Despite the low quality of talent that he employed in his scruffy striptease emporium on Dallas' Commerce Street, Jack Ruby claimed—often and loud—that he loved "class."
At the moment that the President of the U.S. was gunned down, Ruby, a fleshy, balding bachelor of 52, was sitting at a desk in the display advertising department of the Dallas Morning News, working on an advertisement designed to promote the outstanding virtues of his droop-bosomed Carousel Club strippers. Someone came in with the news of the assassination.
Ruby seemed incredulous. He went into another office to watch television, then went back to his ad copy. Finally he returned to his club and wrote the word CLOSED across the front of his billboards outside. This was the only "classy" thing to do. "I couldn't forget that Communists had sent Oswald to kill our President," he said later. "I couldn't forget how Jackie had suffered, and that Caroline and John wouldn't have a daddy any more."
So Jack Ruby took his gun and killed Oswald—and, as it was with Oswald's own crime, the U.S. was still trying to figure out why.
"Sparky." One of eight children of Russian and Polish immigrants, Jack Rubenstein was born and raised in the "Bloody 20th" ward of Chicago's West Side, never finished high school. He liked to think that he had connections with racketeers—the classy kind. He affected the sharp dress of the big-time mobsters, the white-on-white shirts and ties, pearl-grey hats, phony diamond pinkie ring. He dropped hoodlum names like dandruff.
But the big-timers never even knew he existed. He was a "novelty salesman," a euphemism for a dollar-grubber who would sell virtually anything, even if it was a little hot. He peddled cigars, janitorial supplies, calendars, and, says his brother Hyman by way of explaining Jack's innate patriotism, "things like statues of General MacArthur and others of national interest."
Then for a while Jack turned organizer for the racketeer-infested Waste Material Handlers Union. Accounts differ. Some say he got out of line and was beaten by mobsters; others say the cops banged him over the head. In any event, his union career was short-lived. He was admitted to the Army Air Forces during World War II, served three inconspicuous years, came out a pfc. and returned to whatever buck-producing activity he could find. For a while he scalped tickets for sporting events, boxed for a short time under the name of "Sparkling Ruby." His friends still call him "Sparky."
"A Real Guy." Like his three brothers, Jack legally changed his surname to Ruby. In 1949 he went to Dallas to help out a sister who was running a two-bit nightclub. He played bartender for a while and then took over management of the Carousel. He clung to newsmen like a leech, begging often for free publicity.