Return with the Mack Vol. 2: The Sins of the Father
Mattress Mack didn't exactly come from a hardscrabble background, but his dad's prosperous career in the insurance business came to a screeching halt in 1975.
The grim notice above is clipped from the January 4, 1976 Fort Worth Star-Telegram and marks a signal, humiliating moment in the downfall of George McIngvale Sr., father of Jim “Mattress Mack” Mcingvale. In order to understand a guy like Mattress Mack – or hell, any guy really – it can be extremely useful to study the father – both his successes, and more vitally, his one catastrophic failure. Perhaps there lies the key to Mattress Mack’s maniacal drive and his ever more desperate yearning for a respect beyond that accorded to the merely wealthy.
And great googly moogly is the case of George Critz McIngvale Sr. a goldmine in this regard. Houston’s strangely beloved Recliner Icon is a carbon copy of his old man – a try-hard athlete as a youngster; an extremely extroverted natural born gladhander, a flamboyant philanthropist, and, for a time, an insolvent pauper and business failure.
While that was temporary in the younger’s case, the elder McIngvale was never again to reach the majestic summit he had reached by 1969, when his reign as King of All Texas Coastal Mobile Home Insurers came to grief with a finality that left not just his bottom line but also his good name in ruins. There was no second act in his life, at least not on the professional stage. Just as he entered his 50s, he was sent to the showers and would thereafter have to content himself with lesser jobs and the joys of being a father and grandfather, “Mister Mack” to his famous son’s Mattress Mack.
George McIngvale’s 2013 Chronicle obituary does not specify his place of birth, but dwells at length on his deep love for Starkville, the town where he grew up, a place whose French name translates as “town where there is nothing but Mississippi State University.” There he starred on gridiron, basketball court and track and was named “Mr Starkville High School.” George then enrolled at Mississippi State a few months before Pearl Harbor and studied there for two years before going off to serve the war effort. His unit – the 91st Infantry Division, 316th Engineer Combat Battalion – were some of the worker ants who, towards the end of that campaign, enabled the Liberation of Italy, primarily through the repair and construction of roads in bridges north of Rome.
Following this brave and brutal interruption, George returned to Mississippi State and rejoined the football team, then known as the Maroons. (Though they still wear that color, they have unoriginally adopted the Bulldog as spirit animal.) He also joined the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity, a factoid I would ignore here save for the fact that Mattress Mack followed in his footsteps at the University of Texas and some of his sons followed at their respective schools. This is a family that seems hidebound by tradition, both in good traits and bad.
George left the Maroon life behind in 1947 and, wasting no time, married Angela Buffler the following year in Florence, Alabama, where George Jr., the first of their six children was born in 1949. By 1951 the little family was back in Starkville, where they welcomed James Franklin – Mattress Mack – into the world, a planet there scented by Mississippi pines and esprit du dairy cow. Though George dearly loved Starkville, the town was perhaps too small for his ambitions, or to provide him with a job lucrative enough to keep his growing brood in style and comfort – enabled by his Angela-inspired conversion to Catholicism*, George Jr. and Mack would eventually be joined by a younger brother and three sisters. And so like so many others before them they hung a GTT shingle over their door and headed west to Texas, specifically to the bright lights of Big D, where George and Mack were enrolled in St. Pius X elementary school.
George found work with a concern called Allied Finance, which rewarded him with money enough to not just keep his family afloat but also to chip in to the founding of Bishop Lynch High School. He also made lots of connections through the Allied Finance gig, and he discovered he had a knack for parting them from their money and diverting that cash into his beguiling Bishop Lynch dream. Back in the 1920’s his type was described as “hail-fellow-well-met”: George was a backslapping fellow ever-ready to bombard near-strangers earthy maxims like Right's right and wrong's wrong; The Lord hates a coward! And, Make up your mind and be somebody!
His approach went over well in suburban 1950s Dallas and in due time Bishop Lynch became a reality. Today the school still prospers, somewhat comparable to Houston’s St. Thomas as the elder if not more academically prestigious of Big D’s largest Catholic High Schools. (The analogy breaks down in that St. Thomas is some 60 years older than Lynch, but in both cities, those wily Jesuits slipped in and built schools that surpassed their elder brethren in academic reputation. Disclaimer – for those that don’t know, Ruckus himself is a proud graduate of Houston’s Strake Jesuit and therefore biased. )
It is said that for the rest of his life, Bishop Lynch’s Friars comprised the third F-word that guided George’s life, right behind faith and family. That’s the kind view. Others would throw fraud into the mix.
By the late 1960s, George had left Allied Finance behind in order to found McIngvale Associates. At the time, mobile homes were a somewhat new phenomenon, and the insurance industry was still finding its way with them. George rushed headlong into the void like a football fullback breaking through a gaping hole in the line, and at first the money seemed to come tumbling from the skies in big fat Santa Claus sacks. Witness here the oh-so-McIngvaleian shindig he hosted to mark the grand opening of McIngvale Associates new offices in 1971, as recorded by the Star-Telegram:
A CAKE FIVE FEET TALL! 150 SHEET CAKES! 900 POUNDS OF CAKE-CAKE-CAKE! ICING BY THE PAIL!!!!1
Now who does that sound like?
Aside from brief notices marking additions to McIngvale Associates’ board, the Star-Telegram seems to have ignored McIngvale and his company until it printed that stealthily shaming ad in January of 1975 denoting the company’s bankruptcy. A few days after that they ran an article explaining WTF happened.
Now children in those days, Austin would occasionally enact legislation not 100 percent favorable to big insurance companies and thanks to a 1973 law protecting policyholders from the failures of their underwriters, other Texas insurers were having to rally around and cough up a sum of $5 million the insolvent McIngvale Associates — considered to be George McIngvale’s corporate alter ego — owed to policyholders.
