You Can’t Miss Marvin : He’s loud in every sense of the word. And when he stands up for the little guy, everybody in Houston notices. You Can’t Miss Marvin

It was the lunch hour and Marvin Zindler opened the door of the Sunset Tea House.

Then the oddest thing happened. Heads turned. Eyes focused, then clicked with recognition. Mouths curved into smiles. And people actually began to clap.

Zindler didn’t even break stride. This kind of thing happens to him wherever he goes. People are constantly asking him for his autograph. Passers-by he has never met treat him like a long-lost cousin.

Marvin Zindler, you see, is the most famous person in Houston. If he and the mayor were to walk into a room, the smart money would bet on Zindler as the one who would draw the most attention.

His official job description is that of consumer affairs reporter for Station KTRK, the local ABC affiliate. But to his legions of followers, that’s like saying Babe Ruth was a baseball player.

Zindler brays and bellows. He pounds his fist in righteous indignation and makes mincemeat of the English language in the process. He’s also the guy responsible for the closing of the Chicken Ranch, once the best-known whorehouse in Texas.

But most of all, he stands up for the little guy and gets things done. When all else fails, as it often does, people in Houston turn to Marvin--everyone calls him Marvin. Letters asking for his help run at a clip of about 50,000 a year.

True, there are other consumer advocates out there, including the well-known David Horowitz in Los Angeles. But Zindler is an original. And if the ranting were not enough, there is the Zindler look: the dandified clothes, the snowy wig, the pearly white capped teeth, the blue-tinted sunglasses, the ever-present pancake makeup and enough plastic surgery to make Phyllis Diller jealous.

Finally, there is the famous Zindler sign-off, in which, after having righted yet another wrong, he peers into the camera and pauses before the Vesuvian eruption.

“MAAAAARRRRVIN ZINDLER . . . EYYYYYYEWITNESS NEWS.”

At which point Dave Ward, the anchorman, turns to him each night and deadpans a “Thank you, Marvin,” as if what he had just witnessed was not one of the more unusual events in television news.

On first viewing, “my first reaction was, ‘What in the hell is that?’ ” said Zindler’s cameraman, Bob Dows. “People may hate him, but they can tell you what he did last night. There will never be another Marvin.”

For 17 years, Zindler has carried the torch on television for righteousness, with a dose of self-aggrandizement to boot. His “rat and roach” report every Friday about local restaurants has made “sliiiiiime in the ice machine” a household phrase.

In his first year with the station, his questioning led to the shutdown of the Chicken Ranch, the most famous brothel in Texas. Many were the prominent state officials who knew every bend in the road on the way to the Chicken Ranch, just outside the otherwise nondescript town of LaGrange.

“It was as nice a whorehouse as you ever saw,” wrote Larry L. King, author of the “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” which immortalized the Chicken Ranch. “It sat in a green Texas glade, white-shuttered and tidy, surrounded by leafy oak trees and a few slim renegade pines, and the kind of pure clean air the menthol-cigarette people advertise. . . . Yeah, they had ‘em a real bird’s nest on the ground out there. Then along came Marvin Zindler.”

What Zindler did was go to a press conference in Austin, Tex., conducted by then-Gov. Dolph Briscoe, and, as the story goes, posed this question as the session was winding down: “Governor, is it true there is a house of ill repute operating in the great state of Texas?”

Well, that did it.

Marvin Zindler had arrived.

And the whorehouse closed.

Although the Chicken Ranch episode put him on the map, Zindler was not without notoriety in his earlier days. Before he joined the television station, he was a deputy sheriff in the consumer fraud division. His affectation of the day was a pince-nez. He hauled in female prisoners in mink-covered handcuffs.

When he was going to make an arrest, he would often call the media to ensure it received proper attention. Once, he delayed arresting the owner of an auto dealership because a television crew couldn’t make it at the originally scheduled time.

Zindler ended up getting fired from the Sheriff’s Department, reportedly because he was better known than the newly elected sheriff. Zindler was quoted at the time as saying, “Sometimes God works in strange ways, and maybe this is just one of them.”

Marvin Zindler was tucked away in his office, a cubicle about the size of a walk-in closet. Littering the walls were awards and certificates of appreciation, including one proclaiming him an outstanding contributor to the field of plastic surgery. A change of clothing hung from the left arm of a suit of armor. It was the office of a pack rat, with boxes full of memorabilia tucked under the desk.

On this particular day, Zindler sported a blue double-breasted blazer and plaid pants, and his eyes were barely visible behind the blue shades. At 68, his skin is still smooth (for obvious reasons). He wears a huge gold-and-diamond ring.

