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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast, the podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Barbork Thun. And tonight, dear listener, we travel once more to the American Deep South. About 15 miles southeast of downtown San Antonio lies the tiny city of Elmendorf.
Elmendorf lies in Bexar County, Texas, and currently has a population of only 1,488 people. But back in the 1920s and 30s, it was even smaller, with around only 300 people. Even though it's a small place, it has by US standards a long history, dating back to its founding in 1885 by Henry Elmendorf.
It's rural, quiet, and birthplace to a legendary American serial killer named Joseph D. Ball. Please check out my fan page on Facebook. Go to facebook.com slash the SK podcast for discussion, bonus content, and frequent interaction with me, your humble host.
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and your friends and family will envy your excellent taste in fashion while doing it. I was unsure, dear listener, if I should include Joe Ball in my ledger of serial killer tales. It's never been proven that Joe killed more than two victims. Only circumstantial evidence points to him being responsible for perhaps as many as twenty human beings.
Also, his story is filled with such quintessential Americana and ruggedness that I simply had to deliver it to you, dear listener. It's freezing winter at the moment here in Norway, and it has snowed almost continuously for two months. So it was nice looking closer at the sun-scorched soil of the Texas Dust Bowl. Imagine, if you will, dear listener, a photograph.
It's a vintage photo, black and white, with a clear sepia tint. It shows a man standing on a beach, wearing an old-fashioned bathing suit for men. As you may know, in the early 1900s, men did not typically wear swimming trunks. They wore bathing suits. These were also common with early days bodybuilders and strongmen. The man in the photo has in his one hand an open whiskey bottle at his belly.
Looking as if he has just been taking a sip, and in his left hand he holds what appears to be a pair of binoculars. The sand on the beach appears bright, and next to the man is some weedy brush typical of the southern Texas coastline. The man's name was Joe Ball.
He has been described by some people as roguishly handsome, but I would rather say he looks stout and somewhat square, with an arrogant snare on his face. If you didn't know Joe Ball's history, you might think he was just another old-time party boy, a genteel William Faulkner look-alike, having a grand old time.
"'If, however, you've heard the legend of Joe Ball, "'his close-cropped hair and cramped face making him appear sordid and murderous, "'he looks like he could get his girlfriend drunk, "'entice her to look off into the distance, "'shoot her in the head, bury her in the sand, "'and then return home to his bar, his waitress, and his alligators.'
And that is just what Joe Ball did. Joe Ball was a bootlegger and a gambler, a scion of the richest family in tiny Elmendorf. There is a significant amount of rumors and legends surrounding Joe Ball, and they say he was a ladies' man. What he would typically do was to have his way with the waitresses at his bar, and when they got pregnant, he got rid of them, sometimes by way of feeding them,
while alive, to his alligators. When deputy sheriffs finally caught up with him in September of 1938, they dug up the dismembered corpse of one of his barmaids, dug up his girlfriend in the sand, and hauled away the alligators. Ball became known as the Bluebeard of Texas, the Butcher of Elmendorf, and the Alligator Man. And his story...
told and retold in various newspapers through crime magazines and books caught the fancy of anyone who was ever fascinated by how low people could go how much deeper the pit of human infamy could be dug it is impossible to figure the final death count since so many women had come and gone through ball's bar-room doors over the years
But the total was at least two, perhaps as many as 25. Along with serial killers such as Albert Fish and the Atlanta Ripper, both of whom has been featured on this podcast, Joe Ball was one of America's first modern serial killers. The facts in Ball's story vary wildly with the source.
From the number of victims to the names of the principals to what the witnesses saw. This is especially so online, where websites like the Wacky World of Murder and Homicidal Heroes treat Ball as if he were an early rockstar, the Chuck Berry of serial killers. It's almost as if they are rooting him on.
Indeed, Ball is often hailed as a mythic kin to Ed Gein, the Wisconsin ghoul who, in the 50s, killed people and dug up and flailed corpses and wore their skin. The guy on whom Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre were based. Tobe Hooper made a second film called Eaten Alive.
It should come as no surprise that it concerned a deranged Texas hotelier who fed his guests, including a pretty prostitute he hacked to death with a rake, to an alligator that he kept in his yard. Was Ball truly, as one website insisted, one of the U.S.'s greatest nutcases?
Or was he, as other modern maniacs have defended themselves, merely misunderstood? Because the men from the Bexar County Sheriff's Office who cornered Ball are dead, their successors are the only directly linked source.
