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I was working with Elmer Kelton on the San Angelo Standard-Times when Buffalo Wagons, his first best-seller western novel was published. Kelton was my friend and one of my early influences in the writing game. He told me to always hang onto my day job if I ever tried writing books.

Elmer Kelton was voted the greatest western novelist of all time by the Western Writers of America association. And he was as humble as St. Frances of Assisi.

The following copy details my rough start in the newspaper business.

The English professor’s name was Elton Miles. He was a member of the Sul Ross State College faculty in 1955.

Miles kept me after class one afternoon to deliver this message: “I know you have been writing theme papers for other students and charging them in the neighborhood of $10. The papers are obviously the work of one writer, and many of them are quite good. But this business is going to stop.”

Then Miles asked me what I was majoring in. I told him I had no major. I was taking general courses and drinking a lot of beer. He was a skinny little fellow with a crooked grin and a limp shock of brown hair that kept falling down over one of his eyes. I knew he was plenty smart. I sensed that he sort of liked me. Even when he was dressing me down. He was doing it with his lopsided grin.

“You are accomplishing nothing,” Miles said. “You need to transfer out of Sul Ross to a school with a journalism department.” He was telling more than suggesting. “Southwest Texas State in San Marcos has a journalism department. Joe Vogel is head of the department and he is my friend. I am going to recommend you to Joe. This is something you really need to do.”

The rest is history. I didn’t know what journalism really was at the time, but I became a journalist in spite of myself. Vogel was a one-man journalism department with one parttime professor by the name of Box. I never took a course from Box. All of my J school courses were from Vogel. I hit it big with Vogel, my very first article for the College Star was an interview I did with a half-naked female student with hair scorched in a student housing fire just off the main campus.

The reporter for the weekly San Marcos Record concentrated on the fire, the damage done, and the number of fire-fighters it took to control the blaze. I wrote about nothing but the half-naked girl with the burnt hair, and Joe Vogel loved my story.

I married my first wife, Vicky Miller, shortly before leaving Sul Ross and Alpine for San Marcos. Vicky had just graduated from Alpine High School. She and Ann Bounds were the two prettiest girls in Alpine High. I pegged Vicky as the most comely. After graduating from Southwest Texas State, my first newspaper job was editor of the Bay City News, a small Bay City weekly owned by shrimp boat owner and captain Steve Parsuit. Steve didn’t have a printing press. We got the Bay City News printed just a few miles up the road in El Campo at State Sen. Culp Krueger’s El Campo Leader-News and Svoboda (Svoboda was the Czech language part of the paper). El Campo was and still is rice farming country with roots going back to the Czech Republic. Before this, the country was known as Czechoslovakia and the language was Czechoslovakian. A number of the oldtimers still spoke the language back in the 1950s. I heard it in some stores around Bay City and El Campo.

I would write copy and headlines for our paper, then Parsuit’s business flunky Chuck Arthur and I would drive it to El Campo for printing.

I fished and drank a lot of beer the three months I was in Bay City, the big event of my Bay City newspaper tenure being the birth of my first child, Grady Michael Kindrick. Grady was born premature on June 26, 1957, in Matagorda Regional Medical Center. He weighed three pounds at birth. Within two months, his weight had climbed to that of a normal child of that age. I was making $65 a week in Bay City, and when it began looking like the Bay City News might have been on shaky ground, I headed for Kerrville to write for Rankin Starkey’s Kerrville Daily News. The pay at Kerrville was $70 a week.

We rented a little duplex not far from the Junction Highway that ran through Kerrville. Vicky was spoon feeding baby Grady. We couldn’t afford to go anywhere, and our only entertainment in those days was a little black-and-white TV with rabbit ears. We could see snowy forms on the little screen, and the audio was just as bad. Sometimes we tried to watch boxing and wrestling.

The Kerrville job lasted a month. I started on the wrong foot in Kerrville. Carroll Abbott was Starkey’s editor, and I was all ears as Abbott explained that, in order to become successful in the Kerrville newspaper business, a young newsman like me should join the Kerrville Junior Chamber of Commerce. Abbott was a big wheel with the Jaycees. He insisted that this was the only way for a young fellow with any kind of ambition to go.

I didn’t know what the hell a junior chamber of commerce was all about, but I wanted to do good so I told Abbott to sign me up. Abbott then directed me to the city park. The Miss Texas pageant had just been held in the Kerrville City Park and the Jaycees had been tasked with dismantling the stage and catwalk that had supported the beauty contestants.

The Jaycee who seemed to be in charge handed me a clawhammer.

“What do I do with this,” I asked.

“Start pulling nails out of that catwalk,” he said.

“What’s the pay?”

“Nothing, of course” he said. “The Junior Chamber of Commerce is a civic organization. We do work like this because we are proud of our city.”

I handed him back the hammer and quit the Kerrville Junior Chamber of Commerce on the spot. I never joined anything again.

But my days in Kerrville were already in short number. When Rankin Starkey ordered me to wear a coat and tie to work, I told him I would if he would pay the cleaning bill. He refused and I was headed to San Angelo the next day for a reporting job with the San Angelo Standard Times, the daily newspaper I grew up reading in my hometown of Junction.

I got the San Angelo job by telephone. I called and asked for the editor. Managing editor Ed Hunter came on the line. I told him I was from Junction, that I had graduated from Southwest Texas State, that I wasn’t making enough money in Kerrville, and that I needed to make more than

$75 a week. Hunter said he could start me at $85 a week, and I was rich. I herded Vicky and Grady into our peach-colored 1951 Ford sedan and we were loaded and rolling into the sand dunes and tumbleweeds of West Texas. I had the world by the tail with a down-hill pull. I would make money and history in the metropolis of San Angelo where the Harte-Hanks red rooster was emblazoned on the door of every Standard-Times staff car.

I did know that Houston Harte and Bernard Hanks came out of the Missouri School of Journalism at the University of Missouri. They founded the San Angelo Standard-Times and branched out with a chain of mid-sized daily newspapers that included the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, the Greenville Hearld, Abilene Reporter-News, and three others that were not Texas papers. Bernard Hanks died during the early going, and Houston Harte kept the Hanks name in respect for Bernard Hanks’ widow.

It would be euphemistic to say that Houston Harte Sr. was eccentric. He was that and then some, a compact-sized executive with the stern and craggy features of a pitbull. He had red rooster images on most everything he owned.

I never knew the story behind Harte’s affinity for the barnyard cocks; I learned quickly, though, that the image of a crowing rooster in red ink was overlaid on the front page of every San Angelo newspaper when it rained an inch or more over three or more counties in the West Texas newspaper’s circulation area.

The red rooster was emblazoned on the door of every Standard-Times staff car. The foyer tile in Harte’s San Angelo mansion was red, white, and black, in the giant image of a crowing red rooster. Harte’s cufflinks were red roosters, and the newspaper icon was adapted by at least one independently-owned drinking joint, The Red Rooster on Concho Street. Harte-Hanks had no interest in the saloon, but most of the Standard-Times staff frequented the place.

The one staffer who did not drink in the Red Rooster or anywhere else was farm and ranch editor Elmer Kelton, a serious writer who was raised as a cowboy near Horse Camp on the Five Wells Ranch near Andrews in West Texas.

Kelton, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, is now recognized by many as the top writer of western fiction in America. His story lines were fiction, but Kelton’s work was as honest and unfailingly accurate as most pieces of library history.

Elmer had published his first western best-seller, Buffalo Wagons, when I met him. I was impressed with his humility. He wrote his fiction at night, his newspaper farm and ranch news by day.

“It’s fine to write western fiction at night,” Kelton once told me, “but be sure and hang on to your day job. There ain’t a lot of money in it.”

He then went on to win every western writers award available. He was voted the best western author in the counry by the Western Writers of America.

I liked Kelton because of his affable nature. He treated everyone the same and we all loved him. But he always declined when I invited him out drinking. I don’t think he even drank alcohol.

