Juanita Dale Slusher pranced into Dallas in 1949 as a wide-eyed 13-year-old runaway with a baby-doll face, but with a body that would make Bettie Page blush.
She was a Texas hayseed from a dusty town 300 miles south of Dallas, and the Big D saw her coming.
The junior-high dropout worked as a hotel chambermaid just long enough to learn that there were other ways to make money with mattresses.
She married at 14, but prison bars came between Juanita and her teenage husband, whose primary skill was taking things that didn’t belong to him.
She had to eat, so like many down-and-out divorcees she found her way to the naughty nightclubs of Commerce Street in downtown Dallas.
Juanita sold cigarettes and served cocktails to the men who visited the clubs for adult merriment — businessmen in town from Houston or Oklahoma City, ranchers up from Waco, college frat boys on weekend wing dings.
The pert teen, an athletic 5-foot-3, became a favorite of the butt-pinching set. SheÔøΩcolored her brown hair platinum and used giggles and wiggles to induce pickled fellows to tuck astonishing tips in her smock pockets.