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This is about my part in Sugarland Express and the zany world of movie folks like Steven Spielberg and Goldie Hawn. Goldie did not like Luckenbach. This and other material may be viewed on the Sam Kindrick blog. The link is actionmagsa.com

When I met Steven Spielberg my head was falling off my shoulders and rolling around my feet.

It was spring of 1974 in Floresville. I was hungover bad and wishing I had never heard of Spielberg or casting director Shari Rhodes.

The filming of Sugarland Express with Goldie Hawn and Ben Johnson had begun. I have a speaking part in the movie.

This was Spielberg’s first gig as a director. He had somehow persuaded co-producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown to foot the production bill.

I was still with the Express and News during those times, and my drinking was starting to escalate. I had the shakes that morning in Floresville. I was hurting so bad that my hair hurt.

I am the Texas newspaperman in the film who tries to inverview a howling baby Langston. I will get into the story line and other details later.

There are tidbits here of human interest, like Goldie getting her drivers so stoned on weed they never got her to the movie set on time, or the fit she pitched when some of us hauled her to Luckenbach.

`Suffice it to say that Goldie Hawn did not care for Luckenbach, but more on all of this later.

What I remember most about Steven Spielberg and the Sugarland Express filming was my miserable hungover condition and Spielberg’s torturous obsession for detail. He achieved it through mind-rattling repetition, bolstered by a fetching ability to reach the hearts and souls of veteran film stars.

It all started for me in the Gunter Hotel coffee shop where I met casting director Shari Rhodes. I’m not sure how this meeting came about, but I think it may have been arranged by my friend Big John Hamilton, owner of Big John’s Steak House and a movie actor himself who appeared in seveal John Wayne movies.

Guich Koock may have been with me that morning. He did wind up with a part in the movie. Koock had partnered with Hondo Crouch to buy the town of Luckenbach, and the two of them were popping up all over the burgeoning San Antonio and South Texas entertainment map.In Sugarland, Guich played a Louisiana highway patrolman.

Shari Rhodes was a delight. Even with the hangover I took to her immediately.

“How would you like to play a part in our film?” Shari Rhodes laughed. “You look like a movie star in the making.”

I didn’t have any idea what Sugarland Express was all about, but I agreed to give it a try. Shari had me sign a bunch of papers, and two mornings later I met her and other people from Universal Pictures back at the Gunter Hotel. It was 5 o’clock in the morning and we were loaded in a van and headed for filming in Florersville.

Shari was with us. I had no idea of her stature in the film industry. She was laughing and cutting up with me like we had been friends for ages.

Who would have suspected that she would work in films like Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and many other films? I think she may have directed a few movies herself. Years later I was to learn that Shari Rhodes died from breast cancer in 2009.

In addition to me, Shari, the van driver, and maybe a couple more, there was Louise Latham, a veteran Hollywood character actress
who I recognized immediately but had no inkling as to her name. The supporting actors and actresses like Louise Latham are the true talents who keep the Hollywood star ship afloat. You see them in a film and there is immediate recognition, but their names are but a meaningless string of letters among the film credits.

Like Shari Rhodes, Louise Latham proved to be an affable, down-to-earth, and engaging lady of grace with a ready sense of humor.

I had been drinking most of the night and early morning in San Antonio’s downtown Commanders Room, an after-hours nightclub that sometimes stayed open until daylight. Louise must have sensed that I wasn’t quite right in the head and nervous system.

“Are you feeling all right?”

I didn’t want to tell her I was experiencing a monumental hangover.

“It’s early for me,” I said.

Latham seemed to understand.

“This is just the way for us people who work in films,” she said. “The public has no idea. The reason we are up at these ungodly hours is all about time and money. When we are on location away from the Hollywood studios it costs a tremendous amount of money to pay everyone involved and cover the huge production expense.
We are up at dawn because we utilize every minute of real daylight we have available. Daylight is like pure gold in the film industry. When on location, we go from first light until dark.”

The setting in Floresville where my scene was filmed was one of those old country-style houses with a wide front porch, wide concrete steps, and a long concrete sidewalk which led from the street to the porch.

I recall laying down in the shade of a tree, waiting for instructions. Finally I was up and facing the director. I had donned a new dark red and black sport coat that was almost new. I owned only two sport coats. I was ready for my debut on the silver screen when Spielberg called out to Shari Rhodes.

“Take this guy to the wardrobe trailer and have them outfit him in a gold coat,” Spielberg told Shari.

Turning to me, the director explained:

“Nothing against your red coat, but gold fits your dark coloring. We want you to look your best for this scene. I know you will do fine.”

Steven Spielberg is one of the greatest and most liked directors in Hollywood.

We saw the Spielberg genius early with Sugarland. The world saw it one short year after Sugarland when he broke the record bank with Jaws.