Publisher Houston Harte’s office was behind one-way glass. He could sit in his office and view everything going on in the newspaper city room. The outside of the glass was reflective, and new employees were known to fix their hair or squeeze pimples without knowing that the company’s chief executive was looking straight out at them.

I had been with the newspaper for about a year, long enough to rate a staff car with a red rooster on the door when I committed what I thought then was my worst gaffe in San Angelo. I was a general assignments reporter then, covering everything from car wrecks to an occasional murder away from San Angelo and Tom Green County. Each reporter had a designated parking spot in the Standard-Times lot. Mine was occupied by a cream-colored Cadillac when I pulled in from an assignment one rainy afternoon. A wooden sign that read Staff Only had somehow toppled over. It had a couple of rusty nails protruding from the sign board and it was caked with West Texas mud.

I picked the sign up and pitched it onto the hood of the Cadillac, mud and nails included. Then I found another parking place for the staff car and went into the newspaper building. I was in the newspaper snack bar when I heard old man Harte screech at Ed Hunter, the managing editor.

“Goddamn it Ed, find out right now who put that muddy sign with nails on my Cadillac.”

Hunter came to San Angelo from the Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City. He was a likeable professional, but he hadn’t been on the job long enough to know that the old newspaper pioneer had a soft spot in his heart for drunks and intemperant kid reporters.

Hunter was a little rattled. He seemed to know who to zero in on.

“Okay, Sam Kindrick, what about this?”

I had to confess.

“I thought Mr. Harte had a black Cadillac,” I told Hunter. “This one was cream-colored. I put the sign on it because it was in my parking space.”

Hunter was as collected as he could possibly be.

“Mr. Harte has five Cadillacs,” Hunter said. “One is black, one is white, one is blue, one is red, and this one is cream-colored. In the future, I think you had best not damage another Cadillac in the Standard-Times lot.”

Hunter didn’t know it at the time that old man Harte had never fired an employee for drinking or booze related mischief. George Kunkel would go on knee-walking, commode-hugging benders, only to return to his copy desk job withlittle or no repercussion. I never heard of Houston Harte drinking alcohol or being drunk, but his tolerance for booze-blitzed employees such as Kunkel and sports writer Blondie Cross was a topic of much discussion in high places and some not so high.

Blondie Cross covered high school football for the San Angelo Standard-Times, and anyone who knows anything about West Texas knows that high school football is king. Blondie Cross was a big, puffy albino-looking man with red skin and cloudy eyes. He wrote a Standard-Times sports column for years, and half of West Texas believed Cross had supernatural powers when it came to football game predictions. If Blondie predicted a team would win, that team almost always won, and the Standard-Time hierarchy ignored or tolerated Cross’s penchant for whisky.

First one and then another young reporter would be dispatched across West Texas to fetch Blondie and bring him home. The bosses all knew the score. My first Blondie Cross assignment found me driving to Eldorado where Blondie had supposedly had weather-related car trouble.
I found Cross’s car in a dry wash with water up to what we called the running boards in those days. The car had stalled but Cross was doing well.

He was sitting on top of the car as boiled as an owl.

My second child, Steven Howard Kindrick, was born August 27, 1958 in San Angelo’s Shannon Hospital. It was shortly after Steve’s birth that the word got out. Harte-Hanks was buying the San Antonio Express-News.

This, to me, was the bigtime. Houston Harte, we all knew, had long yearned for a flagship daily newspaper in a metropolitan setting.This was it and I was determined to go with them. I had little trouble making the transition. Ed Hunter recommended me, and I was subsequently hired by Express and News executive editor Charles O. Kilpatrick.

My salary: $100 a week in 1960. I had arrived.

<www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1340043527&__tn__=%2CdC-R-R&eid=ARDZF_jz6SBTy6-aiL9ybhzQ3tLtZ9g9gNZLuMuZBCaHSycQ2U4UM1GsKceDa3oxsqHypadi03Z3qXgR&hc_ref=ARTUeUoUIpjhrbbZORFDskPPJQT5CKxpVM2fePlY-GNtx…> 16 mins · <www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1340043527#> This is about Lacy McAndrew Brinson, my favorite female singer/songwriter who with husband Mike has written a hot new song about my late circuit-riding preacher friend George W. Cooper.
The song, which will be produced in a Nashville recording project by Dean Miller, son of country music legend Roger Miller, is titled Moonshine Revival.
Lacy is carrying me as a co-writer of the song because she says the tune was inspired by my story of Rev. George Cooper which appeared in my book The Best of Sam Kindrick–Secret Life and Hard Times of a Cedar Chopper.
“Your story inspired me to write the song,” says Lacy, who works as a federal attorney when not performing and writing songs. “I have loved your writing since we met, and the story of George Cooper was my inspiration for a song. My grandfather was a circuit-riding preacher in the South.”
I have always leaned toward the writers. That’s what first attracted me to Willie, his lyrics. Lacy is a special young lady who writes and performs with her own material. There are too many human jukeboxes around, those performers who scream into a skull orchard microphone with the material of others.
Here is Lacy’s intro for the project: Moonshine Revival -Lacy Brinson McAndrew, Mike McAndrew (©2019)
*based on a true story about Rev. George W. Cooper *adapted from “Rowdy Reverend” by Sam Kindrick (The best of Sam Kindrick, 1973)
In addition to the chapter on George Cooper in my book, I wrote a short booklet for George which he hawked on his clear channel radio programs which emanated from the Texa-Mexico border.
George <www.facebook.com/george.briscoe.967?__tn__=%2CdK-R-R&eid=ARCwzqcInAbS98YCx4qudSdr46jstIGAvX-Rxd-hIApjW4NbGNAlacoH-kgibV-tHdVXLXmPGyzFUh-W&fref=mentions> was the father of Billy Cooper, my longtime friend and a member of Willie Nelsons road crew for years. George came out of High Point, North Carolina and Lacy’s voice has a High Point ring to it.
Jim Chesnut introduced me to Lacy Brinson in 2017, and it was Chesnut, a former Nashville recording artist, who wrote the first Action Magazine cover story on Lacy. And after this, we had Lacy on the last Sam Kindrick music promotion at Texas Pride Barbecue.
The record project with Dean Miller producing will include Moonshine Revival and two other Lacy Brinson songs.
“I am excited about it, Lacy said. “We will see how things turn out.”
They should turn out good. Lacy has an honest country music delivery with a voice that sparkles like spring water running through a moonshine still.
Moonshine Revival has hit written all over it.

When I left Sul Ross at Alpine for my final two years of college at Southwest Texas State College in San Marcos (now Texas State University), there followed jumps to newspaper jobs in Bay City, Kerrville, and San Angelo before I landed a general assignments reporter job at the San Antonio Express and News in 1960.

I covered three major hurricanes for the Express and News, along with many other assignments, and I also wrote a daily column, but before I recount those early newspaper jobs and experiences I will recall the defining time in my career as a big city newspaper reporter.

I was in Crystal City, Texas, a small South Texas town that residents still proclaim to be “The Spinach Capital of the World.” It was circa 1970, and the statue of Popeye on the town square belied the explosive atmosphere which was beyond my sense of comprehension at the time.

La Raza Unida had been formed by Chicano activists Jose Angel Guiterrez and Mario Campean, both Mexican-American firebrands whose party translated to National United People’s Party.

I was in the midst of a political racial takeover as La Raza, with help from the Teamsters Union, fielded their own candidates and trucked South Texas migrant farm workers to the polls in an unheard-of takeover of all municipal offices. None of the candidates, including newly elected Mayor Juan Cornejo, had better than a fifth-grade education. La Raza had made a statement.

La Raza candidates won every municipal office in Crystal City that spring as tensions hummed like a fiddle string fixing to break. Anglo townspeople were boarding up their houses and leaving town as the governor sent famed and feared Texas Ranger Captain A.Y. Allee in to keep the peace.

