by Jack Olsen
With no husband on the premises, the young mother was equally protective of her sons. One summer Stanley and Dean, seven and nine, witnessed a minor misdemeanor: neighborhood boys shot out a street-corner light. Sheriff’s deputies used the two Corll children as informers, and then pinned little tin badges on them. When their mother came home from work that night, the boys were babbling with pride, but Mary Corll was upset at the news. “I called up the sheriff and I told him I didn’t appreciate him having to have help from little kids,” she recalled, still angry almost twenty-five years afterward. “I figured the other kids would be layin’ for Stanley and Dean, and there’d be fights all summer, and I asked the sheriff to send protection. When he wouldn’t do it, I just said, ‘Well, my children are not gonna stay in this neighborhood!’ I sent ‘em to my mother’s farm in Indiana for the summer.”
In the young woman’s view, the season on the farm eliminated any later necessity for sex education for the two boys. “When they came back, I didn’t see that there was much that I had to tell them. What kind of sex training do you have to give a boy that’s lived on a farm? You don’t have to tell him nothin’! And Dean never asked. He was unconcerned about sex. The boys ran around the house and they didn’t care whether they had clothes on or not.”
By the time Dean reached adolescence, his mother had married a salesman, J. J. “Jake” West, a burly man who traveled Louisiana, Mississippi and East Texas for Westclox. The family moved to Vidor, Texas, a few miles east of Beaumont and a short haul from the Louisiana border. Dean Corll spent his high school years in Vidor, birthplace of the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and frequent site of Klan rallies.
An early friend of the West family described the community: “Vidor is considered, and always has been, a backward community. We pay damned little taxes, we have darn little. A railroad town, a rough class of people here after the war…. There are no colored people in this town. None. There have never been.*This town has some ideas that date back prior to the time I was born, and it’s still that way. People came to Vidor because it’s a nice quiet place to get away.”
Sally Bixby Defty, star reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, studied Vidor first hand and put the matter even more candidly: “There are some nice people, but essentially it’s the kind of place where the big event for the kids is to pour kerosene on the cat and set it afire. It’s the kind of place where nobody cares about civil rights and everybody cares about the high school football team.”
Dean enrolled as a freshman in Vidor High School. “He wasn’t no grade-A student,” his mother remembered. “He was satisfactory. He stayed in school because he was really interested in the band. He didn’t fail, but he was no Truman Capote, no genius at the age of twelve. I never wanted a genius and thank God I never had one.”
The boys swam naked at the Blue Hole, an old clay quarry, and went down to the Trinity River to pick pecans. Dean took up skin diving, but he had to quit when he almost fainted in church one morning. “We took him to the doctor and he said it was pressure on his neck,” Mrs. West said. “Had something to do with that heart murmur a few years before. So he had to quit skin diving and cut off strenuous activity again. He didn’t care. He was all tied up in the band by that time, playing his trombone.” Young Dean liked to trap flying squirrels and chain them around his neck, or take them to school in his cowboy boots.
One day a pecan salesman dropped in at the Wests’ big home on Dogwood Drive and noticed the lady of the house baking several pies at once. “If you got that much energy,” the man said, “why don’t you start making candy?” The energetic Mrs. West liked the idea, and soon afterward the entire family drove to a candy plant in Houston and paid fifty dollars for a praline recipe.
From the first day of candymaking, Dean Corll became the embodiment of the whole operation. “I remember the machines coming in,” a high school friend said, “and putting ’em in the garage, for separating and cracking different-size pecans, shaking ’em, cleaning ’em, all by machine, and Dean kept those machines running, wrapped the candy in boxes and delivered ’em. That’s one reason he didn’t have a whole lot of social life. He was busy all the time.”
