The Death Shift

by Peter Elkind

  Dick Jones was similarly larger than life. He was a strong, hearty man—six feet tall, prematurely bald, and well over two hundred pounds—with a passion for Cadillacs and T-bone steaks. In high school, Jones had played guard on the varsity football team. When an armed robber tried to stick up one of his clubs one night, Jones lunged for the intruder as though he were a quarterback and took three slugs in the chest. Things looked bleak for a while—a priest pronounced last rites at the hospital—but Dick Jones was not the sort to succumb to anything easily. Those who knew Jones during his gambling days regarded him as equal parts honest and tough. “If there is such a thing as a clean gambler, he was one of them,” said one man, a retired general in the Texas National Guard. “If you won, he’d pay you. If you lost, let me tell you, you better have your money.”

  In December 1933, Jones married Gladys Leola Fowler, a twenty-two-year-old native of Ohio who had moved to Texas five years earlier. In meeting Gladys at a downtown San Antonio club, Dick had discovered a partner who shared his motivation to build a better life. A tiny, bespectacled woman with a steel spine, Gladys had worked since she was a teenager, when her father’s death had forced her to quit school and take a job. Although the clubs were producing a handsome living, Gladys made her new husband promise to quit gambling. She was shaken by the shooting and wanted a wholesome environment for a family; though unable to conceive their own offspring, the couple had plans to adopt. In 1937, Jones gave up the clubs and entered a business in which a man could gamble legally—oil. After drilling a dry hole, he recognized that the entertainment trade suited him best. Two years later, he opened a new club, this one large, flashy, and—almost entirely—legitimate.

  Jones’s place was on the edge of the city limits, on Fredricksburg Road, a major thoroughfare leading northwest out of town toward Amarillo. He christened it the Kit Kat Klub and emblazoned the name where no one could miss it, in neon letters outside the building. The Kit Kat was a bulky carnival of a place, a two-story Art Deco structure that looked like a cruise ship run aground. Jones had embellished the property with $30,000 in improvements, a staggering sum for that day. Outside, beneath giant palm trees, were a lighted terrazzo patio and a stand where Jones sold barbecue. A roomy dance floor dominated the inside. Mirrors lined the walls, and live bands performed from orchestra platforms. Dick managed the place, while Gladys kept the books and spun records on the turntable when live entertainment wasn’t available. A highlight came on weekend nights, when the proprietor cut the music for hobby-horse races. Competing for a prize bottle of champagne, men and women took turns bumping ridiculously across the room.

  The shadow of World War II paradoxically lifted San Antonio’s doldrums. Servicemen flooded the city for training; thousands would marry there and return after the war. A WPA grant had recently beautified the downtown river with landscaped walkways and bridges. The area around the Alamo had been purchased for preservation as a park. San Antonio seemed to renew its legendary zest for public celebration. Crowds flocked there every April, when the entire city shut down for a week of parades and street fairs known as Fiesta. In this newly buoyant town, the Kit Kat became one of the hot spots, a position it would maintain for an astonishing twenty years. Walking the narrow line between dull and scandalous, Jones served up good food as well as a sassy atmosphere. He brought the first performing belly dancer to town. He hired dancing roller-skaters and magic acts and snagged big-name national bands. Celebrities—such as Bob Hope and Rosalind Russell—visited the Kit Kat when they were in San Antonio.

  The owner’s personality was a critical component of the formula, for Dick Jones was an inspired self-promoter. One year, he invested in prefabricated housing. To overcome customers’ fear that a stiff breeze would blow the buildings apart, Jones rented a crane and deposited a truck on the roof of his model home. Jones ran his construction company by day, dressed in an open shirt, dungarees, and work boots. By night, he donned a black three-piece suit, headed down to the club, and became the dapper host, remembering names, buying drinks, telling jokes.