The Express and News articles I wrote during and after the Crystal City political phenomena resulted in me being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Ironically, the man on the Pulitzer committee who nominated me, Express and News executive editor Charlie Kilpatrick, was to fire me from the newspaper in years to come. Times were crazy in those days.

As the polls closed and final votes were tabulated, I heard shouts on the streets which made it plain and clear that gringos such as myself were not welcome in Crystal City. I heard a couple of bottles shatter on the street asphalt. They were tossed from moving cars, but I saw no faces. There was fear in the air. It was almost palpable. I had rented a motel room from friendly Anglos who had moved to Crystal City from New York State. They had customers and friends with white faces and brown faces. They did not know what was happening. They didn’t understand what the racial divide was all about.

For many years the Texas Rangers had been a feared and hated force in the beet fields and the barrios of South Texas. The Mexican-American people have charged ranger brutality for years, and while there has no doubt been some justification for the racial prejudice charges, the rangers have proven themselves through the years as the unstoppable crime fighting machine of Texas.

Joaquin Jackson was the last Texas Ranger to be appointed by a ranger captain, Alfred Young Allee. Now the rangers come up through the Texas Department of Public Safety ranks like regular patrolmen. In his book One Ranger, Jackson devoted an entire chapter to Captain Allee.

In his prime, Captain Allee weighed about 200 pounds and stood about 6 feet tall. But Ranger Joaquin Jackson told me there was not a man on the planet who could stand up to Captain Allee.

Joaquin Jackson was my friend. I put him on the cover of my magazine once, and I also wrote about his wife Shirley, a country music vocalist with a lot of talent. So I believed every one of Jackson’s words when he described the ranger captain who gave him his job.

“Cap Allee is the most formidable man I have ever met,” Jackson said. “I believe him to be totally fearless. You meet him you know. It is in his eyes. There is no fear. It’s the A.Y. Allee presence. Nobody can stand up to it.”

I was to meet Allee and understand that presence on my first day in Crystal City. He was getting up in the years then. Allee called me “newspaper man” but I could sense he meant  “newspaper boy.” We became friends over the ensuing months. and I believe the tough old ranger captain developed a genuine liking for me. He chewed cigars, but I never saw him spit. He grunted on occasion, and I came to learn that some of his grunts were to emphasize his wishes or meanings.

The streets of Crystal City were almost deserted on election night. There was an eerie quiet when Captain Allee said, “Come on, newspaper man. You can go with me to the election party if you like.” Then Allee started walking and I fell in behind him. It seemed like the safest place to be at the time.

The election victory party was being held in a ratty, run-down, whisky bar known as The Veteran’s Club. It resembled an ancient army barracks that had long since said goodbye to its orignal and then peeling paint job.

The La Raza celebrants had a snoot full when we arrived. They were hooting, hollering, and filling the air with Spanish language invective which suggested raw danger.

Captain Allee’s cowboy boots thumped loudly as we crossed the Veteran’s Club flooring toward the bar. It sounded like a drum beat of doom. When Allee grunted it was like a combination of grunt and clearing of the throat. Grrruuump.

The Veteran’s Club was crammed with some sinister-looking characters, the shine of alcohol hatred and menace in their eyes.

“Grrruuump.” He did it before he spoke. Utter quiet. You could have heard a matchstick hit the floor.

“I need your attention,” Allee said. Not loudly but evenly. “Some of you know who I am. For those who don’t, I am Alfred Alee, captain of Texas Rangers. I have been appointed by the governor to see that the law is upheld in Crystal City. I will now take a minute to congratulate you on your election victory tonight. You won fair and square and I would be the last one to deny you.” Another pause. Another grrruuump before Allee finished his speech.

“You won this election,” he said. “But if any one of you tries to take the law into your hands, I will kill you.”

He grunted again and headed for the door. I fell in behind. No graveyard was ever quieter than the Crystal City Veteran’s Club that night. I was waiting for the bullet to crash into my back as I followed Allee across the floor and out the door.

The next day, I visited the captain at a small temporary office he maintained on Crystal City’s main street. I asked him about his stunning promise to the party celebrants and he told me something I will remember for the rest of my life:

“You will always be okay newspaper man if you say what you mean, mean what you say, and cover the ground that you stand on. Not one of those drunks last night doubted for a minute that I would kill the first one who broke the law and violated the peace.”

Allee was over 70 then and not far from retirement. He epitomized the legendary saying: You got one riot, you need only one ranger. His era was coming to an end and I think he might have sensed it. After the Crystal City showdown, Allee’s antagonists were relentless.

Crystal City Mayor Juan Cornejo, a diminutive fellow who might have stood 5-foot-4 at the most, flew from Crystal City to San Antonio where he filed federal assault charges against the ranger captain.

If I asked Captain Allee what was going on his answer never wavered. “”You are the newspaper man. You tell me.”

He answered a specific question with a straight answer.

“Mayor Cornejo has filed a federal assault complaint against you in San Antonio,” I told Allee. “What do you say to that?”

That warranted an Allee grrruuump and a typical Allee answer.

“If I had assaulted the mayor,” Allee said with a laconic grin, “he wouldn’t have been able to crawl on an airplane and fly to San Antonio to file any complaint. He would have been in a hospital. I didn’t assault him. I just picked him up and shook him a little.”

Captain Allee died in 1987 at age 82. The legend of the Texas Rangers has had a good run. Ranger Manuel (Lone Wolf) Gonzaullas tamed the oil boom towns of Texas; Captain Gully Cowsert of Junction wrecked every carnival that came near him; and Ranger Captain Frank Hamer ended the lives and bloody crime spree of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker.

A.Y. Allee was the last of the breed. He averted a race riot in Crystal City.

His tormentors danced around him near the end, filing lawsuits and complaints like a bunch of kids poking sticks at a proud but crippled wolf.

I was proud to call him friend who was true to his word. He said what he meant, he meant what he said, and he always covered the ground that he stood on.

