The Man With Candy

by Jack Olsen

  Mrs. West was described by another employee as “not really young in those years—she must’ve been nearly fifty—but she was a nice-looking lady, very attractive. She was lonely, she had a good figure, and she wanted to get married. Who can blame her? She went out a lot, wore a lot of make-up, sweaters and slacks, fur coats, things like that. She drove around in a new station wagon. I got the impression that she was trying to hang on to her youth. She depended on palmists and readers. She’d have a favorite seer and she wouldn’t do a thing unless it was planned out and read first. The seer would say, ‘Mary, I see a certain time and a certain place, and if you go there you’re gonna meet a man that’s gonna be very influential,’ and she’d go.”

  Workers remembered a striking aspect of the mother-son relationship. “They were both super-protective of each other,” a parttime wrapper recalled. “Sometimes it was like she was the daughter and he was the father. Sometimes he’d even scold her, right in front of us. She’d be telling about one of her dates, and Dean’d get angry, and he’d say, ‘Oh, Mother, don’t!’ and he’d shake his head like he was annoyed, you know? He was like a lot of boys with divorced parents—they take over as head of the house, and they feel that they’re protecting their mothers.”

  An early friend of the family saw the mutual protectiveness as a problem for both. “They say Dean thought a lot of his father, but he lived with his mother,” the man said. “When he was twentyeight he bought a motorcycle and his mother was always getting down on him about it. She was so afraid he was gonna hurt himself or somethin’…. She was really protective. Dean had to hide his new Honda in the candy shop so she wouldn’t see it. He’d lock it in the little storeroom. It really bent my head that he was that afraid of her.”

  Another friend recalled: “Mrs. West was about like the mother of a fifteen- or a sixteen-year-old boy, and she—you know how Houston is—she was just afraid of what her boy could get into. Even though Dean was grown, she still treated him that way. The things he bought and everything else, she was always questioning him. ‘Why’d you do this, why’d you do that?’”

  To everyone in the busy plant, Corll was the indefatigable candymaker, a skilled professional with bottomless reserves of energy and enterprise. “He improvised on the recipe and almost put Pecan Prince out of business because our candy was so much better,” one said. “Dean would always work on the recipes, pralines, pecan rolls, divinity, little chewies, and he was a genius at it. None of us ever knew the recipe; that’s another reason Dean was so important to the business. He was a regular one-man band.”

  Sometimes working conditions were oppressive inside the metal building, with temperatures well above one hundred as the mixtures sputtered and spattered in giant copper pots. “We all got burns,” said a helper. “I had second- and third-degree burns on my fingers, still have scars. You’d try handling the candy without gloves, and that stuff just hardens as soon as it gets on your skin, and you have to peel it off, and the skin comes too. That happened to Dean lots of times, but he never seemed to mind it. He was so strong! He was always building himself up with weights and bar bells. We had these pots as big as a table, and we’d have to hook ’em to a hoist and push ’em along an overhead rail to the marble table where we poured. Sometimes Dean would get impatient, and he’d take two potholders and lift that whole pot, boiling hot! He wasn’t but five foot eleven, maybe a hundred eighty-five, a hundred and ninety, but he was a powerful man. Work? I never saw anybody work like that man! He was trying to build up the business for himself and his mother. He could do everything there was to do in the place. People say he was nothing but a pervert and a homosexual. Well, to us he didn’t have any swishy mannerisms. All he was was a very fine worker.”

  Mary West reflected on the same period and said aciduously, “Yeh, Dean worked hard, and what’d he get? Nothin’! He got a lot of bills, and he got shot.”

  With the candy factory as his laboratory, young Corll indulged his taste in electrical gewgaws. He installed secret microphones, and gleefully taped two employees conspiring to steal candy. He rigged up a telephone that recorded incoming messages, and he laughed and played tricks on the other workers. “Dean was a good sport,” one of them recalled, “and we used to do things that’d drive a person off the wall. Like we’d telephone from the outside and leave fake messages on Dean’s recorder, because when he was working on the candy he wouldn’t answer the phone or allow anybody else to answer it, and after all the candy was poured, he’d sit down and take his messages and return the calls. So we’d phone in and say, ‘Mr. Corll, I’d like to order a hundred gross of pralines, six dozen boxes of chewies, eighty pounds of divinity,’ and we’d keep ordering till—‘Beep!’ The beeper’d go off and end the tape before he could get the name and address.

