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Veteran Texas Ranger up to his neck in mesquite
beans
By Bill Whitaker
Several weeks ago, a woman called up Texas' only mesquite bean
business to say she had raked up two whole piles of mesquite beans
for collection, but that the beans had since been stolen.
One of the proprietors later joked that they could always send
out hefty former Texas Ranger Sid Merchant to track down the missing
beans. After all, the legendary, 64-year-old West Texas lawman
is also one of the chief officers in the Abilene-based Mesquite
Bean Cartel.
"Actually, I don't know how I got involved in all this,"
former Ranger Merchant told me during the mesquite-bean business'
formal debut recently. "I guess I got talked into it by Tony
Dry.
"Tony's a friend of mine and, well, he just wouldn't quit
talking about making money off mesquite beans."
Certainly it's an odd twist for the area's best-known ex-lawman.
At least mesquite beans are legal. If Sid Merchant and his business
partners are successful, people will be using mesquite beans instead
of mesquite wood for cooking.
Of course, it's hard even for Sid's business partners to view
him as anything else than a lawman. When a bag of mesquite beans
was discovered to have a 15-pound sledgehammer inside, business
associate Tony Dry jokingly chewed the former Ranger out.
"What are you doing holding that thing?" Tony admonished
his friend. "That should be tagged and bagged and marked
Exhibit A!"
DOING HIS DUTY
Polite but somewhat aloof around those he doesn't know well,
Sid Merchant is only slightly more gregarious around longtime
acquaintances concerning the myriad of cases he's worked during
his 23 years as the area's primary Texas Ranger.
He admits he probably gives people the wrong impression.
"I think some people think I'm mad all the time, but I'm
really not," the stone-faced former Ranger says. "I
just look that way!"
He still mulls over the 1967 murder of Joyce White, wife of
Abilene Department of Public Safety trooper Alfred White. Later
arrested, White was charged and eventually convicted of murder
without malice, then was sentenced to five years in prison.
Sid Merchant was personally amazed at the fellow lawman's act
of violence, but completed his own role in the painful investigation.
But then, that apparently gets to Sid Merchant's core.
Once a Midland policeman and, from 1956 to 1965, a Department
of Public Safety trooper, the graduate of Happy High School says
he has always enjoyed trying to unravel situations, especially
when it might do some greater good.
"When I was in the Navy, I was a shore patrolman,"
he said. "It was basically to keep sailors orderly - and
that's tough when they've been at sea six months. But I guess
trying to keep people out of trouble struck me as interesting.
"I think we sent just as many back to the ship as we did
to the brig."
After many years roaming the highways in West Texas, often
"all by my lonesome," the idea of becoming a Texas Ranger
began to appeal to him because of the self-reliance the job demanded
and the greater challenges involved.
"One thing was the very idea of being a Ranger and being
part of history," he said. "And the next thing was the
criminal work involved. It was more challenging than what I had
been doing - trying to figure out what happened and how it happened."
DASTARDLY DEVILS
Much of his work centered on the West Texas oil fields where,
during the riotous oil boom of the '70s and early '80s, equipment
theft became an enormous problem. Like many oilmen themselves,
the criminals tended to keep things in the family.
"When I retired here, I was working on the grandsons of
the people I was working on when I started," the Haskell
native said, "and most of them involved the oil fields."
But while the oil-field theft problem has had its ups and downs,
dependent on the economy and price of oil, he's seen the drug
problem explode, especially in desolate stretches of West Texas
as well as those neglected areas along the Rio Grande.
"I think they're getting more dastardly," he said
of drug dealers coming across the Texas-Mexico border. "The
Rio Grande is a war zone. I have rancher friends down there who
don't know what to do. They have to carry weapons around with
them.
"They feel like they're prisoners on their own property."
As far as personal honors go, Sid isn't the type to blow his
own horn - he's like a lot of Texas Rangers when it comes to that
- but he does admit he was proud when, in 1984, he was made an
honorary squadron commander of the Dyess AFB security police.
Since retiring in 1988 from the Rangers, Sid has been able
to carve out more time with friends. And while he was briefly
disabled by a stroke recently, he also surprised many by bouncing
back quickly.
Today he works as a private investigator in oil-field security,
an area in which he has lots of know-how. But he continues to
look upon his years as a Texas Ranger with great pride, mostly
because of other Rangers he got to work with.
Only when asked to cite names of other Rangers does he bubble
forth with great eagerness.
"Of course, a lot of folks don't seem to even realize
we still exist today," he sighed. "Either they think
we're not active anymore or they think we're just myth or something
from Texas history.
"Worse yet," he said, somewhat disgustedly, "some
think we're just a baseball team."
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Copyright ©1996 or
1997, Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps. Publications
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