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Sadistic Brawler. The mottled, volatile life of Jack Ruby began in the slums of Chicago. His father was usually drunk and out of a job; his mother was obsessed by the delusion that she had a fishbone lodged in her throat. They separated when Ruby was ten, and he lived in foster homes for a number of years. A dropout at 16, Ruby gained a reputation as a savage alley fighter who would start punching at the slightest hint of antiSemitism. He scratched out a living scalping tickets, peddling horse-race tip sheets, vending pennants at sports events, selling newspaper subscriptions door to door. He helped organize a Chicago junkyard workers' union in 1937, was drafted during World War II, served his entire hitch Stateside as an airplane mechanic, was honorably discharged in 1946.
Soon after that, he headed for Dallas to join his sister, Mrs. Eva Grant, in the operation of a couple of bump-and-grind dives there. The Carousel Club, a tarnished-tinsel walk-up joint, became his empire. He was a sadistic, heavy-fisted brawler who insisted on acting as his own bouncer. Occasionally he would set up an irksome drunk for a beating by shoving him into a stripper's dressing room, accusing him of pawing the girl, then slugging his helpless victim senseless. Sometimes he would punch a stripper who irked him. He was arrested eight times—but never convicted—on charges ranging from carrying a concealed weapon to serving liquor illegally. He was a fawning sycophant with cops, setting them up with free booze and dates with his girls, trundling predawn sandwiches and coffee into headquarters for men on the midnight shift.
Though he was paunchy and pasty-faced, he fancied himself a Dallas Adonis. At times he was blackly depressed because his hair was falling out, but he carefully plastered it back in long, thick strips to cover his scalp. Occasionally he would strip off his shirt, suck in his stomach and flex his muscles before his strippers. He never married, but he had a liaison with a blonde divorcee for eleven years. His passion for dogs approached dementia. He once turned up at a Dallas rabbi's house with half a dozen mutts at his heels, sobbing that one was "my wife" and the others were "my children."
His moods were a frightening study in emotional extremes. Not long after he was jailed, his eyes filled with tears when someone mentioned George Senator, his Dallas roommate. Gently Ruby said to his attorney, "Tell George I'd really like to see him." When Senator showed up the next day, Ruby glanced at him and exploded: "You sonofabitch! You're wearing my best suit! That's the suit I was gonna wear at my goddam trial!"