher of Texas Girl, as was ace photographer Bill Spence, the man behind the camera for our big Texas Girl photo shoot. It all took place at Willie’s country club.

Western artist Clinton Baermann was present, and he appeared in photographs with me, Cardenas, and numerous scantily clad beauty candidates who frolicked around that afternoon on the Pedernales Country Club hill. A few of them were stark naked, and photographer Spence didn’t miss a one.

This shoot was to include the finals candidates for Texas Girl Magazine’s search for the most beautiful woman in Texas. The magazine was billed as the Texas answer to Playboy which it hardly was.

While Action Magazine lasted 44 years on inexpensive Canadian newsprint paper, beautiful full enamel color Texas Girl Magazine went belly-up after two more issues.

I don’t think a Texas beauty queen was ever named.

Willie said, “Too damn bad. It was one hell of an idea.”

Filed Under: Columns Tagged With: David Allan Coe, Leon Russel, Willie Nelson

Larry Patton

Larry Patton
Larry Patton

Former San Antonio musician Larry Patton is having a rough time of it with fourth stage metastatic melanoma, a deadly form of cancer which is in his stomach, pancreas, lymph nodes, liver and pelvic area.

Patton will be recalled by San Antonio music fans for his 1970s work with Claude Morgan and the Buckboard Boogie Boys.

A bass guitarist and vocalist, Patton, who now lives in Chestmound, Tennessee, was the Flying Burrito Brothers front man for a number of years, and he has worked with such notables over the years as Willie Nelson, Bobby Bare, Ronnie Milsap, Johnny Bush, Barbara Fairchild, and countless others.

Patton was the bus driver for both Ricky Skaggs and Delbert McClinton for a number of years, and he was partially responsible for getting Mike Kennedy’s audition with Skaggs.

Oldtimers on the San Antonio music scene will recall when Larry Patton, Larry Roberson, and Ron Knuth hit town in the 1970s. They had all been members of Hank Williams Jr.’s band, and all of them found themselves out of work when Williams fell off a bluff while hunting in Montana.

Landing in San Antonio, bassist (Big) Larry Patton, drummer (Little) Larry Roberson, and fiddler Ron Knuth soon fell in with Claude Morgan to become The Buckboard Boogie Boys.

Patton married Pamela Roberts, daughter of San Antonio fiddler and band leader Slim Roberts, and the rest is music history.

With his singing daughters, Pamela and Deborah, and drummer son Will, Slim formed the popular club  band he called The Generation Gap.

Will Roberts was the contact for this article on Patton.

“Larry is my brother-in-law,” Will said. “He is also the caring and kindly spirit who took me into his home and saved my life when my addiction to drugs and alcohol was killing me. I have been clean and sober since October of 1989, and I owe a big part of it to Larry. I don’t have the words to adequately explain what a wonderful man he is.”

Will says Patton knows his days are limited, although doctors have supplied him with no time frame.

Roberts said a GoFundMe account has been set up to help the family pay expenses. Please help if you can.

Filed Under: Columns

My Years on KEXL Radio

Barbara Marullo
Barbara Marullo

Immediately after my firing at the Express and News I was in shock. I knew I couldn’t feed myself if I continued the drinking, but what the hell was I to do?

Willie Nelson offered to take me in. He said he would find something for me to do on the road, maybe with publicity or something of that nature.

Nelson is like that, generous and kind and well known for taking in strays. But this was not the time. While I would eventually tour for a short time with Willie and help emcee some of his earlier Fourth of July Picnics, I couldn’t make myself jump on a Nelson tour bus immediately after my firing from the newspaper.

Maybe it was pride, ignorance, or innate stupidity, but I needed to figure some things out on my own.

A couple of years before the newspaper firing I had been offered a job with the Houston Post. This opportunity might still have been available, but I didn’t want to live in Houston. I accepted a special features job with the onetime rival San Antonio Light, but quit this short-lived experiment when I was ordered to write color for a Houston Astros playoff game. I still didn’t like Houston, and I have never cared for baseball.

Marie Hicks hired me to write a weekly front-page column for the North Side Recorder, a San Antonio shopper that was delivered free over most of north San Antonio. The shopper pay was hardly enough to feed my family, but it was helping when my herky-jerky career was to take another hairpin turn.

It was mid-afternoon and I was shooting 9-ball pool in a beer joint on Oblate at San Pedro when the big voice of Hal Davis interrupted my mindless reverie.

“How does it feel to be broke and on your ass?” Davis taunted. He was almost as big as his voice.

I recognized him immediately. He was the radio hotshot I had thrown out of the menudo cookoff. I wasn’t immediately sure that Davis wouldn’t take a swing at me as he walked up to the pool table. “You don’t have to like me, Mister ex-newspaper columnist, but I’m here to offer you a news announcer job on a rock-and-roll hippie radio station if you could lower yourself to such a level.”

“I don’t believe you,” I told Davis. “I have never worked on a radio station.”

“Show up at our studios on Data Point Drive at 4 o’clock in the morning and find out,” Davis said. “The starting pay won’t be over the rafters, but it will beat hell out of what you are making now.”

This couldn’t be. It would be impossible. I had never even heard my recorded voice. I was convinced that Hal Davis, general manager of Doubleday Broadcasting’s KITE AM and KEXL FM radio stations, would inflict some form of debilitating revenge on me for throwing him and his wife out of the menudo cookoff.

Davis might have me arrested for trespassing if I showed up at that radio station at 4 o’clock in the morning. I told myself this. Or he might have security bulls unceremoniously drag me off the property by the scruff of my neck.

It would serve me right. Especially since I had been as drunk or drunker than Davis at the cookoff and concert.

I told my wife Vicky that afternoon. She urged me to try it. Why not? We had no money. Nothing to lose but more face. If there was any face left.

It was pitch dark when I arrived at the building on Data Point. I took the elevator to the second floor. KITE-AM and KEXL-FM studios were separate, each with control rooms and studio space. Shit, I thought, this can’t be happening.

Davis had told me to “ask for Ron.”

When I entered the KEXL waiting room I was met by Ron Houston, a controversial disc jockey who possessed the greatest voice San Antonio radio has ever known. Freddy Lee Jones (aka Ron Houston when he worked in his hometown of Karnes City) had been a top jock on AM stations KMAC, KTSA, KFAN, KNUZ in Houston, KMAL in Karnes County, and country FM KBUC. He was now the morning drive voice on an outlaw free-form rocker the likes of which Texas radio fans had never heard before. It was KEXL FM (104.5). the collective voice of a radio rock music culture that I was soon to become enmeshed in.

Houston and I knew each other from the drinking joints. He was the unrepentant friend of shotgun-packing pimp and 3-card monte dealer Bunny Eckert, a fact that didn’t exactly endear Houston to polite society and the San Antonio Country Club set, although Houston would later be posthumously named to the Texas Radio Hall of Fame.

He called me “Soul” on that first radio station meeting, and he was still calling me “Soul” years later when a massive heart attack took his life.

“What the hell am I supposed to do?” I asked Houston on that first KEXL morning as we sat behind twin microphones looking at each other.

I will never forget his answer.

