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A  TALE  ABOUT  TINCY

            One day long ago in Fort Worth, Texas, I had a couple of unusual experiences.  First a thug named Tincy Eggleston threatened to kill me.  A few minutes later I stumbled into a Congressman’s office to use the phone and wound up working for him for 27 years.  I survived both occurrences.

            To begin with, there was Tincy Eggleston.  If this notorious hoodlum were still alive, the nicety-nicety people in today’s P.C. world probably would describe him as a hit person, which would serve him right, since the whole idea of gender neutrality would have infuriated him.  Tincy would be a hero, however, to today’s mossback conservatives who want to privatize every government function except that of the 82nd Airborne.  As a pioneer in the field of privatization, Tincy pushed the envelope even beyond what Adam Smith had in mind.  For the right money, Tincy would provide a free-enterprise service ordinarily carried out only on court orders in the Texas Prison System execution chamber in Huntsville.  Tincy’s methods were different, but the results were the same, and there was far less paperwork and no lawyers at all.            

            Appropriately enough, Tincy even looked  like a hit man--or at least what most of us imagined a professional hired gun ought to look like.  A wiry, coiled steel spring of a man in his late 40’s, he had eyes like fixed bayonets--cold, piercing, merciless.  Amid the mayhem of the Fort Worth underworld,  Tincy also dealt in such ancillary services as holdups, skull bashings and shakedowns.  His enterprises often were chronicled under big black headlines in Texas newspapers.

            These activities understandably aroused the interest of various branches of the Texas constabulary.  Once Tincy was being driven to Dallas for questioning about one of his jobs.  Bored by the long drive, he unexpectedly struck up a conversation with Carl Freund, a newspaper reporter sitting in the front seat alongside the beefy Dallas deputy sheriff who was driving.   Philosophizing about his craft, Tincy warned Carl to be especially wary of getting robbed by novice bandits.

            “Those damn amateurs are liable to get scared and kill you,” Tincy said.   “On the other hand,  you take guys like Cecil Green and me.  We know our business.  We just want your money.  We would never get nervous and kill you, because then it would be a lot of trouble to go to court.”

            Carl nodded understandingly.

            “But if somebody slipped me five thousand bucks and wanted you dead, that would be another matter, you understand,” Tincy explained.      

            It’s hard to imagine today, but Fort Worth in the 1950’s was sort of like Chicago in the 1920’s, with a couple of obvious differences.  One was that Al Capone surely must have had a classier, more sophisticated bunch of hoodlums.  The other was that Fort Worth’s gang battles were fought not mainly over control of bootlegging, as Chicago’s were, but rather over control of lucrative gambling territories.

            In Fort Worth the violence started with a car bombing in 1950.  Nelson Harris, a local gambler, his wife and their unborn child were killed.  After that, with disturbing regularity, thugs representing various factions began shooting each other, blowing each other up, and stuffing each other down abandoned wells.

            In those days I was a reporter for a brash little newspaper called The Fort Worth Press.  Usually I  was assigned to cover humdrum offices in the Federal Courthouse rather than gang murders.  When the City Desk was short-handed, though, I was thrown into the breach--as I was the day an innovative assassin craftily buried a box of dynamite in front of the roadside country mailbox near Fort Worth.  Having strung detonating wires to a clump of trees nearby, the killer hid and waited until Herbert (The Cat) Noble drove up to check his mail.  Then, when the hit man touched the two wires together, Noble abruptly lost the last of the nine lives to which his nickname theoretically entitled him.

            On another occasion, I was dispatched to a house near Lake Worth occupied by a gambler named Frank Cates.  Somebody planted a bomb under the floor directly beneath Cates’s telephone, then went to a nearby phone booth, rang his number and asked, “Is that you, Frank?”  It was.  Blooey.

            Incredibly, Cates survived the blast.  When police arrived, he looked like he had been through a meat grinder and his clothing was shredded, but he was busily counting a pile of still-smoking money.

            The Fort Worth Press, which breathlessly described such activities in lurid detail each day,  was an incredible institution.  Forever teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the paper was such a penny-pincher that reporters had to turn in the stub of a copy pencil to get a new one.  To make a phone call to New York took prior approval from the City Desk.  And once when a reporter rode with sheriff’s deputies to a crime scene out in the suburbs and then asked how to get home, the City Desk told him to hitchhike.

             Worst of all, in the sweltering summers of Fort Worth, The Press had the only major downtown building without refrigerated air conditioning.  Instead we had washed-air coolers on the roof.  During the winter these would get clogged with dirt.  When the water was turned on in late spring, the blowers would hurl tiny mudballs through the city room.  So it was a goshawful place to work, right?