  Jones’s surviving customers say the Kit Kat Klub operated within the law, save for a few slot machines and penny-ante gambling games. These he confined to the Zebra Lounge, a private club Jones operated in one room of the Kit Kat. Ever mindful of thematic detail, Jones painted the walls with zebra stripes and covered the bar with animal skins. The members-only club designation allowed him to serve liquor by the drink. Because of strict Texas liquor laws, he could offer only setups in the main portion of the building. The private club also let Jones isolate the less public aspect of his business. From time to time, the Bexar County sheriff conducted gambling raids. Jones avoided such unpleasantness through tips from a friendly deputy, who notified him when it was time to lock up the club’s slot machines.

  Though he dodged the legal entanglements of his gambling, Dick Jones would never shed its taint. In 1952, San Antonio police chief R. D. Allen publicly identified him as one of three “well-known gamblers” operating “large-stake games” in Bexar County. The chief said Jones was operating, not at the Kit Kat, but at his home. Jones was livid. Accompanied by his attorney, he marched into the city manager’s office and demanded a retraction. “I’m not in the gambling business and I don’t intend to get into it,” he told the local papers. “I’m not ashamed for having done it, but I haven’t gambled or associated with gambling for 15 years. I don’t even know how to play cards.” Three days later, unable to prove his claim, the police chief was forced to offer Jones an embarrassing public apology, GAMING CHARGE ‘NO DICE’; ALLEN EATS CROW, read the front-page newspaper headline. Nonetheless, the Federal Bureau of Investigation pegged him too. In a postwar crime survey, the San Antonio FBI office included Jones and his club on its list of “notorious types and places of amusement.”

  However long the gambling continued, it became less frequent as his family grew. Dick and Gladys adopted their four children from four different families. Lisa arrived in 1943, Wiley in 1946, Genene in 1950, and Travis in 1952. They lived on Fredricksburg Road a mile north of the Kit Kat, outside the city limits in a home that was as dramatic as the family patriarch.

  It was not so much the size of the residence that was memorable—although with four bedrooms, a large reception area, living room, formal dining room, family room, library, and tiled front terrace, it was gracious enough—as the setting. Two stories tall, built of white stucco and crowned with a roof of red clay tile, the house stood perched high atop a hill like a gaudy Mexican castle. It was set on eight landscaped acres, featuring a swimming pool, a private tennis court, and stalls for a pair of horses. Visitors reached the house on a formal drive marked by pillars that were decorated with the letter J. A wooden fence encircled the property. The Jones estate offered a stunning view of downtown, ten miles away, and a sight to those who drove past. Long after Dick Jones professed to have mended his ways, San Antonians would point and remark, “That’s where the gambler lives.”

  While they were married and living alone, Dick and Gladys had enjoyed an extravagant lifestyle. They took a year off to travel around the world. They acquired pilot’s licenses and went joy-riding in small airplanes. During the war, Gladys was among the few women in San Antonio who had a pair of nylon hose. But when their children arrived, they settled down—albeit in a fashion that matched their quarters. Gladys dressed the house in antiques and silver and herself in fine clothes and furs. The children all took lessons on the grand piano that dominated the living room. Dick bought the family Cadillacs with cash.

  Jones shared his largesse with others. He bestowed lavish gifts on employees and was quick to pick up the tab for a tableful of friends. Friends tell many stories about Jones opening his wallet to help out a casual acquaintance in need. “He was a patsy for anyone who was down and out,” said Harold Nelson, Jones’s lawyer since the 1950s. Five times, the Kit Kat hosted his high school class reunion—steak dinner and drinks included—and Dick Jones footed the bill.

  De
spite his wealth and free-spending ways, which included generous contributions to local charities, Dick Jones remained anathema to respectable San Antonio. The least pretentious city in Texas, San Antonio was paradoxically the most exclusive. In Houston and Dallas, even the hoariest private clubs opened their doors to newcomers of sufficient wealth and power. In San Antonio, bloodlines were paramount. Powerful moneyed arrivals could go to their graves awaiting an invitation to join the San Antonio Country Club, where debutantes were introduced. Within such circles, a former gambler and his brood might as well have been lepers.

