Editors note: This article is reposted in its entirety. It was originally published in the April 21 edition of the Amarillo Globe-News.

Bill O'Brien knows that when Stanley Marsh 3 is in the media, the word "eccentric" closely follows, as in "the eccentric multimillionaire" It's been that way before the first Cadillacs went hood-down into the ground west of Amarillo nearly 40 years ago.

But after consulting the Oxford English Dictionary, O'Brien knows the word fits for his lifelong friend.

"'Eccentric' is the opposite of 'concentric,'" said O'Brien, 70, managing partner of Texas Beef. "Concentric is the circle where the control point is dead center in the middle. If you took this whole community and asked, 'What is the control point and dead center of Amarillo?' that would not be where Stanley is.

"He's eccentric meaning his center is different than the center of the community, but aren't we lucky that it is because of the resources, assets and benefits brought to the community. It's because his center is not concentric and because he marches to his own drum. It's a reason why Amarillo has its own personality and that's wonderful."

There are those who now will certainly take issue. Marsh has long been seen as the Texas Panhandle's merry prankster, a quirky pop art aficionado, media tycoon and, yes, eccentric multimillionaire.

But now, in the wake of 10 civil lawsuits and 14 criminal charges, the image of the jolly off-beat "Alice in Wonderland" character wearing the top hat and tails has taken a public pounding.

Marsh, 75, incapacitated by a series of strokes, is in the fight for his life in the twilight of his colorful life. Amarillo's most controversial character in its history has been indicted six times on eight counts of sexual performance by a child, four counts of sexual assault of a child and two counts of indecency with a child.

Special prosecutor Matt Powell, Lubbock County District Attorney, presented the case to a Potter County grand jury on April 10, and indictments were announced the next day. For the second time since November when he was charged with 11 criminal felonies of sexual abuse and sexual performance by a child , Marsh is free on bond.

Virtually all the charges stem from alleged involvement with older boys in Marsh's "Dynamite Museum," a project of various art endeavors dating back to the 1990s. The most well-known are the hundreds of mock traffic signs across the city with its whimsical droll messages.

Civil lawsuits from the families of 10 teenagers brought against Marsh in late 2012 alleging sexual abuse were settled out of court in February. But the criminal charges have continued unabated. If convicted, the second-degree felony is punishable by 2 to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000 on each count.

Marsh's attorneys, Paul Nugent and Heather Peterson, issued a statement on the day of the indictments that they plan to mount a vigorous defense.

"We welcome the challenge of exposing the truth, and defending our friend and client, Mr. Marsh," a portion of the statement read.

Most who know Marsh are reluctant to speak publicly for attribution. Friends believe charges are not true, that the civil suits were a money-grab in the latter years of Marsh's life. They admit to his quirkiness and frivolity, but have never seen any clues to indicate a step into the alleged depravity.

Wyatt McSpadden, 60, a successful editorial, commercial and advertising photographer in Austin, grew up in Amarillo. He worked for Marsh from 1971-75 as part of what was known as the "Toad Hall Gang," a reference to the name of Marsh's manor.

"I never had any illusion that Stanley was any kind of a saint because he wasn't," McSpadden said. "I never put him on that pedestal, but I never saw anything inappropriate going on.

"Now a lot of crazy stuff was going on, don't get me wrong, but never a hint of what they say he has been charged with. My take is I hate this, but it's not beyond belief, you know."

There's also a sentiment in the public that Marsh has finally been caught crossing an ugly line, the whistle blown after years of looking the other way. Old money privilege that insulated him has at last been pulled apart to reveal something more ominous than Uncle Stanley.

The wheels of justice will eventually stop with a verdict, but however it spins, the damage, controversy and public opinion is already immense.

"It's muddled, too complex, a very unsatisfactory story," said Larry Preddy, a former club owner and art patron who met Marsh on several occasions. "He's really wrecked himself. He's almost destroyed himself. This whole thing seems to be about legacy, but what will it be now?"

