Houston's Channel 13's Marvin Zindler dies at 85
July 30, 2007, 10:17PM
A FAREWELL TO ZINDLER
The funeral is set for 11 a.m. today at Congregation
Beth Israel, 5600 N. Braeswood. Burial will be at Beth
Israel Cemetery.
Marvin Zindler obituary Marvin Zindler, a Houston
institution for more than three decades and a pioneer of
consumer reporting, died Sunday at M.D. Anderson
Hospital after a fight with cancer.
The irascible, flamboyant 85-year-old television
personality had been diagnosed in July with inoperable
pancreatic cancer that spread to his liver.
Even in his last days, Zindler continued to work, filing
reports from his hospital bed. In his last report,
broadcast Saturday, in which he helped a 45-year-old
U.S. citizen secure a Social Security card necessary for
employment, Zindler appeared thin and his voice was
weak. Still, he signed off with a hearty "MAARVIN
ZINDLER, eyewitness news" — his trademark for 34 years
with KTRK Channel 13.
"Marvin Zindler was unique," said Dave Ward, the
station's longtime anchor and one of the people
responsible for Zindler being on the air. "There's never
been anyone who lived life more than this man or who
wanted to do more than this man. This is a personal loss
to me and to everyone at this station — and to every
man, woman and child, really, who lives in Southeast
Texas."
Channel 13 interrupted its regular lineup Sunday at 8
p.m. to announce Zindler's death, with Ward calling him
"a legend in Houston television who will never be
forgotten."
The station had extended tributes during its 10 p.m.
newscast.
Serbino Sandier-Walker, a journalism professor at Texas
Southern University, called Zindler "irreplaceable."
"Marvin Zindler was a man for the people,"
Sandier-Walker said. "He fought for the little person.
He made consumer reporting what it is today."
'Rat and roach' reports
To youthful viewers, Zindler is perhaps best known as
the kind-hearted, grandfatherly figure in white wig and
blue shades who delivered the weekly "rat and roach
reports" based on health department restaurant
inspections. After his idiosyncratic sign-off, his most
famous catch phrase comes from the frequent health
inspector findings of, "all together now, SLIIIME in the
ice machine."
But to generations of low-income Houstonians, Zindler
was the champion of last resort, the man to whom you
turned when bureaucracies seemed indifferent and
businesses tried to take advantage. The station said
that for many years Zindler received 100,000 appeals for
help.
Though he was proudest of his work championing "the
little guy" and helping secure medical care for needy
children, he was best known for stories he did a mere
seven months after starting the job in 1973 that led to
the closing of the state's best-known "bawdy house," as
Zindler called it — a notorious La Grange brothel known
as the Chicken Ranch.
The reports not only won him national notoriety but also
a public thrashing by Fayette County Sheriff T.J.
Flournoy, a Chicken Ranch partisan, who broke two of
Zindler's ribs and snatched his toupee, reportedly
waving it in the air as if it were a prized enemy scalp.
Texas author Larry L. King wrote an article about it for
Playboy magazine in 1974, which was turned into a
long-running Broadway musical four years later and
became a kitschy 1982 movie starring Dolly Parton, Burt
Reynolds and Dom DeLuise.
In The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, DeLuise played a
character based on Zindler, a vainglorious reporter who
goes on a crusade to close the brothel.
Though Zindler's Chicken Ranch stories often were
characterized as a moral crusade or a quest for
publicity, Zindler maintained that he'd pursued them
because he'd been convinced by state law enforcement
sources that the Chicken Ranch and another nearby
brothel were making payoffs to local officials and were
involved in organized crime.
"I didn't care that they had a whorehouse," he'd say in
later years. "We had plenty here in Houston."
Zindler seemed to enjoy the spotlight the musical and
movie shone on him — he kept a poster for the film on
his office wall — though he always said he felt his most
important stories were 1985 reports on financial
mismanagement by the Hermann Hospital board of trustees.
Zindler also loved to talk of the thousands of children
who'd received free medical care from Marvin's Angels,
doctors who donated their services because Zindler asked
them to. In addition to his frequent on-air reports
about such cases, Zindler started a foundation with his
friend and plastic surgeon Dr. Joseph Agris that helped
children around the world.
These activities, he told a reporter last year, were why
— in his 80s and after enduring open-heart surgery and
surviving a previous bout with prostate cancer — Zindler
continued to work.
