#weird texas

[letsgethaunted]

The Hotel Zaza collection prides itself on offering luxury and upscale ambience as part of their guest experience...so why is Room 322 described as a tiny "goth dungeon closet" adorned with missing carpet, creepy skull art, handmade paintings, chains, a random framed executive's business headshot, and a possible two-way mirror? Join us this week as Nat razzle dazzles Aly with a PowerPoint Presentation that leaves us all wondering, "What's up with Room 322?"

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Shorty, Celebrity Squirrel

It isn't your typical community that accepts homeless freeloaders into the neighborhood. After all, nobody wants hirsute vagrant pestering people for morsels, especially around the city's historic downtown square. In Tyler, however, citizens not only tolerated their local mooch, they were downright fond of him. Shorty, as he came to be known frequented the grounds of the Smith County Courthouse, regularly begging folks modate him. The town even went so far as to install a special pedestrian crossing and to lower the speed limit along Broadway for his safety.

it just goes to show how far being cute and charming can get you. After all, Shorty's fat, furry cheeks were probably pretty tough to say no to. Not to mention his bushy little tail. For fifteen years, Shorty called the square home. When he finally passed away, in 1963, Tyler decided that's where he should be buried too. Residents organized a funeral for the little guy and laid him to rest in a park across from the courthouse. A marker was erected bearing his image.

Not everyone had so much respect for Tyler's mascot, though. Twice, hooligans made off with Shorty's grave marker. The police located the missing marker the first time but weren't so lucky the second. Though the city eventually replaced the headstone, it's a surprise they did, since most residents seem to have forgotten about Shorty, anyway. There's no mention of him in any of Tyler's online visitor information, and both the city staff and local historians don't have much more than a vague recollection of his story. Despite having been memorialized right in the center of town, Shorty seems to have passed into obscurity. It just makes you wonder how many other fuzzy little mascots are out there-their stories forgotten, their tiny caskets overlooked.

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A Vote for the Man in the Ladies' Lingerie

I wanted to let you know about one of our local noteworthy inhabitants here in Austin. He's a homeless cross-dresser and sometime mayoral candidate.

Austin, perhaps more than any other city in Texas, knows how to have a good time. From the bars and bands of Sixth Street to the relaxation of Barton Springs, this town appreciates living right. There's one Austin resident who goes above and beyond all others in his quest to live a uniquely enjoyable life: His name is Leslie Cochran.

Leslie was formerly very visible, living in a makeshift lean-to he constructed for himself on Sixth Street. His home stood out not just because of its location, but because of the numerous messages Leslie painted on its side, explaining his plight in life as well as accusing the Austin government and Police Department of various wrongdoings. After a number of years spent in this abode, Leslie was forced to move along by the Austin police. He is still often seen around town, just not at this permanent location.

Austin residents have come to embrace this eccentric character. This has been proven time and time again during the city's mayoral elections, he received two thousand votes for mayor of one of the state's prominent cities. Leslie Cochran is undoubtedly a local hero of the highest caliber. -Kent W.

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Jack Ruby: Hero or Villian?

By: Josh Alan Friedman

He is frozen in our consciousness as the paunchy, black-suited figure who gunned down Lee Harvey Oswald on national TV two days after Kennedy's death. Jack Ruby believed he avenged his President's murder, saved Dallas's reputation in the eyes of the world, and spared the fair Jacqueline the horror of a murder trial.

Ruby remains a star player in the American mythology of the JFK assassination. He has figured in countless conspiracy theories and works of fiction and nonfiction. In 1990, Ruby's executor-attorney was asking $130,000 for the .38 Colt Cobra that killed Oswald, along with some mundane possessions, like an undershirt Ruby had bought at Sears. (Who the heck would want Jack Ruby's undershirt?)

An international glare came upon Ruby's dark little corner of Dallas life on November 25, 1963. "Anybody coulda killed Oswald, the way people's feelings was running at that time," says Dallas deputy sheriff Lynn Burk, who knew Ruby well and was present when Oswald was captured at the Texas Theater. "It didn't surprise some policeman didn't kill Oswald first."

"He was stuck by what he did," says Captain Ray Abner, who was Ruby's personal guard in jail. "He said he loved Kennedy and that he was glad he did it. But I believe Jack just intended to wound Oswald. Spend a couple of years in prison, sell a book and movie rights. He was a small figure who came up from the Chicago underworld. He was a guy who wanted to be a big shot."

On Ruby's last day as a free citizen that November day in '63, he was a balding, fifty-two-year-old. He had oily, slicked-back black hair, a cleft in his chin, and five-o'clock jowl shadow, and he wore a tie stickpin and diamond pinkie ring.

