Gary Cartwright, Acclaimed Texas Writer, Dies at 82

[JSngry]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/business/media/gary-cartwright-dead-texas-writer.html

 

“One of the best stories ever that Cartwright wrote, or that the magazine published, was one of Cartwright’s first stories,” Mr. Smith said. “It was about Jay J. Armes, a private detective in El Paso who literally had hooks for arms. You cannot make this up.”

In the weeks leading up to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the Dallas apartment that Mr. Cartwright shared with his friend and fellow reporter, Bud Shrake, was a popular late-night hangout for, among others, Jack Ruby and one of Ruby’s favorite strippers, Jada.

Mr. Ruby, the nightclub owner who shot Lee Harvey Oswald, was a recurring figure in Mr. Cartwright’s journalism. As Mr. Cartwright wrote in “Confessions of a Washed-up Sportswriter” (1983), “On the morning of the assassination, Ruby called our apartment and asked if we’d seen Jada.”

Mr. Cartwright’s work appeared alongside that of Larry McMurtry, J. Frank Dobie, Molly Ivins, Katherine Anne Porter and other Texas writers in the 2003 anthology “Lone Star Literature.” The book included this Cartwright passage:

“If there is a tear left, shed it for Jack Ruby. He didn’t make history; he only stepped in front of it. When he emerged from obscurity into that inextricable freeze-frame that joins all of our minds to Dallas, Jack Ruby, a baldheaded little man who wanted above all else to make it big, had his back to the camera.”

Even more famous was his 1976 Texas Monthly cover article about one of Ruby’s stripper friends, a Texas folk hero named Candy Barr.

“They say she once sat waiting in a rocking chair talking to sweet Jesus,” Mr. Cartwright wrote, “and when her ex-husband kicked down the door, she threw down on him with a pistol that was resting conveniently in her lap. She shot him in the stomach, but she was aiming for the groin.”