Spielberg was a fuzzy-cheeked 28 years of age when Sugarland was filmed, yet he held some sort of hypnotic magic over his veteran actors and actresses, grizzled pro Ben Johnson being a prime example.

Over and over and over again, in one scene, Spielberg coaxed Johnson into jumping out of the same pickup truck.

Slamming on the brakes, Ben jumped from the vehicle.

Spielberg the kid director was congratulating Johnson when his feet hit the street.

“Great job, Ben,” Spielberg gushed. “An incredible scene. Let’s do it once more, please sir.”

Johnson jumped out of the truck again.

“Fantastic, Ben,” Spielberg bubbled. “What an actor you are. I would like to see this at one more angle. Please do it for me again. Ben.”

Johnson jumped out of the truck yet again.

“Incredible, Ben. I don’t believe I have ever seen anything better,” Spielberg was relentless.

I don’t know how many times Ben Johnson jumped out of the truck with Spielberg rooting him on. Nobody was keeping count. And I can’t say how many times the director had me and and other faux newspaper reporters and TV cameramen walk up the sidewalk to the front porch of that old house in Floresville.

Sugarland Express was also written by Spielberg, the story based on a true Texas tale of comedic madness which started when Lou Jean Poplin talks husband Clovis Michael Poplin into breaking out of a low-security prison to go after their 2-year-old son Langston who is in foster care. Adding to the obsurdity of it all was the fact that Clovis was only four months short of release from the pre-release prison farm when Lou Jean talked him into the jail break.

The slow-motion and ever-growing chase that ensued, with over 200 cop cars, rubberneck spectators, gun nuts, and self-annointed honky-tonk heroes, was a carnival on wheels with a light show the likes of which Hollywood had never known before.

Clovis and Lou Jean were crossing South Texas to retrieve their 2-year-old son from foster parents in what was actually Floresville. They had a kidnapped highway patrolman in tow. Adding to the insanity of it all was a Boy Scout troop Spielberg had out directing traffic.

Goldie Hawn played Lou Jean Poplin. Her husband Michael was played by William Atherton. The zany plot has Lou Jean and Michael kidnapping Highway Patrolman Maxwell Slide, who is portrayed by Michael Sacks.

The baby Langston was portrayed by producer Zanuck’s 2-year-old son Harrison Zanuck. Louise Latham played Mrs. Looby, the foster mother. The foster father was played by Merrill Connally, Governor John Connally’s brother. Ben Johnson plays DPS Captain Harlin Tanner, and it was Captain Tanner who led the procession of lawmen and weirdos.

The news crew arrived first at the Floresville house where baby Langston was being fostered by Mrs. Looby and the governor’s brother, Merrill Connally.

The script called for us news people to march down the sidewalk, up the flight of steps, and onto the porch where we are met by Mrs. Looby and Merrill Connally, who is holding Baby Langston.

While this may sound simple, it was not. I think there were five of us in the entourage of news people. I know that country singer Dale Jackson was holding a giant TV sound camera. The others may have been holding notebooks. I was the only one of the bunch with a speaking part.

Here was the rub. After we completed our advance down the sidewalk and upon the porch, Spielberg insisted that we all land in the exact same spot. He also insisted that none of us look down at our feet as we advanced on the house and stopped on the porch. Here is where the operation got maddeningly tricky. Spielberg got down on his knees and placed chalk X marks on the exact spots where he wanted us to land. We had to repeat that advance maneuver over and over and over again, counting the exact number of steps from the street to our exact designated landing spots on the porch. Not until all of us were able to count our steps and land squarely on our designated porch positions in complete unison did the filming proceed.

It was late afternoon before we got to the grand climax, an irate foster mother meeting the encroachment of a bunch of news yoyos trespassing on her porch.

By this time everyone was irritable, restless, and discontent. Especially Harrison Zanuck, the Baby Langston who was the object of it all. He was holding soda crackers slathered in grape jelly because his father said that was the only goodie he would respond to. And producer Zanuck was there overseeing his baby.

I was leading the news people onslaught, so it was me who the infuriated foster mother lit into.

“I know why you people are here,” hissed Mrs. Looby. “You are not welcome here and I will have to ask you to leave.”

Here is where I saw the great actress in action, eyes narrowed in slits of hate. Louise Latham was earning her pay.

She was scary. She was living the life of a foster mother in danger of losing her baby. Mrs. Looby did not resemble in any way the Louise Latham I rode to Floresville with.

I had my lines down.

“But, ma’am, we just want to talk to the little child.”

Then I hollered the kickers:

“Langston, do you know who your real mother is? Could you wave bye bye to your real father?”

At this point, someone hollered “Cut.”

Baby Langston had smeared his grape jelly cracker across his foster father’s shirt and coat front.