His strip joint, a second-rate club called the Carousel, was located one flight up on Commerce Street, between a parking garage and a short-order restaurant. Jack Ruby's stage was the size of a boxing ring, with a five-piece bump-and-rind orchestra but no dancing. The bar was boomerang-shaped, finished in gold-plated plastic and gaudy mesh drapes. Overhead hung a gold-framed painting of a stallion, which Ruby believed had "real class." Ruby was obsessed with class.

Terré Tale, a Dallas strip queen of the '60s, says she met Ruby when she innocently answered a newspaper ad for a cock-tail waitress at the Carousel: "They sat me down next to a guy with more arms than an octopus. I didn't even know the Carousel had strippers. I'd never seen a strip. But Jack Ruby was nice to me. He told me could make me a star, put me in an apartment, send me to the beauty parlor every day."

Tale refused Ruby's offer, but a few years later, she was headlining at the Colony Club, two doors down from Ruby at 1322 Commercee. Abe Weinstein's Colony Club was Dallas's most reputable burlesque house from 1939 to 1973. Ruby envied this deco cabaret, which seemed to possess the elusive class he so craved.

"My club was a nightclub," says retired owner Weinstein. "His was just a joint. I had big names, he had nobody."

Ruby, whose God-given name was Rubenstein, was a pain in the beck to Weinstein, bottom-feeding off the Colony's actions for three years. "My relationship with Jack was bad," says Weinstein. "He threatened to kill me one week before he killed Oswald. He tried to hire away my waitresses and employees. Here's my opinion: Jack Ruby killed Oswald because he wanted to be world famous. If he'd have killed Oswald before the police got Oswald, he could have been a hero. But it was no great thing to get him in the police station."

According to Weinstein, Ruby had a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality. "If you went into his club and he'd never seen you before and you said, 'Jack, I'm hungry, I don't have a place to sleep,' he would feed you and give you a place to sleep. But if he didn't like you, he'd stab you in the back."

But there are those who saw more good in Jack Ruby than bad. Joe Johnson worked for him in six years, starting in 1957. Johnson led a five-piece R&B group. His trademark was belting out sax solos as he walked along the bar top. "I was part of a family," Johnson says. "Ruby was the best boss I had in Dallas. After he shot Oswald, the FBI followed me everywhere I'd play. I got six pages in the Warren Report."

And certainly Ruby girls showed great devotion for their boss. Little Lynn liked Ruby enough to show up at the jail crying after he was imprisoned. The nineteen-year-old, blue-eyed stripper carried a Beretta pistol in her scarf to give him. Skilled more in the art of revealing than concealing, Little Lynn turned out to be a poor smuggler. The gun was quickly detected, and she was arrested at the entrance.

Shari Angel, a former Carousel headliner, tried to raise money for a medal or a monument for Jack. "He was a wonderful man," she told the Dallas Times Herald in 1986.

A little-known literary gem, Jack Ruby's Girls, published in 1970 by Genesis Press in Atlanta, gives an insider's peep into Ruby's and his club. IN LOVING MEMORY OF JACK RUBY reads the dedication by Diana Hunter and Alice Anderson. Profiled within was the love-hate relationship of half of dozen Ruby strippers.

"Jack Ruby's Carousel Club was in the heart of a city that never took the Carousel to its heart," wrote the authors. Anyone who reads on will understand why. "Dumping" champagne was a Carousel ritual. Girls accidentally spilled bottles of the rotgut, marked up to $17.50 from the $1.60 wholesale price. Ruby beer went for sixty cents a glass, and it wasn't fit for drink. The girls were told to waste as much as possible while sitting with the suckers in the booths. But Ruby didn't allow hooking, claimed the authors; only the false promise of sex so that the girls could hustle champagne.

Before the Kennedy assassination, Dallas had a smalltown camaraderie that may seem odd today. Ruby was odd today. Ruby was friendly with many people in law enforcement and often brought sandwiches up to police headquarters. Free drinks went to the servicemen, even reporters, with whom Ruby tried to ingratiate himself. That's why he didn't seem out of place in the basement where Oswald was shot.

Today, most of the strippers who worked for Ruby have evaporated from Dallas. "I didn't live forty-seven years by talking about it," spat the ex-husband of a Ruby stripper, who hung up on me when I called to interview him. One former Ruby associate, when asked for the whereabouts of the girls, put it this way: "I would figure most became prostitutes or addicts or died. A stripper's career is ten years, and the few who survive afterward must be quite strong and pull their lives together."

