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Texas Tales

published: October 3rd 2008
by: MIke Cox

The Texas Rangers finally succeeded in eliminating gambling at Galve-ston’s famed Balinese Room in 1957, but it took a Category 2 hurricane to cashier the old casino-on-a-pier once and for all.
    Coming ashore on Galveston Island in the predawn hours of Sept. 13, Hurricane Ike pushed a towering storm surge that beat the Balinese Room worse than a guy betting a full house against a straight flush. When the sun came up on Sept. 13 all that remained of the 79-year-old National Historic Landmark were the pilings that once supported a pier that extended 600 feet into the Gulf and a pile of debris that included the old joint’s famous red door.
    Oh, one other thing survived, at least in the early days following the storm – the club’s Web site. Visiting www.balineseroom.net less than 24 hours after the club’s destruction was almost as painful as listening to a dead friend’s voice on their not-yet-erased answering machine message.
    Hopefully, the club’s latest owner has managed to salvage some artifacts from the ruins and has deep enough pockets to rebuild the place. But it won’t be the actual structure that hosted some of America’s biggest entertainers, from Bob Hope to Chairman of the Board Frank Sinatra.
    The club’s history goes back to 1923 when a small restaurant not-so-uniquely known as the Chop Suey opened at 21st Street and Seawall. Though shut down for a time for illegal gambling, it reopened after Sam and Rosario Maceo – Italian immigrants who went from barbering to bootlegging – used some of their illicit income to purchase it. They called it the Sui Jen and offered Chinese food and a night club. Oh, and wide-open gambling.
    By this time, the early 1930s, many Texans and out-of-state visitors came to Galveston to brace themselves with illegal booze and a little partying in the face of a financial crisis first referred to in the newspapers and magazines as “the Emergency.” Soon it came to be called the Depression, and later, the Great Depression.
    Indeed, the Sui Jen and other places owned by the Maceos, including the Turf Club, helped Galveston fare better than many cities as the Emergency dragged on. 
    Early in World War II, with Galveston swarming with soldiers, airmen and sailors, the Maceos decided to go with a more tropical sounding name – the Balinese Room. They remodeled the place and lengthened what had been a 200-foot pier by 400 feet. At the end of the pier, 200 yards out into the Gulf of Mexico, they built a sophisticated gaming room.
    Of course, 600 feet was still well inside U.S. territorial waters, but the Maceos seemed to think the room lay far enough at sea for them to run a casino just as if it were legal to do so. 
    Galveston had always seen itself as independent from the rest of Texas and no one minded particularly that the club had been a speak-easy and gambling joint for most of its existence. The Maceos stimulated the local economy.
    When someone asked long-time Galveston County Sheriff Frank Biaggne why he didn’t shuter the Balinese Room, he famously replied that it was a private club and he was not a member.
    Using the business model later perfected in a then-small Nevada town called Las Vegas, the Maceos brought in the biggest names in entertainment during the club’s heyday. The list of men and women who appeared at the club reads like an entertainment industry’s Who’s Who. Listed alphabetically, some of those who had gigs at the Balinese Room included Gene Autry, Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Duke Ellington, Phil Harris, Guy Lombardo, Groucho Marx and Mel Torme.
    On orders from Austin, Rangers occasionally raided the place. That usually came after some politician found it expedient to proclaim he was “Shocked, shocked to find out that gaming is going on…” in the Great State of Texas. (Rent a DVD of “Casa-blanca” if you’d like to practice Captain Renault’s famous line.)
    Usually, when the men in the big hats showed up at the red door, the Balinese’s house band struck up a rousing version of “The Eyes of Texas” to alert the staff in the back that the Rangers had arrived. By the time the lawmen got to the gaming room, no evidence of gambling could be found.
    In 1957, newly elected state Attorney General Will Wilson, who as a district attorney had cleaned up gambling and vice in Dallas, turned his attention to the so-called Free State of Galveston. “Shocked, shocked…” he employed undercover operatives to penetrate the club and later, after someone tipped off the Balinese that the Rangers were planning a big raid, used civil injunctions to still the slots and stop the roulette wheels.
    Even so, the process took longer than most people realize. Up to the early ‘60s, Rangers still occasionally showed up to make sure the lid on Galveston gaming stayed down.
    But for all practical purposes, the party – at least the illegal version – was over by the spring of 1957. The Maceos had died a few years earlier and the club closed. Variously someone would reopen the place as a shell shop or eatery, but the magic was long gone.  
    The old club got roughed up by Hurricane Carla in 1961 and again by Alicia in 1983, but the structure proved as durable as a geriatric slot machine addict.
    Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997, the Balinese Room sat empty for a time before Houston lawyer Scott Arnold took a 60-year lease on the place in 2001. He reopened it as a live entertainment venue – sans gambling.
    Whether he will rebuild the Balinese and roll the figurative dice one more time remains to be seen.
***
    Rankin Museum Association President Donna Bell has spent much of her life on a ranch and is not afraid of hard work.
    When money became available to repaint the lobby of Rankin’s old Yates Hotel, now the town’s museum, she pitched in and helped prep the plaster walls for a color makeover. But she encountered a stubborn raised spot next to the stairs that she couldn’t budge no matter how hard she tried. Finally, she gave up and just painted over it.
    Later, from one of the sons of hotel-builder Ira Yates, the legendary father of the old rich Yates Field, she learned the story behind that rough place in the wall. It marked a rough time in Rankin’s history, when bootleg booze and black gold flowed with equal ease.
    Yates built the three-story, 46-room sandy brick hotel in 1927 at the height of the oil boom that exploded on the Pecos County ranch he had traded a general store for in 1915. In considering a name for his new hostelry, he modestly thought Yates Hotel had a nice ring to it.
    “He kept an upstairs room,” Mrs. Bell says. “We haven’t identified which room, but he played a lot of poker in it.”
    Billed as the first fire-proof hotel between Fort Worth and El Paso, the Yates had a restaurant, drug store and barbershop. The hotel saw many a hand-shake deal during the boom years and became a popular stopping place for east-west travelers.
    The rooms on the north side had no closets and cost less than the south-side rooms, which caught a better breeze and had a door between rooms so they could be used as suites. North or south-side, however, guests had to walk down the hall to a bathroom.
    By today’s standards, a room on either side of the hotel did not cost all that much. A single school teacher who lived there in the late 1930s paid $39 a month for a room – meals included.
    “There’s a cute story about an old-maid (probably all of 25 to 30 years old) Home Extension agent from Austin who used to stay at the Yates in the ‘40s,” Mrs. Bell says. “She always washed her stockings at night and hung them in the bathroom to dry. One morning she came in and found some man had washed his socks and hung them right next to her hose. She was scandalized.”
    The hotel closed in 1964 and stood vacant for a decade before the Rankin Museum Association converted it into a museum. Though someone vandalized the hotel about a year after it went out of business, the Yates’ original wicker furniture still sits in the lobby with its restored black and white checkerboard floor.
    During the Yates’ heyday, within an easy walk from the hotel lay one of the marvels of West Texas: Rankin Beach. That part of the state had not had any waterfront access since prehistoric times, but Yates put in a giant concrete swimming hole, 60 feet wide and 120 feet long. Legend has it that he even had beach sand trucked in from the Texas coast, though he could have gotten plenty from the sand dunes of not-too-distant Ward County.
    People could keep cool in Yates’ pool, enjoy live entertainment at the adjoining dance pavilion or spin around on a skating rink. A young accordion player named Lawrence Welk and his orchestra played at Rankin Beach in 1928-29 as did Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden.
    One night during the boom, while her husband toiled away in the oil patch, his pretty wife sashayed and shimmied on the dance floor at the nearby Skidmore Plantation with an equally light-footed male partner.
    The evening seemed magic until the woman’s husband showed up and pulled a pistol from his oil-stained coveralls.
    Seeking any port in a storm, the woman and her dancing partner hoofed it toward the Yates Hotel, the armed husband close behind. When they entered the hotel’s lobby, the bell hop ducked as the husband fired several shots at the man he’d caught dancing with his wife.
    None of the bullets took effect, and officers soon corralled the jealous husband, but the flying lead left some ugly pockmarks in the wall. For some reason, whoever repaired the bullet holes did not bother to smooth over the one next to the stair way.
    So far as is known, that was the only gunplay at the Yates. That may be why the hotel has a scarcity of ghosts.
    Almost all old hotels come furnished with at least one restless spirit, but Mrs. Bell says the Yates is no Hotel California. One woman claimed to have had encounters with a lady apparition she called Gertrude, but Mrs. Bell says she’s never heard or seen anything unusual at the Yates other than the old bullet hole.
    If anyone’s spirit is lingering at the Yates, by all rights it ought to be Yates himself. He spent a lot of time in his hotel prior to his death in 1939 and oil paintings of he and his wife are prominently displayed in the lobby.
    For a fellow who didn’t learn to read until he was 14, Yates obviously had a good head for business. Folks said he did well at cards, too.
    “He insisted that all his children learn to play poker,” Mrs. Bell says. “He said poker would make them good at business.”
    Knowing when to fold ‘em and when to hold ‘em sure paid off for the old man.

