But certainly Jack couldn’t be proud of the time when he sucker punched a patron from behind, and after knocking him down proceeded to kick him in the face. And this was the brother of one of Ruby’s exotic dancers. She feared Ruby would kill her brother before someone stopped the “fight.”437
A frequent patron noted, in what is certainly a classic understatement, that Ruby would in some cases “take more severe action than the situation seemed to warrant.”438
Ejection down the stairs seemed to be Ruby’s preferred method of disposing of unruly patrons, but he didn’t save that solely for his customers. He threatened to throw one of his female employees, a cigarette girl, down the stairs during an argument over forty-five to fifty dollars in wages.439
Jack simply couldn’t help himself when it came to being physical. Despite their recurring arguments, of all his siblings he was the closest to his sister Eva.* When she went to the hospital for a week in November of 1963, he visited her two or three times a day, and he spent more time grieving with her over the assassination weekend than anyone else. But when the two of them would get into it over money or the operation of the Vegas Club, Jack couldn’t even resist giving Eva a slap across the kisser now and then.440
Because Ruby had been a very good street fighter going back to his days in Chicago, kept in good physical shape, and was always a strong man, no one can recall Ruby, no matter whom he took on, getting beat up himself. But that doesn’t mean he always won. It seems that one fellow Ruby pummeled not only had never heard of the Marquis of Queensbury rules, but also, unfortunately for Jack, had Mike Tyson genes in him before Iron Mike was even born. Willis “Dub” Dickerson, a musician who had worked for Jack at one of his clubs in the early 1950s, dropped by the Carousel one night and pulled up a chair at a table of four, partially blocking the aisle. When Ruby told him to move his chair and Dub told Jack to “go to hell,” they naturally ended up out on the street. After Jack knocked Dickerson down with a blow to the head and Dickerson got up, Jack pushed him against a wall and, with his left hand in Dickerson’s face holding him to the wall, began kneeing him in the groin. Dub didn’t like this, of course, and proceeded to bite down hard on Jack’s very available left forefinger, partially severing it at the first joint. Jack later had to have the tip of the finger amputated. Dickerson saw Jack a few times thereafter and Jack wasn’t angry at all with him, knowing that all is fair in love and street fighting.441
Jack was the consummate glad-hander, but one employee noted, as had others, that although he was an extrovert and friendly with everybody, he appeared to have very few close friends.442 Wally Weston, Jack’s emcee at the Carousel, had a simple explanation: Ruby never had close friends because of his violent temper and peculiar personality.443 Yet this was a man who minutes after striking up a conversation with a total stranger and learning of his problems gave him his apartment key and insisted he go there and stay with him. The man ended up living with Jack for a little over a year.444
That generosity was one of the traits, among others, fondly remembered by former Ruby employees. In a book about Ruby, Diana Hunter and Alice Anderson, two of Jack’s Carousel “girls,” wrote,
Jack Ruby was our boss, but that was all we were ever sure of. We never knew exactly what to expect of him. He raged at us. He praised us. He browbeat us. He helped us. He was tight-fisted with us. He was generous. Often in the crush of busy evenings at the Carousel, when the music was loud, we reviled Jack Ruby. But we also loved that guy…He grumbled about the salaries he had to pay us. Yet he was generous to a fault. He loaned money to friends without seeming to care if he was ever paid back. He opened his apartment to acquaintances who needed a place to sleep. He offered a job to anyone who needed one, whether or not the person was qualified…That toughness which Jack Ruby displayed on occasion was mostly for show. He was crude in his language and his manners, true. But the girls who worked at the Carousel saw in him a nature that was kind and generous. We knew him best as a man with a longing to make friends and keep them. And he had a kind of honesty that transcended everything. When he disliked something, he was quick to admit it. When he loved something, it was all the way.445
Many of the sentiments of Hunter and Anderson were undoubtedly summed up in their book’s dedication, which read, “In Loving Memory of Jack Ruby, Our Raging Boss, Our Faithful Friend, the Kindest-Hearted Sonuvabitch We Ever Knew.”
