‘Wizard of West’ Wove Rare Magic, Left Texas-Size Legend : Personalities: Gambler and bootlegger was called crafty and cunning as a coyote. ‘Pinkie’ was also widely admired as a civic and political activist.

Friends called him Pinkie, “The Wizard of the West,” and they called him often.

They called him when they needed money, jobs, donations, legal advice, political clout or maybe just a good bottle of whiskey or a large or small dice game.

They called him from the state capital in Austin or from a sleazy jail in West Texas.

“Any time you needed something done, you could count on Pinkie to get it done,” said oil man Charles Perry.

Still, few really knew him, for he was passionately private. Much of his life was a mystery, which was what he wanted. And yet, insiders suggest that Tom (Pinkie) Roden was a civic godfather with a dark side and a shadowy past.

At his death in 1989, Pinkie’s longtime friend, John Ben Sheppard, a former state attorney general, said, “We’ll never know the extent of his contributions or philanthropy. He let others take the bows, and he did the work and paid the bills.”

Politicians privately sought his counsel and his contributions, and it was former Texas Gov. Preston Smith who said, “I would class Tom Roden as one of the top 10 people I know. The state and the community have lost a great man.”

Indeed they did. His adopted hometown of Odessa, the rowdy West Texas oil mecca, honored him as its outstanding citizen. And lawyers awarded him a Liberty Bell as the non-lawyer who best upheld the tradition of American justice.

Not bad for a guy who did hard time at the state prison in his younger days.

The Odessa Chamber of Commerce named him to its Business Hall of Fame and a former state whiskey regulator praised him as “an outstanding citizen, a great character, a dear friend and the kingpin of the liquor business in Texas for many years.”

Not at all bad for a shy, gentle, stuttering, freckle-faced, enigmatic hulk who grew up dirt poor, made a fortune bootlegging whiskey and founded the most far-flung, Byzantine liquor store chain in all of Texas.

A guy who could socialize with the governor or the state’s top accountant one night and shoot dice the next evening with a legendary gambler.

A guy who spent a lifetime outfoxing or befriending Texas cops, sheriffs, Rangers and liquor agents, as much for fun as profit.

“We never did catch him running the casino operation,” concedes retired RangeP. Lynch of nearby Midland. “He kept assuring us he was shutting it down, but there may have been some games we didn’t know about.”

Perhaps the last of his special if not always noble breed, Pinkie is gone but his legacy will be with Texas for generations to come. Like no other, he shaped the crazy-quilt laws governing how, where, what and when Texans buy and drink their booze.

Born at a hardscrabble settlement named Chalk Mountain in 1911, Pinkie Roden spent much of his childhood at nearby Glen Rose, a small, riverside resort and spa 60 miles south of Ft. Worth.

He worked in his father’s drugstore before making a youthful career move that would forever shape his life. As a bellboy at the local hotel, he was exposed early on to sins of the flesh, and their first cousins, whiskey and gambling.

He sampled them all.

More important, it took him no time at all to learn that hotel guests would pay handsomely for booze in a dry town, a lesson he took to heart.

He had dropped out of school by age 16, and soon drifted to Ft. Worth, ostensibly to live with a grandmother and finish public school. In fact, he learned the bootlegging business from a young buddy, Clem Connally, and Clem’s father, Dee, who operated out of a service station front.

In Ft. Worth, Pinkie used an alias, Tom Boyd, during his brushes with the law. He adored his mother and feared his father and worried constantly that his photograph might find its way into the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram.

It never did, but he left town not altogether by choice.

Friends, associates and even family members are a bit hazy on just how, when and why Pinkie surfaced next in the West Texas town of Sweetwater, near Abilene.

But it was a pivotal period, for he not only perfected his bootlegging skills but apparently learned the art of making moonshine whiskey.

When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Pinkie went semi-legitimate, opening his first liquor store the following year in Big Spring, west of Sweetwater.

That’s not to suggest that Texas was suddenly awash in legal whiskey.

At the time, vast stretches of West Texas were dry, and would remain so for years to come. Across thousands of square miles, Prohibition was not dead or even gravely wounded.

Those wanting to purchase legal whiskey often had to travel 100 miles or more. Even today, large sections of the region remain dry except for scattered tiny and remote crossroads where beer and liquor are sold.

To label Pinkie a visionary or an entrepreneur would not be straining the truth; his actions speak for themselves. With West Texas ripe for the taking, he took.

The Big Spring store provided a facade of legitimacy and an early base for what would become a multimillion-dollar enterprise, both legal and otherwise.

And West Texans always were a thirsty lot with a lusty affection for cold beer and good, bad or bootleg whiskey.

“Pinkie never considered bootlegging a crime,” joked one of his old cronies. “He considered it a public service.”

In the mid-1950s, the Texas House Crime Investigating Committee convened in Amarillo to look into bootlegging activities in West Texas, particularly Lubbock. Then the biggest and wettest dry town in Texas, Lubbock was a tempting 120 miles north of Pinkie’s Odessa base.

The Houston Post, in a series on bootlegging, reported: “Testimony, telephone calls and other records showed beyond a doubt that a multimillion-dollar syndicate, controlled by one Tom (Pinkie) Roden of Odessa, sold most of the liquor which ended up in Lubbock and other dry West Texas cities.”

The Amarillo testimony also revealed that 10 stores that Pinkie controlled “through a system of demand notes” grossed $8,788,711 in 1951 and 1952.

