Marvin Zindler signs off

You gotta respect a guy who turns to a weird career like journalism in when he was 51, especially with the emotional and physical baggage that seems wrong for the job. Vanity (he had 17 plastic surgery procedures over the years), deafness (and so he yelled), and a taste for high living aren’t what you’d expect from a consumer reporter, defender of the poor, the immigrant and the unfortunate.

But, what would Houston have been without Marvin Zindler, who died last Sunday at the age of 85? A former high-end haberdasher, Marine, and deputy sheriff, he claimed he was screwed over after a car dealer pulled strings with the local sheriff, following Marvin’s investigation into an always popular odometer roll-back scam. Crooked sheriff’s, used car dealers, and any one else screwing the little guy would regret that. Marvin dusted himself off and reinvented himself as, what else, a journalist and crusader.

A little old for the standard TV talking head, Zindler created a uniquely Texas personality — and made his investigative reports instant classics. Every obituary mentions his role in exposing the famous (or infamous, depending on your sense of things) “Chicken Ranch” — the rural whorehouse that served Texas A & M and U of Texas students for several generations (and was the basis for “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”), in Houston, he combined “Sixty Minutes” and Jimmy Swaggert in his on-air personality as he gleefully browbeat bureaucrats into resolving housing and immigration problems — and, sweet-talked the rich and beautiful to support charitable work in Mexico.

Zindler, and Houston plastic surgeon Joseph Agris, regularly arranged to fly medical teams and equipment to Puerto Vallarta (who said you can’t have fun while doing good), correcting cleft palates and other congenital deformities for poor Mexican children. Through the Agris-Zindler foundation, the Houston based charity has expanded to provide free reconstuctive work and distribute medical equipment throughout the world.

You have to respect a guy who didn’t become a journalist until well into middle-age, and who made outrage enjoyable, especially when the outrage was something as something as simple as …. SLIME IN THE ICE MACHINE!