When my lines were repeated the next time, Harrison Zanuck broke into an ear-splitting scream, flinging one of his crackers at me.

“You are scaring the child with your voice,” a bystander said.

Daddy Zanuck broke in at this point.

“This is exactly how we want him to react, like a frightened 2-yeaar-old.”

Earlier movie reviews failed to give Goldie Hawn her just due because they didn’t know Goldie.

The Hollywood Reporter said of Spielberg’s Sugarland Express: The fledgling filmmaker often fails to keep a tight enough rein on Hawn. Too often she breaks into her Laugh-in giggle and bubble-headed blonde routine, destroying the image of a distraught driven mother.

When Sugarland was filmed, Goldie was only a few months removed from a go-go dancer job in a cheap saloon. When members of the Sugarland cast took her for a visit to Lucenbach, Goldie turned up her nose and started bitching and complaining about “the nasty place” until Ben Johnson told her to shut up.

“If you don’t like it here,” Johnson told Goldie, “you can hitchhike back to San Antonio.”

And that was it. Johnson knew how to handle the petulant kid, and Spielberg knew what he was doing when he signed her on.

Goldie fit the Lou Jean Poplin part to a T.

Sugarland Express concluded my movie careeer, although I did have a significant part in an independent production that never made it off the cutting room floor. This one was The Adventures of Jody Shannon, and again I was recommended for the part by John Hamilton. It was filmed in Brackettville.

In this one I played a hypocritical dice shooting circuit-riding Preacher Sam with a whiskey flask protruding from a hip pocket. I rode a white mule and preached hell fire and damnation to a bunch of saloon girls in the main scene. Playing piano in the saloon was Wild Man Ray Liberto, former brother-in-law of Johnny Cash.

This ill-fated production was financed by a group of San Antonio dentists. It was produced as a children’s film, but funding was withdrawn when the dentists decreed that it was unfit for kid consumption.

The Preacher Sam saloon sermon, and a fight among a bunch of buffalo hunters were the two scenes deemed too rough for kids. And these were the two scenes the kids went wild over when showed some raw rushes of the film.

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.

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 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 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 guitarist 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 weighing 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.

Yesterday was my 30-year sobriety birthday. I didn’t post it until today because lightning had knocked out my computer.

I haven’t had a drink of alcohol or an illegal drug since October 16, 1989. It was rough and rocky traveling through those hard years of 1988 and 1989. I was busted four times and charged with aggravated possession of methamphetamine after each arrest.

It is by God’s grace, help from a big bunch of anonymous sober drunks, and a front of nightclub advertisers who stuck with me through the worst of it all, that Action Magazine was to survive while I somehow escaped hard time in the state penitentiary.

After almost 44 years of monthly publicatiion without a miss, I retired Action Magazine this past January. The most memorable of my drug busts came at the hands of former Bexar County Sheriff Harlon Copeland, and by the Alamo Area Drug Task Force, headed back then by Sumner Bowen.

Sheriff Copeland personally conducted the wild circus-like drug bust of my Action Magazine offices on Wurzbach Road where I was led into the parking lot only after Copeland’s deputies had alerted every TV and radio station in town.

I recall a Channel 4 reporter poking a microphone in my face and announcing with much drama: “You are live on WOAI-TV. What do you have to say?”

I was completely out of control at the time. I distinctly recall answering the TV reporter with “Fuck Harlon Copeland.” I don’t recall much more about that awful day. I can testify with accuracy that no more microphones were shoved in my face.

I had already been convicted and placed on 10 years probation when I was busted again, this time by task force leader Sumner Bowen who raided magazine offices I had on the main drag in Castle Hills.
Bowen offered me an informant deal which I rejected.

“Give me the lab,” Bowen said, “and we can all have a cup of coffee at Maggies and go on home.”

I chose the trip to jail, not because of any misguided loyalty notions or drug world hero status. At that point in time, I had been around the criminal element long enough to know what happens to snitches, and I had no intention of spending the rest of my life looking back over my shoulder.

My arrests wound up on the front page of the San Antonio Light and on a section front in the Express/News, both without me losing one single advertiser in Action Magazine that I was aware of.

Major North Side club operators like Ronnie Branham, Alex Habeeb, Jack Mikulenka, and Danny Levinson, plus South Side club stalwarts like Frank Mueller and Frank Mumme, closed around me like shepherds protecting a stricken lamb.

They seemingly did not give one shit about my arrest problems, and when I hit the front page of th Light, Tiffany Billiards owner Danny Levinson called up to double the size of his Action Magazine ad.

Details of my jail time, courtroom miracles, and association with both petty criminals and headliner bad boys like Arthur Harry (Bunny) Eckert, will all be included in an autobiography I have started writing. So stay tuned.

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.”