Texas Tuesday: A Life of Hogs, Hooters and Topless Hunts

Money doesn't take the red out of a neck as documented here in this article by John Kelso.

The most politically incorrect man in the state of Texas?
My nominee would be Charles Johnson III, 52, who comes from a wealthy oil and gas family in this Texas Panhandle city.

How many other guys can you name who have traveled all the way to New Guinea to deliver Amarillo Hooters T-shirts to the female natives? This is the side of big oil nobody talks about.

Johnson has documented this with several snapshots of himself standing next to some of these native women wearing Hooters shirts. The photos have a National Geographic air to them, until you notice the shirts.

In one of the photos, a New Guinea woman is carrying a live hog under her arm.
"She was nursing that pig when we saw her," recalled the jovial Johnson, who, as you have probably guessed by now, is single. "A lot of women in New Guinea nurse their pigs to fatten 'em up."

In one photo, Johnson is shown with one of the natives while he is decked out in a leopard fez and bowling shirt.

"I told them that's what chieftans in Texas wore, and they treated me with a lot of respect," Johnson said.

I asked Johnson who took these photos of him with the New Guinea natives. "My mother," he said. I don't think he was kidding.

You can tell Charles Johnson when you see him coming down the road in Amarillo. He's the one with the huge stuffed hog riding in the sidecar of his BSA motorcycle.

"I was in Bulgaria and I shot a big 450-pound hog," explained Johnson, 52, an investments business guy who has visited 165 countries around the world. "I had my taxidermist down in Kerrville stuff him with foam rubber. I stuff him in my sidecar and take him barhopping. He probably has a lot more fun dead than alive. We put dollar bills in his hooves for the girls in the strip clubs."

When he's not raising hell in foreign countries, Johnson is raising hell in his hometown of Amarillo. In the fall he and his running buddy, Bill Fellers Jr., put on a topless dove hunt on Johnson's farm — located next to the Clements maximum-security prison here.

"It makes the (prison) guards real nervous,' said Fellers, who is in the oil and gas exploration business and is also single. For the hunt, Johnson and friends hire three or four topless dancers who retrieve the birds as they're shot down.

The dancers who work the hunt have "nothing on but their sneakers," Johnson said. "When they bring a dove back, they get a dollar."

Fellers says the topless dove hunt irritates some of the wives of the men who go on the hunt. In fact, one year when the wives got wind of the upcoming date of the topless dove hunt, they made their husbands take them to the Amarillo symphony instead.

Fellers and Johnson made hay out of this, though, by text-messaging photos of the topless dancers at the dove hunt to the guys who had been dragged to the symphony.

"They'd be sitting there in the symphony with their cell phones, and their wives would say, 'What's that, honey?' " Fellers said.

Perhaps the apex of Johnson's politically incorrect career occurred when he brought a 378-pound Dallas transvestite named Rhapsody as his date to his 20th high school reunion in Amarillo.

"She was a great date. Drank a whole fifth of vodka," Johnson said.

"Just to feed her would have been enough," Fellers added.

But it did not set well with the ladies who were putting on the reunion. "I still get (garbage) from the women who were organizing it," Johnson said.

Johnson has a little something to offend everybody, including the animal rights people. His beautiful 1927-vintage brick home in Amarillo is littered with stuffed animals. But he takes it one step further. For example, he has a stuffed baboon on display at home in a baby coffin, smoking a hookah.

Then there was the time Johnson and Fellers played chicken-head golf by cutting the heads off chickens and using them as balls. "Sometimes you have to make do with what you have, and we didn't have any balls," Fellers explained.

Or the time Johnson visited a bar in Manila called the Hobbit House that was staffed entirely by dwarfs, bouncers and all.

But that's another story.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE