OUT WITH A BANG: The short, sad life of Violet Pistole
When Violet Ruth Pistole turned a gun on herself in a Dallas, Texas, package store in 1952, she was a woman of 27 with two husbands in her past and a four-year-old son she rarely saw. She wasn’t alone when she raised the gun to fire. With her was William “Bill” Benson Parker, her third husband.
Violet managed the Five Point Liquor Store on Field Street; she lived in quarters in the rear of the building, according to the Dallas Morning News. After closing up at 10 p.m., she and Parker indulged in some of the store’s inventory. Both were known to be heavy drinkers.
Parker told police that, at 4:30 a.m., the two were in the bedroom when Violet showed him a gun she had bought for protection. Then, he said, she put the .25 caliber automatic pistol to her chest and fired a single bullet.
Violet died at 5:05 a.m., en route to Parkland Hospital. Justice of the Peace Glenn Byrd conducted the inquest that same morning and, with only Parker as a witness, determined that Violet died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Police found a note in Violet’s purse, the newspaper reported, but the homicide detective on the case said it offered no explanation. Parker said he could give no reason for his wife’s action.
VIOLET’S FAMILY
Violet’s parents married in their teens, and it’s easy to see from old photos that she owed her good looks at least in part to her father’s genes. Unfortunately, alcoholism likely was woven into that same DNA.
Joseph Hershel Pistole was named for his grandfather, a Tennessee farmer who brought his large family to Collin County in the 1890s. At 17, Joe married Opal Ruth Brown, the daughter of a local merchant. The couple had two sons; daughter Violet, their youngest, was born in McKinney in 1925.
In 1930, the family of five was living in a farming community north of Dallas; a decade later, Joe and Opal’s divorce had splintered the family. Violet,15, and her mother moved to Dallas’s Oak Lawn area; Violet attended school, Opal waited tables. Violet’s brothers, Erwin and Lewis, joined the Marine Corps.
When World War II broke out, Joe, 42, signed up; the novelty of a father and two sons enlisting together earned them a mention in a Waco newspaper. Lewis served during the war as a Marine Corps Technical Sergeant. Erwin, also a sergeant, was captured at Wake Island in the first days of the war and spent the duration in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.
Assigned to a basic training squad in Waco, Private Joe Pistole saw no action. He couldn’t pass muster in the military because of his drinking, according to a family member.
FIRST LOVE
It’s possible Violet, a fetching carhop, first encountered Gene Deaton, 26, at the hamburger stand where she worked. It’s not hard to imagine the 16-year-old being drawn to a handsome older man in uniform. The girl from a broken home and the soldier with a dark past fell in love.
Deaton grew up in Paris, Texas, the son of a barber. He played bass in the pep band and worked on the school’s yearbook, The Owl. His photo in that publication shows a 17-year-old with a winning smile.
When Violet met Deaton, he already had one marriage behind him: in 1937, while working as a bartender in Allentown, Pennsylvania, he married a waitress named Dorothy. Back in Texas, presumably with his bride, Deaton worked at a drugstore soda fountain and tried selling insurance. Then, he turned to crime.
On a Monday night in January 1939, Deaton and an ex-con named C.H. Cannon held a pistol on Jimmie Sutton, a filling station attendant in Bonham, Texas, who readily handed over all $12 in the till. The sheriff captured the robbers on their way home to Paris. Both men entered guilty pleas and, by the end of the month, Cannon had been sentenced to five and Deaton to two years in prison.
Deaton entered the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville in March 1939; 19 months later, the governor granted him a conditional pardon, directing him to report to the Dallas County Parole Board. In the summer of 1941, Deaton received a full pardon and restoration of citizenship.
Deaton wasted no time launching his new life: He married the pretty carhop named Violet, and he joined the Army.
LOST LOVE
Plenty of couples rushed into marriage during the war years, and plenty of those marriage didn’t survive the post-war era. Given Violet’s youth and the length of Deaton’s absence — he served four years, 33 months of which he was overseas — their initial infatuation had time to sputter out. Violet was a teen-aged bride. When Deaton returned home to a 21-year-old wife, he had missed 13 percent of her life.
At what point they split is unclear. But in the spring of 1946, Deaton moved from his hometown to Hugo, Oklahoma, where he managed Sargent’s Jewelry Store and joined the Lions Club. That same summer, Violet was working as a hosiery repair expert at McCrory’s five-and-dime in Denton, Texas.
On September 18, 1946, Violet filed for divorce in Denton County. Six months later, Gene Deaton overturned his car while taking a curve on US Highway 70 near Bennington, Oklahoma. He died at 10 p.m. in a Durant hospital. He was 32 years old.
Violet wasn’t mentioned in The Paris News’s initial account of Deaton’s death, suggesting the divorce already was final. But in a subsequent funeral announcement, the paper listed “Mrs. Deaton, the former Miss Violet Ruth Pistole of Denton,” as a survivor.
At 21, Violet already was either a widow or a divorcee. She had five years, four months and six days left to live.
VIOLET’S SON
In June 1947, Violet married Earl Morris, Jr., an Arkansas-born Navy veteran who worked after the war as an appliance salesman at a Sears store. Nine months later, she gave birth to a son she named Michael.
The boy lived with his grandmother Opal from the start. He has a single memory of Violet: once, during a visit to the liquor store, she gave him a chocolate bar.
“I don’t really remember her as much as I remember the chocolate bar,” he says today of his mother. As for his father, he recalls meeting him once when he was 18. The marriage didn’t last long. Like his mother, Morris was an alcoholic, Mike says.