Ruby’s generosity wasn’t limited, as indicated, to his employees, as he could be compassionate and bighearted toward anyone down on their luck, often giving destitute or poor people out on the street more than just small change without their even soliciting it from him. Dallas police officer T. M. Hansen Jr. said he had personally seen Ruby doing this several times, adding, “I have heard a lot of people say that he helped a lot of people.”446 “Jack is a very compassionate person,” his sister Eileen would tell the Warren Commission. “He always feels sorry for the underdog.”447 Tammi True, one of Jack’s favorite strippers, said that “Jack was always picking people up off the street…that didn’t have a place to stay or any money…We had three or four guys sleeping in the club every night because they didn’t have a place to stay.”448
There was another side to Ruby’s generosity and compassion that, unlike his help to the poor, was perhaps not quite as altruistic. Ruby would always pick up a dinner check and was always giving people presents, some felt because he wanted to be liked.449 And Joyce Gordon, a stripper at the Carousel, said, “Jack did a lot of things because he thought he’d get a pat on the back, a medal, be praised for what he was doing.”450
And the overall positive view of Ruby by those on the inside was also often tempered by the unkind realities seen by those same people. The girls alluded to it when they stated, “Jack was a paradox, a lot of contradictions.”451
One comedian, who had a routine that poked fun at President Kennedy and his wife, told the FBI that Ruby told him that his jokes were funny but only an idiot would laugh at them. Ruby then went on to prohibit his entertainers from using any material that would reflect adversely against “Negroes, Jews or the Kennedys,” adding he didn’t appreciate comedians “knocking the president or his wife.” Another comedian at the club had told what he felt were completely “inoffensive” Jewish jokes one night, but Ruby took offense at them and told the comic, “My people have suffered enough.” Yet, with respect to blacks, a musician who hung out frequently at the Carousel said that while he never heard Ruby express hatred or make inflammatory remarks about them, he nevertheless referred to them in the vulgar vernacular, and on one occasion he observed Ruby refuse admittance to the club to a mixed group of black and white businessmen.452
Billy Joe Willis, a Carousel Club drummer for two years, characterized his boss as a highly emotional person who had no control over his emotions, someone who was prone to argue with his employees over trivial matters and fire them with the slightest provocation.453 And Ruby beat the handyman at the Carousel Club so badly over a disagreement that the man had to be taken to Parkland Hospital for emergency treatment.454
Although Ruby appeared decisive in the ironhanded running of his club, he apparently had trouble making even the smallest decisions. Either that or he had an inordinate need to have contact with others. One friend told the FBI that he was in stores with Jack on two occasions, once to buy toothpaste and the other time to buy batteries. Both times Jack solicited the opinions of the employees and several customers in the store before making his purchase.455 If Ruby wasn’t neurotic, no one is.
Ruby seemed to be a lightning rod for opinions. Everyone who knew him had a rather strong one about him. When one reads all of the FBI reports on Ruby in the Warren Commission volumes, a somewhat paradoxically consistent picture of contradictions emerges—difficult to fully understand yet making Ruby almost predictable in his behavior. As mentioned earlier, there was perhaps no group of individuals, including his family, who knew Ruby better than his employees at the Carousel. For the most part they loved h
im, mood swings and all. As former employees Hunter and Anderson perceived Ruby’s way of thinking, “Every score had to be evened, every wrong, real or imagined, had to be righted. He couldn’t stand to see anyone ‘get away’ with something. And he saw no reason to wait for the proper authorities to take action. Invariably, he plunged right in and tried to do it himself,”456 all completely compatible with what he did to Oswald in the basement of Dallas City Hall.
For those who logically believe that Ruby was not involved in any conspiracy to silence Oswald, there are, in these observations of Ruby’s makeup, keys to the puzzle as to why he shot Oswald. But the observation of Ruby that explains not the “why he shot Oswald,” but the “why he was there” question, was provided by several people who knew Ruby well. William Howard, who knew Jack for more than ten years, said simply, “He liked to be in the middle of things no matter what it was.”457 Newspaperman Tony Zoppi seconded that, saying, “If there was one Ruby trait that stands out it is that he had to be where the action was. He was…all over the place, wherever anything exciting was happening. That’s why the President’s assassination and all the follow-up activity at the jail with Oswald and the press attracted Jack like a magnet. It was a natural for him.”458 Wes Wise, of KRLD TV-radio in Dallas, said that as a sports broadcaster for the station he saw Ruby “at almost every boxing match I ever attended. He would be at every football game…He’d be at fires, he’d be at major accidents.”459 This quality of Ruby’s long predated Dallas. Ben Epstein, who grew up with Ruby, chumming around with him at neighborhood hangouts like the barbershop and pool hall, said that Ruby had a strong affinity for being “where the action was.”460*
The fact was that Jack Ruby never saw a crowd that he didn’t want to be a part of. On that fateful Sunday morning, what he saw at City Hall motivated him to take himself, with his hair-trigger temper, with his desire to right any wrong, with his penchant for taking the law into his own hands, into that basement. Though the evidence lends itself to the inference that Ruby probably intended to kill Oswald the first chance he had when he left his apartment that Sunday morning, it was Ruby’s need to be in the middle of things that proved to be the catalyst, the one necessary ingredient in his makeup that made the shooting of Oswald when and where it happened a reality.
