OUT-OF-STATE REPORTERS invariably describe Amarillo as dull-which it most certainly is not. It became obvious that in this fight, both sides were playing for keeps. Not content with suing for monetary damages, George Whittenburg had gone to the district attorney hoping to have Amarillo’s biggest celebrity put in prison. This past December, however, the chuckling over the case came to a halt when an Amarillo grand jury indicted Marsh on felony charges of aggravated assault and kidnapping in the chicken coop incident.
Marsh was playing the role of the frontier cowboy, accountable to no one Whittenburg, acting like an angry Judge Roy Bean, was intent on getting his revenge. To many amused citizens of Amarillo, the fight between George Whittenburg and Stanley Marsh 3 was like an old-fashioned range war-only this time, in modern-day Texas, the battle between two proud Panhandle clans was over street signs instead of cattle and oil wells. Well, it’s time for the truth to come out.” “For too long, people have been afraid of taking on Stanley Marsh because of his immense wealth and power. “I want Stanley Marsh removed as a factor in the lives of young people in Amarillo, especially teenage boys,” he says. “He’s obsessed with destroying Stanley.”īut the 51-year-old Whittenburg, a trim, self-confident man who usually puts in fourteen-hour days at his law firm, says he feels obligated to investigate certain lurid rumors circulating about Marsh. “George knows that Stanley has been snickering at the Whittenburgs for years,” says Charles Rittenberry, one of Marsh’s attorneys. Marsh’s friends insist that Whittenburg was simply using the lawsuit to restore the Whittenburgs to a position of influence in a city that had never appreciated them. Y’all used to have money, but you don’t anymore.”īefore Marsh’s lawyers advised him to stay silent to avoid causing more controversy, Marsh told a Dallas Morning News reporter that he was “appalled and dismayed by the ridiculous, untrue allegations” and said the Whittenburg lawsuit was merely an attempt to get money from him. Ben says Marsh screamed, “The goddam Whittenburgs. (He calls himself Stanley Marsh 3, pronouncing “three,” because he thinks Stanley Marsh III is too pretentious.) For the past two years he has been decorating Amarillo with diamond-shaped street signs with images of the Mona Lisa and killer bees and such bizarre messages as “Road Does Not End,” “Ostrich X-ing,” and “You Will Never Be the Same.” His goal, he once said, was “to encourage art for art’s sake and use it to fight back the ever-rising flood of philistinism.”īut when a teenager named Ben Whittenburg, one of the youngest members of another famous oil-rich Panhandle family, stole a Marsh sign that pictured a rabbit with the word “Rapid” written underneath it, Marsh hunted down the young Whittenburg and, according to Ben, threatened to hit him with a hammer, called his family “poor white trash,” and locked him in a chicken coop. With his teddy bear body, Mark Twain–like mustache, and shirttail hanging out of his pants, Marsh looks like a genuine Mad Hatter, and he loves playing the part. He sent letters to Pat Nixon asking her to donate her finest clothes to what he said was his Museum of Decadent Art. He hired an Italian dwarf to accompany him to a large society wedding dressed in an Aunt Jemima outfit.
Whether burying tail-finned Cadillacs in the ground near old Route 66 or throwing water balloons out of his twelfth-floor office window in downtown Amarillo, the 58-year-old Marsh, scion of one of West Texas’ most prominent oil and gas families, has devised a myriad of “stunts,” as he calls them, “to get people out of their mental ruts.” He showed up at John Connally’s bribery trial in Washington, D.C., wearing Western dude clothes and carrying a bucket of cow manure.
FOR A QUARTER OF A CENTURY, STANLEY MARSH 3 has reigned as Texas’ merriest prankster, the Puck of the Panhandle.
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