When I graduated from Junction High School in 1953, I had little to show. I lettered in football, basketball, and track and field, no big accomplishment in a small Class A school. From Junction I went to Alpine where I enrolled in what was then Sul Ross State College. It became Sul Ross University in 1969. During the two years I spent at Sul Ross I was to meet Elvis Presley, Norman Cash, and Dan Blocker. None of these names meant much of anything to the world back in 1955. Little did any of us suspect that Presley would become the king of rock, that Cash would become an American League batting champion, or that Blocker would emerge as the hulking superstar Hoss Cartwright on the TV series Bonanza. I met Presley at an off-campus cafe the day before he was to make his West Texas debut at the Alpine High School Auditorium. I don’t recall name of the restaurant, but it was directly across from the Sul Ross campus on Alpine’s main drag. Presley was with Scotty Moore and Bill Black, his lead guitarist and upright bass player respectively. The three of them had been out tacking up flyers promoting the upcoming show. Presley’s early recordings on the Sun Records label were just starting to get air play. He was also coming off a successful run on the Louisiana Hayride radio show. I was in the cafe with Glen Llewallen, a Sul Ross basketball player. I don’t remember which one it was, but Elvis, Scotty, or Bill invited us to attend the upcoming show. Colonel Parker had yet to enter the Elvis Presley picture. Alpine KVLF Radio Dj John Nelson and Memphis promoter Bob Neal booked the show for $250. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill had to make that stretch three ways. The show was to benefit the Alpine Future Farmers of America. The high school furnished the PA. Llewallen and I did attend the show with Vicky Miller, a senior in Alpine High School who was to become my first wife and the mother of my children. My interest in that first Elvis show started with an attraction I had to guitaristt Scotty Moore’s quirky rockabilly style. At that time I had been fooling around with an electric guitar, a misguided folly I soon abandoned when it became more than obvious that I would never become the next Merle Travis or Tommy Emmanuel. Scotty did not disappoint on that distant night in the Alpine school auditorium, but the main attraction came as an unexpected jolt. Elvis was not decked out in the regal, high-necked gold lame´finery which was to become a part of his bigger-than-life image. He hit that school auditorium stage au naturel Presley, wearing a white T-shirt, jeans, and blue sneakers. It was Memphis magic with The Blue Moon of Kentucky shining somewhere out there with the Marfa Ghost Lights. It was 1955 and West Texas college girls were all but coming out of their undies in a high school auditorium. Who in hell told them they could shuck their britches? I had never witnessed anything like it. Presley was doing his pelvic palpitations that no modern day dick dancer has ever been able to emulate. Moore had the guitar calling from Rockabilly Heaven, and as Kinky Friedman might observe, Bill Black was snortin’ and fartin’ on the Tennessee upright walking bass. Petticoats were popular with many young females in those days, voluminous body draperies which were flying like kites as Presley somehow wound up with a marking pen in his hand. With some of the girls yanking petticoats all the way over their heads, Elvis couldn’t miss. He signed everythig but bare bottoms, and he might have autographed a couple of those in the melee. Just one year after that incredible night, Presley packed San Antonio’s Municipal Auditorium with screaming damsels. By this time he owned three Cadillacs and was on his way to unheard of world super-stardom. Glen Llewallen and I had asked Evis, Scotty, and Bill after the Alpine show to join us for drinks at a popular college skull orchard known as The Bull Beer Parlor. They accepted at first but later declined. They had a show booked for the following night in El Paso, and there was some concern that the old Cadillac they were driving might overheat if they didn’t get an early start. They pulled out at daybreak and I never again laid eyes on the king of rock-and-roll. Elvis died August 16, 1977; Bill Black died October 21, 1965; Scotty Moore died June 28, 2016. Norman Cash and I had two things in common. We were both born on November 10, 1934, and both of us liked to play 9-ball pool for money. Baseball and baseball players were foreign to me. We didn’t have the sport in the Junction school system, so when I met Norman Cash in the Sul Ross Student Union Building, we were competing with each other on a pool table for a dollar a game. Cash was as country as pig tracks, an easy guy to like and be friends with. He hailed from Justiceburg, Texas, a greasy spot in the road which was just down a fence line or two from the West Texas town of Post, population 5,000 plus a few more. We all called Cash “The Justiceburg Flash.” I don’t think he minded the nickname. I knew Cash was a Sul Ross baseball and football player. He was an All Lonestar Conference running back. What I didn’t know was that he was a world class athlete who would be drafted as a football running back by the Chicago Bears, and as a baseball player by the Chicago White Sox. He declined a pro football career to sign with the White Sox and after a series of trades he wound up with Detroit. Also known by friends and fans as “Stormin’ Norman,” Cash was the American League batting champion in 1961. He was a lefty. At Sul Ross I started watching baseball only because of my friendship with Cash. He drove homeruns over the right field fence in Kokernot Field with regularity. An outstanding power hitter, his 377 career home runs were the fourth most by an American League left-handed hitter when he retired, behind Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and Lou Gehrig; his 373 home runs with the Tigers rank second in franchise history behind teammate Al Kaline (399). He also led the AL in assists three times and fielding percentage twice; he ranked among the all-time leaders in assists (4th with 1,317) and double plays (10th with 1,347) upon his retirement, and was fifth in AL history in games at first base (1,943). Cash never seemed to take himself seriously. He was the first Detroit Tiger to hit a home run ball out of Tiger Stadium. He was to repeat the feat three more times before his retirement. And he may have been the first major league baseball player to bring a table leg instead of a standard baseball bat to home plate during a game. Nolan Ryan was in the midst of his second no-hitter when Cash walked up with the table leg. The umpire said, “You can’t bat with that.” Cash said, “Why not. I can’t hit him anyway.” That was the Norman Cash I knew. Cash drowned near Beaver Island in Lake MIchigan in October of 1986. Authorities ruled that he slipped on a wet dock and struck his head, causing him to slide into the water and drown. There were those, though, who believed Cash was murdered. One of the doubters was Detroit Lions football player Alex Karas, a friend and drinking buddy of Cash. Karas was quoted by one of their friends. He said: “They killed him, you know. They hung him over the boat, filled his cowboy boots with water, and let him sink. Gambling debt. He owed the wrong kind of people more than he could pay back. So they killed him.” I hate to think that Stormin’ Norman went that way. Toxicology tests showed that Cash was not drunk when he died. He was a powerfully built man, only 51, and with reflexes like a cat. I tend to believe Alex Karas might have had something. Norman never returned to Justiceburg that I know. I know that he had a wife when he died and that he was buried in Michigan. But you can never get all of the Texas out of a real Texan. Norman Cash was wearing his cowboy boots when he died. Dan Blocker had finished his Sul Ross football career and was back working on his masters in the dramatic arts when we met. I was working summers at the Sul Ross swimming pool, parttime life guarding and parttime pool maintenance man. Dan Blocker was a friendly giant who told me he had been teaching drama at Sonora High School. A native of De Kalb in Bowie County, and weiging 14 pounds at birth, Blocker was the biggest baby ever born in Bowie County. When I met him he must have weighed 350 or more, and with hair on his back like a West Texas peccary. I had already heard the Tobe Gober story before I met Blocker. Sul Ross was a rodeo school when I was there, and some of the cowboys on scholarship were enough to scare the shit out of the average student of the finer arts. One of the scariest was a big bulldogger named Tobe Gober, who wrote with bold black marker in the Sul Ross Student Union men’s room: All Band and Drama Majors are Queer. He signed it Tobe Gober. I heard the Blocker/Gober confrontation was brutal, but I could never say for sure since I wasn’t present. But there were more than a few witnesses who would testify that Blocker dragged a huge bulldogger into the student union building mens room by his hair, then stood over the battered cowboy while Tobe scrubbed the wall clean with soap and water. Such went the stories in the summer of 1955, a heady and exciting time for students at that West Texas college. Elvis Presley played the Alpine high school auditorium that year, and such stars as Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Huson, and James Dean were filming the epic movie Giant at nearby Marfa. Many of the stars, including Taylor and Dean, were driving the 30 miles over to Alpine where they swam in the college pool as townsfolk and students alike gawked. Dan Blocker was in his element.The movie stars were enthralled. Despite his gigantic size and 50-gallon oil drum physique, he was a stunningly graceful diver. With Liz Taylor and her swimming pool hand maidens in waiting, Big Dan did his thing on the 3-meter diving board. His massive 350-pound bulk would bend the high board almost to the water before catapulting Blocker skyward. He did graceful flips with twists that never failed to amaze the audience. Little did any of them dream that they were watching the big star of another generation and new age medium. It was 1955. They were watching big Hoss Cartright before the prize-winning TV serial Bonanza was even a germ in some producer’s mind. The Dan Blocker I remember was the playful giant who would enliven his own awards ceremony with humor not for the faint of stomach. I don’t recall exactly what the honor for Blocker was all about, but the ceremony was in the Alpine Holland Hotel banquet room. In the 1950s, many news photographers were still using the Speed Graphic Camera with flash bulbs that were cloudy blobs when spent. Blocker somehow picked up one of these discarded bulbs and stuck it in his nose. It did resemble a giant booger when big Dan faced his audience. “Anybody have a handkerchief,” he hollered. And the solemnity of the occasion was no more. My most vivid memory of Dan Blocker goes back to one late-summer day when I returned to my job at the swimming pool after visiting my hometown of Junction for more than a week. That pool was without a roof and my swim suit had been hanging in the bath house. I slipped it on and when I made it out to the pool, Dan Blocker was sunning himself on the pool apron. My suit was stiff from disuse, and I was vaguely aware of some sort of movement on my back when Blocker yelled at me. “Hey, Sam,” he said. “You need to be real still. And don’t make any sudden moves. There are three big scorpions on your back and you need to dive into the pool before they get you.” That did it. My back muscles spasmed and three giant scorpions stung me in unison as I leaped into the pool. I can still hear Dan Blocker’s guffaws. Those damn scorpions almost killed me, and Blocker loved every minute of it. But he liked me. His belly laughter told me so. Dan died May 13, 1972, in a Los Angeles hospital. Cause of death was a pulmonary embolism following gall bladder surgery. It was supposed to be a simple operation, but someone used a dirty knife. I felt like crying when I heard the news.