“Just start talking, Soul.”

That was the improbable beginning.

I knew that traditional news was not expected of me. To satisfy federal broadcast requirements I picked up a few lines from a syndicated service called “News of the Weird,” but my main job was to jawbone with Ron Houston about most anything that crossed my mind.

“I always wished I had taped our first show together,” Houston said many times.

I had a strong voice with an unmistakable Junction, Texas drawl. Ron and I were to develop a morning drive show that many believed had no equal.

I was the “champion of men and the working girl’s friend,” and on other mornings, it was simply “the long-haired redneck,” an ID I snatched from David Alan Coe.

I delighted in sniping on the air at Charlie Kilpatrick, executive editor of the Express and News who had fired me, and a San Antonio social climber whose greatest accomplishment in life had been realized when he was officially made a member of the Texas Cavaliers.

Hal Davis had been brought in by Doubleday Broadcasting to oversee both KITE AM and KEXL FM stations, and I soon realized that Davis was unimpressed with the aristocracy of San Antonio.

While I japed on the air at Charlie Kilpatrick and his little tin soldier Texas Cavaliers suit, Davis remained conspicuously silent.

To denigrate any fat cat Cavalier of San Antonio Country Club status would put most any San Antonio media upstart on the chopping block.

Yet I was allowed to say stuff on the air like:

“I wonder how Charlie Kilpatrick can manage to put on his socks without help from wife Margie this morning. I heard that Margie went out of town for the weekend. Charlie has a lot of trouble with colored socks. And he may not know how to properly use colored toilet paper, either.”

Hal Davis allowed me to run wild with caustic drivel such as this. And it didn’t take me long to figure out why Davis put me on the air. He had as much push-back renegade in him as I had in me, and I will always believe that Hal Davis pocketed his pride and hired me partly because he believed I was dealt with unjustly, and partly because he sensed I might attract listeners.

My growing legions of young listeners were not lost on most of the local radio score keepers.

Hal Davis and I became friends.

“I just had a hunch,” Davis later told me. “I thought those hippie kids would like you and I was right.”

I guess Ron Houston knew something too. I just wish he could have been present years later when I was inducted into the San Antonio Radio Hall of Fame. I will always remember those first words out of his mouth.

“Start talking, Soul.”

Talking I did, quickly bonding and blending with the young air staff at KEXL. While Houston was only a few years younger than me, I had a couple of decades on the others. And at this time I was making the big transition from alcohol to the world of the young dopers I found myself surrounded by at KEXL.

I fit right in. I had found my next home. I loved Ron Houston in life and death, and I learned to love the KEXL wild-assed kids who made up the air staff. These young rock music marvels were in a world and time of their own. They included such talents as Barbara (Legs) Marullo, Martha Martinez, Allen (Bubba) Grimm, Sweet Michael Boykin, Nick St. John, Bobby Reyes, Debbie Jecker, Tom Devine, and others. They were light years ahead of the bellowing blowhards who characterized most AM radio and a lot of new FM stations of that era. I made the most noise of any of them, yakking with Ron Houston on the morning drive, and shattering the peace and quiet with the commercials I had started to write and record.

KEXL jocks were dramatically quiet. Some of them would enunciate the call letters softly. At other moments, after a segue of tasteful rock album cuts, the jock might reverently whisper them all together into the mike: Kex-sul, album radio.

Although KEXL FM was outlaw rock in its purest form, there was some method behind the madness. KEXL was officially an AOR station…Album Oriented Rock.

Most amazing about KEXL was the formatting. None of it came directly from the front office. Most of it was through staff members like Allen Grimm, who was the longest tenured KEXL program director, and Martha Martinez. Grimm actually started it all when KEXL was in its infancy at HemisFair Plaza.

Grimm had been dead for a number of years when I prepared this manuscript; Martinez was an alive and lively cancer survivor who helped me fill in some blanks. And Barbara (Legs) Marullo was the one KEXL sweetheart who could recall most of the music played in those legendary years. Marullo and Martinez were the two foxes I knew and depended upon while breaking in at KEXL.

Martha said “We had a loose format, with certain cuts designated for different day parts; the hardest rocking cuts were saved for late afternoon through about midnight. There were rules about how often cuts were played to keep them from being played too often; we taped paper logs on the albums, where we noted which cut we played at what time.”

I recall Bubba Grimm shouting at some errant new jock: “I never want to hear the same album cut more than once over a three-day period!” That might have been a slight exaggeration, but it was close.

The program director, or music director, Martha continued, “would listen to each album and note which were the best songs to play for each day part, or, in some cases, which cuts NEVER to play. So, while we all had different tastes, the music was really decided by the time you were on.”

The KEXL jocks were more than amazing in their uncanny ability to pick hit songs before they became hit songs. Alan Grimm broke Aerosmith before anyone else in Texas had recognized this rock music hit machine, and KEXL’s Sweet Michael Boykin broke Jackson Browne in San Antonio.

“I recall Bubba breaking Aerosmith in Texas,” Barbara Marullo recalled. “We were playing groups like Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Rush, Yes, Styx, Montrosee, Peter Frampton, The Band and Byrds … See what you have started. And I can recall Martha introducing Bonnie Raitt to South Texas radio listeners for sure. And the Pointer Sisters. Willie had them on his picnic show at Liberty Hill.”

Barbara recalled benefits for KEXL which were held at Olmos Park and at Sayers. Despite the huge cult following, and more listeners from the general population than most of the experts could imagine, KEXL was always digging for survival money. These concerts included Shawn Phillips, The Grateful Dead, Augie Meyers, and New Riders of the Purple Sage.

“We played hell out of Bruce Springsteen, starting with his first LP,” Marullo said. “That was Bubba and Martha’s doing. I recall first seeing him at Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin.”

I will never forget my first meeting with new KEXL general manager Rex Tackett, a career radio management type and good guy who was obviously in uncharted waters with management of KEXL FM.

Shortly after my air shift with Ron Houston was up and running, Tackett pulled me into his office where he had two record album jackets stting on his desk. These big jackets were almost exactly twelve and a half inches square, and the record covers on Tackett’s desk looked like they had been run through a shredding machine.

“You are the oldest employee I have on this radio station staff,” Tackett said. “I was hoping you could tell me what has been happening to these album jackets. They are torn all to pieces. The lettering is so ripped up I can’t even read the names of some songs. It would appear that someone may have cut them with a knife or other sharp instrument.”

I lied to Rex Tackett with the straight face of a 60-year-old San Quentin convict.

“I haven’t got any idea,” I said, hoping Tackett wasn’t watching my lying eyes.

I knew what had happened to those album covers. Some of the DJs had been using the jackets to chop up and line up cocaine and crystal meth. I was relatively new to the drug culture, but I had been around long enough to recognize razor blade slashes on a cardboard album jacket.

I knew the girls had not been laying out lines of coke and meth. I had no problem figuring out who was doing it. And without a single qualm, I would lie to the boss and protect those young KEXL jocks who were snorting lines of coke and crank off the album jackets. I could not snitch on my fellow radio offenders, and without even realizing it, I had chosen the treacherous path of the owlhoot. I was one of them. I couldn’t bring myself to snitch then, as I could not bring myself to snitch years later when I was facing 20 years in the state penitentiary.