Now 71, the retired purchasing agent for an oil company lives in a comfortable home in far north Dallas with his wife of 48 years. Mike and Veronica have two grown children. His home is filled with photographs of his family, including those accompanying this story.
Mike speaks fondly of his grandmother Opal and her second husband, Raymond Watson, a hardworking sharecropper whose surname Mike took when the two formally adopted him. They gave him a stable life, he said, one that allowed him to attend all 12 grades of school in Frisco before entering North Texas State University.*
Although Opal raised him as her own — his official birth record names Opal as his mother— she reminded Mike throughout his childhood that Violet was his mother. “From the time I was really little, she always wanted me to know that Violet was my mother…and she didn’t want me to think badly of her.”
For that reason, she gave Mike a different version of Violet’s death than the one found in the inquest report. She told the boy that Violet didn’t commit suicide, but that Bill Parker, her husband at the time, had killed her.
Mike later turned to his trusted Uncle Erwin to clarify his grandmother’s version of the story. Violet’s brother, the one who survived the war years in a POW camp, told Mike that he believed Violet’s death was either an accident or a suicide…not a homicide.
THE END
Violet’s life — especially in her final months — supports her brother’s assessment of the events of February 17, 1952. Violet had more reasons to want to end her life than Parker had for wanting her dead.
Not yet 30 and on her third marriage, she was living in a single room at the back of a liquor store, estranged from her son, alone most nights. And, according to Mike, she regretted divorcing and grieved the death of Gene Deaton.
“I believe he was the love of her life,” Mike says, attributing their split to the carelessness of a young woman who enjoyed male attention. “You can be too pretty, you know,” he added, “and it can get you into trouble.”
In the winter of 1952, Violet was in trouble. Bill Parker, an enthusiastic drinking partner, worked as a driver for the Mayflower moving company. He was on the road most of the time. In the store day and night, Violet couldn’t escape temptation; drinking was taking a toll.
On February 1, she wrote to Parker that she was a nervous wreck. I don’t know what is wrong with me. Lately, I just go completely haywire at the least thing…that diet helps to make me nervous. But I am going to keep on with it, until I lose all my extra pounds.
Four days later, she wrote to him again — a full handwritten page — to say how upset she’d been that Fishburn’s cleaners on Ross Avenue had lost her favorite dress. And, because of the diet, she complained that she got “awfully hungry” on nights she worked until 10.
It makes it hard on me, when I work late. Seems like this store gets on my nerves more every day that I work here. In fact, I hate it with all my heart tonight. Sometimes I could cry my eyes out, if it would do any good. When are you going to buy me…a house to live in?
Violet had good reason to feel uncomfortable in the store. Only two months earlier, she had been robbed at gunpoint. A man came into the store with a government check made out to someone else and asked Violet to cash it. She gave him the $29. Fearing trouble with the federal government, Dorris Key Bogard of McKinney returned at closing time with an accomplice and a pistol, locked everyone but Violet in the restroom, and told her to return the check to him. She slyly said “the boss” had picked it up earlier. The robber left, not realizing the store’s owner and manager were among those he had locked in the restroom.
The following day, Bogard tried robbing an auto parts store on Elm Street. The two men he held at gunpoint didn’t like the idea of being locked in a restroom, and a scuffle ensued. Bogard shoved his gun into one man’s stomach and twice pulled the trigger. The gun failed to fire. The would-be victims grabbed the would-be robber and called police.
Violet kept her head during the robbery, but she no longer felt safe at work/home. It can’t be a coincidence that on December 8, three days after the robbery, she and Parker married. On December 20, with her husband at her side, she testified at Bogard’s bond hearing.
On February 5, knowing Parker would be on the road the day of Bogard’s trial, Violet wrote to him:
I sure do dread going through this all by myself. That is one reason I hate to work at night now, afraid we will be robbed again, and you aren’t here to protect me. I must have the real old blues tonight, because nothing is going right for me it seems…Try to call every now and then because it gets awfully lonesome…”
On February 15, Bogard was sentenced to 35 years in prison for robbery and an attempted robbery that, had Bogard’s gun been working, could have been a murder.
The next night, Parker flew into Dallas. He and Violet locked up the Five Point Liquor Store at 10 p.m. and poured themselves a drink. At 4:30 a.m., they were still drinking, Parker at the foot of the bed, Violet in a chair in front of the fire. She got up to retrieve the gun she had bought to keep on hand at the liquor store, Parker told police. And suddenly, she “placed this pistol to her chest and fired one time.”
Parker reached for the phone and told the operator that his wife had shot herself and to send an ambulance. The operator connected him to Parkland Hospital, and she stayed on the line as he repeated his request for an ambulance. Violet was pronounced D.O.A. shortly after 5 a.m. February 17, 1952.
The official police report notes that Parker was too drunk to provide a coherent story. When the homicide detective asked him to explain his wife’s actions, he couldn’t do it. They had been married a little over two months. Was it possible he knew nothing of her past? Was he too obtuse to hear her cries in those last letters?
Or was he simply too drunk? Police charged Parker with disturbance of the peace and jailed him on the night his wife died. It’s likely he soon returned to the road. Efforts to trace him have been unsuccessful.
Violet was buried in a leafy spot next to her mother, Opal, and stepfather, Raymond in the historic Pecan Grove Cemetery in McKinney. Mike Watson visits them there.
*North Texas State University is now called the University of North Texas
