History Lesson 
Closing Down La Grange
In which the Long lens of the Law uncovers Sin and Corruption in Babylon-on-the-Brazos, and the Electric Bounty Hunter confronts the Nightmare Sheriff and the Banshee madam to unearth a Bizarre Tale.
True Confessions
ON WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1, 1973, the La Grange Chicken Ranch, the Oldest Continually Operating Non-Floating Whorehouse in the United States, was closed down. The Texas Chamber of Commerce elected to ignore the passage of an establishment possibly older than all its members; and the State Historical Society, equally misfeasant, overlooked the shuttering of the house that slept more politicians than the Driskill Hotel and the Governor's Mansion combined.
You all know about the Chicken Ranch of course. It was just about the first tourist attraction I heard about when I came to Texas. But, then, I came to Texas to be an Aggie, so that explains that. Later on I even learned that there was a town called La Grange nestled somewhere on the outskirts of the whorehouse of the same name.
Hell, I even went to La Grange once. The whorehouse, I mean. Not, mind you, because I had any truly unquenchable perversions that required a trip to La Grange to unleash, but, rather, because I figured that if one was going to be an Aggie, well then, Be An Aggie. The pilgrimage to La Grange sits close to the heart of The Aggie Myth, as central to the catechism as standing at football games and building the Bonfire for the Texas game.
We went on Thursday night when they had the $8 Aggie Special, trekking down in an old Pontiac full of fraudulently-purchased Lone Star and a thousand obscene variants of some drastically original horny Aggie fantasy.
We circled around town for a while, body temperature rising in inverse proportion to the declining stash of Lone Star and the increasing depravity of the fantasy, a deep, twisted well of prurient anxiety gradually filling to the point where no adolescent squeamishness could possibly abort an explosive gusher of Sinful Lust.
How's that for metaphor? eh? Us Aggies get a three-syllable handicap in this magazine-writin'. In any case, the air went out of the fantasy as soon as we pulled into the Chicken Ranch parking lot and the first person we spotted was a deputy sheriff. He was just there to help park cars, though, so we proceeded on up to the door where Lilly, the black maid—the only black as a matter of strict fact (historical accuracy being an important part of articles like this) who ever passed the doors of the Chicken Ranch—checked our phony I.D.'s to make sure we were 21 and let us in.
We sauntered into the parlor where we drunkenly introduced ourselves to a half-dozen local farmers, a couple of cross-country truck drivers, and a fellow pilgrim who'd journeyed all the way down from Nebraska—and met three young ladies who either worked there or were truck drivers, too, we weren't sure which.
One of the young ladies offered to sell us a Coke for 50 cents, which we declined, and then one of her friends asked us for a quarter to play the jukebox, which we cheerfully provided. My friend Richard, who was still trying to decide if they worked there or were just visiting truck drivers, thought he'd break the ice a little by asking one of them if she wanted to dance, which she didn't.
"What's with this dancin' stuff, honey?" is what she said. "Ya wanna do some business here or not?" That's when we decided she must be one of the U.T. coeds we'd heard about.
Pretty soon after that I picked one of the ladies (or she picked me, quite possibly, my recollection being sort of hazy) and we wandered off down the hall to one of the bedrooms. The walls of the room possessed an angularity that bespoke distracted carpentry, all of them covered with irregular splotches of pastel paint, and the furnishings consisted of a bed, a dresser and a sink, all rather commonplace in appearance and not at all meeting my expectations.
The top dresser drawer had been left open to reveal an intriguing assortment of oils, photographs, and leather goods, but I held firm for the Aggie Special which didn't include any of its contents. Ruthie, who was the lady I'd picked (or who'd picked me), just rolled her eyes and made a face when I told her I only had the eight dollars anyway. She told me to "Git yer clothes off, honey," and left to go deposit my money someplace.
I thought for a bit about how this wasn't the way we'd planned it on the way down and was consequently a little slow getting undressed, being still garbed in my pants when Ruthie got back. "What's this?" she asked me. "We ain't got all night ya know." I apologized for being so slow and took my pants off.
She then started poking and tugging at me, "checkin fer diseases," she said, a bit of foreplay that possessed all the sensuality of my Army physical. Ruthie next threw me down on the bed, took off her own clothes and lay down beside me, and told me that for just eight dollars I didn't get to kiss her.
Pleased that I hadn't brought any more money, we just started pawing and pulling at each other and, next thing I knew, she was on top of me and asking if I was "finished already, honey?" "Well, uuuh..." I said. Then she pulled me up off the bed, washed us both off, and told me ta "git yer clothes back on, honey." It had been what's known in the trade as a "Four-get": Get up, Get on, Get off, and Get out.
I met the rest of my cohorts outside, all except for Richard for whom we had to wait another hour and a half. He'd been so abased at being turned down for his dance that he'd gone and splurged $40 on a lavish degeneracy of sufficient novelty that its graphic description entertained us all the way back to College Station.