When asked in interviews if any kind of written history of the department had survived from the 30s, the current corporal replied that it didn't, but that his great-grandfather had been the sheriff of neighboring Wilson County. "'I heard Joe Ball was a black man,' he said, "'and he would kill the waitresses and throw their bodies in a pond behind this place.'
A San Antonio Public Library librarian was asked by the same interviewer if she had any files on the Ball family, but she didn't. That is, until she was confronted by the fact that Ball was a serial killer of some repute. She then cheerfully asked if Ball was, and I quote, if he is the guy with the alligator farm, end quote. Joe Ball did not exactly have an alligator farm, but...
More on that a bit further on. The various stories one gets when investigating Joe Ball is proof, once again, that people see what they want to see. Especially when it involves flesh-eating alligators. As I started by saying, dear listener, Elmendorf is a small place.
As the saying goes, if you blink, you'll have missed it. Especially if you're heading south on US-181 and thinking about the beaches at Port Aransas or Corpus Christi. Most people speed right by the small town just outside the San Antonio city limit sign.
If you turn west toward Elmendorf, you'll drive through a couple of miles of scrubby fields, wide-open pastures, mobile homes and mobile home subdivisions. Many of the double-wides are nice, with tailored yards and pretty gardens. Their mailboxes reveal the town's current makeup. Garcia, Ramos, Guerrero. Elmendorf is about two-thirds Hispanic.
and it is pretty poor. Very few have ever photographed it for a tourist brochure, but it does actually have a nice website featuring a bit of its history and some nice pictures. Many of the roads in town are gravel. The main intersection at FM 327 and 3rd Avenue has a stop sign and a hair salon. Just behind the intersection is a hand-drawn sign
On one side, it advertises Tony's Bar and Grill, and on the other, it shows a caricature of an alligator in a baseball cap with a bat on his shoulder that reads Gators. Nearby are Roy's Place and D. Leon's Grocery, which have been in business for 70 years. The Elmendorf Lounge used to be here, but now it's out on 181.
The town was incorporated in 1963, and its first mayor was Raymond Ball, Joe's brother, but it has had a troubled history of late. Elmendorf developed a reputation as a so-called speed trap in the 70s, and in 1983 the mayor resigned, as did two successive police chiefs who were accused of submitting false documents to a state agency.
In 1987, the mayor and a council member walked out of a meeting because of a disagreement. They resigned and later tried to come back, but the council wouldn't let them. In the year 2000, the mayor and four council members, including Richard Bucky Ball Jr., Joe's nephew, were indicted for violating the Texas Open Meetings Act, which is a misdemeanor.
The town got water lines laid only about a decade ago, and sewer lines even more recently. Most of the commerce, restaurants, gas stations, antique stores, is carried out on US Highway 181, which leads the rest of the world to pass Elmendorf by. There are things to do in town, though. At St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, the largest and oldest church in town,
Inside the parish hall, on any weekday morning, you'll find a crowd of elderly people from the area, there to hang out with friends and eat a free lunch, provided by the Texas Department of Aging and the city of San Antonio. On a good morning, there are 80, about half Mexican-American, half white.
Some of the women start playing Mexican train dominoes at 10.30. Others spend their time visiting at the five lines of tables strung together cafeteria style. The program has been going on since 1973. The first manager was a Mrs. Michael Ball. When asked about Joe Ball, everyone there knew the name. Some actually claimed to remember the man.
Lawrence Lideke was fourteen in 1938. He used to sneak into Ball's yard to see the alligators. He said Ball was a good shot, and that he could shoot a bullet through the mouth of a beer bottle or hit a coin in the air. But he was mean. We were afraid of him, remembered polite Marian, who is eighty-eight years old. He'd get mad and kill you.
Townspeople were suspicious of Ball even before his death, she said. He was a dirty rat. He had some black people there. He treated them so mean. Locals take a certain hushed pleasure in talking about the town's most infamous son, even if they don't always get the facts right. They found two bodies on the beach somewhere, said Jesse Bayer, who lives in nearby Floresville.
but they never found any other bodies. He fed them to the alligators, what I hear. I don't know how many. Alex Saucedo, who also grew up in Floresville, was asked in an interview if he thought Ball had fed his waitresses to his gators. Oh yeah, he said brightly. Others in town claim Ball's victims were all prostitutes, disappearing, moving on to other cities, as prostitutes often do.
