Patriarch tells of gambling and bootlegging on Beula King’s Hill

Above photo, at left is new development that’s surged during the administration of Mayor Tracy Craig in the old “Sunrise” neighborhood along East 8th Street. The white house at right is the Jodie King home where Mayor Craig gathered with teammates heading for practice or games in their Little League Years.

From The East Texas Journal, September 2022

By Hudson Old, Publisher

Just beyond the edge of the law in the Sunrise Community on the east side of Mt. Pleasant, Jodie King provided services including weekend gambling in his younger years and bootlegging during his retirement years, after he quit gambling.
After he gave up bootlegging, he gave up some of his secrets as well. He had practical advice for hiding half pints in the back yard, for example.
In 1979, when he was 82, he laid out his life story in the office of Titus County’s premier historian, Traylor Russell. Mr. Russell lined out the taped interview as part of an oral history project in which Etta Ray Case and Donna K. White combined for 45 interviews. Everybody interviewed signed a release that’s been kept on file.
“After it’s typed up we’ll give you a copy and we’ll keep a copy at the library for years to come,” Mr. Russell promised Mr. King.
Born in Crockett Texas, he was the grandson of a slave whose father “never married a white woman” but had a life-long domestic relationship with his housekeeping cook.
He said his grandfather was set free at age 21, and that he took the last name King though by blood he was a Matlock.
The son of Dick King, who lived to be 102, Jodie was born in 1897. He grew up working Houston County cotton fields until the spring of 1912 when he and five first cousins were sent to Booker T. Washington’s school in Tuskegee, Alabama for three years.
An athlete, in the summers he played minor league ball across Alabama in Selma, Tuskegee, Mobile and Choctaw. In Georgia, he played in Atlanta and Dublin. The team was his first experience in organized desegregation. What mattered was how good a player played.
“I pitched and played second base,” Mr. King said. “That’s what paid our way for going to school.”
Times got hard in 1915 when his father called him back to work on the farm.
At Tuskegee, he’d learned to survey, a skill that opened the door to work that first brought him to Mt. Pleasant.
“The Smith place and my grandfather’s farms joined,” he said. “That’s how they found out about me.” The Smith Brothers were road contractors who worked across Texas, he said.
He was 17 when he arrived in Mt. Pleasant and “helped survey half the roads out of this town.”
At one point, he left town on the advice of a local lawman named Sanders after being spotted coming out of Bully Daingerfield’s Café, “the only café owned by a black man back then.” Authorities generally turned a blind eye to dice games at Bully’s. Jodie was out on the porch when the lawman passed “on that old roan horse.”
“Whoever you are and wherever you came from, don’t let night catch you here,” he told Jodie, who was by then wise to law enforcement tactics of the era.
Mr. Sanders, he said, generally roped prisoners he intended to jail.
“He’d whip you, white or black,” Jodie said. “Didn’t make any difference.”
There was unwritten protocol concerning treatment of prisoners.
“If you acted stubborn, he’d let that horse run with you. If you followed nice, he’d take you on down and put you in the jail house. Get sassy and he’d beat you” before you were locked up.
Jodie left Mt. Pleasant that time on Christmas Eve night, 1917.
When World War I broke out the next year, his father paid $10 to keep him out of the draft and working on the farm.
“I made a crop at home in 1918,” he said. When the Smith Brothers got a contract to build a road from Mt. Vernon to Sulphur Springs, he left Houston County for a return to East Texas on June 19, 1919.
In 1919 he married Beula Jackson and the place where their house stood on East 8th in Sunrise came to be known as Beula King’s Hill.
Jodie worked building roads, tamping ties on the railroad and sewing cotton seed sacks at the feed mill.
He supplemented his income as a gambler, and built a place behind his house for Saturday afternoon games.
On April 13, 1934, he earned mention in a brief bit of front page news, a shade less than four column inches that made the lower left corner of page 1.
A man charged with “assault to murder is said to have imbibed too freely of liquor and decided to kill Jodie King, firing a charge with a shotgun at King, but missing him and striking another man.” News-wise, the incident was dismissed as having “occurred in Sunrise.”
Jodie King’s home was a refuge for Sam Olds, who was white.
“After my mother left, my dad and I moved in with my grandmother in the 1100 block of lawn, which was three blocks from Beula King’s Hill,” said Mr. Olds, a retired insurance executive who’s now 85 and living in Arizona.
“I was friends with Jodie’s son, Richard,” Mr. Olds said. “Our daddies worked together and drank together. When the men stayed up late, I remember Richard’s mother putting us to bed.”
In 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, in an ad in a newspaper Jodie King pulled from the trash at the railroad depot, he found an ad for work in California. In East Texas, he worked as a laborer for $2 a day. In California, he worked in a shipyard making $2 an hour. He stayed through the war, coming home in 1946.
He knew how to load dice. He could hold one set of dice in the bend of his elbow while shooting another. In the stories he told at Traylor Russell’s office, he wasn’t caught but once making the change, and that accusation came only years after the fact.
To read the transcript from the archives of the City of Mt. Pleasant Public library archives, go to easttexasjournal.net. Jodie King – Tuskegee educated cotton mill worker, ship builder, surveyor, bootlegger and gambler – East Texas Journal