Bookmaker Jack Hanratty had called it.

I was well on my way to becoming the Outlaw Journalist.

My intention was never to be a radio personality. I always knew that I would finish my life as a writer. Those two-plus years at KEXL were crazy. It was like something out of a psilocybin mushroom dream. Ron was recording land commercials for G.G. Gale of Timberwood Park fame, while I was writing copy and cutting trailer park spots for S.A. Sam Greene. I recall some of the lines: “Oaks North Mobile Home Estates, folks, out where the Texas Hills kiss the sky. Big acreage-sized lots and privacy to boot. You don’t have to watch your neighbor’s old lady hanging out her panty hose at Oaks North. Got room for a hat-stomping and an armadillo race on the same property…”

Parts of Oaks North can still be seen in the Bulverde area.

Sam Greene was the super San Antonio land huckster who much later established a monastery near Blanco, proclaimed himself to be a monk named Father Benedict, and proceeded to molest every young boy he could get his hands on.

Greene’s natural flair for the dramatic helped hasten his Waterloo. His monastery’s biggest draw was a painting of the Virgin Mary that reportedly wept tears of myrrh. Convicted of sexually molesting novice monks at the monastery, Father Benedict admitted that the weeping icon was bogus and eventually killed himself with a massive overdose of pain meds.

While I had suspected that Greene might have been a bit light in his loafers, I was as surprised as most when salesman Sam was to re-invent himself as Father Benedict with Jesus-style monk sandals and long flowing gray beard.

I know that I had my part in Greene’s land scam. I wrote most of the radio copy with little more than a perfunctory description of the property from Greene. One was for Twin Lakes Estates near Lytle. My on-air description of lunker bass thrashing the two lake tops, plus a majestic wild turkey hen soaring over the sparkling water at sunrise, was close to being at least some type of misdemeanor. When I had occasion to view the actual property we had been promoting, I felt like giving someone their money back. The “twin lakes” were greasy little stock tanks with green algae scum on the top and a couple of used Kotex pads laying in plain view.

I carried a picture in my head of this sordid scene until Benedict got busted for sodomizing apprentice monks. After that, contrived bass and non-existent turkeys didn’t seem all that bad.

Soon after my arrival at KEXL I learned that all language on the air is regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Violators may be fined or jailed or both, and gross offenders may be removed from an air job. I acquired an FCC manual and studied the language requirements. I learned the words that were taboo for radio announcers, but I took it a notch further. To my surprise, I found other words without federal restriction, many of them words that most people would assume to be on the banned list.

When I used the word “horny” in a newscast, my radio associates were shocked to learn that this is not a federal no-no word. Or it wasn’t at the time. Neither is the word “wired,” no matter in what context it may be used. Or such was the case in the 1970s.

To the young drug users of the 1970s, the slang term “wired” meant that one was jacked up, sky-high and buzzing on some form of speed, blood pressure elevated and heart thumping like a Harley motor.

When I came on the air at 5 o’clock in the morning and said I was “wired and inspired,” vast numbers of young speed freaks connected.

A non-doper friend said he almost wrecked his car the first time he heard me make the comment.

When I was on KEXL the stations were rated by a service called Arbitron. We never hit the top of the rating chart, but we always believed we had as many or more listeners than any other FM station in the area.

Most of the ratings were done by telephone, someone from the rating service calling residents and asking what radio station they were listening to. The most obvious flaw here was the assumption that all radio listeners had traditional dwellings with telephones.

Many members of the hippie subculture which comprised our listener base did not live in traditional houses with traditional telephones. They lived in trailers, Volkswagen buses, apartment pads that belonged to God-only-knows-who, and what traditional society refers to as communes.

But they had access to radios, and their collective listener muscle would be on display when a hot live rock act was advertised on KEXL.

KEXL was fun for me, a diversion before my inevitable re-entry into the writing game. The station promoted a renaissance fair, and we drew big crowds with the KEXL armadillo races at HemisFair Plaza.

Samuelito, my world-champion racing armadillo, successfully defended his crown at the KEXL races, and some of the giddy radio station fans may have actually believed the Samuelito bullshit.

When ZZ Top was breaking into the market, a dozen 30-second radio ads on KEXL would pack any club in San Antonio. The listeners were always out there and we always knew it. KEXL jocks enjoyed a special rapport with many of the leading rock musicians of that era. There was always a name act ready to help with a benefit during KEXL’s last days. The sad ending in 1977 was inevitable. Doubleday, the giant book publisher, was closing out its broadcasting arm, and KEXL’s last night on the air was noted by our party at Johnny Goode’s Village Inn.

The T-shirts I had printed were apropos. They featured a tombstone with the epitaph:

KEXL is Dead

Here Lies the Last Free Radio Station

One armadillo standing by the grave held a Bible. A second armadillo was prone and weeping over the grave.

I think I shed a tear myself that night. I didn’t know the how nor the why of it all, but I knew I would be going back to the writing business. There was no other place for me in San Antonio radio. I didn’t even consider contacting another station.

Filed Under: Columns Tagged With: KEXL, radio

Alan Brown knocks out homicide cop

Alan Brown
Alan Brown

When I was a cub reporter with the San Angelo Standard-Times in West Texas I learned a basic truth about people that set the tone for my life as a professional writer.

Not all readers demand a conventional winner, and the Norman Rockwell myth has never applied to the vast majority of us.

Tom Steph was the San Angelo city editor who launched me into a world of characters who have included the hustlers and the hustled.

Steph came to the San Angelo newspaper from the Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City, and I never forgot what he taught me.

“Be different,” Steph said. “Write your articles about the losers and the off-color characters of this world. Steinbeck did it, Erskine Caldwell did it. People get sick of hearing about the winners. There is a little loser in all of us, and we can all identify. So many of us are a little odd, a little off-whack, a little removed from the beaten path.”

A year after that, I had transferred to the San Antonio Express-News where I started as a general assignments reporter. My first opportunity to put Tom Steph’s visionary advice into newspaper print was soon to be forthcoming.

The San Antonio Livestock Show and Rodeo was in full swing, and the city editor had suggested that I try to interview world all-around champion cowboy Jim Shoulders for a feature article.

Before heading for the rodeo grounds, I stopped off at the Melody Room Lounge, a drinking dump on Third Street directly across from the newspaper building. There were a couple of cheap hotels in the immediate area, and this is where I met Robert (Coyote) Perry, a little-known Choctaw Indian rodeo performer and stock pen manure scooper who followed the rodeo tour, entering both bull riding and saddle bronc riding events.

We were shooting 9-ball pool when a cowboy friend of Perry’s introduced him.

“This is Coyote Perry,” said the cowboy. “He is the losingest cowboy on the rodeo circuit. Some call him Wolf Perry, but to most of us he is Coyote Perry. He gets his name from the coyote yips and howls that come out of his mouth every time he is thrown by a bronc or a bull. When Coyote Perry hits the arena ground they can hear his howling all the way to Tulsa.”

Jim Shoulders was forgotten. Coyote Perry had captured my imagination.

