Reclaiming History (250 page)

On April 4, 1944, while Jack was still away in the service, his mother was admitted to Michael Reese Hospital with arteriosclerotic heart disease, followed by complications of bronchial pneumonia, which proved fatal. She passed away while in the hospital on the evening of April 11, 1944. Jack came home for the funeral in Chicago and was very upset, having become very fond of and devoted to his mother despite all the family turmoil to which she had contributed.
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But years later, he would take the death of his president harder.

After his discharge, Jack returned to Chicago. He and his three brothers, Hyman, Sam, and Earl, teamed up to run Earl Products Company, which Earl, the sole investor, had started after he left the service in 1944 and which involved selling small cedar chests and candy punchboards by mail order. As his brothers were discharged from the military and returned to Chicago, Earl gave each of them equal shares of the business even though they did not invest money in it. Jack recalled that he “prospered” in the business, but dissension soon set in since there wasn’t enough money to go around, and Hyman left, leaving Earl, Sam, and Jack to manage the company.
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However, that too was short-lived as Jack and his brothers had a falling out. Earl and Sam wanted Jack, who was the sales manager, to sell exclusively the products they were manufacturing, but Jack seemed interested in selling products made by others too. Consequently, Jack and Sam had an argument (“a real run out” was how Earl put it, “a little difference as to the politics of the company” were Sam’s words), and as Earl said later, “We just couldn’t get along so we decided to buy Jack out.” And they did for a little over $14,000 in cash,
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almost assuredly the most money Jack Ruby would ever have to his name.

Two other catalysts to Jack’s departure from Earl Products in 1947 were his apparent dislike for traveling outside the Chicago area to secure new accounts, as Earl and Sam would have liked, and sister Eva’s moving to Dallas some four or five years previously. She had been writing Jack with tales of how good life was there, and asked him to come and join her. Jack subsequently left for Dallas very shortly after his buyout, but not before he and a partner from Detroit were unsuccessful in a cookware promotion business.
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With the help of some money Jack had sent her earlier to obtain a building lease, Eva had purchased a nightclub, known as the Singapore Supper Club, in the 1700 block of South Ervay Street in Dallas. Earl and Hyman had also given money to Eva to help her out. Jack, after his arrival, invested “a lot” of his $14,000 cash windfall and became a 50 percent partner with Eva in the club, which was primarily a dance hall that served beer.
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But the club was in a bad area, and business was so poor they were lucky they were eating. Jack eventually left Eva by herself to run the Singapore and returned to Chicago for a few months to enter into various “merchandising deals,” as he referred to them, but they proved unsuccessful. A pattern was well established. Jack was always selling some cheap item of merchandise, and he was always unsuccessful. When Eva asked Jack to come back to help with the club, he returned to Dallas that same year, 1947.
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Jack, who had been using the name Jack Ruby for some time, decided to officially change his name from Jacob Rubenstein, his petition saying he sought the change because the name Rubenstein was too long and because he was “well known” as Jack Ruby. On December 30, 1947, he secured a decree from the 68th Judicial District Court in Dallas effecting the change, which included the addition of a middle initial, L, in memory of his late friend Leon Cooke. Jack’s brothers Earl and Sam had already changed their name to Ruby; it’s unknown if this prompted Jack to follow suit. Earl stated that he and Jack never discussed the name change. Hyman kept the name Rubenstein.
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Now officially “Jack L. Ruby,” and having left his failed merchandising deals in Chicago, Jack’s main interest in life for the next sixteen years became managing nightclubs and dance halls in Dallas. Though he was an owner of nightclubs, where smoking and drinking were almost automatic, he himself never smoked and rarely drank. Apparently, Jack rarely took a drink because he could not hold his liquor.
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Eva testified that Jack didn’t drink a fifth of liquor a year. When they went out, she said, “We ordered two drinks. I would drink mine and have to drink two-thirds of his.” And she added, “I don’t remember but once he had a cigar in his mouth…and maybe he had three or four cigarettes in his life that I know of.” Said Earl, “He didn’t smoke at all.”
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Soon after Jack resumed operating the Singapore Supper Club, he changed its name to the Silver Spur (though it was sometimes referred to as the Silver Slipper), and Eva left for the West Coast, where she operated a restaurant behind a bar on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and later sold fishing tackle and radios on the road. She remained a partner with Jack in the club, gave him power of attorney, and invested money when she could, but she only returned to Dallas sporadically over a ten-year period until her permanent return in 1959.
