Texas has produced and nurtured a great number of colorful characters, but none more colorful than the prismatic Judge Roy Bean. He squeezed many showy lives into one lifetime. In fact, he didn’t become the Judge Roy Bean that Paul Newman immortalized on film until he was almost 60 years old. This proves my favorite maxim: “The greatest mistake in life is thinking it’s too late.”
In his earlier years, he was living in a poor area of San Antonio named for him. It was called Beanville. He tried and failed at many things, mostly for, ironically, running afoul of the law. He failed at selling firewood because he cut down trees that didn’t belong to him. He failed as a butcher because butchering other people’s maverick cows before you’ve bought them is frowned upon. He failed at selling milk because he watered it down. One customer complained that he found a minnow in his milk. Bean defended himself by saying, “That’s the last time I let that cow drink out of the creek before I milk her.” He eventually had some success when he opened a saloon in Beanville, but he sold out when he heard that there were rare opportunities out in west Texas where they were building the railroad.