            Wrong.  For the young crew in the newsroom, it was wonderful.  One sports writer doubled at night as a honkytonk piano player.  A retired circus performer worked as a rim man on the copy desk, and one day he strung a tightrope up among the ceiling lights and gamboled aerially over the city desk.

            The city staff was boistrous, savvy and ambitious.  Most of us had seen combat in World War II.  One guy left a leg on Guadalcanal.  The Press had virtually no sacred cows, perhaps because it got so little advertising from local merchants there was hardly anybody capable of bringing economic pressure on us.  If you could get a story, you could print it. We loved the challenge of trying to beat the pants off the big, rich Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the morning and afternoon papers which dominated the area with a  circulation five times our own and a news staff to match.  I once was sent  out on a late-breaking murder story in an office building downtown and found myself opposed by four reporters from the Star-Telegram.  On The Press, we were impoverished in everything but esprit de corps.

            My desk adjoined that of Carl Freund, the county courthouse reporter.  I always suspected Carl of possessing some mysterious physical property enabling him to absorb news through his pores, or something.  Still active today as a private news gatherer for Fort Worth commercial interests, Carl can ferret out more information in less time than anybody I ever knew.  In The Press’ heydey of the Fifties, he was a walking encyclopedia on the gang wars.  But Carl was out of the office on that spring morning in 1955 when City Editor Dave Hall motioned me over to his desk.  

            “Tincy Eggleston’s testifying today before the federal grand jury that’s looking into gambling,” he said.  “Go over there and see what he’ll tell you.  Take Gene and get a piece of art.”                         

            From the photo department I picked up my pal Gene Gordon, a young red-headed cameraman with whom I often worked.  He grabbed his cumbersome old Speed Graphic and we headed for the Federal Courthouse Building.  Knowing Tincy’s reputation only too well, Gene asked:  “How are we going to do this?”

            “I think Tincy will talk to us if we approach him right,” I said.  Modesty prevented my saying so, but I was certain that my moon-faced boyish innocence would charm the socks off even a thug like Tincy Eggleston.

            We found him sitting alone in a second-floor hallway just outside the grand jury room.  Donning what I believed to be my most benign, pure-hearted expression, I walked up to Tincy and stuck out my right hand. 

             “Good morning, Mr. Eggleston,” I said, certain that he seldom had been addressed in that fashion.

            Tincy ignored my proffered handshake and scowled.

            “My name is Marshall Lynam.  My friend Gene Gordon and I work for The Press,”  I bubbled in what I hoped was childlike purity. 

            Tincy scowled again.  His eyes narrowed.

            “If you’re not too busy at the moment, we thought we’d like to talk with you for a few minutes,”  I said.

            Tincy stared squarely at me--stony, silent and unblinking.

            “May I sit down and talk with you?” I said, motioning toward the bench.

            Tincy said not a word, but kept those carbon-steel eyes fixed on me.  I felt my collar tightening.  Finally his lip curled and I could see his message coming.

            “Listen, you son of a bitch,” he hissed.  “Hell, no, I ain’t going to talk to you.  And let me tell you something else.  If you try to take my picture, I’ll kill you.”

            Up to that time, I never knew anybody could talk in italics, but Tincy did.

            His menacing eyes followed us intently as Gene and I moved down the hall toward the stairway. “What now?”  Gene asked.

            “I’ve got to call the City Desk,” I said.  “Is there a pay phone around here?”

            “Don’t see any.  All these offices seem to be locked up.  Maybe there’s an office open upstairs.”

            There was.  On the next floor up, the door to Room 327 was standing wide open.  Neither Gene nor I knew it at the time, but this was the office of Fort Worth’s newly-elected Congressman, Jim Wright.  He wasn’t in at the moment, but I had seen him around town a couple of times--a personable young fellow with a shock of red hair and trademark eyebrows whose overhang provided as much shade as your average carport.  In Texas he already was known as a political giant-killer. The previous year, he had confounded the Fort Worth political establishment by beating an incumbent Congressman personally hand-picked by the most powerful man in town.

            Even though Jim Wright was clearly brainy and ambitious, we never dreamed in 1955 he was destined to achieve the most powerful legislative office in the world.  In our frantic quest for a telephone, we had bumbled into the office of the man who would be Speaker of the House of Representatives in the historic 100th Congress of the United States.

            And I certainly would have scoffed at the notion that I, of all people, would find myself standing at this man’s side in his dealings over the years with three Presidents in the White House, Menachem Begin in Jerusalem, Anwar Sadat in Cairo, Margaret Thatcher in 10 Downing Street, and Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin.