The graveyard in town is remarkably large. Most of the headstones are usually decorated with colorful flowers. One would think Joe Ball's grave would be off in some corner hidden by neglect, but his is the first grave you see when you walk in the gate from the church. On it is the engraving Joseph D. Ball, January 7, 1896-1990.
September 24, 1938. He lies next to his father, Frank X. Ball. The family of Ball is a recurring name all over this cemetery. Frank X. Ball more or less built Elmendorf. This was cotton country, and Ball borrowed some money and built a gin to process the crop.
The railroad put a depot in town, and Elmendorf cotton, as well as pottery, bricks, and tile, made at a local factory, were exported to the rest of the world. A school opened in 1902. By the late 20s, the town was thriving, with general stores, a hotel, a doctor's office, meat markets, a confectionery, and a couple of cotton gins.
"'My daddy said there'd be cotton wagons two miles up the old highway,' remembered Bucky, whose father, Richard, was Joe's brother. Elmendorf was a jumping town way back then, and Frank Ball was rich. He began buying and selling farms, especially when they got cheap during their depression. He opened a general store, from which he sold everything from caskets to shoes.'
He built the first stone home in the area, and he and his wife, Elizabeth, had eight children, many of whom became pillars of the community. Frank Jr. became a school trustee in 1914. Raymond opened a new grocery store, which also held a post office. His wife, Jane, would become the postmaster. Their second child, Joe, was no politician. He was, however, good with guns.
My uncle could shoot a bird off a telephone line with a pistol from the bumper of his Model A Ford, Bucky said. Joe Ball joined the U.S. Army in 1917 to fight in the Great War. In his official Army photo, he looks pale and innocent, as a lot of Americans did who went off to fight for democracy and freedom. Ball saw action in Europe, according to Bucky.
and received his honorable discharge in 1919, for then to return home to Elmendorf. Joe may not have followed in his father's footsteps, but he learned something from him about business. Just as people needed a gin to process their cotton, they needed, well, gin and whiskey. And as prohibition settled in during the 1920s, Ball became a bootlegger,
He drove all around the area, selling whiskey to people out of a fifty-gallon barrel. Ball was around six feet tall and hundred and sixty pounds, according to Elton Q. Jr. His father, a Bexar County deputy sheriff, helped investigate Ball, and later wrote about him in a book titled The Wild and Free Dukedom of Bexar. He wasn't near as good-looking as they describe in these detective magazines, said Q. Jr.,
and he could be dangerous. In the mid-twenties, Ball began hiring, off and on, a young black man named Clifton Wheeler to help around the house and the business. Wheeler was a handyman, but he did a lot of Joe Ball's manual labor and dirty work. According to many, Wheeler lived in fear of Ball. Joe's contemporary, Lee Decke, says that Ball would shoot at Wheeler's feet to make him dance the jitterbug.
As expected, Paul's nephew has a different image of Joe based on the stories his father told him. According to Bucky, he was always kind-hearted and generous, remembering a tale about his uncle paying for a poor Mexican-American couple to go to the doctor to have their baby. Allegedly, he did generous acts like that several times. However...
It is far from certain that such Robin Hoodian behavior on Joe Ball's part is historical fact or a simply fictional flavor added to the Joe Ball legend. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you.
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Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. After the Prohibition, which ended in 1933, Ball opened a tavern. In the back were two bedrooms and up front were a bar, played a piano, and a room with tables where the men drank and played cards.
Sometimes, Ball hosted cockfights. At some point, he went to one of the nearby low-water areas, where alligators were occasionally seen, caught some, and put them in a concrete pool behind a tavern. He strung wire ten feet high around the pool. Perhaps he loved alligators, or perhaps he just knew how to bring in customers.
Kewd wrote in his book that it was common knowledge that every Saturday night a drunken orgy occurred. Any wild animal, possum, cat, dog or any other animal without an owner helped make the show a little better. Get drunk, throw an animal in and watch the alligators. In addition to the hosting of animal blood sports, Ball hired women, dance hall girls, to wait tables.
Now, dear listener, you need to remember that this was during the depths of the Great Depression, when life was very hard for the average American. Women came through Elmendorf looking for work. Some stayed, and some just seemed to disappear. Hazel Brown was a woman who wasn't afraid of maintaining eye contact, and when you look at her photo, it seems as if she stares deep into your mind.