Coyote Perry was built like a human fireplug, a swarthy competitor who did his best.

I soon learned that Perry’s rodeo winnings were from scant to non-existent, and he earned most of the money used to get him from rodeo to rodeo by shoveling shit out of the arenas and stock barns. Sometimes he slept in the barns, sometimes in cheap hotels like the one near the Express and News.

When asked about his situation, Perry said, “Heck, who says I’m the losingest? I won eighth place in bull riding at Cheyenne one time, and I placed fifth in saddle bronc at Pendleton. I guess it was a year or so back.”

I asked Perry why he fought it with the professional rodeo circuit.

“I rodeo because I have a bad back,” he said without blinking. “I think I have one of them slipped disc doohickeys or something like that. Rodeoing beats hell out of riding a Farmall tractor on the reservation from daylight til dark. It was killing my back.”

I asked Perry if being thrown and maybe stomped on by a brahman bull wouldn’t be equally or more painful than the tractor. He had a simple answer: “Being thrown and stomped on only hurts for a little while. Riding that tractor hurt from daylight til dark.”

I left Robert Perry in the Melody Room to return to the newspaper city room where I wrote about Coyote Perry, the losingest cowboy on the professional rodeo tour.

The wire services picked up on the article, and, within hours, Coyote Perry was featured in newspapers all over the United States, as well as the front cover of the London Times.

That West Texas editor, Tom Steph, was right. The losers have a place, too. And many of the off-plumb winners might look like losers through the lens of proper society. I had found my way with that segment of humanity which has produced many of my friends and subjects of my writing. People are continually asking me about the rapport I have enjoyed with many of the subjects.

I guess it came natural for me, and I answer most questions as candidly as possible.

How in the hell did I talk world renown pool hustler Minnesota Fats into wearing a Santa Claus suit for a picture shoot?

Simple. I asked him and he jumped into the suit.

My entire life as a writer has included subjects who Hank Williams might have described as fractured stars from “Life’s Mighty Gallery of Pictures.” Some famous and some infamous, the characters who have made my world go around. From Rudolph Wonderone Jr. (aka Minnesota Fats) they have included the likes of David Alan Coe, Big John Hamilton, Hondo Crouch, Honest Charlie Potter, Willie Nelson, world renown tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle, Leon Russell, Johnny Rodriguez, and Bourbon Street Chaplain Rev. Bob Harrington.

The names and the memories will never leave me. The list goes on into what seems like infinity–motorcycle daredevils Even Steven and Igo Mendoza, golf legend Lee (The Flea) Trevino, San Antonio and Las Vegas sports handicapper Tony Salinas, George Strait, Wild Man Ray Liberto, madam Theresa Brown, Johnny Bush, Darrell McCall, Alex Harvey, wild piano pounder Blind George McClain, Augie Meyers, Gary Stewart, Texas Ranger legend A.Y. Allee, boxer Tony Ayala, Red Adair with Boots and Coots, pool shark and billiard parlor owner Bananas Rodriguez, gambler and bookmaker Jack Hanratty, San Antonio Bandidos chapter founder Royce Showalter, Dub Robinson, saddle bronc champion Case Tibbs, Randy Toman.

The criminal defense lawyers such as Alan Brown and A.L. Hernden are both personal and professional associates. Others include Ray Wylie Hubbard, police figure shotgun-toting Arthur (Bunny) Eckert, and Bobby (Kid Death) Thomas, boxer and scam artist who was by far the craziest bastard I ever knew. And many many more. I guess I loved Bobby, and, at some level, I know he loved me. And I guess the same might be said about a bunch of them.

“Sambo!” Bobby always called me, with heavy emphasis on the “bo!”

Nobody but Bobby (Kid Death) Thomas could peddle laundered and blow-dried sheep skins for baby polar bear hides and get away with it. Bobby showed me how he did it. All lanolin was removed through the laundromat washing and drying process, and the fluffy, snow white sheep hides resembled what all of us thought an infant polar bear skin would surely look like.

I was greatly impressed by the blinding white sheep fur.

I was told that Thomas got $50 each for the skins. He sold a few but I never knew how many.

I realize that I would never have fit well in polite society, so I chose that other fork in the road which included booze, drugs, hustlers, felony charges and jail, pitfalls and pratfalls, and some of the most interesting and talented people this world has ever known.

Alex Harvey wrote hits like “Delta Dawn” and “Ruben James,” and he offered me this bit of encouragement as I entered my mid-80s and started on this book.

“It ain’t the number of years you have that is important,” he said, “it’s still all about how high you can jump.”

In the early 1970s I was drinking hard but enjoying some measure of success. The Express and News had published my first book, a paperback titled The Best of Sam Kindrick–Secret Life and Hard Times of a Cedar Chopper. It was basically a compilation of short articles and columns I had written for the newspaper. Nothing like the size or scope of this project. The paper paid for 20,000 copies of the book, and the deal called for the paper recouping all printing expenses before I was to share in the profits.

Sales of the book were going at a brisk clip, one of the big reasons being television promotions by U.S. Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez. Henry liked me. His 20th Congressional District covered a large area of San Antonio and Bexar County, and I know that some of those books sold simply because Henry strongly suggested that people should buy it. During this era both the Express and News and KENS 5 TV were owned by Harte Hanks, so I had unlimited newspaper and television exposure for the book.

My early friendship with Willie Nelson was starting to grow. Nelson was playing John T. Floore Country Store in Helotes

on a regular basis, and my understanding at the time was that Willie needed these regular gigs to pay off his gambling debts. I do know that Nelson liked to play poker for money, and he also loved to play golf. It was the game of golf that first tied Willie to San Antonio golf hustler and caddy Larry Trader.

Larry Trader had carried the golf bags for pro golfer Tommy (Thunder) Bolt, and he was a friend of Lee Trevino, the El Paso hustler who became the greatest Hispanic golfer of all times. Larry’s brother Bobby Trader was another scratch golfer who had played on the University of Houston golf team. At that time, Nelson was letting Larry handle some of his bookings at John T. Floore Country Store in Helotes. Old man John T. had taken a liking to me, and I had the run of Flores when Willie was playing the big outdoor patio during spring and summer months.

I first played golf with Nelson and Trader when Willie was hanging out at an abandoned country club in Bandera. He had an eye to buy the Bandera club, but scrapped that idea and moved to Austin when the redneck culture around Bandera started rubbing his fur the wrong way.

Nelson and I were inconsistent duffers during those early golf outings, shooting in the 90s on many days.

“The safest place to be on the course with Willie and Sam is directly in front of them,” Larry Trader was fond of saying. “They will drive a golf ball in every direction, but seldom straight down the fairway. Flying buzzards and ground squirrels are in constant danger.”

In subsequent years, Nelson got much better at the game. I gave it up in disgust when it became obvious that I would never be the next Arnold Palmer.

When I started giving Nelson ink in my Express and News column, he seemed grateful. This was long before the world found out about the amazing talent from Abbott, Texas.

I recall asking Willie if there were other newspaper writers around the country who recognized his talent and were writing about him.

