DevilishTexan
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Dec 3, 2003
- Posts
- 71,963
http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l74/devlishtexan/MZ.jpgHouston's Channel 13 Marvin Zindler dies at 85
Marvin Zindler, a Houston institution for more than three decades and a pioneer of consumer reporting, died Sunday at M.D. Anderson Hospital after a fight with cancer.
The irascible, flamboyant 85-year-old television personality had been diagnosed in July with inoperable pancreatic cancer that had spread to his liver.
Even in his last days, Zindler continued to work, filing reports from his hospital bed. In his last report, broadcast Saturday, in which he helped a 45-year-old U.S. citizen secure a social security card necessary for employment, Zindler appeared thin and his voice was weak.
Still, he signed off with a hearty "MAARVIN ZINDLER, EYEWITNESS NEWS" — his trademark for 34 years with KTRK Channel 13.
To youthful viewers, Zindler is perhaps best known as the kind-hearted, grandfatherly figure in white wig and blue shades who delivered the weekly "rat and roach reports" based on health department restaurant inspections. After his ideosyncratic signoff, his most famous catch phrase comes from the frequent health inspector findings of (all together now) "SLI-I-IME in the ice machine."
But to generations of low-income Houstonians, Zindler was the champion of last resort, the man to whom you turned when bureaucracies seemed indifferent and businesses tried to take advantage. The station said Zindler received 100,000 appeals for help each year.
Though he was proudest of his work championing "the little guy" and helping secure medical care for needy children, he was best known for stories he did a mere seven months after starting the job in 1973 that led to the closing of the state's best known "bawdy house," as Zindler called it — a notorious La Grange brothel known as the Chicken Ranch.
The reports not only won him national notoriety but also a public thrashing by Fayette County Sheriff T.J. Flournoy, a Chicken House partisan, who broke two of Zindler's ribs and snatched his toupee from his head, reportedly waving it in the air as if it were a prized enemy scalp.
Larry King (the Texas author, not the CNN interviewer) wrote an article about it for Playboy magazine in 1974, which was turned into a long-running Broadway musical four years later and which in turn became a kitschy 1982 movie starring Dolly Parton, Burt Reynolds and Dom Delouise.
Delouise played a character based on Zindler, a vainglorious reporter who goes on a crusade to close the brothel.
Though Zindler's Chicken Ranch stories often were characterized as a moral crusade or a quest for publicity, Zindler maintained that he'd pursued them because he'd been persuaded by state law enforcement sources that the Chicken Ranch and another nearby brothel were making payoffs to local officials and were involved in organized crime.
"I didn't care that they had a whorehouse," he'd say in later years. "We had plenty here in Houston."
Zindler seemed to enjoy the spotlight the musical and movie shone on him — he kept a poster for the film on his office wall — though he always said he felt his most important stories were 1985 reports on financial mismanagement by the Hermann Hospital board of trustees.
Zindler also loved to talk of the thousands of children who'd received free medical care from Marvin's Angels, doctors who donated their services because Zindler asked them to. In addition to his frequent on-air reports about such cases, Zindler started a foundation with his friend and plastic surgeon Dr. Joseph Agris that helped children around the world.
These activities, he told a reporter last year, were why — in his 80s and after enduring open-heart surgery and surviving a previous bout with prostate cancer — Zindler continued to work.
Zindler signed a lifetime contract with the station in 1988. He honored it to the letter. Even after being diagnosed in early July with the disease that would kill him, he went on the air in a bathrobe, pajamas and slippers to report the news.
It was the lead story on Channel 13's 6 p.m. news, and — to make it clear he was still on the job and not using his illness as an excuse to slack off — Zindler ended the report as he ended all the others, by braying his famous signoff.
Though he was off the air for a time, the station's Web site boasts six stories from Zindler within the past two weeks.
Zindler's unusual lifetime contract — reportedly earning him $1 million a year, though he insisted it was lower — recognized his worth to the station, which until recently consistently had the most watched local news program. His was one of the city's most recognizable faces, even if it kept changing.
Zindler had countless cosmetic surgury procedures, beginning with his first one in 1954 after he was fired from an earlier television job by an executive who said he was "too ugly" to work in TV.
Born into wealth, Zindler admitted to having had an unfocused youth. Abe Zindler, his father, considered his middle son frivolous and irresponsible and died in 1963 deeply disappointed in him. The successful retailer and longtime mayor of Bellaire left no inheritance to Marvin but rather placed it in a trust for Marvin's five children. Marvin could draw only the interest.
Abe Zindler also left Marvin a harsh letter in which he derided his middle son as "a silly playboy with no sense in your head" and urged him to make something of himself.
Despite his love of clothes, Zindler had never liked working in his stern father's clothing stores. In the 1940s, while still working days for his father, Zindler began at a night DJ and spot news reporter for KATL, a now-defunct radio station. In the 1950s, while working as a volunteer policeman, he began writing and taking photographs for the Houston Press, a long-gone daily newspaper, and did spot news reports for KPRC television's fledgling news operation.