We will never forget the Cosmic Sweetheart and her cadre of foxy followers.

They took the San Antonio, Texas nightclub scene by storm in the rowdy and rip-snorting 1970s and 1980s.

The first time I laid eyes on Carol Cannon she was tending bar at Al Hoxie’s Horse Feathers Saloon on Wurzbach Road in San Antonio, Texas.

The power of first impressions can never be underestimated. Big Carol was a visual extravaganza who gave new meaning to an epic of cosmic dimensions.

Standing 6-foot-2-inches in her bare feet, San Antonio’s Cosmic Sweetheart sported the blond beauty of a screen actress and showmanship befitting a carnival queen. She moved with fluid bare-midriff grace, jingling and jangling and rattling in a cacophony of ankle bells and hoop earrings big enough for a trained seal to jump through.

In high school, she said, she was 5-foot-ll-inches tall and very curvy.

“The other kids called me Boom Boom Cannon,” Carol laughed.

She has a big and boisterous laugh to go with it all. There was always something mysteriously exotic about Carol Cannon, an intelligence that spoke of far more then a tall bar girl.

Inspired by Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger, the Cosmic Sweetheart had a twinkling half-karat diamond that belonged to her grandmother inlaid in one of her front teeth, and she was truly built like the proverbial brick shit house. All of this and her college teaching degree and her time as a high school teacher, plus early work as a musician with the Fort Worth Symphony produced a combination that would help land Carol Cannon speaking parts in two major movies and position her to become a major nightclub owner and operator on the San Antonio scene. She also helped form a small Fort Worth production company that discovered legendary Texas rock band ZZ Top. The fact that she went on to become a bank vice president and stock broker in later life was no coincidence.

The Cosmic Sweetheart is a nickname Carol carried from college. And that’s what she named what might have been the only third world discotheque in the country. Like most San Antonio’s major discotheques of the time, The Cosmic Sweetheart Discotheque was owned and operated by Ronnie Branham under the auspices of Alex Habeeb and El Dorado Vending. The club was frequented by Arab student pilots (Saudis and Iranians) who hated each other, and it was staffed by waitresses ranging from Chinese to Hispanic to Vietnamese descent. The Cosmic Sweetheart was near Lackland Air Force Base on San Antonio’s southwest side.

Those were the days before the Islamic revolution when the U.S. friendly Shah of Iran was in power. The military exchange situation we had with that country is now part of our contentious history with the Iranians.

Although she worked in numerous San Antonio nightclubs, Big Carol, as she was known to many, is best remembered for her tenure as owner/operator of the Foxy Lady Saloon on Perrin Beitel Road in San Antonio.

This came about when Alex Habeeb said, “Carol, we need to put you in your own club. I have been watching you and I know you can handle it. I believe we can make a lot of money.”
So the Foxy Lady Saloon was born. Carol’s Foxy Lady bartenders and wait staff were all female stunners who worked under such titillating titles as Miss Joyful, Patty Perfect, Annie Oakley, Teen Angel, and The Diamond Princess. All were fitting nicknames for a Cosmic Sweetheart’s earthly domain which was to attract country music stars like Willie Nelson and casting directors for major films such as Race With The Devil and Logan’s Run.

I recall the night that we crowded into Willie Nelson’s Mercedes out behind the Foxy Lady Saloon to hear the completed tape of Redheaded Stranger, the album that would go platinum and catapult Nelson into almost instant national stardom.

Carol, me, Willie, Larry Trader, and Billy Cooper were jammed into the Mercedes. The marijuana smoke was so dense we could barely see. Willie was as excited as I had ever seen him. Trader and Cooper were working for Nelson at the time.

Of the new album, he said: “This one is the real motherfucker.” And those were his exact words.

Carol recalls Willie’s penchant for tequila sunrises and Joy Gandy, the dimpled waitress with long flowing raven tresses who answered to the nickname Miss Joyful. Joy was a stone fox, an eyefull befitting of her stage name.

“Willie was married to his second wife Connie at the time, and the crush he had on Joy was just a big crush,” Carol recalls. “But everyone had a crush on Joy. Willie and Joy never dated. She was beautiful with the huge dimples and long black hair. Willie was the biggest name visiting the Foxy Lady at the time, although we did get a call from The Eagles. They were playing San Antonio when someone from their group called and asked for directions, but the Eagles never showed up.”

Carol said, “I have always had a Plan B.
When I left a school teaching job in Fort Worth for San Antonio in the early 1970s, I never dreamed that San Antonio would be my forever home. I was in a marriage that wasn’t working , and my best friend, Joy Gandy, was waiting tables and tending bar in a jumping San Antonio discotheque called Tiffany Palace. Joy recommended me to the club owners and I was hired. My life was never the same again.”

In those days, the major disco nightclubs were built and largely controlled by shrewd and astute business individuals and amalgamations of the same.

When Carol Cannon was hired at Tiffany Palace, the club was being bankrolled by El Dorado Vending, a company comprised of Alex Habeeb, Joe Friesenhahn, and John Fitzpatrick. Ronnie Branham was the club operator/owner, and he hired Carol at the suggestion of Habeeb.

“They were buying and developing these properties all over the city,” Carol said. “They were fixing them up and installing renters (titular “owners”) to operate them. They got their rent from the club operator, plus proceeds from all vending machines their company supplied, including juke boxes, pool tables, and game machines. The money was literally flowing.”

El Dorado Vending was comprised of an unlikely combo as Carol recalls them.

“One was Lebanese, one was a Jew, and the third was an Irish Catholic,” Carol said. “They couldn’t have been better or more efficient at what they did. Habeeb was in for the bucks and the lifestyle. Fitzpatrick and Friesenhahn were in it for the money. John was married and Friesenhahn couldn’t have been any lower profile than he was. Alex Habeeb liked the lifestyle, but his main focus was always the money and he was a financial genius who knew how to deal with people.”

Malcolm Gildart, owner of Allcoin Equipment Co., was also partnered with Habeeb and Freisenhahn in bankrolling many of the Ronnie Branham clubs. Gildart also put Jack Mikulenka in business with the numerous Jack clubs.They all worked together.

During her earlier years in Fort Worth, Carol Cannon was raised in a musician family.

“My mother once worked the road with Glen Campbell,” Carol said. “And I was playing with the Fort Worth Symphony when I was very young. I played violin, viola, and cello. My mom was a violinist.”

Carol had an affinity for all things music, and the importance of secondary education was part of her upbringing. Carol’s natural flair for the dramatic was always near the surface, though, and while she worked her way through three universities and into a junior high teaching job, Big Carol was busily helping form a producion company that was largely responsibe for discovering the Texas rock phenomenon ZZ Top.

“I graduated from Texas Wesleyan in Fort Worth,” Carol said. “I also attended TCU and The University of the Americas in Mexico City. I was teaching Spanish in the junior high level when I left Fort Worth for San Antonio. I think one of my biggest accomplishments while in Fort Worth was teaming up with my friend Jack Ford and a few other little hippie types to sign ZZ Top for a Texas outlaw tour. Each of us put in a few thousand dollars. It’s like I said, I have always had a Plan B. We called our group Brotherhood Productions.The band was unknown when we started this tour through 22 Texas towns and a few cities. We had an old van with ZZ Top painted on both sides in gigantic letters. It was an attention getter and ZZ was really starting to click with the public. We were making some good money when our tour wound up in Dallas. By then we could afford a good hotel, and I recall Billy Gibbons looking out one of the hotel windows at a line of people forming for the show at a nearby venue. He was realizing that his life was never going to be the same again.”