“There are,” he said. “They are in pockets around the country. Like you, these guys are willing to go out on a limb for me.”

This was a time when Nelson had become disillusioned and disgruntled with the county music recording industry based in Nashville. This was also a time when marijuana possession was still a felony, and Willie was making little attempt to hide his almost open use of the evil weed.

“I have decided to record my music in Texas,” Willie told me. “I guess people wanting to buy the records will just have to come to Texas to get them.”

Those were heady years for us all. Nelson’s Saturday night gigs in Helotes ended at midnight, giving us plenty of time for impromptu visits to San Antonio live music venues that stayed open until 2 a.m. On many of those nights I would pile into Willie’s Mercedes with him, Larry Trader, road hand Billy Cooper, and some member of his crew who drove. Two clubs we always hit were the eclectic Bijou and Scotty Young’s Scotchman’s Club, both on San Pedro Avenue. Sam Noin and Romy Vela owned and operated the Bijou. And after these came the Longneck Club off Blanco Road where Augie Meyers and other top local talent was showcased. Ronnie Branham was the Longneck operator.

The Bijou was one of those rare and ratty little joints that appealed to musicians. It was a musician’s bar with a soul of its own. I recall one night with Willie when we entered the Bijou to find blind Blind George McClain pounding the piano. Blind George was out of Austin. He had about 10 percent of his eyesight but no more. His aggressive piano style was combined with his loud foot stomping on plywood stage flooring as he rocked the house. When we entered the Bijou that night, Willie quietly slid in next to George at the piano. He whispered something to Blind George and McClain lit up like a brush fire. He instantly knew who was with him on the piano bench. The duet that followed was epic–Blind George and Nelson ripping the house down with Willie’s “Bloody Mary Morning.”

On another note, I have always wished I had a video clip of Blind George and his equally blind brother-in-law fist-fighting one night out behind the Bijou. They finally punched themselves out and I don’t think either of them landed  a single solid blow.

When we visited the Scotchman’s Club, Victor Lopez and Los Blues were the house band, a hot group including Jimmy Casas and Bobby Rey.

“I look back now and can hardly believe it,” Lopez told me

shortly before his death in 2017. “When you all came into the club I would invite Willie up to sing a number. He usually just sang one song or maybe two and got down, always polite and the gentleman. I would thank him and got back to playing. What a dunce I was. Here was one of the greatest songwriters of all time, and I was letting him off my stage with a mere ‘thank you.’ I should have encouraged him to play all night.”

Nelson truly enjoyed club hopping in those earlier times, and so did I. Late one night we stopped at my house on Harriett drive to pick up some money and that was when Willie stepped on the dog bone. In those days, we were still feeding the dogs bones and table scraps.

The bone went through Willie’s tennis shoe. There was blood everywhere. His howl of pain awakened my wife Vicky, who walked in to find Nelson holding his injured foot and hopping across the living room on the other one.

I recall my then wife telling one of her girlfriends: “Yes, I woke up to this horrible noise and could hardly believe my eyes when I walked into my living room to find Willie Nelson hopping on one foot and holding the other one.”

Nelson and I were pretty tight in 1973 when I hatched a plan for a world championship menudo cookoff. I had attended the much-ballyhooed first international chili cookoff at the Big Bend ghost town of Terlingua, which featured chili cooks H. Allen Smith and Wick Fowler. By then I was hobnobbing with Luckenbach imagineer Hondo Crouch and future movie star Guich Koock, and I had an idea that we could pump up a pretty good crowd with the right kind of promotion.

Menudo is the Mexican and South Texas soup made from tripe, hominy, chopped onion, serranos, and various other spices. Tripe is the rubbery and powerfully pungent lining of a beef stomach. The legends of Mexico have always touted menudo as a hangover cure.

I stole the name for our cookoff product from a Wheaties cereal box. Our cookoff would feature the true “Breakfast of Champions.” It might not be a medically proven hangover cure, I conceded, but a lot of drunks ate menudo and flour tortillas after a hard night on the alcohol sauce. “The Breakfast of Champions” cookoff captured the heart and imagination of San Antonio and South Texas. I started pumping it in my newspaper column, and the results were amazing.

Entrants for the cookoff numbered almost a hundred, some of them being cooking teams who came from distant towns like Corpus Christi, Brownsville, Harlingen, and Victoria.

On that morning of the big day, it was April and hot. Cars were jamming the access road leading from IH 10 to Raymond Russell Park. I will never forget the DPS cop who called me out of Raymond Russell Park and demanded by what authority was I causing a gigantic traffic backup which was endangering human life.

I told the cop we were fixing to host the greatest menudo cookoff ever held, and that he would need to talk with my co-sponsor for the event for any questions he might want answered.

“Who might your co-sponsor be?” the cop bawled at me.

“Congressman Henry Gonzalez,” I answered.

“The United States congressman?” the cop was about to cry.

“One and the same,” I told the policeman.

I hadn’t bothered to tell Henry that he was co-sponsoring a menudo cookoff, but I felt confident that he would back me up.

The poor cop headed back to his cruiser while cars and trucks passed him as they turned into the park.

I recall cringing when I looked up to see a Winnebago full of prostitutes and a big banner proclaiming “Hot Pants Menudo.” It was my friend madam Theresa Brown and some of her working girls, and I recall the little sinking sensation I felt in my belly while trying to figure out what I would do with Theresa.

“Damn it, Theresa,” I told her. “What the hell are you trying to do to me? I don’t need the heat.”

T-Brown was unfazed, and her smile promised nothing but mischief when she gave me her answer:

“Fuck you, Sammy, I know more about menudo than you do.”

We would have the Willie Nelson band and others who might want to join in. Before it was over we had Johnny Bush and the Bandoleros, plus more than 20 other groups and a mid-afternoon boxing match that would feature homicide detective Roy Aguilar and criminal attorney Alan Brown.

This captured the fancy of both lawyers and cops, who talked it up for weeks prior to the event in both the courthouse and the police headquarters.

Brown was the nephew of bookmaker Jack Hanratty, and Hanratty told me in advance to bet as much money as I could get down on Brown, a former Golden Gloves champion from Edinburg in the Rio Grande Valley.

To the unpracticed eye of most of the spectators, this fistic match between detective and lawyer looked like a mismatch that might result in serious injury to the attorney.

Homicide detective Roy Aguilar was a former street fighter and police academy athlete who was built like a steel oil drum with muscled arms and legs. Brown was a couple of shades paler than Aguillar with a snock of hair hanging over one eye and nothing to suggest arm or leg power that could hurt anything much bigger than a long-legged yard toad.

Minutes before the fight was to start, I heard Hanratty holler out: “Two-to-one.” Then only seconds before the opening bell I heard him yell “Five-to-one.”

I was standing next to the old bookie when he upped the odds yet again: “Ten-to-one.”

I looked at Jack and he said, “You will not lose if you bet on Alan. He has whipped every fighter in the Rio Grande Valley at least once.”

It was late spring and blazing hot that day. Jimmy Parks was refereeing the fight.

Aguilar was the aggressor from the opening bell.

He charged Brown hard, punching and missing and sweating.

“Twenty-to-one” Hanratty yelled.

