Galveston: A History of the Island

Chapter 21

21 IN THE STRANGE swirl of pennissiveness that replaced the Island's traditional genteel culture, nothing was stranger than the spiritual metamorphosis of W. L. Moody, Jr. Approaching his sixty-fifth birthday in 1930, Moody became almost a caricature of his time, an object of curiosity and even sympathy. He was a deceptively frail man, with a fringe of white hair and a snow white mustache: if he had worn a monocle and a top hat, he would have looked exactly like the little man on the Monopoly board. People called him Old Man Moody, or just the Old Man, but the vestments of age seemed to suit him. The sourness of youth was gone now, replaced with the mellowed texture of mature, well-reasoned cupidity. Though he was still an ardent prohibitionist and ultraconservative, the Old Man found it easy to compromise with the hedonistic attitudes of Galveston in the 1930s. There was a time when he would have looked on such frivolity as the International Pageant of Pulchritude as the work of the devil, but now he supported it. Indeed, judging from the coverage the pageant received in the Daily News, he regarded it as in a class with the Oberammergau passion play. Two incidents in the 1930s profoundly shocked the Old Man and changed his life. Both involved his sons, William L. Moody III and Shearn Moody. Old Man Moody and his wife, Libbie Shearn Moody, also had two daughters-Mary, who was the oldest of the four children, and Libbie, who was the youngest-but the Old Man looked to his two sons to carry on the family empire. His namesake, 230 Gary Cartwright Will Moody III, seemed at first to be everything his bloodline suggested . Bright and ambitious, he dropped out of high school at seventeen to work at his father's bank. By the time he was nineteen he was the youngest bank president in the country. In another two years he was vice president of the Moody family's insurance company , the hotel company, and the publishing company. But Will III sought his own identity in the business world, and he began to gamble and make what the Old Man regarded as hasty and reckless business decisions. The lavish $100,000 home that he built on Cedar Lawn Circle was a statement of the son's independence , and though the Old Man financed it, he didn't like it. He didn't like it, either, that his son spent time with Sam Maceo, and sometimes borrowed large sums of money from the mobster. Maceo , who was leading a move to upgrade the Island's tourist facilities , convinced young Moody to build a new luxury hotel on the east end of the Island, separate from his family's chain of hotels. The Jack Tar Motel had the best furnishings and the latest technology , including air conditioning. The Old Man took this as a slap in the face: until now no Moody hotel had ever had air conditioning. Will III sometimes dealt in foreign currency, which the Old Man thought was foolhardy. When a new silent movie house opened on Market Street, young Moody agreed to finance the organ, disregarding the Old Man's advice that movies were a fad and that organs belonged in church. The son mocked not only his father but his grandfather, too, when he decided to invest heavily in oil, gas, and mineral properties. This time the son was wildly successful. From 1925 until 1929-in partnership with a high roller named o. D. Seagraves-young Moody made millions from oil and gas deals. Then he lost it all, and more, in the stock market crash of 1929. The Old Man granted his son a bailout loan, but it wasn't enough. In 1933 Will Moody III was forced to declare bankruptcy, something no Moody before him had ever done. W. L. Moody, Jr.'s humiliation was beyond description. "A Moody man always pays his debts" had been one of the Old Man's set-instone creeds, and now his oldest son and namesake owed a staggering $8.5 million. The Old Man studied the situation, then moved with the terrible swiftness of an avenging angel, repossessing his son's house on Cedar Lawn Circle and banishing him from the Island. When Will Ill's ranch was auctioned off on the steps of the GALVESTON 231 Kimbell County...