Call us crazy, but practically everybody in Houston is in mourning for a consumer advocate named Marvin Zindler, a genuinely-nice person and world-famous for the following:
Though he was proudest of his work championing "the little guy" he was best known for stories he did a mere seven months after starting the job in 1973 that led to the closing of the state's best-known "bawdy house," as Zindler called it — a notorious La Grange brothel known as the Chicken Ranch.
The reports not only won him national notoriety but also a public thrashing by Fayette County Sheriff T.J. Flournoy, a Chicken House partisan, who broke two of Zindler's ribs and snatched his toupee, reportedly waving it in the air as if it were a prized enemy scalp.
Texas author Larry L. King wrote an article about it for Playboy magazine in 1974, which was turned into a long-running Broadway musical four years later and became a kitschy 1982 movie starring Dolly Parton, Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise. In "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas", DeLuise played a character based on Zindler, a vainglorious reporter who goes on a crusade to close the brothel.
The guy wore makeup all the time, had 18 plastic surgeries, over 300 hairpieces (most of them white), usually wore a white suit, and God help you if you did anyone wrong and he got wind of it, especially someone screwing over anyone poor or disabled. He gave his last report from his hospital bed Saturday night, helping a guy get a social security card, and died Sunday. Made over a million a year and lived in the same 1960's 4-bedroom house he & his wife raised their kids in. Hollered so loud on his broadcasts that the sound engineers would turn down the volume when he did the Friday restaurant cleanliness review (fondly known as the Rat & Roach Report) right before he bellowed out "What did they have? SLIIIIME IN THE ICE MACHINE!"
There are a couple of YouTubes with him - he has to be seen to be believed. He's the reason I snort derisively when someone alludes to the likes of Dubya representing Texas. RIP Marvin.