There were no takers.

Second round ended with no punch from Brown, just bobbing, weaving, ducking, and dodging.

Roy was dripping sweat when the third and final round started.

And then it was over. Alan hit Roy with a crashing right cross that glazed his eyes and turned his legs to spaghetti. And even as Aguillar was plunging to the canvas, Jack could be heard in the distance: “Forty-to-one.”

I recall saying a little prayer at the time–Oh, Lord, don’t let Roy be dead.

The great cookoff ended sometime before dawn. Crowd estimates unofficially topped 20,000, but we had no official count since no tickets were sold. We did sell rivers of beer with my associates getting away with most of the profits. A few gravestones were upended by vandals in next door Mission Park Cemetery, but nobody got killed that I ever heard about. I did have a deputy sheriff escort a radio station executive off the grounds when he and his wife engaged in a hollering cuss fight that could be heard all over Raymond Russell Park. Hal Davis was general manager of the Doubleday radio stations KITE AM and KEXL FM at the time. I had no information on Mr. and Mrs. Davis, just that they were raising holy hell with each other. Ironically, Davis would play a large part in my future, but I will talk about this when we get there. One of our county commissioners told me later in private that I shouldn’t try any more promotions in county parks for a long while.

At this stage, I was hungover, dog tired, and in dire need of rest. But my rest and recovery would be short-lived and fraught with stunning and traumatic upheaval.

A few short weeks after my menudo cookoff, I awakened to learn that Australian newspaper billionaire Rupert Murdoch had purchased the Express and News from Harte-Hanks for $17-million. I had an uneasy sensation in my gut upon learning this news. Houston Harte Sr. had hand-raised me in the newspaper business like an orphaned goat, putting up with my kid shenanigans at the San Angelo Standard-Times, and following my progress in San Antonio when he bought the Express-News. Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza couldn’t have had it any better. As I mentioned earlier, the elderly newspaper titan loved to walk into the Express city room and plant his rear on a corner of my desk to talk.

Harte Senior installed Conway Craig as the Express and News general manager, but Houston Harte Jr. was directly in line to take over when the elderly Craig retired, and I always sensed that my invisible cloak of protection had been passed down from father to son. Houstie liked me as well as his father and I knew it.

Charles O. (Charlie) Kilpatrick, our scrotumless sycophant and social climber of an executive editor, was more than half scared of me because of the rapport I had always enjoyed with the Hartes. Kilpatrick’s expertise at posterior oscillation was a fact to be acknowledged, and, by God, his good standing membership in the self-imagined royalty of the Texas Cavaliers was a sad prize to define one’s blue blood worth as a human being. At some level I was aware of this although I had never really thought much about it.

It was the morning after sale of the Express and News that I got the call. I was to report to the office of executive editor Kilpatrick.

I was about to be fired from my column writing job with the Express and News. I knew it but had trouble believing it. From hurricanes to uprisings in the onion fields, I had covered it all, putting my heart and soul into the San Antonio newspaper job. I had never made much money, but with childlike faith I had always looked with optimism for some sort of future with the Express and News.

When I walked into Kilpatrick’s office I knew. Charlie was looking at the wall somewhere behind me when he spoke.

He had wanted to do this for a long time. I could tell. The Harte’s were gone and I was standing there like a naked fighting rooster with no spurs.

“You are the best writer I have ever been associated with,” Kilpatrick said, “but I have to let you go.”

I asked for a reason, nothing more.

“You associate with criminals and other undesirable people,” he said.

He named a couple of my San Antonio friends before dropping Willie Nelson’s name.

“This musician you just had out at Raymond Russell park is a known dope addict,” Kilpatrick said.

Then he dropped the name that confirmed what I had suspected.

“Paul English,” Kilpatrick said. “The Nelson drummer is a pimp. I know for a fact that English is a pimp, and these are the people you have been associating with.”

I knew then that Kilpatrick was getting his information from within the Nelson camp. Or very close to the camp. It is true that Paul was a Fort Worth gangster and pimp before he joined the Nelson band, but Charlie Kilpatrick had no way of knowing this. Someone close to Willie fired the torpedo that sank my canoe. I was dumbfounded when it happened. I am pretty sure now who the Judas was. The slimeball sneak is dead now, but my resentment is still very much alive.

My hands were shaking when Kilpatrick ended my newspaper career. I recall the surreal feeling I had of being skinned alive and refitted with another person’s skin. I looked down at my hands and saw shriveled folds of skin that didn’t belong to me as workers from the Express press room rolled stacks of boxes filled with copies of my book down the hallway next to Kilpatrick’s office.

“I have decided to give you your remaining books as severance pay,” Kilpatrick said. “The press room workers will help you load them in your truck.”

There were many boxes, containing the unsold books. The newspaper had recouped all printing costs, and I was to get my pay through future book sales. I had no way to market these books. Thousands of them. I had no money. I had school age kids at home.

I can recall the tangle of emotions that hit me. I felt for a minute like crying; I felt for another minute like going back to Junction and being that carefree little boy running the beautiful South Llano River bottoms of my childhood. Then the anger hit me like a runaway freight. I felt like cutting off Charlie Kilpatrick’s balls and them tamping them down his throat with a 10-pound maul. I felt like getting drunk and I did.

Then I picked up the pieces and went on. I had to quit drinking and I did. I started doing dope as a substitute, recalling now the words of my musician and songwriting friend Ray Wyie Hubbard.

“We figured cocaine was the answer to our drinking problem,” Hubbard was heard to say.

It wasn’t. It was the gateway to another little stretch of hell on earth. I stuck with my mantra–Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. And the insanity got its second wind.

Filed Under: Columns

The book progresses

My involvement with San Antonio’s world fair–HemisFair 68–actually started in 1967 when a group of business people sent me to Montreal for the purpose of selling San Antonio and our upcoming fair to a film company from the Czech Republic. Expo 67, the world fair in Montreal, had just ended.

This venture was almost as crazy as it sounds, and the outcome is still beyond my comprehension. There were others from San Antonio involved, but I saw only the Czech film executive who represented the two productions–film shows titled Laterna Magika (The Magic Lantern), and Keno Automat. No communist countries were invited to participate in HemisFair, but these film productions were independently owned and produced by citizens of the Czech Republic.

I was still with the Express-News at the time. It was late September, 1967, and I was wearing a paper-thin sports coat when I climbed off an Air Canada plane that brought me to Montreal from New York City. It was snowing lightly and I was shivering. I thought I might freeze to death. My involvement was not financed by the newspaper, but by a San Antonio business amalgamation headed by R. Jay Cassell. Cassell was a mover and a shaker on the San Antonio business scene at that time.

Imagine the hick from Junction checking into Montreal’s Chateau Champlain Hotel, billed then as the elite and most expensive of all hotels in the world. The Chateau Champlain builder had sworn to construct a hotel that would make Conrad Hilton structures look like chicken coops by comparison. This giant of chrome, glass, and steel then towered 40 stories above the St. Lawrence River and the city of Montreal, Quebec, and night lights shimmering over the water were breathtaking.