A Sentimental History of America's Oldest Whorehouse
When old Frank Lotto published the first History of Fayette County back in 1902, he wrote, with what must have been a sly snicker to himself, that "The City of La Grange has made a reputation for sociability over the whole state.
It was nicely located for friendly ambience, being sprawled around high limestone bluffs on a parabolic stretch of the Colorado River in that part of Central Texas where the coastal plains begin gently ballooning into a sinuous undulation that goes westering off to the Hill Country. Dense battalions of age-disfigured live oaks, camouflaged in clouds of hanging moss and sentried by towering cedars, occupy the creek and river bottoms while post oak columns skirt the soft green edges of Bermuda Grass hillsides and cypress files demarcate the boundaries of old Spanish land grants. The Second Congress of the Republic of Texas, enticed by vistas "that but few countryes on Earth can compare with," overwhelmingly voted to establish their permanent capital at La Grange, and only President Sam Houston's self-serving veto kept it in the still-unbuilt jerkwater burg named for himself.
If the easy-rolling richness of Fayette County posed no strong attraction for General Sam, it proved a powerful lure across the world in Central Europe. Beginning in the 1830's it became the terminus for South Germans and Bohemians in flight from famine and persecution. They brought with them an industrious capacity for small farming, which still endures, and an independence of mind bordering on the perverse, which also still endures. Ever since 1860, when they voted not to secede with the rest of the state, Fayette County has maintained a strong tradition of political aberrance.
The immigrants also imported a zesty beer-hall enthusiasm for rowdy pleasures. Indeed, nothing in the county's history has proven so consistently unpopular as Temperance, which went down to its first massive electoral defeat in 1877. It was the kind of indulgent tolerance that could sanction the longest-running brothel ever to open its doors and beds in America.
Just when exactly those doors and beds did open is a point of some contention. Dates offered range all the way from 1844, based largely on myth, to 1915, when the house was installed in its present location on the outskirts of town. The most likely occasion for its founding is somewhere in between, with several La Grange oldtimers remembering its definite existence prior to the turn of the century. Ernest Emmerich, who was town marshall in neighboring Round Top back around the First World War, remembers then-County Sheriff August Loessin telling him it was there when August took office in 1894.
The debate, in any case, is spuriously academic. Just as a history of North America, despite its prior existence, doesn't really commence until Columbus, so the True Story of the Chicken Ranch doesn't begin until the arrival, in about 1905, of Ms. Faye Stewart, alias Jessie Williams, and known to friends, employees, numerous intimate acquaintances and elusive Posterity as Miss Jessie.
Originally from Hubbard, up near Waco, Miss Jessie was a whorehouse madam on an epic scale, prostitution's answer to Casey Stengel or Vince Lombardi, author and actor, is one of the great chapters in the journal of her profession. A woman of undeniable personal resonance, with rough-hewn country charm and shrewd backwoods tenacity, she is still discussed with soft-eyed affection and reverential tones by those who knew her.
Buddy Zapalac, the editor of The La Grange Journal, says, 'She just had ta be one a the most amazin' women who ever lived. She was strong! But she was generous, too. And whoooh, Boy! but she was a smart one."
It was Miss Jessie who somehow brought discipline and profit to the house while making peace with the surrounding community at large and its power center in particular; she also negotiated the tacit treaties that enabled her house to survive in the face of contradiction and indignation, a diplomatic performance rivaling those of Henry Kissinger.
Among the first allies she acquired were the Loessin brothers, August and Will, the former being County Sheriff and the latter, younger, being at once the City Marshall in La Grange and his brother's chief deputy (and later his successor as Sheriff). Widely venerated as peace officers, the brothers Loessin seem genuinely to have been well-respected and able peace-keepers, August being the only Central Texas Sheriff to crush the Ku Klux Klan during its bloody pre-War resurgence and Will earning a statewide reputation for ingenious detective work.
The early basis for their pact with Miss Jessie seems to have been a kind of mutual coexistence. She foreswore many of those sidelines that would seem natural in a country cathouse, liquor most notably, and operated it as peaceably and businesslike as the Post Office. The two sheriffs, for their part, just ignored it.
It was a beneficial relationship. Miss Jessie prospered and, in 1915, she abandoned the battered downtown hotel they then occupied, and moved her business to the southeastern outskirts of town. She brought in a few new girls as well, including two sisters who learned their craft in the break-hell East Texas oil boom and were to serve as middle-management. The house was by now rooting itself into the communal fabric of La Grange and its resident employees, encouraged by Miss Jessie to stay on a permanent basis, had fashioned a broad array of links with the townsfolk; when the boys from La Grange went overseas to Save Democracy in The Great War, the girls from the Ranch sent them cookies.
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