In 1962, he began working for the sheriff's department where he eventually found his true calling — helping "the little guy" — and also found an outlet for his constant for attention. He created and ran the department's consumer fraud division.
Known for his fancy clothes, the press conferences he held at the drop of a hat and the mink-lined handcuffs he carried (in case he had to arrest a woman), Zindler rose to the rank of sergeant. After 10 years with the department, he was fired in late 1972, allegedly for angering local business people by doing his job too well.
Ward recommended that Zindler be hired by Channel 13. The television job gave him a bigger platform for his eccentricities and greater opportunities to anger people.
Zindler helped pioneer consumer advocacy and reporting in 1973 when he came to Channel 13 after having spent 10 years as a Harris County Sheriff's deputy during which he'd created the department's consumer fraud division.
Channel 13 gave him greater opportunities to anger people and a bigger platform for his eccentricities. From the beginning he was an oddity — intense, uncomfortable on camera, and he had the mien of a crusader.
The son of a politician, Zindler considered running for Congress in the 1970s at the urging of local Republican leaders. A survey was commissioned that said he could win, Zindler says, but he decided not to run because Gertrude, his first wife, didn't want to live in Washington.
Zindler's authorized biography tells of an earlier aborted entry into politics. In 1949, when he was 28, Zindler announced his candidacy for the mayorship of Bellaire, where his father had served as mayor for several terms.
The Houston Post came out against him, calling the younger Zindler a "pinhead." The paper retracted the statement after Zindler filed a lawsuit, the book says, but the retraction ran under an eye-catching headline: "We won't call Marvin Harold Zindler a 'pinhead' again.
Zindler became involved in Democratic Party politics, serving as a delegate one year at the Democratic State Convention where a conservative delegate slugged him after Zindler had made desparaging comments about the conservative wing of the party in a speech.
Zindler went on to work in the senatorial campaign of Lyndon Baines Johnson and in other Democratic campaigns before switching to the Republican Party, where he continued to espouse liberal notions such as national health insurance.
Zindler often says he doesn't consider himself a journalist, but he could claim credit for helping to pioneer broadcast journalism in Houston. In the 1940s, while working days in his father's clothing store, he toiled at night as a DJ and spot news reporter for KATL, a now-defunct radio station. In the 1950s, while working as a volunteer policeman, he also worked for the Houston Press, a long-gone daily newspaper, as a photographer and reporter. He also did spot news reports for KPRC television's fledging news operation until an executive fired him, he says, for being "too ugly."
That's what led to Zindler's first plastic surgery. He's been tinkering ever since.
R.I.P. Marv, you will be missed.
Marvin Zindler, a Houston institution for more than three decades and a pioneer of consumer reporting, died Sunday at M.D. Anderson Hospital after a fight with cancer.
The irascible, flamboyant 85-year-old television personality had been diagnosed in July with inoperable pancreatic cancer that had spread to his liver.
Even in his last days, Zindler continued to work, filing reports from his hospital bed. In his last report, broadcast Saturday, in which he helped a 45-year-old U.S. citizen secure a social security card necessary for employment, Zindler appeared thin and his voice was weak.
Still, he signed off with a hearty "MAARVIN ZINDLER, EYEWITNESS NEWS" — his trademark for 34 years with KTRK Channel 13.
To youthful viewers, Zindler is perhaps best known as the kind-hearted, grandfatherly figure in white wig and blue shades who delivered the weekly "rat and roach reports" based on health department restaurant inspections. After his ideosyncratic signoff, his most famous catch phrase comes from the frequent health inspector findings of (all together now) "SLI-I-IME in the ice machine."
But to generations of low-income Houstonians, Zindler was the champion of last resort, the man to whom you turned when bureaucracies seemed indifferent and businesses tried to take advantage. The station said Zindler received 100,000 appeals for help each year.
Though he was proudest of his work championing "the little guy" and helping secure medical care for needy children, he was best known for stories he did a mere seven months after starting the job in 1973 that led to the closing of the state's best known "bawdy house," as Zindler called it — a notorious La Grange brothel known as the Chicken Ranch.
The reports not only won him national notoriety but also a public thrashing by Fayette County Sheriff T.J. Flournoy, a Chicken House partisan, who broke two of Zindler's ribs and snatched his toupee from his head, reportedly waving it in the air as if it were a prized enemy scalp.
Larry King (the Texas author, not the CNN interviewer) wrote an article about it for Playboy magazine in 1974, which was turned into a long-running Broadway musical four years later and which in turn became a kitschy 1982 movie starring Dolly Parton, Burt Reynolds and Dom Delouise.
Delouise played a character based on Zindler, a vainglorious reporter who goes on a crusade to close the brothel.
Though Zindler's Chicken Ranch stories often were characterized as a moral crusade or a quest for publicity, Zindler maintained that he'd pursued them because he'd been persuaded by state law enforcement sources that the Chicken Ranch and another nearby brothel were making payoffs to local officials and were involved in organized crime.