And so it was that on Thursday, November 21, 1963, the eve of President John F. Kennedy’s visit to Dallas, Jack Ruby had the last “normal” day of his life. When he went to bed that night, or actually in the wee hours of Friday morning as was his normal custom, he had no idea, like millions of Americans, what was about to happen to his country and most certainly to himself.† The next day would see the assassination of the president of his beloved country and the subsequent unfolding of events that would culminate in his shooting Oswald, a seemingly unpredictable event, which was not all that unpredictable if you really knew Jack Ruby. But Thursday was normal and for Jack that meant a day filled with activities, most if not all of which reflected one of the myriad facets of his personality.
Thursday began as it usually did with the locking up of the club around 2:00 a.m. after the previous evening’s patrons had left. One of Jack’s dancers, Karen Carlin (“Little Lynn”), had had too much of Jack’s rotgut champagne and had gotten sick and passed out in a nearby parking garage. Jack stayed with her until 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. and then joined Larry Crafard, the Carousel Club handyman, for breakfast at the Lucas B & B Restaurant next door to the Vegas Club before going home to bed. Later that morning, around 10:30 or 11:00, he received a call from Connie Trammel, a girl he had met previously at the Carousel Club. She asked him for a ride downtown for a job interview with Lamar Hunt, son of Texas oilman H. L. Hunt. Jack agreed to pick her up and drive her to her appointment. On the way there, Jack made one stop at the Merchants State Bank to purchase a five-hundred-dollar cashier’s check to pay the monthly rent for his Vegas Club, and then later, after they arrived, he stopped in to see one of his lawyers in the same building.461
Probably sometime that morning, Jack called Graham Koch, the lawyer handling his problem with delinquent income and excise taxes, for advice.462
Around noon, Dallas police lieutenant W. F. Dyson and three fellow officers were in the office of Assistant District Attorney Ben Ellis on the sixth floor of the Dallas County Records Building when Ruby walked in and passed out some advertisement cards on his stripper “Jada.” Either just before or after Ruby passed out his Jada cards to Dyson and his fellow officers, Ruby stopped in to see a longtime acquaintance of his, Assistant District Attorney Bill Alexander, whose office was in the adjacent Dallas County Criminal Courts Building, and who within months would help get a sentence of death for Jack for killing Oswald. There he inquired about a friend, Robert Craven, and Craven’s arrest for passing four bad checks.463 Right after he left the Criminal Courts Building, Ruby visited Max Rudberg of AAA Bonding Service to discuss a peace bond hearing coming up on the charge filed against him by his employee, the stripper Jada, whose cards, as we’ve seen, he was still nonetheless passing out.464
During the noon hour, Ruby called John Newnam, the advertising salesman for the Dallas Morning News, to arrange ads for the Vegas and Carousel clubs,465 and sometime during the day Jack gave a pass to the Carousel to an acquaintance he met on the street.466
It is not known for sure when Ruby went to the Carousel Club that Thursday afternoon. He thought it was in the early afternoon hours.467 The Carousel utility worker, Larry Crafard, could only say Ruby arrived “sometime between 12:00 and 3:00” and left the club later in the afternoon.468 Chances are he left somewhere between 3:00 and 3:30 p.m. because around that time he tried to make a dinner date with a woman waiting for a bus on Commerce Street (the street the Carousel Club was on) whom he had met two or three months earlier at the club when she showed up there with the doctor she worked for. Ruby’s pitch to her this Thursday afternoon, “With your looks, you should be in show business,” never got him his date, but she did give him her phone number.469
Ruby called Crafard at the club later in the afternoon, telling him he wanted him to bartend that night at the Vegas Club, and about 7:30 p.m. Ruby picked Crafard up at the Carousel and drove him to the Vegas Club.470 Jack was overseeing the Vegas Club as well as the Carousel because his sister Eva was at home and in quite a bit of pain while she was recuperating from surgery (hysterectomy and the removal of a large abdominal tumor) performed earlier that month.471 Ruby returned to the Carousel at around 9:00 p.m. and talked with Lawrence Meyers, a sales manager for a Chicago-based automobile accessory company who had met Ruby several years earlier during one of his trips to Dallas. Meyers and his lady friend from Chicago, Jean Aase, visited with Ruby for a while, and Meyers invited Ruby to join him and his brother and his brother’s wife later that evening for drinks at the Bon Vivant Room, the club at the Cabana Motel where Meyers and Aase were staying.472 Jack said he would try to stop by, and then left shortly after to have dinner with his good friend Ralph Paul at the Egyptian Lounge, arriving around 9:45 or 10:00 p.m. and staying for about forty-five minutes.473 Joe Campisi, owner and operator of the Egyptian Lounge, apparently was not there that night.
