The Law North of the Salt Fork

By Peter Applebome
Texas Monthly
November 1982




Rufe and Viola Jordan have had hundreds of next-door neighbors during the 32 years they've lived in the two-bedroom apartment at 217 N. Russell in the Panhandle town of Pampa. But few have been appreciated as much as a nattily dressed black man named Little Possum Grice.

On nights when Rufe was feeling a little restless or a little low or nights when he just plain missed his daughter, Anne, who had gone off to school, he would unlock the steel door separating his domicile from Possum's and invite old Possum over. Then he'd stand beside his upright Hallet & Davis walnut piano and sing along in a boisterous, raspy tenor as Possum picked out Rufe's favorite Irish songs--"That Old Irish Mother of Mine," "Mother Machree," "Galway Bay." After the festivities, which sometimes were the highlight of an evening of entertaining at the Jordans', Rufe would thank Possum and return him to the jail cell next door, where he was awaiting trial for shooting Tooker Washington to death after a philosophical disagreement about a card game.

Most people charged with killing someone would probably feel a bit bewildered knocking out sentimental Irish songs while the sheriff sang along. My guess is that Possum felt nothing of the sort. A lot of adjectives fit Rufe Jordan, but "bewildering" is definitely not among them. One of the most comfortable Texas stereotypes is that of the oldstyle rural "shurf": part lawman, part counselor, part local historian, part arbiter of community mores-a combination of John Wayne and an Irish parish priest. And from his imposing bulk to his traditional garb to his oddly courtly and absolutely distinctive manner of speech, there can't be a better specimen extant than Gray County sheriff Rufe Jordan.

"Rufe is as full of empathy as a man can be, and let me tell you, he's as upright and square as a box. He's probably one of the greatest sheriffs that Texas has ever had," says Rowdy Bowers, a well-known Pampa defense attorney. "I've heard speculation all through the years that Rufe was getting old, Rufe was getting tired, but he's not. He'll be in that job as long as he wants to be."

Rufe didn't plan on spending 32 years in the courthouse when he and Viola first surveyed the fourth-floor apartment there after his election in 1950. But you get the impression that he realized he might be there for a while. "'Course, I had never seen a jail," Viola recalls, "so Rufe said, 'Mother, if you don't want to live up there that's fine, but you won't be by yourself as much as if we lived outside.' And we decided that if we were going to live up there, we would fix it up like home, and that's what we've done." Apart from minor catastrophes, like the time a prisoner stole the meat from a freezer they kept in the jail, and recurrent annoyances, like the sounds of jailbirds trying to saw or burrow their way to the outside world, the courthouse has provided a delightfully normal home.

By now, Viola finds it hard to imagine going home by any route other than the elevator to the jail.

The apartment itself is ruled by Viola and an eight-year-old poodle named Honey; Rufe's domain is a gloriously cluttered first-floor office. There's Rufe's saddle and chaps from the Pampa Roping Club sitting on a wooden horse. There's his hat rack with three Western hats and about a half-dozen gimme caps. There are commendations from groups such as the West Texas Chamber of Commerce and the Top O' Texas Knife and Fork Club; pictures of his wife, daughter, grandchildren, and great-grandchild; and a plaque reading, "God Could Not Be Everywhere So He Created Grandfathers." In case all that doesn't summon up the world of Norman Rockwell with sufficient clarity, there's a 1971 Norman Rockwell Boy Scout calendar.

Presiding over it all is a six-foot-four-inch, 275-pound man (down from a peak of 346 pounds) with a great bald dome, who from a certain angle looks remarkably like Sydney Greenstreet doing an impression of Matt Dillon. His boots are handmade by a fellow in Clarendon, his jacket is a twill Texas Mesquite Exclusive made in Fort Worth, and his Resistol hat has a sweatband that reads. "Like hell it's yours. This hat belongs to Sheriff Rufe Jordan." He leans sideways, spits chewing tobacco into a brass spittoon on the floor, and begins speaking in a rolling cadence that sounds like the beginning of a sermon.

"Of course, this is my hometown. this is my home county. We have our problems, we surely do, but I think we're very fortunate considering the things we read about," says Rufe, who was born 23 miles south of Pampa in 1912 and whose father was a constable for the county. "But it does seem that violation of the law has been on the increase; theft of property, theft of automobiles, that's all way up, it surely is. There was even a wedding garment taken from one of our very lovely ladies. You wonder who would ever do a thing like that."

Rufe wanted to be a lawyer, but he couldn't afford to stay in school during the Depression. He came back to Pampa, worked in the jail, spent thirteen years at an oil refinery, and returned to law enforcement when the refinery shut down, serving four years as chief deputy before being elected sheriff in his first bid for the office. Over the years, he developed a fondness for the cops-and-robbers aspect of his job. "The matching of wits with a known offender, trying to work these cases out, a burglary, an armed robbery, this or that--it's a challenge, it surely is," he says. "It has never been boresome to me." The volume of wrongdoing keeps him busy-there's a steady stream of petty crime, oil field theft, cattle rustling, and the like-but there's plenty of time left over for his unofficial duties as county psychologist.

Don't misunderstand. Rufe Jordan-who in his younger days was observed to lift the front ends of automobiles when properly worked up-will never pass for a bleeding heart. You need only hear the sharpening of his voice when he tours the jail to realize that. But a fair part of his day is taken up with what Rowdy Bowers refers to as social engineering. And it's that side of the job that seems to get to him most. As Viola says, "I have seen him, well, not go to pieces, because he doesn't do that, but when a judge orders him to take children away from their parents, that just unnerves him. He'd rather be whipped with a wet rope."

There are certain bits of Rufiana that all of Pampa knows. For many years the sheriff was the star of the now defunct Lions Club minstrel show, and everyone seems to have an indelible memory of this huge Irish tenor in blackface, a tux, and a top hat. Rufe and his palomino, Yellow Dog, were also fixtures at every local parade, and talking about the horse puts him in almost the same melancholy state as some of his favorite Irish songs.

"I rode him eighteen and one-half years, a big yellow horse, everyone knew him," he says. "He weighed thirteen hundred pounds and was fifteen and one-half hands high. When he started to go downhill fast, they told me we were going to have to put him to sleep. So finally I said, 'Okay, Doctor, you give me an hour's start, put him to sleep, and we'll never mention him again.' And we haven't."

No doubt the good doctor would rather walk on hot coals than fail to honor the sheriffs grief. For what's most compelling about Shurf Rufe Jordan is not his physical presence or even his courtly sensibilities but the remarkable affection the people of Pampa have for him. He's precisely the kind of indomitable, larger-than-life spirit most of us long to believe in-not so much because he's good at catching crooks as because once he's got them, he's likely to pull Little Possum Grice out of jail and sing "Ireland Must Be Heaven" before fading off to bed.





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