Away from the camera, his voice is surprisingly soft. Tonight, he said, he would report on a young, pregnant woman who tried in vain to have an abortion. Her unborn child had tested positive for several severe birth defects, but the impoverished woman was refused an abortion at the county hospital because the pregnancy was in its fourth month.

“She was poor. She was begging me,” Zindler said. “That story just really knocked me. It really got to me.”

And, as usual, Zindler had only to pick up the phone and call upon one of his hundreds of friends and acquaintances to help the woman. “The telephone is going to light up for this one,” said Zindler after he had finished the voice-over for the evening’s show.

Then, back in his office, Zindler was trying to make another call when his famous temper detonated. He sputtered and screamed at the secretary on the receiving end, then banged the telephone into the cradle. The offense in this case: He had been passed around to different offices.

“It doesn’t matter--he’ll yell at someone in a wheelchair or the president of a corporation,” said Lori Reingold, his producer for the last 10 years.

Indeed, it seems everyone has their favorite Marvin-boils-over story. A woman who used to work for Zindler once complained that he referred to her as Betty (Bleep). News Director Tom Doerr recalls the time when he and Zindler were having a nose-to-nose shouting match. Then, Doerr said, Zindler did something that absolutely amazed him.

“He reached up, pulled out his hearing aids and continued to scream,” Doerr said. “It was clear that he was going to say what he wanted to say, and he didn’t want to listen to me.

“Marvin is just an open, raw nerve,” Doerr said with genuine affection.

The morning after his piece on the pregnant woman, Zindler was having a cup of coffee in the station cafeteria, discussing the many different things he has done to change how he looks. While others might shrink at such a topic, Zindler loves to talk about the two nose jobs, the cartilage implant in his chin, upper and lower eye jobs, collagen injections to remove wrinkles and other treatments.

“I didn’t like what I looked like,” he said. “Maybe that’s what God gave you, but plastic surgeons have the knowledge to change it.”

Zindler takes the same approach with his hair, or lack thereof. Because there is a history of baldness in his family, Zindler walked into a New York wig shop in 1954 and ordered a hairpiece, even though his own hair had receded only slightly.

“I said, ‘Shave this off and give me a hairpiece,’ ” Zindler recalled. He uses Woolite to keep his wigs clean and claims that Gertrude, his wife of 49 years, hasn’t seen him without his toupee since then.

It was time to head out, with Dows driving, Reingold riding shotgun and Zindler in the back of the van. A woman’s suede shoes had been ruined while she was riding in a limousine, and the company had refused to compensate her for her loss. The driver reportedly had cleaned the carpet while waiting for his passengers to return, and the wet rug had stained the shoes.

So here was Zindler walking into an office building. And, as usual, people recognized him instantly.

Three young men were walking out the door when they spied Zindler.

“Eyyyyyewitness News,” they sang out in unison.

Less than half an hour later, the crusading trio walked out, with the story of the shoes. Later in the day, the manager of the limousine service, Richard Brown, offered $70 to replace them.

If there was a low point in the career of Marvin Zindler, it would have been last year, when he ventured outside the safe environs of Houston. His friend, U. S. Rep. Mickey Leland, was reported missing in Ethiopia, and Zindler’s first impulse was to head for the airport.

Without visas, he, Dows and Reingold talked their way into Addis Ababa a day ahead of the journalistic pack. But then things went sour, with reports coming back in the local newspapers about what an oddity Zindler was, and how he spent his time sitting on the veranda sipping tea.

Houston Post television critic Eric Gerber devoted a column to how KTRK had erred in sending Zindler, and how his exaggerated sign-off became more inappropriate as the days wore on.

Zindler bridles at the mere mention of the Africa trip. He is obviously wounded at the skewering he took. And Dows believes Zindler has been wronged.

“We worked as hard as anybody else,” he said. “Marvin didn’t have to be up at 5 a.m. when the search planes took off, but he was there.”

That incident aside, though, Zindler has little to complain about.

He and his wife live in the same suburban house where they raised five children. He has a lifetime contract and is a millionaire. He rides high atop the ratings. “He’s our 300-pound gorilla” when it comes to the ratings, said anchorman Ward. With Zindler, KTRK has led the local evening news ratings here for as long as anyone can remember.

Ward recalled the television station did a detailed survey a few years back that found that more people in Houston recognized Zindler than anyone else in town--96.7% of the population could pick him out of a crowd.

So what did that do to Zindler? It devastated him because he started calculating how many people hadn’t recognized his famous face.

“I thought it was going to destroy him,” Ward said.

Ward, the man who first called Zindler and asked him if he wanted to be on television, said a feeling engulfs him each time his consumer crusader is on the air--a recurring wondering whether someone out there is just turning on the news for the first time, maybe a businessman at a hotel or a new arrival to the city.

“I wonder what their reaction is to this guy,” he said. “It hits me every night.”