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Jack, meanwhile, in about 1952, purchased another club, the Bob Wills Ranch House, located in an industrial area at Corinth and Industrial streets, with money obtained from a friend, Ralph Paul. Jack had met Paul, as was his style, by simply walking up to him one day in 1948 in the Mercantile National Bank, where they both did business, and introducing himself. Paul, like Jack, had come to Dallas the previous year. He was from New York City and in 1948 was half owner of a nightclub called the Sky Club. Paul invited Jack to see the show at his club, and later Jack reciprocated and invited his new buddy Ralph to see his club. They became fast friends, and a few years later Jack went to Paul and told him he wanted to buy the Bob Wills Ranch House and asked to borrow $2,000 so he could “show” some people he had the money, which he would promptly return the next day. It turned out that wasn’t enough. As Paul told the Warren Commission in 1964, “Subsequently he [Ruby] roped me in for $3700.” Eventually, Paul ended up with a note, or part ownership, on the Silver Spur.
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Norman Weisbrod and his partner, Sam Lasser, operated a photograph and popcorn concession at the Ranch House for a year. Weisbrod, calling Ruby a “Damon Runyon type character,”
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said he became convinced that Ruby was “crazy” in the manner he operated his newly purchased club and performed as master of ceremonies. According to Weisbrod, Ruby purchased Western clothing, and at times got up on stage and attempted to entertain the customers with a guitar. Sam Lasser commented on Jack’s efforts at being a guitar-playing cowboy by saying that Ruby could not sing or play the guitar.
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However, Ruby did occasionally have “first-class” entertainment, including Tennessee Ernie Ford, the country western singer Tex Ritter, and big bands including Artie Shaw and other entertainers, many of whom he also, it seems, tried to shortchange. Lasser stated that on one occasion Jack had considerable trouble when he tried to cheat Tex Ritter out of two hundred dollars that Ritter was owed.
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With both the Bob Wills Ranch House and the Silver Spur to run, Jack encountered severe financial difficulty in 1952. He apparently had completely dissipated his $14,000 and was doing so badly that he moved out of his apartment and started sleeping and cooking in the back of the Silver Spur. Dallas police officer Gerald Henslee recalls driving with his partner one summer night up the alley behind the nightclub and seeing a man sleeping in his underwear just inside the screen door. When they rousted him, Ruby identified himself as the owner of the place, and they advised him to find safer sleeping accommodations, considering the bad neighborhood. Jack disregarded the advice but told them to return to his club anytime, everything on the house.
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Jack soon went completely broke and lost both clubs, first the Ranch House and then, about a month later, the Silver Spur, and had a “mental breakdown.”
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Marty Gimple (Jack’s friend from Chicago who had sold punchboards with Jack in 1941) and his business associate Willie Epstein assumed some of the debts and took over the Silver Spur.
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After pulling down the shades and “hibernating” in the flea-bag Cotton Bowl Hotel in Dallas for three or four months, and declining to see his friends, Jack went back to Chicago and was mentally depressed to the point where he told his brother Earl, “Well, it looks like it is the end for me.” Jack was penniless and Earl tried to help him out and find a business for him to run. However, he was listless and wouldn’t go anywhere. Earl even had to force him to wash and clean himself.
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Jack came out of his depression after a month or two and returned to Dallas in 1952, saying he did not like being in Chicago, owed a lot of money to people in Dallas, and wanted to make money so he could pay off his debts.
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Starting his “comeback,” Jack tried operating the Silver Spur again, taking it back from Gimple and Epstein, who apparently were more than happy to get rid of it. And for a few months in 1952 into 1953 he even operated the Ervay Theater, a motion picture theater next door to the Silver Spur.
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In 1953, Jack, with a partner, Joe Bonds, obtained an interest in another Dallas nightclub, the Vegas Club, one he would continue to operate right up to the time he shot Oswald more than ten years later. The Vegas Club (or Club Vegas) was formerly the Studio Lounge, and was located in a semicommercial district on Oaklawn Avenue. The owner, Irving Alkana, had purchased the club in the latter part of 1952 or early 1953. However, Alkana, owing the government $6,000, signed a lease purchase agreement with Jack, whom he had met a year earlier while frequenting the Dallas nightclub scene. Jack completely controlled the operation of the club, which sold beer, wine, soft drinks, and some prepared food items, and managed it along with Bonds. Jack bought Bonds out a few months later for $2,500.