Ruby returned to the Carousel after dinner and had a normal evening—interacting with the crowd as emcee, and getting into a verbal argument with a foul-mouthed drunk in the crowd who wanted Ruby, who was giving away prizes, to get off the stage and bring on the girls, Ruby eventually forcing him to leave without incident.474 Another incident happened while Ruby was on the stage giving a brief demonstration of his twistboard to stimulate sales. “Even President Kennedy tells us to get more exercise,” Ruby said, inducing a heckler to shout, “That bum.” Jack responded immediately, “Don’t ever talk that way about the President.”475
Around 11:30 Jack took Lawrence Meyers up on his invitation and joined him and his brother and wife at the Bon Vivant Room at the Cabana Motel. Jack, ever the entrepreneur, tried to interest Lawrence’s brother Eddie, a Pepsi distributor, in the twistboard as a tie-
in with the Pepsi operation. Eddie wasn’t interested and Jack left after twenty to thirty minutes to go back to the Carousel.476 Jack got back to the club, closed up around 2:00 a.m.,477 and picked up Crafard at the Vegas Club around 2:30 a.m. They had breakfast next door at the Lucas B & B, after which he dropped Crafard off at the Carousel, where he was staying, around 3:30 or 4:00 a.m.478 Ruby then went directly home.
As indicated, it had been a typical day for Jack—caring about his friends, caring about his club, working on his personal problems, handing out club cards, trying to pick up a woman, socializing with friends, trying to make a buck, schmoozing with customers, ejecting customers—before he went to bed in the early hours of Friday, November 22, 1963.479
Dr. Renatus Hartogs, the New York City psychiatrist who examined Oswald when Oswald was thirteen, and went on to write a book about Oswald and Ruby, The Two Assassins, found many similarities between the two. A few he mentioned are that both, at a young age, “were poverty-stricken emotionally as well as sometimes economically…Violence threaded through the life of each…[Psychiatric] help was suggested for each,” Oswald at the Bronx Children’s Court, Ruby at Chicago’s Institute for Juvenile Research. “Both were truants” in school, “both were educationally deprived. Oswald went only as far as the tenth grade, Ruby…only finished the eighth grade.” Both “were impulsive men driven by their fantasies,” and “Oswald acted as though he believed he had the right and the calling to kill the President of the United States…Ruby appears to have felt he had the right to avenge the murder…Neither could accept the slightest degree of frustration without throwing a temper tantrum,” et cetera.480 Hartogs could have added, among a few other things, that both Ruby and Oswald had uncommonly neurotic mothers whose own families found them impossible to get along with, and who the authorities concluded were incapable of properly rearing their sons. It is interesting to note that, as we saw earlier, the primary influence on Lee Harvey Oswald’s young life was his mother, his father having passed away before his birth. Though Joseph Rubenstein was alive throughout Jack’s youth, most of young Jack’s adolescent years were spent without the presence of his father, and Ruby, like Oswald, was reared during this period by his mother. The similarities in their backgrounds go beyond this. As author David Lubin points out, “Oswald and Ruby were classic losers. Violent, undereducated, raised in broken homes by neurotic, paranoid, and…emotionally unstable mothers, unable to hold a steady job (Oswald) or stay out of debt (Ruby)…[Each was] puffed up with compensatory delusions of self-importance.”481
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