Titanic and the Cowboy Open a Gamblin' Joint

Titanic Thompson was unique, one in a million. I can only imagine the number of suckers he parted from their money back in the '20s and '30s when there wasn't much income tax and some people were getting rich overnight and losing it the next day. Ty's christened name was Alvin Clarence Thomas, and he was the son of itinerant farmers. His father liked gambling better than farming, and disappeared when Ty was only 6 months old. Ty spent his childhood on a farm in the Ozark Mountains, where he lived in a three-room log cabin with his mother, stepfather, and four stepbrothers and stepsisters. His granddaddy and uncles worked a farm near there, and liked to gamble at mountain games like shooting at targets with a .22, pitching to a crack, checkers, dominoes, and penny-ante poker. By the time Ty was 15 years old, he could beat them all. "All I ever wanted to do was gamble," he said. And now, here he sat in Dallas in 1961 as an older man playing poker with us.

After we had gotten to know each other a little better from playing poker together, Ty suggested that we open up the Red Men's Club in Tyler, my hometown, where he lived in a rented house. At the time, I was 31 years old and Ty was almost 70, although he looked much younger than that. Ty liked me because I was a cowboy and a pretty good poker player, and I got along with everybody real well. I had all the contacts, and could get the players. The idea was that we would go into business as 50-50 partners, I would run the place, and he wouldn't have to work too hard at it.

We got a charter and opened the club upstairs in the old Elks Club building, right across from the courthouse in downtown Tyler. We both put up a pretty good sum of money for the venture, and in exchange for his interest, Ty wanted his piece of the drop. Sometimes he came to the club during the day for a little while, but he was mostly a night person. Even at 70 years old, he prowled around at night to the bowling alleys and other joints, always working on some kind of a proposition.

Years before we met, Ty had gotten into a big poker game in New York with Rothstein, the guy who fixed the baseball World Series in 1919 and was a big-time gangster type from New York. In those days, poker was played with cards made of paper, and somehow or another, Ty could put a tiny bend on them that he could detect across the room when it came off the deck. He was so good at it that nobody else could see the mark. Ty and Rothstein began betting $1,000 or more on such things as the high card, low card, and so on. Ty wound up beating the man out of $100,000. Of course, he had the best of it at all times.

He pulled off another one of his card tricks on the corner of Irving Street in Dallas, where the Red Men's Club was located on the top floor of a two-story building. He had noticed that every day at around 5 p.m. or so, a breeze came up in front of the club, causing quite an updraft. He discovered that he could pitch a playing card into the air and the wind would carry it to the top of the building. He practiced to the point that he could do it perfectly. Then one day while he was playing poker at the club, he bet the boys that he could throw a card all the way up to the top of the building. They went for that one to the tune of about $800. They got a deck of cards, went downstairs to the corner, picked a card, and watched as Ty pitched it to the rooftop. Doing it once wasn't enough proof, so they had him repeat the trick two or three times, losing about $2,000 to him on the deal.

Ty and I kept our club open in Tyler for about a year and a half before we gave up our charter. He was ready to move on and I was kinda tired of it myself, so I returned to gambling on the road. Ty was a helluva guy, and we had some good times together. The last time I saw him was at the World Series of Poker in 1973, the year before he died. It wasn't until 1972 that I opened my second gambling joint, an AmVets club in Dallas. I got it the easy way. No, I didn't inherit it – I won it in a poker game. But I'll save that story for another day.

Editor's note: Cowboys, Gamblers & Hustlers, Cowboy Wolford's new book, relates more Titanic stories and hundreds of other true gambling tales from yesteryear. The book is available through Card Player. You may contact the author at [email protected].