            When Gene and I popped into Jim Wright’s office that day, a gracious lady on his staff was busy talking to a group of his constituents,  but paused long enough to give us permission to use the telephone.

            I called Mary Crutcher, Assistant City Editor at The Press.

            “Tincy says if we try to take his picture, he’ll kill us.  What should we do?”

            “Where did you talk to him?”

            “On a bench outside the grand jury room.”

            “Was anybody else around?”

            “Just Gene and me.  What should we do?”

            Mary hesitated.  “Hold the line.  I’d better talk to Dave about this.”  

            For several minutes Mary left the line, apparently discussing the matter in some detail with Dave Hall, the City Editor.  Finally she came back on the line.  “Dave said he doesn’t want to decide this by himself.  We’re going in to talk it over with Humphrey.”

            Walter R. Humphrey was the big cheese himself--Editor of The Fort Worth Press.  The whole staff knew Mr. Humphrey must have the most important job on the paper, because in his closed-door private sanctum purred the only window air conditioner in the news department.

            The conference with Humphrey went on and on.  All around Gene and me, visitors were talking to Jim Wright’s staff  about Social Security and stuff like that.  I kind of felt guilty for keeping the phone tied up for so long.  Finally I heard somebody pick up on the other end.

            “Go ahead and take the picture,” Mary ordered.  “Humphrey says Tincy can’t talk to us like that.”

            I swallowed hard.

            “What’d she say?” Gene asked.

            “She says that Humphrey is not the least bit afraid of Tincy, and we should go ahead and take his picture.”

            “A truly courageous man,” Gene observed.

            After thanking the Wright people for letting us use their phone, Gene and I stepped out into the third floor. 

            “What we’ve got to do,” I intoned, “is to analyze this situation very carefully and then formulate some kind of sophisticated strategic plan to enable us to retain both our jobs and our lives.”

            “You mean take the picture and run like hell?”

            “Precisely what I had in mind.”

            Down the west stairs to the grand jury hallway marched Gene and I, young and willing candidates for martyrdom to the lunacy of American journalism.  Just ahead we could see Tincy, still sitting alone on the bench.  Resolutely we strode forward, eyes straight ahead, fixed on our escape route--the east stairway, approximately 150 feet away.  Gene was trying to be nonchalant as he lugged the clunky Speed Graphic, roughly the size of a shoebox, in his left hand, facing Tincy.  

            At the precise moment we came abreast of Tincy, Gene hit the shutter button.  A brilliant flash filled the hallway.  Even if momentarily blinded, Tincy sprang from bench like hungry Rottweiler.  The chase was on.           

            Never before had I realized how much noise a frantic three-man chase can generate in a marble corridor.  The hallway reverberated with our frantic footfalls and Tincy’s vengeful cries of rage.  In the bedlam as we galloped toward the stairs, office doors popped open.  So did the mouths of astonished federal employees.

            “Why are those guys running?” a court clerk asked J.R. (Red) Wright as we barreled past one office door.  Wright was a crusty old U.S. Marshal who shared a surname but no kinship to our Congressional telephone benefactor.    

            Having seen Gene clinging dearly to his camera as Tincy furiously pursued us, the aging lawman laughingly admitted later that he instantly figured out what was happening.  But he said he saw no reason to intervene, since it looked as if Gene and I were likely to get outside the Federal Building before Tincy murdered us.

            In answer to the baffled clerk, Marshal Wright said,  “Oh, you know how crazy those newspaper guys are. They’ve probably got a deadline.”   

            Gene was younger than I, but handicapped by the camera.  With my long legs in warp speed, I reached the stairway about the same time he did.  We leaped down the stairs, several steps at a bounce.  Tincy was still right behind us, panting and cursing.

            Not until we got out the east door of the Federal Building did Tincy give up. Still scowling and cursing, he returned to await his appearance before the grand jury.  Breathless but elated at having escaped, Gene and I stood for a moment on the sidewalk in the comforting sunshine.  Suddenly we both broke into hysterical laughter.  When we got back to the paper, we were still giggling.  But we talked it over and finally decided it wasn’t necessary to go in and congratulate our Editor on the sheer guts it took for him to demonstrate that Tincy simply couldn’t talk to us like that.

            That afternoon I gingerly ventured back into the Federal Building and was relieved to find that Tincy had finished his testimony and left--for what turned out to be the last time.

            On August 31, 1955, his body was found in an abandoned well six miles north of Fort Worth.   A shotgun blast had left a three-inch hole in the base of his skull.  Gene and I were never even questioned as suspects.