The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas legend Dies

[Catherine Vincent]

You all remember him don't you? His name was Marvin Zindler of Eyewitness News

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5009880.html

July 29, 2007, 9:42PM
Channel 13's Marvin Zindler dies at 85

By ERIC HARRISON
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

The irascible, flamboyant 85-year-old television personality had been diagnosed in July with inoperable pancreatic cancer that had 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.

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 ideosyncratic signoff, his most famous catch phrase comes from the frequent health inspector findings of (all together now) "SLI-I-IME 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 Zindler received 100,000 appeals for help each year.

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 House partisan, who broke two of Zindler's ribs and snatched his toupee from his head, reportedly waving it in the air as if it were a prized enemy scalp.

[BlooInBloo]

1. Well, he made it a couple of standard deviations past average. RIP.

[HeeBGBz]

2. I remember him

I used to live in Houston at that time. RIP, Marrrvin Zindler, Eyewitness News.

[cynatnite]

3. Sounds like a decent guy...RIP n/t

[TXN in WA]

4. RIP

Sad...