  But Dick and Gladys Jones weren’t interested in high society, with its stuffy pretensions and immaculate fingernails. Their home was located in what was then regarded as country, and in striking contrast to their life at the Kit Kat, they behaved in many ways like rural folk. Dick rose by 5 A.M. to plan his day, and napped for two hours in midafternoon. Gladys, stubborn and salty, rolled her own cigarettes. Like many a rural couple, they shared work as well as home, breeding the sort of mutual reliance that results from decades of daily partnership.

  Their faith in the power and obligation of family was stout. However busy things were at the club, Dick headed home to preside over formal supper every night. He sat ceremoniously at the head of the table, and the entire family chanted grace. Dick employed his widowed mother at the Kit Kat—Gladys’s mother lived with them—and dreamed that his eldest son, Wiley, would someday join him in business. Thanksgiving and Christmas were blockbuster family occasions, sweetened with homemade cakes and candies. Gladys spent days before each Halloween sewing extravagant costumes for the children. Every summer, Dick hooked up a trailer to the Cadillac and took everyone on long trips across the United States and into Mexico and Canada. Jones usually drove, stopping frequently at roadside parks for a hunk of watermelon, his favorite snack. Gladys served as navigator and family historian, filling albums with snapshots and little typed cards describing each destination. Everything was interesting; she kept photos with captions reading “Unusual Building,” “Skyline,” and “Demolished House.” Born a Baptist, Gladys converted to Catholicism while her children were young, began serving fish for Friday dinner, and escorted them to St. Gregory’s Church for Sunday services. They all attended Catholic schools, where nuns taught catechism classes every morning. Dick resisted formal religion, but the erstwhile gambler often went fishing with the priests.

  The irony of such private moments was lost to all but the closest of family friends, for Dick Jones cultivated his public image as a carefree high roller. By the late 1950s, however, he was hard-pressed to maintain it. Nightclubs are creatures of changing taste, and after two decades, fashion had left the Kit Kat behind. Jones had squeezed a few extra years out of the place by retooling to attract a family-oriented clientele. He built a swimming pool out by the patio and started renting out the Kit Kat for fashion shows and high school proms. But that only postponed the inevitable. The place began losing money; he fell behind on tax payments for the property. To keep afloat, Jones sold off some of his land holdings and converted part of his homestead into a trailer park. Then he tried another scheme: converting the trailer park’s large recreation room into a fancy restaurant. Jones tore the sprinkler system pipes out of his own lawn to use for the superstructure of a giant sign advertising the place. But the restaurant flopped too. For the first time since his childhood, Jones was under financial pressure. This was the prelude for another embarrassing episode. Much like the gambling flap with the San Antonio police chief, it would lead friends to say Dick Jones was misunderstood, and others to label him a rogue who belonged in jail.

  In August 1960, a retired Sears department store executive named Charles Bramble returned late from a Saturday-night party at the Kit Kat to discover a three-hundred-pound safe missing from his home. The safe, which Bramble and his wife had kept in a bedroom closet, contained $1,500 in cash and jewels. The intruder had also ransacked several bedroom drawers and stolen three pistols. The crime became more curious when a neighbor told police detectives he had seen a man in a business suit pushing a large object down the Brambles’ driveway to a late-model Cadillac. The next day, the Reverend Michael Holden, priest at St. Gregory’s Church, notified police he had the Brambles’ safe in his rectory. Nothing was missing, but the priest, citing his holy vows, refused to reveal who had left it. Eight days later, Dick Jones was arrested for theft and burglary.

  When police told Jones they had traced paint scrapings from the safe to his Cadillac, he admitted the crime. After welcoming the Brambles to the party at his club, Jones explained, he had slipped off, entered the Bramble home through a window, hauled the safe to his car, and dropped it off at his home, then returned to the party. But the whole episode, he claimed, was nothing more than a practical joke. Jones said he was puncturing boasts by Bramble, an old friend, that no one could steal his safe. When Bramble reported the theft to police, rather than confiding in him first, Jones said, he panicked; he decided to return the safe through his priest, expecting that to be the end of things. Bramble readily accepted Jones’s explanation, and police dropped the charges, but the incident filled newspaper columns for days.