"I didn't care that they had a whorehouse," he'd say in later years. "We had plenty here in Houston."
Zindler seemed to enjoy the spotlight the musical and movie shone on him — he kept a poster for the film on his office wall — though he always said he felt his most important stories were 1985 reports on financial mismanagement by the Hermann Hospital board of trustees.
Zindler also loved to talk of the thousands of children who'd received free medical care from Marvin's Angels, doctors who donated their services because Zindler asked them to. In addition to his frequent on-air reports about such cases, Zindler started a foundation with his friend and plastic surgeon Dr. Joseph Agris that helped children around the world.
These activities, he told a reporter last year, were why — in his 80s and after enduring open-heart surgery and surviving a previous bout with prostate cancer — Zindler continued to work.
Zindler signed a lifetime contract with the station in 1988. He honored it to the letter. Even after being diagnosed in early July with the disease that would kill him, he went on the air in a bathrobe, pajamas and slippers to report the news.
It was the lead story on Channel 13's 6 p.m. news, and — to make it clear he was still on the job and not using his illness as an excuse to slack off — Zindler ended the report as he ended all the others, by braying his famous signoff.
Though he was off the air for a time, the station's Web site boasts six stories from Zindler within the past two weeks.
Zindler's unusual lifetime contract — reportedly earning him $1 million a year, though he insisted it was lower — recognized his worth to the station, which until recently consistently had the most watched local news program. His was one of the city's most recognizable faces, even if it kept changing.
Zindler had countless cosmetic surgury procedures, beginning with his first one in 1954 after he was fired from an earlier television job by an executive who said he was "too ugly" to work in TV.
Born into wealth, Zindler admitted to having had an unfocused youth. Abe Zindler, his father, considered his middle son frivolous and irresponsible and died in 1963 deeply disappointed in him. The successful retailer and longtime mayor of Bellaire left no inheritance to Marvin but rather placed it in a trust for Marvin's five children. Marvin could draw only the interest.
Abe Zindler also left Marvin a harsh letter in which he derided his middle son as "a silly playboy with no sense in your head" and urged him to make something of himself.
Despite his love of clothes, Zindler had never liked working in his stern father's clothing stores. In the 1940s, while still working days for his father, Zindler began at a night DJ and spot news reporter for KATL, a now-defunct radio station. In the 1950s, while working as a volunteer policeman, he began writing and taking photographs for the Houston Press, a long-gone daily newspaper, and did spot news reports for KPRC television's fledgling news operation.
In 1962, he began working for the sheriff's department where he eventually found his true calling — helping "the little guy" — and also found an outlet for his constant for attention. He created and ran the department's consumer fraud division.
Known for his fancy clothes, the press conferences he held at the drop of a hat and the mink-lined handcuffs he carried (in case he had to arrest a woman), Zindler rose to the rank of sergeant. After 10 years with the department, he was fired in late 1972, allegedly for angering local business people by doing his job too well.
Ward recommended that Zindler be hired by Channel 13. The television job gave him a bigger platform for his eccentricities and greater opportunities to anger people.
Zindler helped pioneer consumer advocacy and reporting in 1973 when he came to Channel 13 after having spent 10 years as a Harris County Sheriff's deputy during which he'd created the department's consumer fraud division.
Channel 13 gave him greater opportunities to anger people and a bigger platform for his eccentricities. From the beginning he was an oddity — intense, uncomfortable on camera, and he had the mien of a crusader.
The son of a politician, Zindler considered running for Congress in the 1970s at the urging of local Republican leaders. A survey was commissioned that said he could win, Zindler says, but he decided not to run because Gertrude, his first wife, didn't want to live in Washington.
Zindler's authorized biography tells of an earlier aborted entry into politics. In 1949, when he was 28, Zindler announced his candidacy for the mayorship of Bellaire, where his father had served as mayor for several terms.
The Houston Post came out against him, calling the younger Zindler a "pinhead." The paper retracted the statement after Zindler filed a lawsuit, the book says, but the retraction ran under an eye-catching headline: "We won't call Marvin Harold Zindler a 'pinhead' again.
Zindler became involved in Democratic Party politics, serving as a delegate one year at the Democratic State Convention where a conservative delegate slugged him after Zindler had made desparaging comments about the conservative wing of the party in a speech.
Zindler went on to work in the senatorial campaign of Lyndon Baines Johnson and in other Democratic campaigns before switching to the Republican Party, where he continued to espouse liberal notions such as national health insurance.
Zindler often says he doesn't consider himself a journalist, but he could claim credit for helping to pioneer broadcast journalism in Houston. In the 1940s, while working days in his father's clothing store, he toiled at night as a DJ and spot news reporter for KATL, a now-defunct radio station. In the 1950s, while working as a volunteer policeman, he also worked for the Houston Press, a long-gone daily newspaper, as a photographer and reporter. He also did spot news reports for KPRC television's fledging news operation until an executive fired him, he says, for being "too ugly."
That's what led to Zindler's first plastic surgery. He's been tinkering ever since.
R.I.P. Marv, you will be missed.