Asked what happened with ZZ Top after the tour, Carol replied with a sharp edge in her voice: “Stone City Productions of San Antonio stole them right out from under us. Just like that, here today and gone tomorrow.”

Carol grew up in Fort Worth, and she did what a number of young women of that day were expected to do. She graduated college, got married, and started teaching school. The marriage was Carol’s first of four and there were major problems from the outset.

“The poor guy had served in Vietnam,” Carol said. “He was suffering from ptsd in a big way. I didn’t know what it was at the time. He was about to drive me crazy when I came to San Antonio to visit my friend Joy Gandy. Her husband was military and stationed in San Antonio. I had no intention of staying for any real length of time, but Joy was tending bar and doing well at the Tiffany Palace, one of the city’s largest discos, and I jumped at a waitress position which came after Joy recommended me.”

A turning point for Big Carol, this new nightclub gig, and one that took no lengthy contemplation on her part.

“Teaching junior high I had been making $392 a month after takeouts for taxes and United Way,” she said. “I was 25 years old at the time, and when I made $94 in tips my first night at Tiffany Palace, it was like wow and yes, I was in the wrong business. I could make more in one week at the discotheque than I was making in a month teaching in the Fort Worth school system. Alex Habeeb of Eldorado Vending told Ronnie Branham to hire me.”

It was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship. Branham was to operate other large and successful discos like Deja Vu, Hallelujah Hollywood, Last National Bank, Sugar Daddy’s and the live country music Longneck Club.”

Carol Cannon and Ronnie Branham had much in common, the most obvious trait they shared being a propensity for show. Branham tooled around the city in Bentleys, Auburn Boat Tail Speedsters, and other expensive and exotic automobiles, while Carol made a fashion statement that few young women would have the nerve to emulate. She paid San Antonio dentist Jerry Beckel to drill a hole in a perfectly healthy front tooth for the diamond implant Carol was still flashing at age 71 when this writing took place. And Beckel was still practicing dentistry.

Said Carol: “He was a little hesitant about drilling into my perfectly good tooth, but I kept after him until he agreed to do it. The diamond idea came from Mick Jagger. I have always been a Jagger freak and I was intrigued when I saw a diamond implanted in one of Jagger’s side teeth.”

Carol said she met the Rolling Stones lead singer in the old Marriott Hotel Bar on Austin Highway when Jagger was dating the Texas girl he eventually married. She has seen 11 Rolling Stones shows, the most memorable and thrilling of them all being the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium Stones performance when the glint of her diamond-studded incisor caught Jagger’s eye.

“He saw the diamond, and when he saw it, he moved out to the edge of the stage in front of me and poured champagne on my head,” Carol said. “It was his way of acknowledgment and his approval of my diamond smile.”

Attention with a flair for drama was always Big Carol’s forte. At a convention center Taste Of The Town event which featured displays by restraurants and pricey bistros from all over the city, Carol Cannon was the focal point for the Branham discotheques.

She showed up in a silver lamé space suit topped by a blinking lighted turban powered by a battery pack. With platform shoes, Carol said she stood 6-7 while heat from the turban all but fried her brain.

“It was a statement,” she said. “The Branham clubs were there and represented with the best eateries in the city.”

If there is a touch of narcissim in Big Carol’s makeup, nobody ever objected, let alone the spectators and film techies who watched her bare-assed naked interviews with two major film casting directors.

“A bunch of us were in the Foxy Lady when this guy walked through the door. He handed me a card and said he was a casting director. He said, ‘Well, you must be the Cosmic Sweetheart.’ He told me a number of people had recommended me for a part in the movie. If I wanted to try for a part I was to meet him the next day at one of the bigger hotels downtown.”

Carol eventually wound up with speaking parts in Race With The Devil with Peter Fonda, Warren Oates and Loretta Swit, and in Logan’s Run with Farah Fawcett and Peter Ustinov. Logan’s Run was Fawcett’s first movie. The casting director for both films was the same, and the Cosmic Sweetheart was required to appear naked for both casting sessions.

She vividly recalled that first casting session for Race With The Devil:

“I took Teen Angel with me. She was 18 and gorgeous. The hotel lobby sign said ‘20th Century Fox Casting. I’m all dressed up for the occasion, mingling and jingling, wearing a yellow dress that was barely tied in the front. There were about 30 people sitting around this big room. They watched me walk and listened to my voice. Then the casting director told me he wanted me to take off all my clothes. I thought..Whoa, what is this? But I went into the dressing room and came out wearing nothing but high heels.”

Boom Boom Cannon had scored a direct hit.

“They called the next day and told me I had a part. I think more than 200 girls had been considered.” Carol got her friend Joy Gandy parts in both films. Carol was called in to audition for Logan’s Run where, once again, she was required to completely disrobe. Carol said, “I played the head witch in Race With The Devil, an American action horror film. My part was in a human sacrifice scene.”

Logan’s Run, Carol said, was a futuristic film in which nobody lived to be older than 30. She played a dancer in the Love Shop.

In the San Antonio nightclub industry of the 1970s and 1980s, every club owner with a brain knew the value of a charismatic and physically attractive “day girl’ bartender. The nights took care of themselves, but daytime business often depended on the looks and steady line of bullshit produced by the great “day girls” of the time. Although horny male customers who sat for hours in rapt anticipation were seldom afforded even a sniff of the tantalizing day bartender goodies, they stuck around nevertheless until the shift ended. No matter how remote and unlikely it might be, there was always the hope a bright and loquacious day bar girl could stoke and nurture until the inevitable end: No pussy, boys, just a lot of happy hot air.

To the club owner, female day bartenders with these attributes were worth their weight in $10 bills. It ain’t easy to tell six different off-color jokes to six different bar patrons at the same time without losing a name or a punchline while mixing and shaking margaritas and daiquiris and washing dirty glasses without missing a beat. These girls were deceptive mistresses of illusion, and the suckers never tired of them.

Lana Seekatz of Squirrel Cage and Sugar Shack fame was one of San Anonio’s best day girl bartenders. Lana also sold ads for Act-ion Mgazine. And there were a limited number of others who fit this special bar category. But none of them ever eclipsed the Cosmic Sweetheart when it came to keeping a day bar full of restless roosters entertained.

Such was the case when Big Carol took Patty Wall (aka Patty Perfect) to work a celebrated day gig on Boerne’s main drag. Carol couldn’t recall the exact name of the saloon, but she won’t ever forget the opening day.

Enter Janet Quist, the Cosmic Sweetheart’s friend who just happened to be Hugh Heffner’s December 1978 Playboy centerfold model. Big Carol had invited her up to sign some Playboys for the Boerne cowboys.The Boerne saloon was jammed to the scuppers. Carol said the testosterone was all but dripping from the rafters.

“I think every cowboy in Kendall County might have been in the joint,” Carol said. “They were pushing and shoving, all eager for Janet to sign their copies of Playboy. I never smelled so much Old Spice in one place at one time in my life.”

Going back to the beginning, the Cosmic Sweetheart Discotheque operation will forever be seared into Carol Cannon’s memory. It was truly a third world disco, staffed by large waitresses of varied nationalities, and patronized by an odd mixture of Arabs who were in pilot training at Lackland.

“The Arabs loved large women and a lot of the waitresses I hired were big ones,” Carol said. “We had waitresses of Chinese, Hispanic, and Vietnamese descent, and our clientele consisted almost exclusively of Arabs, both Saudis and Iranians, plus the big mamas who followed them. This arrangement proved to be tricky at time because the Iranians and Saudis hated each other.”

Branham and his associates picked the right girl for this job, for few others could have maintained order and some semblance of sanity and still realized a profit in a club like the Cosmic Sweetheart.

Carol was the DJ who spun the records and she was the manager who served as sergeant of arms for the Cosmic Sweetheart.