A small light flickered through a broken pane of glass in the dilapidated old officer’s quarters at Fort Concho.
    Glancing at the light, the folks who occupied the adjacent officer’s quarters bolted their doors and left a loaded gun in a convenient location—just in case.
    Established on the Concho River in 1867 to protect Texas from hostile Indians, the fort had been abandoned since 1889. The old fort had become a residential area known as the Fort Addition by the early 1900s.
    Grown men and women did not believe the popular legend that Officer’s Quarters No. 7 was haunted, yet the town’s younger generation found the two-story structure terrifying. The adults merely agreed strange things went on inside the house.
    Interviewed by a reporter in the 1930s about a year-and-a-half before her death, Mrs. Mary E. Rogers, who claimed to the first Anglo child born at the old fort, said “mysterious things happened in that old house (No. 7). They just couldn’t keep it rented.”
    The haunted house label was attached – apparently by children—following the discovery of a murdered man in the old building about 1895 or ’96.
    The limestone quarters had been built in 1877. Col. Benjamin Grierson, commander of the post at the time, wrote his wife saying the building contained a “double set of quarters for unmarried officers.”
    After the fort’s abandonment, as were many of the other buildings, No. 7 was used as a private residence and occasionally rented out.
    At the time of the murder, the house sat abandoned. Someone found the body of a man inside, shot to death. After that day, rumor and legend spread faster than rigor mortis.
    Mrs. Rogers, who remembered a lot about the old fort, said the man killed was a trapper of coyotes, wolves and badgers, Apparently he had been killed is a dispute over trapping rights.
    One woman said the man believed to have committed the murder later was killed himself over a matter of grazing rights.
    “He ran his sheep all over the country,” she said. “There wasn’t much water at the time, so a land owner told him, ‘Don’t drive your sheep in my pasture --.”
    But just like a scene out of a Western movie, the determined sheep owner ran his stock across the other man’s land anyway.
    The landowner and a companion were riding in a wagon one day when they saw the sheep owner coming. The passenger gave the man a rifle and ran. The driver stayed on the wagon as the herder approached. The sheep owner and purported creator of the ghost in No. 7 ended up with a bullet between his eyes.
    The old government building could attract spooky living characters as well as the more ethereal sort.
    Mrs. Rogers said that when she was a young girl living with her family at the fort, two men once approached her and asked if her mother might have a candle. She said she was sure her mother did, and the two asked her to bring them one.
    “I brought them a candle and they went down into basement of No. 7,” she continued. “The people next door saw a light over there that night.”
    The next day, she related, lawmen from Brownwood showed up looking for a pair who had robbed a ranching family and made off with two of their best horses.
    The officers spotted two horses hitched up behind No. 7, arrested the two men inside and took them back to Brownwood to face charges.
    As for Mrs. Rogers, she “liked to got ate up” by her mother for giving the two strangers a candle.

    Author’s note: This story, with some editing and a few additions, is from my first book, “Red Rooster Country,” published in 1970 and is based on a feature article I did for the San Angelo Standard-Times in 1968. Another Standard-Times journalist working a generation before me is the one who interviewed Mrs. Rogers.
Though Mrs. Rogers had said she was the first white child born at the fort,  Suzanne Campbell, head of the West Texas Collection at Angelo State University, says a couple of other pioneers asserted they were the first Anglo kids in Tom Green County.
    When I wrote the story back in the late ‘60s, No. 7 remained in private hands as rental property. It has since become part of the Fort Concho National Historic Landmark. These days, it houses the fort’s library-archives and an office.
    According to tour guide Michael Smith, the staff at Fort Concho has heard of No. 7’s supposed haunting, but no one reports having any spooky encounters in the old building. Indeed, most of the ghost hunter attention at the old fort gets focused on Officer’s Quarters No. 1, where Col. Grierson’s young daughter – Edith -- died of typhoid fever on Sept. 9, 1878. Many believe her ghost has stayed around after all these years.
***
    When Dave George took over as manager of San Antonio’s historic Buckhorn Saloon in 2000, he found a beat up old side-by-side shotgun in his office.
    “It was sitting in the corner,” he recalls. “The double barrels were separated and covered in rust. An old piece of paper was glued to the stock.”
    The muzzle-loading, percussion cap 12-gauge was manufactured in Birmingham, England by the W & C Scott and Son firearms factory. (The venerable brand is now owned by London’s Holland and Holland.)
    Despite the weapon’s shoddy appearance, an acquaintance told George he needed to look into its provenance.
    “There’s some history about that gun,” he said. Unfortunately, no one then connected with the Buckhorn knew just what that history was.