  “He’d come running in and play it for us. ‘Would y’all listen to this?’ And we’d say, ‘Oh, Dean, what a shame! And such a big order, too.’ When he’d find out it was us, he’d say, ‘Okay, I got y’all’s message,’ and we’d say, ‘Oh, no, Dean, that wasn’t us,’ and we’d harse around.”

  For a time, the Corll Candy Company joined forces with a couple who produced candy apples, Ruby and Richard Jenkins, and the factory hummed from dawn till two in the morning. Mrs. Jenkins retained warm memories of Dean Corll. “We just had a high old time with him,” she said. “One day we mixed all this syrupy gook together and it turned out the funniest turquoise color you ever saw, and I had to stir it with paddles that looked like oars. So I said, ‘Hey, Dean, boil and bubble, toil and trouble, I’m gonna make poison apples for the kiddies!’ He laughed; he thought that was just so funny. Then out of the bottom of the pot came this huge bubble, and I poked it and it was firm! I said, ‘Ah ha, I be-witched it!’ And we all laughed again. And do you know not one of those turquoise apples sold?”

  Mrs. Jenkins, a blithe, statuesque blonde, liked to pester young Corll with questions, and one day she insisted on learning the origin of the slab of marble on which the candy was poured. “Okay, if you insist,” Dean began. “You remember the old bus station downtown that they tore down? You remember those rest rooms?”

  “Oh, yes,” Ruby Jenkins said. “That filthy dirty old place.”

  “Well,” Dean said, “this marble was the walls of those rest rooms. I played hell getting the writing off it.”

  For weeks afterward, Dean lifted fresh candy from the marble top with his spatula and offered it to the woman. “Piece of candy, Ruby?” he would say, smirking, and she would wriggle uncomfortably.

  At Christmastime the production of pecan candies was interrupted while the little assembly line retooled for chocolate-covered cherries and other delicacies, few of which ever reached the outside world. “We’d shoot ‘em full of bourbon and give ‘em as Christmas presents to our brokers, our suppliers, people like that,” Mrs. Jenkins said. “And we got grapes and froze ‘em and rolled ‘em in salt and injected ‘em with vodka. Ah, they were good! We’d sit there and say, One for them, two for us,’ and at the end of the day we’d all be high. Dean, too!”

  Ruby and Richard Jenkins came to admire the young candymaker—“I mean we really liked him, both of us did,” the woman said—but they also detected a fundamental difference between Corll and other males. “There were girls around that factory that were wild about him,” Ruby Jenkins said, “but he wouldn’t give ‘em the time of day. His mother would try to line him up with dates, and he didn’t want any part of it. He’d get mad! I never saw him date a woman or show the slightest interest in a woman.”

  Mary West discussed her son’s attractiveness to women in a tone of satisfaction. “One of our girls was in love with him,” she said, “and she came to me all excited on a Friday and said, ‘Dean wants me to go to the beach with him!’ On Monday she said, ‘I won’t go to the beach with him again! He came around to pick me up and he had his van full of kids!’ Well, that was Dean’s protection against being involved with anybody. He didn’t want to show too much affection to women be
cause he just wasn’t ready to hurt their feelings or take up with ‘em, so he kept the kids between ‘em. The girls really loved him, and they loved to tease him, and he teased them back. He had a tear-gas gun, and he was playing with it by himself one day and it went off in the shop, and the next time we came to work one of the girls got to sneezing, her eyes watering, and she couldn’t figure out what was the matter. So after I told ‘em about the gun going off, they kidded Dean, said they were going home, they’d all come down with colds. They were always kiddin’ around like that.”

  When the children in the school across the street learned the nature of the business in the big metal shed, they would line up at the door for samples, and Dean would accommodate them. “He was a regular Pied Piper,” Ruby Jenkins said, laughing. “Everybody told him to stop, but he wouldn’t stop. The principal even called and said, ‘Please, don’t encourage the kids! They’re crossing the street to get the candy, and they’re just little bitty kids. The parents are complaining.’ But Dean’d still give it out. We’d have our candy-apple crew working and there’d be a knock on the door and the kids’d be waiting out there for candy. So we’d tell ‘em, ‘No! You can’t have any!’ and they’d get mad and say, ‘Well, we’ll git it!’ Sure enough, Dean would go around and hand it to them, or he’d carry it across the street to them. Dean loved kids! I never saw a man that loved kids like Dean. They were always around him, huggin’ on him, and he just loved it.