After a while, the family systematized the process. Mrs. West would make the candy, Dean and Stanley would wrap and box it, and Jake West would take it on his sales route and sell it. When special problems came up or extra impetus was needed, the teenage Dean was always ready. “He ran back and forth delivering in Vidor,” Mrs. West recalled. “He did every single thing we asked him to, without ever makin’ a complaint. Sometimes when they both had to wrap, Stanley’d get the jitters and want to go to a ball game or something, and Dean’d say, ‘Well, if you give me all the boxes you’ve wrapped, I’ll let you go.’ And Dean ended up getting the money. This is the way they got along. If Stanley had something Dean wanted, he’d just wait till Stanley needed money and he’d buy it from him.”
The loci of the young man’s life were the high school band room and the candy factory. Said his school friend: “I don’t recall him ever dating a girl or I don’t think he even went to the proms or anything that I can remember. I don’t remember seeing him there. Both of us had few friends.”
An old snapshot showed Corll seated with the band, holding his trombone. “We had a sincere desire to be the best damned band in this whole area, seventy-five or eighty kids,” his friend said. “Dean was no different. The football team wasn’t anything to brag about, but the band was the greatest.” When the band went out of town, Dean would provide big boxes of candy for nibbling on the bus. He failed senior English and was ineligible to graduate, but the 1958 yearbook, The Pirates’ Treasure, pictured him along with the graduates. “Sweet to know,” the yearbook called him. “Very occupied.”
The Wests moved to the northern outskirts of Houston to be closer to the growing market for “Pecan Prince” candies, the family’s new trademark, and Dean made up his high school failure by correspondence. He also began to clash with Jake West, who by now had quit Westclox altogether and was devoting himself exclusively to the family’s thriving business in pralines, pecan chewies, and divinity. Mrs. West described a typical scene disdainfully: “Jake’d order Dean to do things, and one day he said, ‘Dean, take the car and go into town and get some milk.’ Dean came back with the wrong kind, and Mr. West said, ‘Well, he never does anything right!’ Dean told me later, ‘I’m not gonna go in and get him anything else! I’m not gettin’ paid for it anyway.’”
A few days later, Jake West had another errand for his stepson, and he told his wife to pass the order along. “You tell him!” Mrs. West said. “You’re the one that fussed at him the other day.” West ran the errand himself.
“He knew he was wrong,” Mrs. West said, “but he just wouldn’t bow down and say, ‘Well, Dean, I’m sorry.’ I was the peacemaker between the kids and Mr. West the whole time. The kids’d bring me their problems with Mr. West, and I would try to explain his point of view to them, but finally it got to the place where I would say, ‘Look, we’re not doing things for him, we’re doing things for ourselves. If we want things done, we’ll do ’em ’cause we want ’em done.’ That worked fine, and we got along as good as any split family could.”
When Dean was nineteen years old and still working as an unsalaried candymaker and wrapper and handyman, the family moved to The Heights and set up a new shop, and the boy was packed off to Indiana to live on the farm where his mother had been brought up. “I thought it was time he got away from home,” Mary West explained. “My dad had just died, and Mom needed somebody for the adjustment. And I felt like Dean had it coming, to get away. He’d been working for nothing for us.”
The rural sabbatical stretched into two years, and Mrs. West’s recollections are in a minor key. “Dean worked in a coil factory up there, and he had a Simca, two or three cylinders, like a li’l cartoon thing. Nowadays when I ask Mom about it, she remembers things that aggravated her. Like Dean wouldn’t cut off the limb of a tree the
minute she’d ask him. She’d get mad and cut the limb off and he’d take her picture, just to tease her, or take her picture when she was climbing over a fence or somethin’ like that. Well, my mother is not the type to brag about any of her children. When Mom has anything to say, it’s usually critical—something they did that they shouldn’t have done. Like she’d tell Dean to pick up the cobs in the barnyard and he didn’t do it. Little things. He wrote and told me not to tell my folks in Indiana what I was up to in Houston because they’d say something about it. ‘That’s another scatterbrain idea that’s gonna fail.’ This is the attitude my family has had about me. Always. Things are gonna be bad, I’m gonna fail. But Dean was loyal to me, and he said, ‘Mother, write to ’em but don’t tell ’em what you’re doing, ’cause they’re gonna make something out of it.’ It really hurt him to think that they would do that to me.