Ruby's girls were not that strong. Suicides became part of the conspiracy lore. Baby LeGrand, whom Ruby wired money to minutes before killing Oswald, was found hung by her toreador pants in an Oklahoma City holding cell in 1965. She had been arrested on prostitution charges, and her death was ruled a suicide. Tuesday Nite was another suicide.

Not many people came to visit Ruby in jail, according to Ray Abner, who was assigned to guard his cell for more than a year following his arrest. "None of the girls came to see him," Abner says. Just his lawyers, his sister Eva, and his brother Earl. "I couldn't help but overhear his conversations, so I'm pretty sure he wasn't involved in any conspiracy."

Ruby was riding high during the months after he shot Oswald. He doted on his daily shipment of fan mail dropped off, and he got depressed."

Ruby was convicted, and he died of cancer in January 1967 while awaiting a retrial. In the meantime, those who made their living in his champagne hustle world had to go elsewhere for work. Jack Ruby's Girls documents the pilgrimage of two strippers after the Carousel closed: Lacy and Sue Ann applied for jobs at Creek area of Dallas. But DeLuce believed Ruby "ruined" potential prostitutes-all tease, no sex is what Ruby taught them. He didn't allow that type of hanky-panky in the Carousel. "This is a *#%#@!* high-class place," he would remind any Tom, Dick, or Harry, as he kicked them down the stairs.

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Ultimate Avenger

Of all the odd personalities to be found in Texas history, Jack Ruby remains one of the most curious. What made his seedy Dallas strip-joint owner with ties to the underworld throw his own life away to avenge the assassination of John F. Kennedy by murdering the killer? In the nearly forty years since his death, Ruby's name has become synonymous with, and inextricably linked to, countless conspiracy theories. We asked Weird Texas's Dallas correspondent Josh Alan Friedman, to do a little digging and see if he could gain some insight into just what kind of man this mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma really was.

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Flying into the History Books-Backwards

Texans have always had an independent spirit. As anyone who is even slightly familiar with American history knows, Texas was, for a time, its own sovereign nation. This individuality still permeates the character of most Texans. The idea of the federal government telling a Texan what to do doesn't usually sit well.

One Texan bucked the orders of the federal government in a truly legendary way. He became a folk hero for his actions, which, to a degree, are still shrouded in mystery. His name was Douglas Corrigan, but he was known better to the world as Wrong Way. In 1938, he either ignored an edict from the authorities intentionally or made one of the biggest blunders in history. The Galveston native flew from New York to Dublin, Ireland, in one of the earliest transoceanic flights in history. The problem was, he was supposed to heading to California.

Corrigan became obsessed with flying after experiencing his first plane ride as a teenager. He quickly began making his own flights and became part of a core group of dedicated pilots in the early days of aviation. He worked in any capacity he could find in the industry, and in fact, he helped build the Spirit of St. Louis, the plane that Charles Lindbergh used to make the world's first-ever flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Inspired by Lindbergh, Corrigan quickly pledged that he, a man of Irish descent, would be the first to fly nonstop from America to Ireland.

There were a number of obstacles in Corrigan's way. First off, he didn't have a plane. Second, he didn't have the money to buy one. When he did finally managed to buy an aircraft, a new set of problems ensued. It was an old, ramshackle machine that aviation officials deemed far too dangerous to fly over an ocean. Corrigan spent most of his time barnstorming the nation, landing in small towns, and charging people for the rides. Eventually, he was granted permission to fly from Long Beach, California, to New York nonstop and then return. It was a long trip, but at least there'd be terra firma under him if he was forced to land.

Corrigan barely made it to New York. His main fuel tank sprang a leak, and he had only gallons of fuel left when he landed. Instead of fixing the leaky tank for the journey back to California, he simply outfitted his plane with more tanks. The plane was so weighed down by the extra fuel that it could barely struggle off the ground when Corrigan set out on his return trip. When it did lift off, something very curious happened.

It was a foggy day. To burn off some of the excess fuel, Corrigan flew east, out over the Atlantic, and was then supposed to turn around back to California. But what happened over the Atlantic is not clear. The only thing certain is that twenty-eight hours after takeoff, Corrigan, landed not in Long Beach, California, but in Dublin, Ireland. He was sent to the American embassy-he had no passport, no permission to land, and no good explanation for what he was doing on the Emerald Isle. According to Corrigan, he took off into the fog and began heading in what he thought was the correct direction. His compass was from World War I, though, and didn't function properly. He wound up heading in the wrong direction with a leaking fuel tank, and by the time he realized something was wrong, it was too late to turn back.