Pinkie had the soul if not the style of a Robin Hood. He did in fact share the fruits of his often ill-gotten wealth and much of what he did was cemented in myth.

“People would tell all kinds of stories about him and he would never confirm or deny them,” says brother Ted Roden, an Odessa beer distributor. “If he said no, they’d think he was lying. If he said yes, they’d think he was bragging.”

No one ever accused Pinkie of offering a bribe, but as his business and his reputation grew, so did his largess.

On occasion, he lobbied state liquor officials to replace troublesome agents with more compliant colleagues. But he probably used less subtle methods of persuasion, too.

In at least one instance, Pinkie was suspected of sending an aide to fire a warning shot through the window of an uncommonly aggressive investigator.

No one was hurt, but the bullet narrowly missed the agent’s wife and the infant child she was holding.

A devout Democrat, Pinkie worked tirelessly behind the scenes to elect political cronies or oust political enemies, and associates claim the latter seldom knew he or she was on his hit list.

Although difficult to pinpoint exactly why and when, Pinkie’s lifestyle took a dramatic change in the late 1950s and ‘60s.

And for some reason, he apparently decided it might be more fun to make, change or solidify Texas liquor laws than to break them.

“Pinkie wrote an awful lot of liquor law in Texas,” says his friend, Gene Garrison.

Pinkie helped found the Texas Package Stores Assn. and for three decades was a major force in the organization although, by choice, he never served as president.

He and fellow liquor kingpins, Sidney Siegel of Dallas and James Leggett Jr. of Ft. Worth, were the group’s legislative committee and soon became known as “The Three Musketeers” of the industry.

Associates say Pinkie played a leading role in shaping package store legislation, including hours of operation, and a less visible but pivotal role in a Texas mixed-drink law that could mean more business for him and fellow store owners.

Years earlier, Pinkie masterminded a stunning, incredibly profitable scheme to incorporate a tiny precinct totally surrounded by Abilene.

Its name: Impact.

With a 1960 metropolitan population of 120,000, Abilene, in the very heart of a dry area, was a prime target for whiskey merchants of whatever stripe.

Project Impact involved 50 or so people in a tiny, isolated, largely overlooked or ignored part of Abilene. In effect, they quietly voted to incorporate, then legalized off-premises sale of alcoholic beverages.

By no means as simple as it sounds, Impact was the forerunner for any number of similar booze-related schemes across the state.

On weekends and holidays in particular, motorists lined up for blocks to buy beer and booze, and Pinkie and Perkins made millions, tax figures showed.

“All it took to defeat it was for Abilene to go wet, but it took a long, long time to do it,” said Abilene attorney Beverly Tarpley.

Abilene’s churchgoers and Pinkie, their unlikely ally, saw to that.

When the city did vote wet, presumably dooming Impact as an oasis, a reporter telephoned Pinkie for comment.

“Will this break you?” the reporter asked.

“It would have, had I not long prepared for it,” Pinkie replied grandly. “But thanks to the good Christians of Abilene, I will die a wealthy man.”

Several years after arriving in Odessa, Pinkie and some friends stopped by one night at a popular bar called the Melody Club.

The waitress that evening was a perky dark-haired divorcee whose turbulent past could rival even Pinkie’s.

“There he was, this big, freckle-faced guy, a real sweetheart and probably the nicest human being I ever met,” Jane Roden wistfully recalls. “I felt like I fell in love with Pinkie the first time I met him.

“He was nice and polite and such a gentleman, and he left a big tip.”

Pinkie became her friend and confidant and, in 1970, despite an age difference of 28 years, her third husband.

Among his first acts was to adopt Jane’s daughter, Cynthia, then 14. Cynthia now has a 5-year-old son, Pinkie’s namesake.

An Odessa travel agent, Cynthia says Pinkie was the “only father I ever had,” and a great one at that. “He was so generous, supportive and encouraging. . . . He spoiled me.”

Pinkie pushed for expansion of the hospital and establishment of the Texas Tech Regional Academic Health Center in Odessa. And he put his time and money into the Odessa 4-H Club and Future Farmers of America, the Boy Scouts and the Boys Club of Odessa.

Although a high school dropout, Pinkie’s biggest civic coup probably was his deft guidance of the campaign that secured the University of Texas of the Permian Basin for Odessa.

“He worked long and hard and called in a lot of favors to get UTPB,” says Frank Deaderick, Pinkie’s nephew and executor of his estate.

Pinkie Roden was a gambler at heart and in practice. And again, Odessa was his kind of town.

“In Odessa, gambling never was really considered a crime,” says Ken Brodnax, editorial page editor and a longtime columnist at the Odessa American.

“It still isn’t.”

Jim Lehrer of the Public Broadcasting System’s MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour remembers reporting on Pinkie’s activities in the 1970s and the raids on his gambling den.

“Once we spent two or three days in Odessa trying to get Pinkie to talk with us but he never would.” said Lehrer, then a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald.

“I wrote stories about him, but those stories were kind of vague.”

Retired Ranger John Woods, who spent 17 years in the area, remembers Pinkie as a “bighearted fellow” but also an elusive target.

“I understood he had some gambling going on in the old Lincoln Hotel,” Woods said. “We made a few trips up there but we never could catch him.”

Pinkie Roden accumulated a tainted fortune, but used it largely for noble and selfless ventures. Thousands of plain, poor and powerful people considered Pinkie their pal but, says Jane Roden, Pinkie was lonely much of his life.

“When you get right down to it,” he once told her, “you can count all your real friends on one hand and still have fingers left over.”