Mustang: A No-Horse Town

Williams McKie founded Mustang 34 years ago to sell booze to folks driving to Dallas. Now, his widow and another feller are debating its fate.

In the 1970s, attorney William McKie had a brilliant idea: He'd turn the town of Mustang, some 60 miles away in Navarro County, into a giant liquor store in the middle of a dry county. He got folks to move into the Mustang Mobile Home Park, offering free rent, and then he got those very same folks to turn their booze-free town into a wet city. Then came the Gusher, the town's liquor store and tourist trap; then came Little Scholtz's beer garden, a magnet for college kids from Navarro College in Corsicana. And then a wet town dried up, when neighboring towns in nearby counties decided, yeah, it was probably better to sell booze than lose the tax money to Mustang.

So now, all that's left in Mustang are 47 folks, according to the latest census, and a fight over the city's future. That's the subject of a terrific little story in this morning's Los Angeles Times: a legal battle over what will become of Mustang. Marsha McKie, William's widow, wants to turn the city her husband founded into a "a family-friendly rest stop with an RV park and playground," writes the Times' Lianne Hart. (Hart writes that McKie was a "Dallas attorney," but according to his obit, he was the former Corsicana city attorney whose "entire law career was practiced in Navarro County and the surrounding area.")

On the other side is Thomas Sinclair, who wants to keep Mustang more...ya know...adult. After all, he already owns the shuttered Mustang Club and Wispers all-nude cabaret. Why stop a good thing now? Well, except for the fact noboby seems to want it. A judge is expected to rule on the case in April. --Robert Wilonsky