Though it’s not spelled out, I am surmising McIngvale’s downfall came about due to Hurricane Beulah, a Cat-3 monster that raked the Lower Rio Grande Valley with 100-mph winds as far inland as McAllen and Pharr, stripping ruby red grapefruit trees bare and, you would think, destroying many a snowbird’s mobile home. The storm killed around 60 people and racked up damages of what would be today well over a billion dollars.
George McIngvale would neither be the first Texan nor the last to underestimate the wrath of the Gulf, but the state insurance industry was in no mood for pity or compassion, no matter what good deeds George had done, no matter how swell a fellow he might be. In a January 1975 hearing, state deputy insurance commissioner Tom McFarling testified before a house committee that a confetti storm of bad paper had emerged from McIngvale’s insurance companies:
“Hundreds of thousands in hot checks” to policyholders bounced before the state moved in to place McIngvale’s firms in receivership, McFarling explained.
State rep Carlyle Smith, Democrat of the Dallas suburb of Grand Prairie, asked McFarling to elaborate on the demises of McIngvale’s various entities in plain English.
“Writing too much business at excessive commission rates. This created a large cash flow,” McFarling said. And then instead of paying that money to policyholders, McIngvale kept it to himself to use as collateral for loans from Texas and Louisiana banks totaling between $12m and $20m, which apparently was not enough to bail him out from whatever calamity was facing him.
McIngvale was not charged with any crime as near as I can tell. Related litigation dragged on for almost two decades, in which George Mcingvale attempted to portray himself as a victim of circumstance. Or something. An appellate court judgment is here, but it’s so shot through with terms like Debenture! And Quo Warranto! I felt like a muggle in Spells 405 at Hogwarts.** (For this to really work, you need to pronounced the D-word as if you were Cato the Elder.)
At any rate, you’ve heard the expression: You’ll never work in this town again. That was how it was for George McIngvale. At around 50 years old, he was finished. Gone were the days of 30,000 sq.-ft office suites and mobile home cakes taller than Simone Biles. His obituary yada-yadas his business career – his feats in business were many but not to be mentioned.
But he didn’t know he was done yet, not in the mid-70s when the pin first hit the shell. No, back then he still had reason to dream of a big comeback. And for the time being he could take pride in the business feats of his two oldest sons – George Jr. and Jim. With an even-more aggressive hard-sell technique than their dad had been alleged to have used on some of his policyholders, the two fresh out of college young men had built a Metroplex fitness club empire of 12 Nautilus equipment stocked gyms reportedly frequented by 100,000 sweaty discofied Dallasites.
Which as anyone who knows the sanitized Legend of Mattress Mack knows, would come crashing down almost as soon as it went up, and the impetus for search for a better life in Houston, his reboot as a furniture salesman, and the desperate roll of the dice – spending the last $5,000 he had to his name on the TV spots that propelled the circuslike Gallery Furniture and its fast-talking impresario into Houston lore for generations now. (Which neatly omits all those worthless gym memberships the McIngvale brothers left behind them in clouds of dust as they skipped town, but hey, let’s let bygones be bygones, okay? Mattress Mack is now the greatest living Houston philanthropist, at least according to Mattress Mack.
That phoenix-like rebirth and other, lesser known stories, such as the documented (though now thoroughly scrubbed from the Internet) stories of his own out-of-control cocaine abuse (and rumors of his peddling of same), and his divorce from an Olympic athlete turned longtime NBC commentator are all fodder for later installments in Ruckus.
Oh, one last thing before we leave poor old George behind. Per the legal proceedings we linked to above, McIngvale Associates was not the full legal name of George’s corporate alter ego. That would be McIngvale Associates General Agency.
Hmmmm….McIngvale Associates General Agency.
Coincidence?
Maybe not:
2015. That’s when we see Mack palling around with Trump in the video above.re
This was around the same time Trump adopted Make America Great Again as his slogan, and while those words had been used many times, by many other politicians of both parties, MAGA is unique to Trump and dates to some point after his prolonged footsie games with McIngvale. So maybe as the MAGA OG George McIngvale wasn’t such a failure after all, at least under his own terms.
* I’d long wondered how it came to pass that there was an Irish Catholic family in Starkville, Mississippi in 1951, for as a lonely Catholic child in Nashville in the 1970s, I discovered that Papists of any ethnicity were thin on the ground, even in the big city. McIingvale is one of those names that could be Irish Catholic or Scots-Irish Proddy, and the North Mississippi provenance strongly suggested the latter, which turned out to be the case. Given how staunch the Protestantism of that breed, Mrs McIngvale’s powers of persuasion must have been formidable.
**This got me to thinking – are legal maneuvers with fancy Latin names actually spells, like, for real? Are we non-lawyers mere muggles to be bumfuzzled for eternity by this witchcraft?
And is the whole Harry Potter thing a commentary on lawyers (wizards), judges (Dumbledore), and law students? Surely there are law schools with reputations as varied as Hufflepuff and Slytherin. Well, I know that there are law firms with reputations as varied as Ravensclaw and Gryffindor.)
I’m one of his Nautilus scam victims. Spring semester 1978 at NTSU (now UNT) in Denton I joined the brand new Nautilus fitness club that was in a strip center right next to campus. I went home for the summer and when I came back in the fall the fitness center and my membership deposit were gone. I was hoping following Mack’s wagering windfall from the Astros World Series Championship that he’d use some of those funds to make good and reimburse a poor college kid for his lost deposit money.
Thanks for the account of one of the men who made Houston great! Ha-ha!