Marvin also traveled extensively, documenting how
Houston doctors helped alleviate suffering in developing
countries. Recently, for example, he helped seven Iraqi
men get prosthetic devices to replace the hands that
were cut off during Saddam Hussein's regime.
"Marvin was one of the most valued and beloved people in
Houston," Henry Florsheim, KTRK-TV president and general
manager, said. "For nearly 35 years he was welcomed into
the hearts and homes of millions of local viewers. This
is a deep loss for me, both personally and
professionally; my prayers are with his family, friends
and co-workers."
Zindler signed a lifetime contract with the station in
1988. He honored it to the letter. Even after being
diagnosed in early July with the disease that would kill
him, he went on the air in a bathrobe, pajamas and
slippers to report the news.
It was the lead story on Channel 13's 6 p.m. news, and —
to make it clear he was still on the job and not using
his illness as an excuse to slack off — Zindler ended
the report braying his famous sign-off.
Zindler's unusual lifetime contract — reportedly earning
him $1 million a year, though he insisted it was lower —
recognized his worth to the station, which until
recently consistently had the most watched local news
program. His was one of the city's most recognizable
faces, even if it kept changing.
Zindler had countless cosmetic surgery procedures,
beginning in 1954 after he was fired from an earlier
television job by an executive who said he was "too
ugly" to work in TV.
Relationship with father
Born into wealth, Zindler admits to having had an
unfocused youth. Abe Zindler, his father, considered his
middle son frivolous and irresponsible and died in 1963
deeply disappointed in him. The successful retailer and
longtime mayor of Bellaire left no inheritance to Marvin
but rather placed it in a trust for Marvin's five
children. Marvin could draw only the interest.
Abe Zindler also left Marvin a harsh letter in which he
derided his middle son as "a silly playboy with no sense
in your head" and urged him to make something of
himself.
Zindler had never liked working in his stern father's
clothing stores. In the 1940s, while still working days
for his father, Zindler began as a night DJ and spot
news reporter for KATL, a now-defunct radio station. In
the 1950s, while working as a volunteer policeman, he
began writing and taking photographs for the Houston
Press, a long-gone daily newspaper, and did spot news
reports for KPRC television's fledgling news operation.
In 1962, he began working for the Sheriff's Department
where, among other duties, he traveled around the world
to extradite fugitives. While working in the Sheriff's
Department, Zindler found his true calling — helping
"the little guy" — and also found an outlet for his
constant desire for attention. He created and ran the
department's consumer fraud division.
Known for his fancy clothes, the press conferences he
held at the drop of a hat and the mink-lined handcuffs
he carried (in case he had to arrest a woman), Zindler
rose to the rank of sergeant. After 10 years with the
department, he was fired in late 1972, allegedly for
angering local business people by doing his job too
well.
Ward recommended that Zindler be hired by Channel 13.
The TV job gave him a bigger platform for his
eccentricities and greater opportunities to anger
people.
From the beginning he was an oddity — intense,
uncomfortable on camera, and he had the mien of a
crusader.
Brush with politics
Zindler considered running for Congress in the 1970s at
the urging of local Republican leaders. A survey was
commissioned that said he could win, Zindler says, but
he decided not to run because Gertrude, his first wife,
didn't want to live in Washington.
Zindler's authorized biography tells of an earlier
aborted entry into politics. In 1949, when he was 28,
Zindler announced his candidacy for the mayorship of
Bellaire, like his father had.
The Houston Post came out against him, calling the
younger Zindler a "pinhead." The paper retracted the
statement after Zindler filed a lawsuit, the book says,
but the retraction ran under an eye-catching headline:
"We won't call Marvin Harold Zindler a 'pinhead' again."
Zindler became involved in Democratic Party politics,
serving as a delegate one year at the state Democratic
convention where a conservative delegate slugged him
after Zindler had made disparaging comments about the
conservative wing of the party in a speech.
Zindler went on to work in the senatorial campaign of
Lyndon Johnson and in other Democratic campaigns before
switching to the Republican Party, where he continued to
espouse liberal notions such as national health
insurance.
Zindler often said he didn't consider himself a
journalist, but he could claim credit for helping to
pioneer broadcast journalism in Houston. He was born on
Aug. 10, 1921, in Houston. He attended public schools
and went to John Tarleton Agricultural College in
Stephenville. He joined the Marines in 1941 and received
an Honorable Discharge. In that same year, he married
Gertrude, his wife of 56 years. They raised five
children before she passed away in 1997.
He is survived by his wife, Niki, his five grown
children, nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
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