    The history of the Buckhorn, however, is easier to trace. Founded in 1881 by Albert Friedrich, it became a San Antonio institution largely on the basis of its innovative business model: Anyone bringing in a set of deer antlers could trade them for a shot of whiskey or a cold beer. Later, Friedrich began to take other items in trade, including firearms.
    His saloon prospered. By the time prohibition came along, the place had become as much a museum and curio shop as saloon, so he survived the dry days as well as the Great Depression.
    In 1956, Lone Star Beer bought the saloon and moved the horns and other relics to its brewery. Lone Star operated the Buckhorn until Stroh’s Beer acquired the company in 1998.  To keep the collection in San Antonio, Friedrich’s granddaughter and her husband bought it and reopened the Buckhorn at 318 E. Houston St. only a few blocks from it original location.
    One of the items reacquired by the Friedrich family was the shotgun George discovered when hired to run the Buckhorn.
    The faded piece of paper attached to the old scattergun did offer a major clue, but it did not tell the whole story. It read:
    “This gun belonged to John Wesley Hardin and was used by him to kill the Sheriff of DeWitt County.
    “He later gave the gun to Sheriff J.C. Jones of Gonzales County who killed several men with it in the interest of law and order.”
    O.D. Mangum of Victoria somehow came into possession of the shotgun and in 1937 conveyed it to the Buckhorn. 
    The label writer, probably Friedrich, did not think it necessary to note that Hardin reigned as Texas’ most prolific 19th century outlaw, killing 44 or so men before being sentenced to 25 years in prison in 1878. Pardoned in 1894, Hardin made it only 17 months before constable John Selman gunned him down in an El Paso saloon on Aug. 19, 1895.
    Though Hardin had owned the shotgun, as George explained, “the surprise was finding out that the sheriff of DeWitt County was Jack Helm, the most notorious of the men who had served in the State Police of the early 1870s. I realized this as I was sitting in my office reading Hardin's autobiography.” 
     In that book, published not long after his violent demise, Hardin gave his version of his career, including the killing of Helm. The book also features an artist’s drawing of Hardin shooting the 12-gauge at the sheriff.
    Hardin seems to have been born mean, but when he picked a wife, he borrowed more trouble by marrying into Texas’ bloodiest feud, the Sutton-Taylor vendetta. Jane Bowen Hardin belonged to the Taylor family while Helm – appointed DeWitt County sheriff after the abolition of the State Police in April 1873 -- played a prominent role on the Sutton side.
    To give a killer his due, Hardin desired to stay out of the feud. But he was a wanted man living in the jurisdiction of Helm. Not long after becoming sheriff, Helm ran into Hardin and offered him a deal: Side with the Suttons and he would look the other way on the criminal charge pending against him.
    Helm gave Hardin a while to think it over, but before that time elapsed, he and a posse of pro-Sutton riders surrounded Hardin’s house one day while he was away and demanded to know his whereabouts. Hardin’s terrified wife refused to say.
    When Hardin returned to find his pregnant wife upset, rather than make the choice demanded by Helm he came up with his own plan. 
    Armed with the double barrel, Hardin confronted Helm outside a blacksmith shop in the small Wilson County town of Albuquerque. For backup he brought along fellow feudist Jim Taylor, who toted a six-shooter. Though accounts of what happened vary, the result is not disputed.
Helm “fell,” as Hardin later wrote, “with 12 buckshot in his breast and several six-shooter balls in his head.” The sheriff had the honor being Hardin’s 31st victim
    When some of Helms’ allies threatened Hardin and Taylor, Hardin trained the shotgun on them. The men backed off and Hardin and Taylor vamoosed.
. “The news soon spread that I had killed Jack Helms,” Hardin wrote. “I received many letters of thanks from the widows of men whom he had cruelly put to death. Many of the best citizens of Gonzales and DeWitt counties patted me on the back and told me that was the best act of my life.”
    Alas, good deeds seldom go unpunished. When Hardin gunned down a deputy sheriff and former Texas Ranger in Comanche County in 1874, he left Texas. Sometime before going on the lam he gave the shotgun to Jones, later (Nov. 2, 1880) elected sheriff of Gonzales County. Three years later a ranger caught up with Hardin in Florida and soon he languished in jail pending trial.
    More than a century-and-a-quarter later, George sent the Hardin shotgun off for restoration. Now, spiffed up and lethal looking, it’s on display behind glass at the Buckhorn.
    But there’s one more mystery. No one knows exactly when Hardin used the shotgun to kill Helm. Hardin remembered the date as May 17, 1873, but contemporary newspapers, while not being precise, indicate the shooting occurred in the third week of July that year.