  “He got him a pool table and put it in the back, and there was a stream of teen-age boys, fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, in and out, in and out. The littler boys, he’d ride ‘em on his Honda Ninety. He had a stereo that went full blast in his trailer next door, and you couldn’t hear yourself think, and there’d be boys in the trailer all the time. He had a telephone that he rigged up for the kids to play with, shaped like a frog, and the eyes lit up when it rang, and you could talk on it without picking up the receiver. And he had a van, a ‘65 or ‘66 white van with a blue carpet and an old blue couch in it, and he had racks for surfboards. He loved the water and he loved the beach, and he was always taking boys down there with him.”

  After a while, some of the other workers began to notice that young Corll acted giddy around young men and boys. “He was flirty,” one of them recalled. “If a guy’d walk by, maybe Dean’d reach out and pinch him. He always had boys around him, and it seemed odd. He didn’t try anything fruity in front of us, but it began to be pretty obvious what he was. I don’t know how his mother could not have known. Everybody around the candy factory knew it; we just kept quiet about it ‘cause he was such a nice, decent person.”

  A teen-age employee named Jimmy developed a marked defensive attitude toward the candymaker. “Jimmy didn’t act like he hated Dean,” said Ruby Jenkins, “but like he was afraid to be alone with him. Whenever Dean’s crew would leave, Jimmy was supposed to come in and clean up for our crew, but if Dean was still there and the two of them were alone, Jimmy wouldn’t do it. He’d ask my husband later, ‘Mr. Jenkins, can I wait to do my clean-up till everybody else is in? I’ll clean fast!’ When Richard asked him why he was afraid to be alone with Dean, he just dropped his head.”

  But other boys remembered Corll fondly, without fear or reservation. “He just acted real nice to me,” a teen-age Heights boy said. “He never tried to mess with me, nothin’. Back then he never even asked me to go anywhere with him. We just went over there, a lot of kids from the neighborhood. David and Malley and I went over there, and he’d give you free candy, and he was just real nice to you, just like a brother or sumpin’. He never tried anythang back then.”

  “He had a lot of young friends,” Mary West said. “They latched on to him. He didn’t look for them. One would bring another one. He would let them use his tape player, teach ‘em how to use it, let ‘em come in any time they wanted, make ‘em feel at home.”

  The night watchman said, “He was a very calm person, and he didn’t seem to be a radical on anything. He didn’t seem to be obnoxious. He just seemed to be just a regular good Joe.”

  Those closest to the candyman suspected that he had a temper, but it was tightly controlled. “He had a room in the back that when he would get real mad he would go in there and pout, like a little kid,” said Ruby Jenkins. “He’d be working and something would go wrong and his ears would turn red and he’d head for his pouting room. As far as cursing, he would never use the big bad curse words. He would use ‘Goddamn’ and ‘son of a bitch,’ but not the big ugly words. He would say ‘shit’ a lot when he’d get angry, and I’d correct him—‘Excretion, Dean, excretion!* He’d just laugh.”

  In the last few years of the Corll Candy Company’s existence, from the mid-1960’s to the summer of 1968, the sturdy young man seemed to be spending a lot of time with his shovel. He dug between the rear wall of the factory and the railroad spur that ran along the right-of-way in the back. He dug in the earthen floor of his “pouting room,” boarded it over and then cemented it. He dug near White Oak Bayou, in an area that later became a blacktop parking lot. His exertions were usually carried out under cover of night, and his explanations were always the same: discarded candy apples drew bees, and spoiled pecans were infested with weevils; the simplest way to avoid insect pests was to bury the contaminated matter. “He was real good about it,” said Ruby Jenkins. “He did his burying without a word of complaint, the way he did everything else. He had this big roll of clear plastic, four or five foot wide, and he had sacks and sacks of cement and some other stuff back in his pouting room. We didn’t ask what he used it for.”