“What did he do for fun? Well, he kept his moon charts and star charts up in the barn. He was interested in astronomy for a while, but he never really did stick with anything for long. He liked fads. He was a gadget man. He had a great big tape recorder that we made payments on. He had a six-hundred-power telescope in Indiana, and he liked to watch the neighbors with it. One day he invited Mom to take a peek, and she looked in and saw them feeding their stock. Dean said, ‘What do you think of that?’ and Mom said, ‘Be quiet! They’ll hear us!’
“He got a movie camera and made movies with all the kids that lived around the farm. There were two sisters about a half a mile down the way that played with him all the time, and they’d take a movie of one of ’em laying on a table, pretending they were making a doctor movie. They put a sheet over her, and then they got chicken livers and stuff like that, and they’d take kitchen tongs and pretend to be pulling these organs out of her, while Dean handled the camera. Wanda was the nurse and her sister was the patient. It was supposed to be a comedy film. I know my mother thought it was funny.”
At Mary West’s request, the twenty-year-old man returned to his family in Houston in 1960. “I called for him because I needed him,” the mother explained. “Our candy business was growing and we needed his help. We started paying him this time.”
For several months, tape-recorded letters and candy and cakes flew back and forth in the mails between Dean Corll and the Indiana girl named Wanda. One day the telephone rang in the candy factory and Wanda was on the line. Mrs. West recreated the leap-year conversation:
“Dean, are you sitting down?”
“No.”
“Well, go ahead and sit down.”
“Okay, I’m sitting down now.”
“Dean, I’m getting married!”
“Who to?”
“You!”
That ended the romance. “He never even called her back!” Mrs. West said emphatically. “He didn’t want to become emotionally involved with any person or any thing. Never!” The young man had seen his mother’s two marriages to Arnold Corll fall apart, and now the marriage to Jake West was crumbling. “Dean knew how hard it was to be married,” Mrs. West said. “He didn’t want it for himself. You can’t blame him. A kid only knows what he sees.”
One day West lost his temper and ordered his wife to go home and stay home; “I don’t ever want to see you in this candy shop again!”
Mary West was not one to suffer despotism gladly. “I said, ‘Okay,’” the redoubtable woman recalled, “and I started a candy company of my own in a garage behind our house. It may seem odd, two candy companies in the same family, but that’s the way it was. It was time to get something started for my children. The idea was maybe we could be successful and we’d wind up with a different shop for every one of us. Well, Mr. West couldn’t stand that I was doing this for my children and not for him. Made him jealous. Well, he’s the one threw me out of the shop. He thought it was on its feet, so he could get all the credit.”
From the beginning, young Dean became absorbed in the new plant, and Mrs. West worked twelve-hour days developing recipes and getting the business off the ground. She named herself president, Dean vice-president, and Stanley, serving a hitch in the marines, secretary-treasurer in absentia. “I incorporated right away so Mr. West and I wouldn’t be responsible for each other’s debts, even though we were still living in the same house,” the mother said. “I had a feeling like he’d go broke. He was a very poor businessman. So I was protecting him at the same time I was protecting myself. He said it was okay, but deep down it wasn’t, especially when we started making money at the Corll Candy Company. He spread the word that somebody had stolen his recipes and somebody was packaging candies just like his. We were still married, and he was trying to break me! He’d give away free candy, things like that, but that only put him deeper in the red. One night Dean and I went over to Pecan Prince and found all these nasty letters that Mr. West was sending out about us. Dean dictated them into his tape recorder. Then we found out that he was following my candy broker around, and all this while we’re still married! Dean stayed loyal to me. Dean was always loyal to me.”