She's all confidence, and was a dangerous beauty. She looks like one of those hard-bitten starlets in Hollywood in the 40s, like Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, whose gruesome 1947 murder was never solved. She had dark hair, dark eyes, and sensual lips. Maybe it's just the age of the photo, or the era in which it was shot.
But it's easy to see how Joe Ball fell in love with her. Before her, Ball had fallen for other waitresses. Around 1934, he met a woman from Seguin, named Minnie Gotthard, also known as Big Minnie. Big Minnie was, according to Kude's book, barzy, displeasing and obnoxious as a person. But Ball liked her. She ran the bar with him, and Wheeler and she had no fear of the drugs.
At some point, though, Ball began seeing barmaid Dolores Buddy Goodwin, who was 15 years his junior. She fell in love with him. How she could fall in love with him is a bit odd, though, since one night in the spring of 1937, he threw a bottle and hit her in the face. This resulted in giving her a scar that ran from her eye to her neck.
By then, Brown, who was from McDade and known as Scatsey, was working at Ball's Tavern. She was also young, only 22, and popular with the customers. She and Buddy became friends. Big Minnie, though, didn't like Buddy one bit, and wasn't afraid to show it. That summer, Big Minnie disappeared. Ball told people she was pregnant in a Corpus Christi hospital.
Clifton Wheeler heard Ball tell people she was going to have a nigger baby. She must have skipped town in a big hurry, though, because she left all of her clothes behind. In September, Ball married Dolores Buddy Goodwin, and he revealed to her his secret, that he had taken Minnie to the beach and killed her. She wouldn't make any more trouble for them.
Buddy was not very good at keeping secrets, and was probably scared of her life too, so she told Scatsey about Minnie's demise. She told her a couple of times. In January of 1938, Buddy's left arm was cut off, and stories flew around Elmendorf that Ball's crazed alligators had torn it off, or that Ball had cut it off and fed it to them.
This is an example of how the legend of Ball can often be exaggerations. The fact is that Buddy had lost the arm in a car wreck, but it was not a car that was the reason for the April disappearance of Dolores Buddy Goodwin. By then, Joe was seeing Hazel Scatsey Brown, and then she disappeared too. On the 23rd of September, 1938—
An old Mexican-American man approached Bexar County Deputy Sheriff John Gray, who was dove hunting in Elmendorf, and told him about a foul-smelling barrel covered in flies that Joe Ball had left behind his sister's barn. It smelled, he said, like something dead was inside. Enough women in Ball's world had disappeared that the next day Gray and Deputy John Clevenhagen drove out to talk to him.
Clevenhagen, who would later become a Texas Ranger, was a hunting buddy of Ball's. He was as good as shot, too. They all went to the barn, but the stinky barrel was gone. They drove to the bar about noon and talked to Ball, who denied knowing anything about it. But when they all returned to the barn, his sister corroborated the old man's story. That was enough for the deputies, who told Ball
They were taking him to San Antonio for questioning. Ball asked if he could first be allowed to have a beer and close down his place. The sheriffs agreed, and the trio returned to the bar. Ball got a beer, took a few sips, went to his register, opened it, and then pulled out a .45 caliber weapon from under the counter. He waved it, and Gray and Klevenhagen, who yelled, Don't!
Klevenhagen went for his own pistol, just as Ball turned his and pointed it at his own heart. Joe Ball pulled the trigger and fell dead on the barroom floor. Four other deputies, including Kewd, descended on the tavern. They checked the five gators, one large and four small, in their pond, which was surrounded by rotting meat. They found an axe matted with blood and hair.
Their first theory was an obvious one, that the fearsome drunk had killed and mutilated his wife and other victims and fed them to the alligators. The Toks talked about other disappearances, including two missing barmaids and a sixteen-year-old boy who hung out at Joe's. Perhaps the Saturday night feeding frenzies had just been a cover for Saturday night murder. Maybe the old bootlegging barrels now held alligator food.
But then Wheeler, who had been taken by sheriffs to San Antonio, spilled the beans. "'Scatsey had fallen for someone else,' he said. "'One of the bar's customers. A guy with a home and a good job. She wanted out. But Ball wouldn't hear of it. When she threatened to tell the police about Big Minnie, he killed her. And now the handyman knew exactly where Scatsey was.'