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It was around this time that Jack discovered—no one remembers how—a ten-year-old black boy from Dallas called “Little Daddy Nelson” (real name, Ben Estes Nelson), who was the greatest little singer, dancer, and piano player Jack and many others had ever seen. Little Daddy started performing regularly at the Vegas Club to highly appreciative audiences. No one recalls how Little Daddy came up with his second name, Sugar Daddy, but it may have been Jack’s doing since he felt he had finally struck gold with the young black performer whom he was going to ride to fame and fortune in New York, Vegas, and Hollywood. Jack spent every penny he had on Little Daddy and on March 18, 1952, signed a contract with the boy’s legal guardian and father, Columbus Nelson, giving Columbus and his wife, presumably the boy’s mother, 25 percent of the action and Little Daddy 50 percent, with Jack getting the remaining 25 percent as his manager. The contract even provided for a tutor for Little Daddy while he was on the road. Jack took Little Daddy to New York and Chicago to line up TV and radio appearances, but just when things were about to happen, a second mother, or a second woman claiming to be Little Daddy’s real mother, showed up as the fly in the ointment, and Jack, on the advice of his lawyer, backed off, afraid of all the legal entanglements that would inevitably follow.
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In September of 1953, some three months prior to the option date of Jack’s lease purchase agreement, Jack informed Alkana that he would not be able to obtain the funds to make the purchase. Alkana took over the management of the club and Jack retained a one-third interest. However, numerous disagreements ensued, including a fist fight in May of 1954. After their brawl, Jack was arrested and charged with carrying a concealed weapon when the police found a .38 caliber snub-nosed revolver in his possession. Alkana said Ruby always had the gun on him because he carried large sums of money. Alkana also told FBI agent Carl Murano Jr. that he could not recall ever seeing Ruby pull his revolver on anyone, nor had he ever heard of Ruby threatening anyone with a gun, including himself when they had their fight and Ruby had the gun on his person. In June of 1954, Alkana sold Jack his two-thirds interest in the Vegas Club.
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In 1955 Jack had difficulty paying federal excise taxes for the Vegas Club, so his brother Sam loaned Jack $5,500 to prevent the IRS from padlocking the door of his club. Sam was forced to sue when Jack defaulted on his payments. They went to trial but apparently the matter was settled before a judgment was rendered, Jack agreeing to pay the balance on the loan, $4,500. At the time of Jack’s death, Sam was still owed about $1,300.
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Jack sold his interest in the Silver Spur in 1955 but continued operating the Vegas Club. Right around this time, he opened another club named Hernando’s Hideaway on Greenville Avenue in Dallas, but it was not successful and he lost it after less than a year.
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Jack continued ownership of the Vegas Club but turned over its operation to his sister Eva in 1959, when she returned from California. She ran the club as a salaried employee with no ownership interest.
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Soon, a new club, the one history would forever link him with, was to come his way. An acquaintance, Joe Slatin, got the idea to open a private membership club in Dallas, and with borrowed funds he leased the upstairs second-floor property at 1312½ Commerce Street, located halfway between the county jail and the Dallas Police Department, and began the process of redecorating and finding employees. Slatin, however, had used up all of his initial capital, so he approached Ruby, who had visited the premises during the redecorating, regarding additional financing. Ruby eventually put up $5,000, money he mostly got from his brother Earl and his friend Ralph Paul, and the Sovereign Club was established as part of S&R Inc. S&R (Slatin and Ruby) was a corporation Ruby formed in February of 1960, though Ralph Paul, Slatin, and a third party are listed in the articles of incorporation, not Jack. Earl Ruby is listed on the board of directors with the above three parties, but again, Jack isn’t.
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The club opened in the early part of 1960. Not only was business poor, but Slatin accused Ruby of trying to be “too high class” in the operation of the club, thereby dooming any chance of success. Seeing no hope for success, Slatin voluntarily withdrew. Jack promised to pay Slatin $300, but never did.
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