“We catered to the Arabs,” Carol said. “No one else in town wanted them. They all drank Johnny Walker Red scotch with orange juice, and every single one of them smoked Marlboro cigarettes. And we had a rule that kept the Iranians and Saudis from declaring all out war on one another. Anyone who got out of line had his picture taken by our house photographer. That photo was put on the wall and the offender was barred for life.”

Carol said the Middle East pilot trainees were constantly on edge.

“The Saudis were okay with the Arab designation,” Carol said. “But don’t call an Iranian an Arab, although that’s what they are. They insist upon being referred to as Iranians.”

The club regulars called Big Carol “The Sword” in Arabic. They had it right.

One of Carol’s biggest thrills was a trip to the Apollo Theater in New York’s Harlem, courtesy of the politically-connected Sutton family of San Antonio. G.J. Sutton was a powerhouse on San Antonio East Side for years, while his brother Percy owned the New York theater. Included in the San Antonio entourage were Carol, friend Karen (Red on the Head) Dittman and boyfriend. and longtime friend Michael Teas and his partner.

“We took the A-train to Harlem in 1985,” Carol said. “It was billed as Motown Returns to the Apollo. It was an incredible show and gathering with the greatest names in show business there. Bill Cosby emceed and the performances were unbelievable. We saw and heard Little Richard, Patty Labelle, Sammy Davis Jr., The Four Tops, Etta James, and Diana Ross. It was televised. Boy George was there along with Rod Stewart. Jesse Jackson, and Coretta King. Just too many names for me to remember them all.”

As disco was born with John Travolta and Saturday Night Fever, disco was to die with the advent of Travolta and Urban Cowboy.

“The disco dancers all went to the two-step,” Carol said. “That was when I moved on to work for John McCormick at the Dallas Nightclub. John owned several clubs, including the Midnight Rodeo. I worked for more than 10 years as John’s inspector general. This included doing payrolls and even carrying a tool belt to work on club airconditioners and other equipment.”

Finally weary of the nightclub scene, Big Carol applied for a job at Citi Bank, was accepted, and eventually retired as a vice president in the bank’s brokerage department. She always had the Plan B.

Boom Boom Cannon was retired at this writing. She is now Boom Boom Cannon Carpenter, living happily in San Antonio with her husband Larry Carpenter and their two dogs. Caroll is now an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church, and she has performed her first wedding ceremony. She says the church is about everything spiritual. She says that’s where she is today.

While Larry stays home with the dogs, Carol travels abroad about three times a year. She recently returned from the Holy Land. She laughs a lot and when she smiles, one may see a diamond’s twinkle. And think, perhaps, of Jagger and the Stones. Maybe about longevity. Or maybe about large females with cosmic insight and X-ray eyes that can see your soul.

“I think we die the first time when we quit breathing,” Carol said. “The second time we die is when people stop talking about us. You and I may live for eons.”

This electronic cigarette phenomena is increasingly taking shape as a fairy tale with a less than happy ending.

Yes, the medical experts are starting to find that vaping ain’t what the vape manufacturers had it cracked up to be.

Inhaling nicotine fumes with a plethora of fruity flavors has been touted as a way to avoid the evils of burning tobacco. Stop smoking and start vaping, they said.

All of which, in my opinion, is a tub of tobacco industry horse shit with the fragrance of lilacs and petunias.

And now the maker of Marlboro tobacco cigarettes and other cancer sticks, a company called Altria, has sprung a new gadget on the tobacco addicted public called IQOS

The gadget tub thumpers say IQOS is less harmful than tobacco although it contains tobacco rather than liquid nicotine as in the vaping process.

The tobacco industry won’t back off, although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just said it is investigating more than 150 potential cases of severe lung illness associated with vaping.

Don’t tell me about tobacco harm. Cigarettes gave me bladder cancer which I got rid of years ago, and my youngest son Steven died this past year with small cell lung cancer, a condition I choose to believe was brought on by his cigarette smoking habit.

I quit sucking on cigarettes over 20 years ago. I smoked up to two packs a day, drawing them down so short the ashes all but fell off behind my teeth. Then it took me another four or five years to finally quit dipping Copenhagen snuff. And all of this happened after I finally gave up alcohol and drugs in 1989.

When I met my wife Sharon I was mainlining the tobacco into my system with the Copenhagen. How she put up with it as long as she did is a mystery today. I slept with the snuff in my mouth, swallowing the overflow juice,

I hit bottom with the Copenhagen one Easter Sunday morning. When I walked into the bathroom to brush my teeth, I found my pillow tightly glued to my beard with dried Copenhagen runoff.

Substitutions and switching of the poisons never works.

Musician Ray Wylie Hubbard and I once decided that cocaine might be an answer to our drinking problem. Wrong!

Nothing worked until we quit it all.

Switching from alcohol to dope and back to alcohol is, for alcoholics like us, akin to switching seats on the Titanic. We were bound for a watery grave until we quit it all.

An old recovered drunk I knew famously proclaimed: The way you quit drinking is you quit drinking!

And I truly believe that the only way to quit smoking is to quit smoking. And I also know that Denial ain’t a river in Egypt.

She was foxy, plucky, irreverent and dressed to the nines, a working girl who would become both famous and infamous in the city of San Antonio, Texas. Some even called her beautiful.

This was my friend Madam Theresa Brown on the day we met. I was a cub reporter for the San Antonio Express and News, she was getting her brothel business recognized and well known. It was in the early 1960s.

We were in Phil Sfair’s Navy Club on Pecan Street, one of the most popular of San Antonio’s after hours emporiums. It was frequented then by judges, lawyers, media people and sports figures. I had asked the bartender about the looker chick on the barstool a few stools down from me.

“Theresa Brown,” the bartender said.

I knew the name and the reputation. When I walked over to introduce myself, T-Brown (by her own eye-twinkling admission the biggest whore in town), turned to me with a knowing and mocking smile.

“The newspaperman,” she said. “I know who you are.”

Maybe she thought I was hitting on her. And maybe I was, depending upon the level of Jack Black I had in my system. It’s hard to remember now. But I never forgot her words.

“You can’t afford me, newspaper boy. So don’t even try. But I’m gonna buy you a drink. Maybe more than one. And you better not go back to that newspaper and write something about me.”

T-Brown, as I always called her, and I sat right there and got shit-faced drunk together. I think she picked up the tab. She probably did for I had little spending money in those days. I can’t recall all we discussed that evening and night. I do know we didn’t leave there and jump into the sack, and I know that our Navy Club meeting was the beginning of a friendship that would endure for more than 50 years. She was right. I couldn’t afford her. Little did we guess at the time that Theresa would help get me and golf great Lee Trevino kicked out of a popular San Antonio restaurant, or that T-Brown would someday run against a man she called one of her former whorehouse clients for a seat on the San Antonio City Council; or that Brown would terrorize the Bexar County Court House and political environs with a 3,000 name trick list that she threatened to make public.

T-Brown was a rebel with a cause. A divorcee with two little boys to feed, she put her back to the snapping dogs of derision and faced the world of shame and disclaim like the tigress she was. She was tough as a pig snout in many ways. She called the manager of the San Francisco steakhouse a motherfucker in a screaming embroglio for the ages, but deep down inside was a sad little girl with a sweet and caring spirit that few got to witness.

When my son Grady committed suicide, T-Brown was one of the first to offer love and comfort. And I was able to reciprocate when her son Cecil died in a one-car roll-over. We both meant it from the bottom of our hearts when we expressed our mutual sorrow.

But her unique sense of humor was always there, an omnipotent threat to the sensibilities of the sanctimous and the phony. Especially those good ole politico boys who had trouble keeping their peckers in their britches.

My World Championship Menudo Cookoff was about to kick off in Raymond Russell Park. The beginnings of a crowd that would number in the thusands were starting to arrive. Willie Nelson and 30 other bands were tuning up for the event. Attorney Alan Brown and homicide detective Roy Aguilar were warming up for their 3-round boxing match that Brown won by a knockout.