He took the sheriffs back to Elmendorf, about three miles from town, on a bluff some three hundred feet from the San Antonio River. By the light of a campfire, he began to dig. Blood bubbled up in the dirt, and the odor became unbearable. Wheeler pulled up two arms and two legs and finally a torso. The sight and smell were apparently so bad
that the sightseers ran in all directions and started heaving and throwing up. Wheeler was asked where the head was, and he pointed to the remains of another campfire. After careful sifting, Cups found a jawbone, some teeth, and finally some pieces of the skull that had once held the attractive face of Hazel Brown. Wheeler told how, after a night of heavy drinking, Bull had asked him to load up the car with blankets and beer.
Joe had a saw, an axe, and a post-hole digger with him, as well as his pistol. They went to his sister's barn, stopping along the way to drink, and then picked up the fetid fifty-five-gallon iron barrel, which they took up to the river. Ball forced Wheeler at gunpoint to dig a grave, and they opened the barrel. Out came Brown's body. Wheeler refused to help Ball dismember the corpse,
So he tried to do it himself, but he got so enraged when one of her hands got in the way of sawing off her head that Wheeler reached over and held Brown's hand, and then helped further, holding her arms and her legs while his boss sawed. They each got sick to their stomachs, so they drank some more beer and then buried the corpse, though they threw the head as well as her clothes, on a campfire.
As dawn broke, they sat around and drank beer, and then drove back to the bar. Wheeler also solved the mystery of Big Minnie. The previous June, Ball told Wheeler to pack the Model A coupe, and be sure to stow plenty of whiskey and beer. Then he took Minnie and Wheeler to Ingleside, near Corpus Christi. Ball found a secluded area, and after a little swimming and a lot of drinking,
Asked the doomed Minnie to take her clothes off. Wheeler made himself scarce, but when Ball called for more whiskey, Wheeler noticed that his boss had his pistol by his side. Ball pointed off in the distance, and when Minnie turned her head to look, he shot her in the temple. Wheeler was shocked, but Ball told him he had no choice.
According to Joe Ball, she was pregnant, and he was seeing Buddy, and therefore he couldn't have Big Minnie around anymore. The two buried her in the sand and drove back to Elmendorf. Police officers questioned Wheeler about the other women, and they found a packet of letters as well as a scrapbook with photos of dozens of women. This, said Chief Deputy J.W. Davis, might lead to the discovery of one or a dozen more murders.
The San Antonio papers wrote of the disappearance of more than a dozen barmaids, including one called Stella, who had had a fight with Joe Ball about Big Minnie. The sheriffs also had a theory that Ball was dealing narcotics, and that it would have been a simple matter to put the dope in the bottles and store it in the alligator's lair. They drained the pool, but they found no drugs.
Three days after Joe Ball's suicide, the police began digging in the sand four miles southeast of Ingleside. They took heavy machinery and hired local laborers. And people with nothing better to do, sometimes hundreds of them, came and watched. A local merchant with an excellent nose for business set up a stand and began selling cold drinks.
The crowd swelled. Excitement and rumors ran high, reported the newspaper San Antonio Light. Other dunes looked suspiciously like burial mounds, and mysterious shapes were seen walking around at night. Finally, on the 14th of October, they found the remains of Big Minnie, well preserved in the deep, cold sand.
Meanwhile, the police had located Buddy in San Diego, where she had fled from her husband and gone to be with her sister. Two weeks later, Officer Clevenhagen and Gray brought her to San Antonio. On the way, they stopped in Phoenix and found one of the women listed as missing from the tavern. Buddy later said that Wheeler told her that on her last night on Earth, Scatsey, who didn't know Buddy, was in San Diego alone.
"'I'd accuse Ball of killing her, just as he had killed Big Minnie.' "'Scatsy badgered Ball until he flew into a rage. "'After a while,' said Buddy, "'Joe hit her with his pistol, and I reckon that killed her. "'He shot her, too, just to make sure. "'In the aftermath, the alligators went to the San Antonio Zoo, "'and Wheeler received two years in jail as an accessory.'
He got out and opened his own bar in town, but soon left and was never heard from again. Joe Ball's legend blew. The pulp press had a lot to do with it.
True Detective, the monthly bible of sordid true crime, found his story irresistible and wouldn't let it go, returning often to the sensational tale of the murderous ladies' man. Dozens of hapless ladies, unborn children, mutilation, kitties and puppies, and of course, alligators starved for human flesh.
