Jack Ruby with two employees. Were they B girls?
In hip-hop culture, a B-girl is a female break dancer, and more broadly, any woman involved with hip-hop. That was the only definition of a B-girl I ever knew.
But I heard a new one today. Or, more accurately, an old one. Ron Patterson, who lives in Oak Cliff but grew up on East Grand, told me that back in the early 60s, Jack Ruby was his “mentor”.
Not sure exactly what he meant by that, but back then, Patterson was in his early 20s. He was young and free, and he had a job at the Adolphus Hotel. He looked up to Ruby, the infamous club owner, whom Patterson says was “a great guy”.
Now 70, Patterson says anyone who worked at the Adolphus could get into Ruby’s clubs.
“They always had all these B-girls,” he says. “B-girls were the women who would get the out-of-town suckers to buy them drinks.”
Their husbands, he says, were mostly cops, often hanging out off duty to watch them dance. The adult entertainment industry has changed quite a bit since then.
