Grande Dame of the Gulf
A belle among the roughneck cities of Texas, Galveston is caught between a relentless ocean and an imperious past. If one doesn’t get it, the other will.
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Gambling even reached into the schools. When I was in junior high in the mid-fifties, Tuesdays in the fall were eagerly awaited because kids whose fathers worked for the Maceos would bring football betting cards to distribute to their classmates. The yellow sheets listed the point spreads for the weekend’s college games. The young runners guarded the cards as if they were dirty pictures; just to acquire one cost 50 cents. If you wanted to bet on the games, that was another dollar, and if you bet on the minimum three games (your best chance of winning), they tried to goad you into betting on more, thus lowering your odds. It sounds pretty sleazy, I admit, but at least I learned at an early age what many men don’t discover until they are 35 or 40: I am not very good at betting on football.
The Maceos operated out of the Turf Grill downtown, a dark, cheerless restaurant where businessmen dropped in to bet on afternoon baseball games and horse races in a separate room. (A full casino was upstairs.) Scores came in over a Western Union ticker and were posted every half-inning on a blackboard that, from my memory of a stolen peek, covered an entire wall. Or you could call for scores, if you had the number, which I at age thirteen counted among my most important pieces of knowledge.
The showcases of the Maceo empire, though, were two plush casinos. The Hollywood, which resembled a long, low hacienda, sat just outside the city limits to the west, the view from the street sheltered by thick vegetation. The Balinese Room occupied a narrow covered pier extending two hundred yards into the Gulf across from the Galvez Hotel. The casino itself was at the very end of the pier, just in case someone decided to raid the place; the halls permitted only single-file traffic and the doors were numerous, so that by the time officers reached their goal, they would find only harmless pool tables and a group of unlikely looking players.
It was the Balinese Room that inspired the best known of the Galveston gambling stories, featuring the county’s sheriff, Frank Biaggne (pronounced in four syllables), whose long career, from 1933 to 1957, closely paralleled the gambling era. Asked on occasion why he never raided the Balinese Room, Biaggne is said to have replied that as it was a private club and he was not a member, he couldn’t get in. Nevertheless, when high-rolling Houston oilmen like Silver Dollar Jim West came down to gamble, they were honored with a police escort.
Galvestonians say that the Maceos were the forerunners of Las Vegas, the first people to combine gambling with national-class entertainment. I report this as legend rather than truth, but if it is accurate, it figures. Successful things had a way of starting out on the Island and ending up elsewhere — from Gail Borden, Galveston’s first customs collector in 1837, who left town before developing his method of condensing milk, on through the Sakowitz brothers, who moved their store to Houston after the 1915 storm, to the International Pageant of Pulchritude, which after abandoning Galveston evolved into the Miss Universe contest. It is fact, however, that the Maceos imported the biggest names around — Phil Harris, Guy Lombardo, Paul Whiteman, Jack Teagarten, Duke Ellington. After Galveston shut down for good in 1957, many of the croupiers and bosses ended up in Las Vegas, and well into the seventies old Galvestonians got royal treatment at the Dunes, the Stardust, the Sands, and other casinos that had people from the Maceo days.
Sam Maceo died in 1951, Rose in 1954. Their empire survived Rose by only three years, until Will Wilson, a Texas attorney general with ambitions to run for governor, sent in the Texas Rangers and closed down both the gambling and the open prostitution. It was sensational news at the time, but in fact the golden age of gambling had already run its course. The Hollywood, preferred by Galvestonians because the Balinese Room was preferred by Houstonians, closed in the late thirties when the Maceos got crosswise with federal Treasury officials. Not so many big entertainers came to Galveston in the later years. In any event, once legal gambling and first-class hotels took off in Las Vegas, Galveston’s illegal gambling and aging hotels could not have competed.
In retrospect, the surprise is not that gambling came to such an abrupt end but that it lasted so long. It could not have happened anywhere but Galveston. The Maceos thrived because they meshed perfectly with the city’s history and self-concept. Gambling played to two old Galveston themes: it enabled the city to remain an important place beyond its time, and it provided a means to get those $5 bills out of Houston pockets. No doubt there were political payoffs that reached all the way to Austin, but the main reason the law looked the other way was that the community itself raised almost no opposition. Once, at a large political rally on the Island, an anti-vice candidate made a speech attacking what he called the gambling hoodlums. His opponent then began his own speech with “My fellow hoodlums” and won in a landslide. Even the law liked the Maceos. If someone involved with the organization committed a crime — a real crime, that is, not gambling — the local DA’s office didn’t need a warrant, just a telephone. The Maceos delivered. They also looked out for Galveston people and wouldn’t let them lose too much at the tables. And it is said that when a Maceo nephew was stationed in San Antonio during World War II, no Galveston boy ever pulled KP. When the Maceo era finally came to an end, Galveston hit bottom.