Hungry Gators sold magazines, just as Ball had used them to sell beer. Elton Q Jr. said, My father called them once and asked, Where'd you get those stories? According to one story, my dad was the roughest, toughest manhandling deputy sheriff in Bexar County history. Well, he told of his aunt Madeline, Joe's sister, who sued True Detective several times for their imaginative versions of Uncle Joe.
I don't know if she ever collected, he said. She didn't need the money. Other pulp magazines picked up the distorted story, and so did books like the Encyclopedia of Serial Killers and America's Most Vicious Criminals. Eventually, the tale made its way to the websites, where anyone can write history. So the hype kept building, and the mistakes repeating.
How Ball shot himself in the head. How his handyman was named Wilfred Sneed. How Sneed said that he had cut up 20 women. How chunks of human flesh were found in the pool. In retrospect, it's hard to tell whom to trust. For example, according to a 1938 article in something called the Sheriff's Association magazine,
That mysterious packet of letters found by the police contained one from Big Minnie telling Ball, I'm still willing to break up you and Buddy if it's the last thing I do. Uncle Henry and I are going to take you to jail as soon as he gets here. I'm going to testify as to what I know. No one knows what she meant by what she knew, especially if that was murder or simply vice, such as smuggling and gambling.
There were plenty of other tales, too, including the oft-told one of an old man who, in 1932, had stumbled into Ball throwing a woman's body into his alligator-filled pool. According to local lore, Ball threatened the man into leaving town, and he fled to California and returned only after Ball was dead. Others claim to have seen Ball throwing pieces of human flesh into the pit.
Ultimately, of course, it's impossible to prove he didn't. Even though most of the missing women were accounted for, usually in San Antonio, some never were. And even though Wheeler, the only eyewitness to Ball's crime, never said anything about the alligators, that didn't mean he didn't know how to keep his mouth shut when he had to. With Ball, it was easy to believe the worst. It still is.
Take one violent, sadistic drunk known for throwing stray pets to his alligators. Add a one-armed missing wife, one hacked-up girlfriend, and another buried in the sand. Who knows how many stray women coming and going, and we quickly see that Joe Ball quite probably did kill more than the two women. And alligators are ravenous animals that are very good at eating human flesh.
It would not have been particularly difficult for Joe Ball to have his gators eat the flesh off the bones of his victims, for then to easily dispose of the skeletal remains. But he tried to set the record straight in a 1957 interview. Joe never put no people in that alligator tank, she said.
Joe wouldn't do a thing like that. He wasn't no horrible monster. Joe was a sweet, kind, good man, and he never hurt nobody unless he was driven to it. End quote. Referring to the scar on her face, she said, He didn't even mean to cut me. He was throwing the bottle at another guy. There were just two murders, she said. Elton Q Jr. agrees, as did his father.
who in a 1988 interview said, I don't think those alligators ate a human body of any kind. Bucky, of course, agrees too. Contrary to expectations, he has a sense of humor about a tale that has blackened his family name. Truthfully, he has no choice. When Bucky was training with the Green Berets in North Carolina in 1959...
A friend's mother, who lived in New Jersey and knew his last name, sent her son a comic book that told the horrifying tale of Joe Ball and the alligators. Bucky, who at 70 wears a jet-black pompadour and looks like an old rockabilly, chuckled as he remembered their shock when he said, "'That was my uncle!' In April, Bucky and his wife, who barrel-raced in their spare time, were in Giddings."
This friend of mine saw me and said, Hey, Ball, did you bring your alligator with you? In truth, alligators aren't that unusual in this part of the South Texas area, said Bucky, who remembers a stuffed one in the Floresville courthouse when he was a kid. They get in the San Antonio River. I saw four over in Browneg Lake recently. They like that still water, end quote.
Bucky said his uncle probably got his from around Greytown, about three miles from Elmendorf in the lowlands, where they go to lay eggs. Bucky has his uncle's World War I portrait and a 48-star flag given to the family after his death. He keeps them in a glass case in his living room. The 24-year-old veteran goes to counseling at Brook Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston
and thinks his uncle's experience in the war had something to do with his actions afterward. My dad told me that after my uncle came back from the war, he was different. I guess what you see and do comes back to you. My counselor tells me your brain is like a tape, and this stuff is on your brain. It'll never go away. There wasn't much army counseling during the Depression, and Joe Ball probably wouldn't have taken it anyway.
He didn't seem to be the type to talk about his feelings. Or maybe that's just a myth talking.
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