G.K. was my accountant for several years, and I’ve mentioned him in a couple of other stories.
He was so fast on a desk calculator that you’d think the keys were about to fly off. By the time I got to know him, he was pretty much an old drunk, and he shook a lot. But when he sat down with a pen in his hand, he had the nicest handwriting of anyone I’ve ever known.
He had gone to business school when he was young. He knew shorthand, could take dictation at an amazing rate, and was a first-rate typist.
I often wonder what his life might have been like if he hadn’t started drinking. I may have mentioned this before, but G.K. said his drinking began while he was working for a Texas millionaire named Pete Coffield.
The strangest thing about G.K. was that, in all the years I knew him, I never saw him drink anything but beer. Well, maybe some coffee, but never hard liquor. He seldom even drank water. The only beer I remember him drinking was Miller High Life, always in the clear bottles.
I do remember him trying to quit a couple of times, but I don’t think he made it more than a day or two. Even then, I suspected he might have cheated. For years, he hardly ate at all.
G.K. said his job required him to travel with his boss to social events. According to him, Mr. Coffield wanted to see him with a beer in his hand throughout those occasions. They traveled around the state, entertaining prominent politicians and businessmen.
Mr. Coffield lived in Rockdale, where their main office was, but much of the entertaining took place at a large mansion on an estate along Westlake Drive in Austin. I was never inside, but whenever I drove by, it looked like a fabulous place.
On nights when there was a party at the Austin mansion, Mr. Coffield’s driver, a Black man named Whitey, would chauffeur him there. Whitey was always on call and drove him everywhere. If they had to travel more than a few hours, Mr. Coffield had several planes he could use.
He always kept a new or nearly new, shiny black car with a red interior for himself and Whitey. He was very frugal, so it wasn’t a big Chrysler, Lincoln, or Cadillac. It was a four-door Ford Fairlane, something like the one pictured below.
If they were going as far as Houston or Dallas, Mr. Coffield and Whitey might leave at three in the morning so they could arrive at the start of the business day. The old man would lie down in the back seat and nap along the way, then get up and straighten himself out once they arrived.
On the day of a big party in Austin, they would get ready to leave. More than once, G.K. suggested that he could ride with Mrs. Coffield in her chauffeured limousine and give Whitey the night off.
Mr. Coffield would say, “I’m not riding with her. Do you have any idea how much gas that thing uses?” Then he would add, “What would people think?”
So they would head out in both vehicles.
I heard plenty of stories about trips to the South Texas ranch between Encinal and Asherton, where all the movers and shakers would gather to drink, spend time with women, and sometimes hunt. From the way G.K. told it, it sounded like the kind of place where the old fellow could get just about anything accomplished if he set his mind to it.
G.K. always said that everything came undone for him and his boss after the son, Petey, died. According to G.K., Petey had left a life insurance policy worth a few thousand dollars, with his aunt—his mother’s sister—as the beneficiary. When the check arrived, G.K. said he was told to forge the aunt’s name and deposit it. He refused, and, according to his story, he was let go.
Something makes me want to believe that story is mostly true.
It wasn’t many years later that both Mr. and Mrs. Coffield had died. The Boy Scouts of America were said to be beneficiaries of a multimillion-dollar estate. Years later, the Scouts still hadn’t received any money, while the attorneys were slowly eating away at the estate.
I have no way of knowing what really happened with any part of that story. But knowing how things sometimes turn out, I wouldn’t be surprised by any of it.