Of course I did not recall the Czech Republic guy’s name, but I do know that he liked me. It was his idea but I didn’t resist when he took me to a wild joint with half-naked women and two bands blaring at the same time. I told him stories of Texas cowboys, menudo, whores, and chicken fights,the specific narratives including fuckers, fighters, wild horse riders and windmill hands like the indomitable Hunger brothers of Junction and Kimble County, and we drank Canadian Club Whisky until both of us were just short of knee-walking slobbering drunk.

“Ah, yas,” I recall him saying. “Big fun in Texas, yah?”

My friend finally loaded me into a cab and we were headed back to the Chateau Champlain Hotel as the sun rose over the beautiful St. Lawrence River. My Czech friend signed a contract the next day to bring both of his productions to San Antonio. Keno Automat and Laterna Magika were two of the greatest and most successful attractions at HemisFair 68.

On weekends, I had a sideline job in the HemisFair Press Center, a building that also housed an office for Governor John Connally, and the Arkansas Pavilion, the only exhibit not representing a country. Highlights of the Arkansas pavilion were two spectacular female spawns of the Ozarks named Glenda Brown and Sherry Worsham. One look at these two and you knew precisely why they were chosen to represent Arkansas. And right across the fair walkway was The House of Sir John Falstaff, the largest and busiest saloon on the fair grounds, and my second home until HemisFair 68 was over.

On occasion, my HemisFair job called for me chauffering dignitaries and various VIPs around the grounds in a golf cart. I soon learned this was not my calling when I met Canadian actor Lorne Greene, who played Ben Cartwright in the TV series Bonanza. Greene was unimpressed when I told him I knew Dan Blocker, the undisputed star of the series who I had met when I attended Sul Ross State University in Alpine. I’m sure he must have been jealous of his TV son Hoss. He looked at me as if viewing an insect.

“Sure, sure,” I recall Greene saying. “Everyone in Texas knows Dan Blocker.”

Dallas Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith was my favorite HemisFair passenger. Dandy Don was a hoot and I have never forgotten that day I spent with him.

“Look at my arm,” he said, putting his forearm alongside mine. “Not much bigger than yours, right. That’s why I have got to get out of pro football. I need to get out before someone kills me.”

Those were the hard early years when the Cowboys lacked adequate front line protection for the quarterback. Meredith was being pounded without mercy on almost every football Sunday.
Don was six-three and his forearm was a damn sight bigger than mine, but he was making his point.

“You can plainly see that I don’t have any business playing out there and being assaulted by animals like Dick Butkus and Alex Karras.”

Meredith was always the showman. He described his lowest point in pro football with a grin: “You are five touchdowns behind in the fourth quarter in the Cotton Bowl, it’s raining and freezing cold, and the Cowboys fans are throwing cabbages. It don’t get any worse than that.”

Of all the celebrities I was to meet during HemisFair, iconic western actor Chill Wills was the one who seemed to always be around the most. Wills and San Antonio restaurant owner and parttime actor John Hamilton had both worked in John Wayne movies, the most noteworthy being the epic 1960 film “The Alamo.”

Hamilton owned Big John’s Steak House just off Austin Highway in San Antonio, a popular eatery and watering hole frequented by actors, sports figures, politicians, gamblers, musicians, a few police characters, and a scattering of media people. Wills stayed with Hamilton throughout almost all of HemisFair, and I drank with him on many weekend evenings at the Falstaff saloon.
I recall a telephone call I got from John Hamilton at about 5 o’clock one morning. He and Chill had been drinking all night, and I could hear Chill’s gravel voice in the background.

“Is that Sam?”

“Yes,” John replied. And then said to me: “Chill wants permission to use that saying of yours, the one where you described some politician as having a face that resembled hammered shit.”

I told Hamilton I had no patent on the expression.

Then Chill Wills took the phone: “I know that saying must be an original, and I would sure like to use it with your permission. I am thinking of a Hollywood jerk right now that has a face that looks like hammered shit.”

I told Wills to be my guest and that made him happy. Hamilton said Chills then passed out with a smile on his face.

During HemisFair 68 and in months and years to follow, I was beginning to realize that my alcohol consumption was escalating. I told myself that I could handle it but I never did.

At the morning San Antonio Express I was on the evening shift, starting my day at 1 p.m. The Evening News guys started in the early mornings. By the early 1970s I had worked my way into a daily column called Offbeat, and the San Antonio Express and News eventually published a paperback book for me that was titled The Best of Sam Kindrick, Secret Life and Hard Times of a Cedar Chopper.

My subjects for Offbeat were just that, offbeat characters, many of whom also became friends. They included bookmakers Jack Hanratty and Tony Salinas, madam Theresa Brown, notorious shotgun-packing pimp and drug dealer Arthur Harry (Bunny) Eckert whose body is believed to be encased in concrete at the bottom of Canyon Lake, and many many more.

Hanratty, who was on the San Quentin prison fire department with Vegas casino operator Benny Binion, later sent me to Vegas to cover Binion’s first World Championship Poker Tournament.

I sat with Jack as he was dying from brain cancer, and I was a pallbearer at Jack’s funeral. The “old alligator” as many of us called him, inadvertently named this book.

“You are the outlaw journalist,” Jack said. And he crowned me with that appellation several years before my drug busts, jail time, and some of the darkest days of my life. Jack seemed to know. I was the outlaw journalist even before I was to really live up to the title.

A typical day at the Express and News when my drinking was really starting to kick in started with me arriving at the Melody Room Lounge on Third Street, just across from the paper, around noon. I recall drinking two and maybe three beers just to quiet my nerves. My hands were shaking slightly then, my guts were shaking inside, sweat was beading and dripping from both hands and feet and I found it all but impossible to type on my old manual Royal typewriter without the calming beers.

After settling slightly, I managed to write what I needed to write before leaving the newspaper for more drinking at downtown clubs that included Flamingo Lounge, the Black Fox, San Jacinto Club, the Burnt Orange Club, and the Southwest Conference Club. Sometimes I took a break to eat, sometimes I just drank. I usually stuck with beer until I couldn’t hold anymore. Then it was to Jack Daniels bourbon and water and later just Jack Black on the rocks. Sometimes I drank vodka, but never scotch if there was anything else available.

My excuse for all but living in these skull orchards was that I needed this environment to meet the colorful characters who paraded through my written copy. When the clubs closed at the legal alcohol deadline of 2 a.m., I headed straight for San Antonio’s infamous after-hours joints–Al Paesano’s Holiday Club, Phil Sfair’s Navy Club, and the club owned and operated by Phil’s brothers, Mike Sfair and George Sfair. This was the Commander’s Room on downtown Main Avenue where I did most of my heavy drinking damage. Before the club became the Commanders Room it was the Rickshaw, operated by Johnny Jowdy and his wife Bea.