Then came Theresa and her girls, arriving in a Winnebago with untrammeled fanfare and a huge sign that proclaimed: Hot Pants Menudo.

The throng was already spilling over into the adjacent Sunset Memorial Park where they would litter and overturn more than one grave marker.

“Damn you Theresa,” I recall hollering, “we have enough heat without you and the girls.”

T-Brown was unflappable.

“We know more about cooking menudo than you do,” she told me. “Leave us alone.”

As the years rolled by, Theresa’s notoriety increased exponentially. She was living in Kyle between San Marcos and Austin when she died in a San Antonio hospital of natural causes. We had maintained an email connection until shortly before her death September 18, 2012.

When the standard funeral home death notice reached the Express and News city desk, the editors didn’t realize whose passing they were publicizing. Theresa merited only a short obit with her name listed as Theresa Brown Burquette and nothing about her sensational background. A young and beautiful photo of Theresa accompanied the printed copy. No cause of death was given and the notice asked that all donations go to the San Antonio Women’s Shelter. The official obit did note that Theresa “will always be remembered for her adventurous nature and love of travel.”

Once again, the Express and News city desk had blown it, opening the door for my full-blown Theresa Brown column in Action Magazine, identifying her as the notorious San Antonio madam who terrorized politicians and hobnobbed with sports stars and members of “the fourth estate.”

An Express and News staffer called me in a panic after the Brown column in Action Magazine.

Yes, I told the newspaper person. This was indeed the famed Theresa Brown, and, yes, I had been her longtime friend.The San Antonio Express then quoted me in a comprehensive obituary which covered the sensational and troubled life of San Antonio’s Madam Theresa Brown.

Here, in part, is how the daily newspaper story went:

Theresa Brown, who has died at age 78, was a brothel madam from San Antonio, Texas, who caused palpitations in many American households after it was revealed that she had carefully maintained a catalogue of more than 3,000 men – politicians, sports stars, religious “pillars of the community,” and at least one district judge – who had visited her establishment.

The so-called “Trick List”, whose existence was revealed after the FBI raided her bordello in 1980, was made even more combustible by the fact that, alongside the names, Theresa Brown had noted each man’s sexual preferences and peccadilloes. America’s Establishment breathed a sigh of relief when the lawmen who had confiscated the list burned it, but agonies were later renewed when it transpired that Theresa Brown had kept a back-up.

At some point after her arrest she was said to have given the list to a journalist working for a leftist local newspaper, but she later regretted doing so and won a temporary restraining order preventing the paper from publishing it. The paper, meanwhile, found itself deluged with threats from husbands and phone calls from wives anxious to know if their husbands’ names were on the list.

In February 1981 the chief District Judge William Sessions (later director of the FBI) decided not to renew the order and the paper subsequently published the names of 19 of Theresa Brown’s alleged “high and mighty” clients, whose sexual preferences, the paper claimed, were “too indecent to print”.

Theresa Brown was subsequently sentenced to five years probation, and in 1982 the remnants of her brothel, including a selection of clients’ underwear and a circular bed bearing the legend “please remove your clothes” were sold off.

Theresa Brown never divulged the identities of other clients, though for years local and national newspapers continued to speculate about its contents. For many men, the possibility that the list might some time be published in full remained a Sword of Damocles hanging over their lives.

Theresa Brown was born in San Antonio in 1934. According to a later interview she had two children and worked as a bookkeeper and clerk before opening her brothel in the 1960s. “I was getting $50 a month for both kids, and we lived in a (housing estate) project,” she explained. “I decided to better myself in the grand tradition of free enterprise.”

In the ranks of such establishments, Theresa Brown’s brothel operated to the highest standards — and prices were set accordingly. House rules banned her girls from wearing religious symbols or wedding rings during working hours and instructed them never to use drugs, to bathe daily, to keep the house clean and to wear shoes when clients were arriving or leaving.

After her establishment was closed down, she ran a bric-a-brac store for a short time and also ran, unsuccessfully, for San Antonio City Council – against an alleged former client, Gene Canavan.

Canavan, of course, denied the allegation, but Theresa said Canavan was one of her tricks and I believed her. She also told me that District Judge Ted Butler was on the list, no big secret since the entire courthouse crowd knew of judge Ted’s affinity for Theresa’s damsels of ill repute. But Theresa never publicly identified a one of her johns.

By court order in 1985, San Antonio police had torched the original list confiscated when they raided the bordello at 315 Northtrail Drive in San Antonio.

The publication Theresa gave the backup trick list was a left-leaning west side tab called El Pueblo. The reporter who received the index card file of client names was one Amanda Saldivar, and it was Saldivar who passed the list on to El Pueblo’s editorial board.

I know Theresa never wanted the list published. When El Pueblo named 19 of Brown’s clients, Theresa flew into a rage. She didn’t want the wives and the children hurt.

The tabloid called those 19 clients “the high and mighty of San Antonio, who in the past have constantly accused the Blacks, the Mexicns, the poor and working people of being immoral, corrupt, and law breakers.”

Represented by ace San Antonio attorney Pat Maloney, Theresa sought and was granted a temporary restraining order against the paper.

Maloney told The Associated Press: “She is terribly, terribly worried about the families of these poor men. Theresa Brown is not a kiss-and-tell person. This is viciously and tragically unfair.”

The backup list was eventually returned to Theresa. She promised to torch it, too, but nobody known what happened to the list.

In later years, I asked Brown why she didn’t turn her list over to me.

She fairly cackled: “I never thought of it at the time, but that’s what I should have done. Wow. You wouldn’t print the list, but you just having it would have been enough to scare the shit out of the entire world. Why didn’t we think of it?”

That October of 1980 was a wild and rollicking time in San Antonio history. Jack Hanratty was running his Castle Hills sports book, much to the chagrin of several DAs. And shotgun-toting Arthur Harry (Bunny) Eckert was blasting fellow pimps into eternity with his trusted sawed-off 12 gauge. What seemed like the eyes of the world were on Theresa Brown when vice cops came swooping down on her stylish whorehouse.

Theresa had a hand in getting me and golfing great Lee Trevino kicked out of the San Francisco Steak House. But the true villain in that little caper was notorious sports bookmaker Jack Hanratty, who took a perverse delight in walking bar and restaurant tabs, the bigger the bills the better.

Golfing great Trevino was here for the Texas Open. Larry Trader, who had caddied for Lee the Flea, was there at the San Francisco SteakHouse with me, bookie Hanratty, Theresa Brown, and a few others from the skull orchard scene. Trevino was an unrepentant Brown friend who visited Theresa on every San Antonio visit.

With an expansive wave of his hand, Hanratty ordered Porterhouse steaks for our party, then excused himself for a break in the men’s room. In predictable Hanratty fashion, Jack never returned, and when the steak house maître d’ tried to present Trevino the bill, Theresa blew a fuse, chastising the waitperson for bringing embarrassment to the “world’s greatest golfer.”

I didn’t have any money, and “the world’s greatest golfer” had left his in his hotel room. Jack Hanratty had disappeared, along with Larry Trader, andwhen security kicked us out of the restaurant, Theresa Brown left in a cab, probably with more money in her purse than the rest of us combined.

Trevino was on foot. I don’t even know how he got to the restaurant. But I gave him a ride to his hotel, where he fished a roll of $100 bills from under a mattress. We returned to the San Francisco Steak House where Lee paid the

bill.

I never learned exactly what caused Theresa’s death. She told me by phone a year or so before her death that her health was failing. Quietly and without publicity or the usual fanfare, Theresa went quietly about her charitable avocation of helping disabled and underprivileged women.

Theresa and I exchanged Christmas cards until shortry before her passing. She had embraced Christianity several years after selling her bordello property and dropping off the local radar.

“I have Jesus Christ in my life,” she said.

And that was it. No more rhetoric on the subject.

T-Brown was the real product. And I believe the same could been said about Mary Magdalene. I will always harbor a corner of love and respect in my heart for Madam Theresa Brown.