Speculation has always held that Corrigan knew exactly what he was doing when he headed for Europe. His story is considered a ruse to get him out of the considerable international trouble he could face for violating orders from the U.S. government as well as for entering a foreign nation without permission or documentation.

Corrigan and his plane were sent back to the United States on an ocean liner. When the board entered New York Harbor, cheering spectators lined the shore, fire-boats shot plumes of water into the sky, and a ticker tape parade was arranged for him down Broadway. Going the wrong way had made him a national folk hero. Corrigan's daring and defiant exploits had lifted the spirits of a Depressed-weary nation. The New York Post printed a front-page headline that read HAIL TO WRONG WAY CORRIGAN! -printed backwards. Before long, the term Wrong Way Corrigan had entered the public vernacular and became synonymous with any overtly befuddled act.

After his famous flight, Corrigan led a fairly simple life, living on an orange grove in Santa Ana, California. He never confessed that he had planned to fly to Ireland all along. Until his dying day, on December 9, 1995, he maintained that his transatlantic flight was the result of a navigational error. -Chris Gethard

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San Antonio's Prince of Thrones

Barney Smith is on the very rim of the art world. Few men have dared venture into the realm he has chosen, and none has done so with such zeal. He paints, he engraved, he sculpts, but he always works with the same medium: toilet seats.

Eyeglasses, cosmetology supplies, sports memorabilia, cartoon characters-you name it, he's put it on a toilet seat. He has seats sporting license plates for every state in the union. He made a seat honoring wooden nickels. Another is dedicated to the Global Positioning System. Yet another stands as a tribute to railroad crossings. There's even a seat commemorating his wife's gallstone surgery (sans the actual gallstone, which his wife has kept hidden from him). And the ideas just keep coming. One of his latest features a piece of Saddam Hussein's own toilet, recovered from an underground bunker in the Green Zone.

The whole thing started somewhere around 1970, after Smith returned from a hunting trip with his father. Both came home with bucks, and both were eager to display the horns. Smith's dad mounted his to traditional wooden shields, but Barney, a master plumber, got the pride over his inspiration, he realized he had uncovered his new pastime.

Today, Smith has decorated more than seven hundred rings and lids, on display in the garage adjacent to his San Antonio home. And he can tell you a story about each and every one. He will, too, if you've got the time. Every visitor is more than welcome to a uniquely tangential tour of his creations, which will cover not, but any variety of topics. It's entirely possible for a person to learn about cosmetic dentistry, the D.A.R.E. program, and Japanese currency all in the same visit.

Considering the enthusiasm Smith displays, it's hard to believe that for many years he kept a lid on his hobby. No one was privy to the unusual gallery until 1992, when a man inquired about some of Smith's oil paintings, which were on display at a yard sale. Smith invited him inside to see more, but once the man got a look at the toilet seats, Smith recalls, "He wasn't interested in my oils anymore!" The collection had been open to the public ever since.

Of course, everyone has to ask him what his own toilet seat looks like. He insists t's undecorated. Besides, he prefers to work with molded wood; for personal use, he likes plastic.

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Dan Blocker: A Man Called Hoss

"Really, this is what we're known for, the home of Dan Blocker. Even though he wasn't born here."

That may be the most extensive oral history you'll get on the subject should you decide to drop in at the little museum in the town of O'Donnell. If you're stopping here, though, you probably known as much. The fact that TV's Hoss Cartwright grew up here is what gives anyone from out of town a reason to pull through this way.

So it's a little odd that all the Dan Blocker memorabilia is kept in the museum's back room. To be fair, they did build a nice Western-style display area for it, though it quickly begins to feel like a barrier between the Blocker stuff and your grubby little hands.

If you can see well enough through the windows, it's possible to learn a few things about the big man from the little screen. Born in DeKalb, he was reportedly the largest baby ever in Bowie County, at a whopping fourteen pounds. At age eleven, he wore a size XL shirt and pants with a forty-two-inch waist, as illustrated by one of his boyhood outfits, apparently stuffed with a pillow for a measure of realism.

Blocker's family ran a grocery store just across the street from where the O'Donnell Museum now stands. Supposedly, that's where you would find young Danny when he wasn't at school. The storefront is boarded up now, but it still displays the Blocker name. A large Hoss-style hat has been painted on the building's face.

Next door, in Heritage Plaza, you'll find a bust dedicated to the man who made O'Donnell famous. Always with his hat, Blocker endures as Bonanza's most beloved cowboy, forever typecast in bronze.

The plaque below his head reads

THANKS TO FILM, HOSS CARTWRIGHT WILL LIVE; BUT ALL TOO SELDOM DOES THE WORLD GET TO KEEP A DAN BLOCKER.