Twenty-Two Years and Only a Tie
Galveston tried all sorts of things to get out of the doldrums, from a football bowl game to a new industrial park. All the schemes had one thing in common. They failed, quickly and utterly. Galveston was a place where nothing ever worked.
Not far from my house were mysterious abandoned railroad tracks that ran down Forty-third Street though mostly residential neighborhoods — relics of the worst fiasco of the nineteenth century. (It is characteristic of Galveston that the detritus of failure has been preserved almost as well as the reminders of success.) The tracks were all that remained of the Galveston & Western Railway, whose promoters had great plans. Their idea was to bypass Houston by hugging the coast and eventually to reach Mexico City. They didn’t quite make it: at its peak the G&W extended only thirteen miles and never got off the Island.
The first misadventure I remember personally was the Shrimp Bowl, which was conceived as a solution to the paucity of off-season tourist business. The football game began life in 1948 as the Oleander Bowl, pairing two junior college teams, and soon mutated into a match of anonymous armed service squads. (Imagine trying to promote McClellan Air Force Base versus the Quantico Marines.) Euthanasia was decided on after the 1959 score: 90-0.
Pelican Island, separated from the city docks by a narrow channel, was a more serious flop. It was touted as the magic elixir, the remedy for all of Galveston’s problems. Before World War I, Pelican had been Galveston’s Ellis Island, site of the quarantine station where tens of thousands of immigrants arrived. Inaccessible except by boat, Pelican had been substantially enlarged by decades of use as a dumping ground for dredged spoil. Pelican’s vast mud flasts, broken only by occasional patches of salt grass, were, in the words of one promotion, “the largest tract of undeveloped land at an important deepwater port in the nation.”
Galveston boosters attributed their city’s long-standing inability to attract industry to the high cost and low availability of protected land behind the seawall. Pelican was cheap land; the city already owned it. And so in 1956 Galveston built a $6 million bridge to Pelican, including a railroad line. It is 27 years old now since the bridge opened, and not one train has ever crossed it. There is a trace of development — the Texas A&M maritime academy, a local radio station, some modest facilities for companies servicing offshore wells — but no industry. The sprawling interior of the island looks no different today than it did before the bridge.
But we were used to such things. Year after year passed on the Island without visible change. New construction was a rare sight in the fifties and sixties; a coat of paint was big news. Galveston withdrew into itself. Even the mainland, two miles away, was considered an alien environment. My friends and I, having attained the legal age for driving, were not admonished by our parents to drive carefully or to come home on time but rather to stay on the Island.
The symbol of this cycle of defeat and insular self-preoccupation was the local high school football team. Ball High didn’t just lose; like its town, it was pathetically noncompetitive. In the twenties and thirties Ball High played Port Arthur seventeen games before scoring a point. A survivor of one Port Arthur game told me about the time Ball High’s beleaguered coach gave a fiery pep talk that he ended with “Now go out there and try to keep it under a hundred.” But there was one school Ball High always beat: Kirwin, a much smaller Catholic school also located on the Island. In true Galveston fashion, that became the only game of the season that mattered. Late in the game the stands echoed with a mocking refrain, sung to the Notre Dame “Victory March,” that celebrated the closest thing Galveston had to a winning tradition: “Tears, tears, for old Kirwin High/Twenty-two years and only a tie.”
Galveston’s setbacks were incessant. Lured to the West Coast by special freight rates, the cotton trade left the city that in 1912 had shipped more bales than any other port in the history of the world. On Broadway, the elongated warehouses where passersby once saw bales piled up to the ceiling now stood dark and empty. Galveston had been the top sulfur port in the world in the forties, but sulfur left for Beaumont. The port tried to compensate with grain, but no sooner had officials worked out a deal for a new grain elevator than Hurricane Carla in 1961 caused the project’s backers to cancel. The Army shut down Fort Crockett. The Santa Fe Railroad pulled out its major subsidiary. Galveston’s TV station, KGUL, moved to Houston and became KHOU. Eventually the soft drink bottling plant, the phone company headquarters, and the regional weather service followed. Falstaff closed the brewery it had taken over from Southern Select, Galveston’s own brand. Fortunes left, too. One of the city’s leading merchants staked his son to a store of his own — he bought Foley’s in Houston. Finally, about all that was left were the hotels, the medical school, a couple of insurance companies, the wharves, and the banks. And it was not coincidence that all of them owed their existence to the three families who have dominated Galveston for a hundred years.
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