  The safe incident opened a decade-long run of snake eyes. In 1963, Jones sold the Kit Kat. He moved his banquet trade to the site of the failed restaurant, rechristened the Oak Hills Party House. And he began devoting his energies to a new business, Dick Jones Outdoor Advertising, which rented out giant billboards and placed ads on bus benches. Jones ran the enterprise from a shop behind the house and instructed Wiley in its ways. But it was his youngest boy, Travis, who developed a fatal attraction to the workshop.

  The four children of Dick and Gladys Jones had shared childhood in pairs: Lisa with Wiley, three years her junior, Genene with Travis, two years younger. Travis had a learning disability but loved to tinker in his father’s sign shop. One afternoon in November 1966, Ralph Haynes, a longtime family employee, noticed the boy, then fourteen, working there on a homemade pipe bomb. “Stop fooling with that thing before you set the place on fire,” Haynes scolded. A moment later, the bomb blew up in Travis’s face, shooting metal shards into his skull. Police rushed Travis to nearby Methodist Hospital in the bed of a pickup truck; he died just before midnight.

  Dick Jones had been asleep in the house when the bomb exploded, and he rushed out to see his adopted son dying before his eyes. But the family member who took it hardest was sixteen-year-old Genene. The family had ordered flowers for the funeral, but Genene purchased a bouquet of her own—red gladioli and yellow carnations. When Travis’s body was laid in the ground, she shrieked and collapsed. It was the first time Genene Jones crossed paths with death; it would be far from the last.

  Classmates who had witnessed her reaction thought it odd to discover Genene back in school later that day. Rather than nursing her grief in private, she had returned just hours after the morning service to milk the sympathy of her peers.

  In some respects, Genene was the Jones family’s most promising child. Intelligent and assertive, she easily dominated conversations. She loved to tell stories. And she had the gift of magic hands: She could crochet and sew and bake, and she was captivating on the piano, with anything from classical music to ragtime.

  But Genene’s life was never tranquil, even in childhood, even at home. Travis’s sudden death had robbed Genene of her closest friend. A natural ally was her sister, Lisa, but the two girls had always been separated by more than just seven years. Where Lisa was low-key and demure, Genene was intense and excitable. Their mother remarked that Genene was the sort of child who would burst into tears if you looked at her wrong. Genene complained often that her parents favored Lisa at her expense. She was particularly bitter one Christmas, when they bought Lisa a pair of diamond earrings and Genene a new sewing machine. The fact that her gift was more expensive did nothing to quell Genene’s complaints. The slightest parental rejoinder set off her sense of being maligned. “Oh, yes, I know,” she would gripe. “I’m the bl
ack sheep of the family.”

  By the time the younger girl entered high school, the proximate source of her resentment was gone; Lisa had married, begun having her own children, and moved out of the house. Genene’s mother then became her adversary; the two strong-willed females battled often, with increasing intensity as Genene plunged into adolescence. After a fight, Genene would storm up to her room, plastered with pictures of the Beatles. Brother Wiley lived at home also, but he was quiet, attended a different high school, and traveled in a crowd of his own. Among the members of her family, Genene took solace from her father alone. She loved to spend afternoons with him, helping paint and put up billboards. He listened to her gripes and taught her to play pool. Genene would eventually embrace the most dramatic of her father’s traits: the refusal to mince words, the affection for the spotlight, the gambler’s comfort with risk. It was as though she acquired by will the paternal traits she could not possess by blood.

  After attending Catholic elementary schools, Genene in 1965 had enrolled in John Marshall High. Marshall was a country school, fifteen miles from downtown and part of a suburban public school district. While some students came from the outer ring of San Antonio suburbs, many arrived from small farms and ranches well beyond the city. The faculty taught courses in agriculture, and the school had its own livestock. Among its extracurricular activities were a Pig Club, a Cattle Club, and a rodeo. Students at other schools joked that Marshall had a hitching post instead of a parking lot.