These clubs operated after hours under what we were always told was a federal charter arranged by District Judge Solomon Casseb. These clubs were ostensibly “private clubs” where dues-paying members kept liquor in private lockers and paid for drinks mixed by the club bartenders. To some extent this started as the protocol, but all of the clubs wound up being open bars serving every mixed drink imaginable. We all learned years later when the after-hours clubs were all closed down that the “federal charter” was non-existent. It was not uncommon for me to stagger out of the Commanders Room with the rising sun in my face. Commanders Room senior owner Mike Sfair was an enormously popular figure among policemen, attorneys, judges, and politicians. Large, dark, and handsome, Sfair was a member of San Antonio’s sizeable Lebanese-American society who had aspired to be a policeman. When he graduated at the very top of his San Antonio Police Academy class, Mike and brother George were already attracting swarms of policemen and others to the club.

Then the inevitable hammer of municipal authority fell on Mike. The city manager got involved and the San Antonio Police Department’s top brass ruled that Sfair could not serve as a policeman while operating a nightclub. He was forced to make the decision, the cop shop or the Commanders Room. Sfair chose the more lucrative nightclub operation, and his Commanders Room was almost immediately filled with policemen and other public figures who sympathized with him, including a number of media people who included television and radio people and reporters and editors from both the San Antonio Express and News and the San Antonio Light.

Mike Sfair knew how to take care of us. Some of the patrons kept bottles in lockers behind the bar, but for the most part it was an open bar that served reduced price drinks to most of the patrons, with some police brass, judges, and newspaper figures like myself drinking free.

We were the people who could hurt an illegal after-hours drinking emporium, and operators like Mike and George Sfair knew it.

When I hit the Commanders Room, it was usually after all other drinking joints were legally closed at 2 a.m., and I would be half drunk when I entered the door. I wasn’t making much more than $150 a week with the newspaper in those days, hardly enough to sustain after-hours drinking of any kind of name brand liquor, so the Jack Daniels bourbon was not mentioned when I ordered free whiskey from Commanders Room bartenders Wooten and Shaw. Some of us low-income newspaper reporters referred to the cheap grade bourbon as “Old Tennis Shoe,” but we swigged it down nevertheless, me until I was blind drunk and lurching as I left the drinkery.

Driving While Intoxicated charges were rare in San Antonio in the 1960s and 1970s, and if you knew the right people they were almost non-existent. No policeman would bust a drunk leaving one of the after-hours clubs if he could possibly avoid it. I was stopped many times by policemen who let me go when they realized I was a newspaper reporter. On a few occasions, the patrolman would follow me home to ensure that I arrived in one piece, and when my Ford car hit another vehicle at slow speed at 4 o’clock in the morning as I pulled away from a curb next to the Commanders Room, the investigating patrolman called a wrecker before driving me home in his squad car. No charges of any kind were filed.

After leaving the Commanders Room on some mornings, and headed for my home on Harriett Street between San Pedro and McCullough avenues, it was not uncommon for me to pull into the Blue Room on San Pedro for one final drink. The Blue Room was the jittery alcoholic’s morning oasis, a dump owned by Wynn Little who opened promptly at 7 a.m.

I will never forget those sad Blue Room mornings which were marked by tendrels of cigarette smoke curling slowly from butts smoldering all on the sidewalk. The men and women suffering alcohol withdrawal were sitting in their cars, smoking furiously, and waiting for the Blue Room doors to open and the medicine that would be available on the Blue Room bar. They called this medicine Seagrams, Johnny Walker Red, Smirnoff, and Jack Black. The slaves to this juice were the losers I surrounded myself with. I was trying hard to become one of them and I had no idea why.

When I reached home on these awful mornings, I had a gallon jug of water I kept under the bed. The alcohol consumption had dehydrated me and I would swig copious amounts of the water. My skin was scaly and my face was puffed. I weighed 160 pounds, but my face suggested a 200 pounder. The bloated image on the cover of my first book tells the tale. I remember the look. It said my guts are on fire and I know there is nothing I can do about it. What the fuck is wrong? The best recognized recovery guide of the alcoholic calls the condition “powerlessness.” I’m sure that I could smell the fire and brimstone. I was that close. But not close enough to alter my drunken regimen. I was living my lie by then. I will quit drinking, by God, when I am ready.

By this point, my marriage was a sham. My poor wife had no idea what to do, and my kids were at loose ends.

Alcohol drove the wagon for those 1960s and early 1970s. Somehow I functioned. Barely at times. When my alcohol level reached a certain level, my personality proceeded to deteriorate. Dr. Jeckyll became Mr. Hyde. Nobody wanted near me. Mike Sfair finally barred me from the Commanders Room when I hit a state representative by the name of Stanford Smith in the mouth. It was an ugly scene, rolling on the floor through the blood, puke, and broken cocktail glass. I had a toilet mouth in those days. If I didn’t like your wife, it would not have been uncommon for me to call her a douche bag or worse, unmindful of the repercussions that were sure to follow. It would get much worse before it would ever get better.

My first meeting with Willie Nelson was under a mesquite tree outside the John T. Floore Country Store in Helotes.
Willie was smoking a joint.

I had little knowledge of country music or country musicians at the time, but I have always been drawn to the written word. Nelson’s lyrics were what originally roped me in.

First it was Hank Williams, then Willie.

Williams died in 1953, my senior year at Junction High School. I never got to meet him, but I did see him once at Cherry Springs Dance Hall, the historic tavern 16 miles north of Fredericksburg. I wasn’t old enough to get in, but I could see and hear Hank through an open window.

I heard “Cheating Heart” and “Kawliga.”

I was a Hank fan for life.

When Hank William died, people in Junction and Kimble County pulled to the sides of the road and turned on their car and truck lights.

It was a phenomenon I couldn’t understand, but one I could appreciate.

Years later, I watched women on Chicago’s Navy Pier climbing wire netting like monkeys, all trying to get at the new Texas superstar known as Willie Nelson.

I know. I was there in the gigantic entertainment complex. Willie and band were getting set to mount the stage.

Looking up at the females clinging to the wire, we just stood there for a few seconds.

“Did you ever dream it would come to this?” I asked Willie.

“Shit no,” said the Redheaded Stranger.

Paul English was on his drum kit and the downbeat rolled out over Lake Michigan.

“Whiskey river take my mind, whiskey river don’t run dry….”
Imagine two-thousand female monkeys, all screaming and screeching together.

It was a phenomenon I couldn’t understand, but I have always been able to appreciate it.

This little redheaded guy who sounded off-key but wasn’’t off-key had the rare ability to paint a picture with words. I sensed the greatness before I was able to articulate it.

It was in the mid-1960s, a time when my alcoholism was really starting to kick in. Johnny Bush was big then with his Bandoleros Band, and I was enjoying some ill-fated success as a columnist with the San Antonio Express and News.

Willie was smoking a joint when we met. He offered me a hit and I took a drag just to be sociable. Alcohol was my drug of choice at the time. I had little interest in marijuana. The hard drugs would come later.

I think Larry Trader introduced me to Willie. Trader was a local character and golf hustler with an engaging personality who had an uncanny ability to ingratiate himself with some country musicians. I knew that Trader had booked Ray Price for some shows in the San Antonio area. I also knew that Nelson and Johnny Bush had both worked for Price before forming their own bands. Bush was Price’s drummer. Nelson was the lead guitar.

A hectic, crazy, and life changing phase of my life was about to begin. The country music years with some of the greatest country musicians who ever lived.

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