Revenge of the Saguaro. Tom Miller
JACK RUBY’S KITCHEN SINK
A WEEKEND AUCTION I ATTENDED IN CENTRAL TEXAS IN 1972 vexed me for a long time. Was it commerce? History? Political science? Finally it struck me: It was art. The Athens Transfer and Storage Company warehouse was the gallery, the items on display were the pieces of art, and we bidders were the unwitting actors in an elaborate one-act play.
I realized it was art years later when Jacqueline Kennedy’s personal effects were auctioned off at a $34.5 million Sotheby’s festival of excess. Myriad explanations were given, but most bidders there said they simply wanted “a piece of history.” That’s what the New York and Texas events had in common. But I had no context for that in the early 1970s; we were simply pioneers in the Kennedy memorabilia business, unaware of the precedent—artistic or otherwise—we were setting.
Rewind to television’s first live murder: sleazy nightclub owner Jack Ruby killing Kennedy assassination-suspect Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas City Hall, November 24, 1963. “You all know me,” Ruby proclaimed to posterity. “I’m Jack Ruby.”
And so he was. Ruby was seized, of course, and lived out his remaining four years in jail. His tawdry Carousel Club closed down in short order, and the building’s owner eventually mothballed all the club’s fixtures in Athens, 75 miles southeast of Dallas. After a few years, Ruby’s former landlord got tired of paying monthly storage fees and arranged to turn everything over to Johnny Stiles, the Athens warehouse owner. In due time Stiles, then about 40, figured the Ruby collection was taking up too much space. He took on a couple of investors and announced to the world that he would be auctioning off all the fixtures from Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club. That auction, less than nine years after President Kennedy was killed, launched the whole JFK memorabilia industry, a phenomenon that climaxed 24 years later at Sotheby’s.
At the time of the Athens event, Jacqueline Kennedy was married to Aristotle Onassis, Dallas had recently won Super Bowl VI, and Marlon Brando had just refused his Oscar for The Godfather. We were earlobe deep in Vietnam, and Watergate meant nothing more than a fancy Foggy Bottom address.
Every art auction has its pièce de résistance to attract connoisseurs. At Athens, the pièce no one could resist was Ruby’s 800-pound safe, said to have not been opened since Carousel Club days. In the weeks leading up to the auction, guessing the safe’s contents was common among the good people of Athens. A map of Dealey Plaza? An envelope stuffed with money? A diagram of the Dallas City Hall basement? Marching orders from the mafia? Evidently the bad people of Athens were thinking along the same lines. The night before the auction, thieves pried open the Faulk Street warehouse door and stole the safe. The still-unsolved theft was a great contribution to conspiracy lore, but not much help to Johnny Stiles and his auction.
I remember this much: When I traveled over to the auction in Athens, Texas, gas cost 21.9 cents a gallon and the town was “the black-eyed pea capital of the world.” A chamber of commerce brochure said the world’s first hamburger was cooked there. The artifacts to be auctioned constituted an odd lot, and I must say we bidders did likewise: café owners looking for fixtures, historians looking for history, nearby ranching and farm families dropping in during Saturday shopping, a sprinkling of assassination buffs, as well as the macabre and the just plain curious. Many in the crowd looked like they had recently spotted UFOs. A couple of bidders flew their private jets to the local airport.
Among the goods: a brass chandelier, clothes racks, a stove, metal closets, chairs, a dish rack, kitchen utensils, an ice-cream freezer, and the object of my desire, Jack Ruby’s kitchen sink.
The safe had been the big draw, but as we bidder-actors milled around looking over the goods before the auction, we consoled ourselves that the leftovers were worthwhile, too. The first item on the block was a Carousel Club barstool. A short fellow in a small cowboy hat walked away with it for $26. Jack Ruby’s lime squeezer—it once squeezed Jack Ruby’s limes—fetched $7. A busted cash register extracted $31. Broken corks, rusty silverware, furniture in need of repair—they all brought under $25. When some napkin holders went on the block, I stepped out to the local Dairy Queen. On my return, I was chagrined to learn that while I was gone the sink had gone, too. It brought in $12. A stage-light shell, the Club’s bathroom scale, and some knickknacks together garnered less than $20. The Carousel sign raised a hubbub, then went for a disappointing $6.
The auctioneer, a seasoned pro, brought up Ruby’s name only when enthusiasm waned, but for the most part he kept the JFK assassination out of his patter. The day’s highest bid of $200 bought a metallic engraving of a horse, mounted on wood. We were a hundred strong at our peak, and the horse engraving was the one electric moment. Unbeknownst to most bidders, Stiles’s two silent partners in the auction stood to the rear, jacking up the price on sale items. As it turns out, they were lousy shills. Their bid on Jack Ruby’s 400 folding chairs was never topped, and they were stuck essentially paying themselves for the near-useless items. They were the only two people present who lost money on the auction.
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