The savage intrafamily competition brought down the marriage in 1963. “This was about the time the Pressure Cooker Club came up in Houston,” Mrs. West said, smiling at the memory. “The newspapers found out that all these frustrated wives were going to a joint out on Telephone Road when their husbands were working, and they’d put their dinner in the pressure cooker when they got home, and the men wouldn’t know what was going on. When Mr. West and I got the divorce, I said, ‘Shoot! If I’d have known it was gonna turn out like this, I might as well have gone into the Pressure Cooker Club!’ But I didn’t. I just worked. That’s all I’ve ever done.”
Dean moved into his first apartment, above the garage that had been converted into the Corll Candy Company. In his mother’s view, the young man’s life was idyllic. “He had every gadget there was in that place,” she said. “He had a tape recorder. He had Spanish sieep-learnin’ tapes that he listened to under his pillow. He bought a Honda and carried the kids on it, and later on he had a Dodge van with a television. He didn’t drink or run around, and if he needed something like a truck or a car, we bought it for him. He had absolutely no sales resistance. If he wanted something, he wanted it right now. Household Finance helped him. Like he’d buy a Honda and then winter’d come and he’d say, ‘I don’t need a Honda anymore,’ and he’d sell it for what’s due, pay off Household Finance, and the next thing he’d buy a bigger one, and do the same thing over. I used to tell him that he needed more sales resistance. He’d kid me. He’d say, ‘Mother, I sure used my sales resistance tonight. I went shopping when the stores were closed!’”
She summoned up a single sour note from those earliest days of the Corll Candy Company. “We had this boy helping out, and I noticed Dean didn’t speak to him for two, three days. I asked one of the girls what happened, the fat girl, and she said the boy told Dean what he could do for Dean, or what they could do for each other, or somethin’. So I just paid the boy off. Dean was really upset with him, and he didn’t mind when I let him go.”
Then the family’s cottage industry suffered a heavy setback; the vice-president and chief candyman was drafted. Corll had first been ordered for a physical in 1962, but his mother had waged a two-year delaying action on the grounds that he was indispensable. But on August 10, 1964, at the age of twenty-four, the young man was assigned to Fort Polk, Louisiana, for basic training. Later he went to Army radio repair school at Fort Benning, Georgia, and then to permanent assignment as a radio repairman at Fort Hood, Texas. Ten months after his induction, he was honorably discharged. “Dean wasn’t a fighter anyhow,” his mother said. “He hated the service. And I needed him real bad. I’m the one got him out. I went through the Red Cross and the governor to do it. Dean was always happy to do anything I asked him. Wherever I wanted him, that’s where he’d be.”
Years later, a close friend theorized that the Army damaged Dean Corll: “He told me that’s where it started, when, you know, the first time he ever—turne
d to a fag, really, I guess that’s the only way I can say it. And ever since then I guess it just got worse and worse and worse.”
With the return of its star executive, the Corll Candy Company moved into a large prefabricated shed across Twenty-second Street from the Helms Elementary School, and the competition with Jake West’s nearby Pecan Prince company intensified. West had a new label put on his candies: “The original Texas pecan chewie, created by J. J. West.” His ex-wife countered by using the same typeface and colors and the inscription: “Corll candy, new, improved, but with the woman’s touch.” “Mr. West didn’t dare say a thing about it,” she said. “That was just our way of getting back at him.”
Every day, Jake would cruise along Twenty-second Street two or three times in his gray Lincoln Continental, checking the activity at the rival factory. “It was strictly business,” Mrs. West said. “He tried to break us, but we weren’t enemies. I didn’t hold it against him. He was jealous of the fact that we were gonna make it.”
An employee had a different interpretation: “Dean was there day and night; he lived right alongside, in a little house trailer. His mother hated Jake West, and she was deliberately trying to put him out of business, and so was Dean. Mary was always telling Dean how much she hated West, all this stuff. The atmosphere was very intense.”
Other employees had similar memories of the Corll Candy Company. Mrs. West seemed to turn more and more toward her outside life, while Dean took over the commercial operation. He had no objections. As his mother was proud of saying, “Dean did whatever I asked of him. And never a complaint.”