  While the candy company was working two shifts and showing a steady profit, Mary West visited a computer dating service on Bissonnet Street and spent four hours providing data. The upshot was a hurried marriage to Walt Colburn,* a merchant seaman. The newlyweds honeymooned in Mexico City, “and he scared the wits out of me,” Mary West said later. “He raised hell with a cabdriver and really showed himself up. I thought he was psycho; he almost got in a fight. Then he told me how the crews used to walk off ships whenever he signed on, and he bragged about it, he bragged about it! His previous wife hung herself in the garage, and he took the rope off her neck before he called the police, and they called it suicide. I went down to the coroner’s office to see the reports, and they said, ‘What do you think you are? Smarter’n the coroner?’ We went on a trip, to Indiana, and Walt had a fit and I said, ‘Either you get out or I’ll throw you out in a field!’ I went back later and picked him up and took him home to Texas.”

  After an annulment, Mrs. West repeated her earlier pattern and remarried the same man, and the new household began to rock and rattle like the home in a movie cartoon. “It was all a big mistake,” she said ruefully. “He was so jealous! Once he flew from Boston to Houston because I didn’t answer the telephone. He rented a car and sat out in front of the house two nights in a row all night, waiting for some violence, and he didn’t find any. And the next day he dialed the wrong number and a man answered the phone, and he came busting in that house and here I was sitting in the middle of the floor, sewing. He’d steal something from the house, and then he’d blame it on Dean, and it got so Dean wouldn’t come over anymore. One year Stanley and his wife and their babies came for Christmas, but Dean wouldn’t come, and he said it was because every time he walked in our house something would happen. Dean said, ‘I don’t want to get involved with his house.’ I was just so hurt! To think that it was Dean’s birthday the day before, and I got him a sweater set. I was real proud of what I got him. I cried the whole Christmas.”

  Colburn’s jealousy quickly led to open warfare, with his wife moving in and out of the house voluntarily and involuntarily, sneaking back to recover her personal possessions, and trying to disentangle herself from the relationship. “Once when I was gone he sent me eight batches of flowers and told me I’d have the most beautiful funeral you ever saw if I died, or else get home! He talked about having me committed to an insane asylum. So I had him picked up
for a mental examination, ‘cause he’d told me he was a regular paranoid schizophrenic. They didn’t keep him twenty-four hours! He called me up and he said, ‘Look, I appreciate what you tried to do for me, but now you’ve got to have your mental examination. I’m not gonna put you in a county hospital, I’m gonna put you in a private one, and after you’ve had your shock treatments you can come home.’ I hid in the candy shop for six weeks!”

  In Mrs. West’s re-creation, Walt Colburn was doggedly chasing other women even while he was trying to frighten her into coming back to his home. “Every time I’d leave he’d run over to the computer and set up another date. One day I called the woman at the computer and told her what I thought was going on, and she said he’d already come in that morning and fixed up a date for that night. Well, Dean had a Dodge van then, with a walkie-talkie and everything, and we drove over to Walt’s house and saw him heading out of the garage in his car, all dressed up. We followed him right to the house of his date. He pulled out his notebook and he looked and he run up and down the steps and he looked some more, but nobody answered the door. The next morning he called me up and he said, ‘Aren’t you gonna come home?’

  “I said, ‘You mean after you got stood up last night?’

  “He said, ‘How’d you know that?’

  “I said, ‘Well, I followed you! That’s how I know it!’”

  The candy business turned sour under the heavy personal stresses, and Dean was forced to take a trainee’s job with Houston Lighting & Power Company to supplement the family’s declining income. At night he would whip up five or six batches of candy to keep the place solvent. Sometimes he would cross the trail of his erstwhile stepfather on the way to work in the morning, “and then Dean’d call me and say, ‘Mother, I run back into Walt today, and he had his girl friend with him,’” said Mrs. West. “But Dean never fussed at Walt; he was real calm about it. Walt’d say, ‘Dean, why don’t you make your mother come home to me?’ Dean’d say, ‘Well, Walt, you know my mother’s not gonna put up with the way you’re doing.’ Just as calm? Dean thought Walt was nuts, and he wanted me to get away from him, but we didn’t know how.”