A life of privilege and good times, zaniness and avant-garde, bon-vivant and fun, is spiraling into something else entirely.

'Always a sense

of adventure'

Stanley Marsh added the "3" because his father and grandfather also had the name, and the Roman numeral III he has said was pretentious - and Marsh disdains pretentiousness.

His grandfather, the original Stanley Marsh, left Ohio shortly before World War I. The family migrated to Oklahoma where he managed a coal company.

Then the oil industry beckoned, and he found himself in the Burkburnett boom near Wichita Falls in the early 1920s. He made his final move west to Amarillo when oil was discovered in the Panhandle. Marsh partnered with wildcatters Don Harrington and Lawrence Hagy. They made millions drilling for natural gas when the oil boom hit in 1926.

Stanley Marsh, Jr., who joined the company in 1946 after his father's death, was seen as quiet and reserved. Estelle, his wife, was the free spirit, a campaigner for social causes that often would ruffle the feathers of the Marsh's fellow well-to-dos.

Marsh, Jr., was lenient with the three boys, of which Stanley was the oldest. Estelle encouraged idealistic free-thinking, dancing to a different drum, and cultural pursuits.

"He was rich. I mean the Marshes were really rich," said O'Brien, who grew up on the same Wolflin neighborhood block. "In my mind, his family opened up a whole new world to me."

At dinner, O'Brien said the talk might be on French novelist Marcel Proust or what is the best accompaniment to dip into a cup of tea.

"Almost anyone who has known Stanley his entire life will tell you that he hasn't changed," he said. "He was not someone who was a lot different as a kid than he is now. He's always had this sense of adventure, this creative side that have been the hallmarks of his life."

In their younger days, O'Brien would get a call on Sunday morning from Marsh, who often planned an adventure from what he could glean from reading the Amarillo Globe-News.

Once, after a minor flood, he got a group of friends to raft the swollen Canadian River from Boys Ranch with hopes of getting to the Dumas bridge. They got halfway. Drunk, they hit a sandbar and that was that. Leeches tagged along on their backs for the ride.

"I got home, tried to sober up, took a shower and I had all these leeches on me," he said.

There was the day trip Marsh planned to the Mangum (Okla.) Rattlesnake Derby. Inebriated, Marsh and friends crashed the Miss Fang contest in the high school gym before they were pointedly asked to leave.

"The most wonderful renegade that any of us had ever known," the late Buck Ramsey, a childhood friend, told Texas Monthly in the 1990s.

He was the life of any party - and there were plenty of parties to be the life of.

"Everybody partied a lot in those days," said John Marmaduke, CEO and president of Hastings Entertainment, who grew up a block from Marsh. "But his parties were probably the best. I don't know anyone like him, anyone close to like him."

Marsh, despite his frivolity, was considered a brilliant student. He graduated from Amarillo High in 1955. He went to TCU, Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., and to the University of Pennsylvania. Marsh graduated from the renowned Wharton School of Business at Penn with a masters degree in economic history.

He returned to his hometown in 1967 to help oversee family investments after his father's death. It may have shocked some, but there was a sharp businessman behind the cheesy veneer.

Marsh bought television station KVII the same year. The ABC affiliate had been a ratings disaster. It wasn't long before KVII revolutionized local television. It became not only the highest-rated news station in Amarillo, but one of the highest in a three-market city in the country.

"A lot of people look at Stanley and say, 'Oh, he inherited a lot of money,' and he did, but beyond that, he made a lot of money," O'Brien said. "He did it with his own savvy approach to business. People think he sat up in his office dreaming - and he did - but at the same time, he was plenty savvy."

Morris Overstreet, the first black in Texas elected to a statewide office when he was twice elected to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, worked for Marsh in high school in the late 1960s when he owned Brown's House of Books. He would continue to work for Marsh with legal work through the years.

"He's always been sort of an eccentric and free-spirit," Overstreet said, "but I always thought of him as a straight-forward honest person. He was very demanding in the workplace. When it came to business, he was precise even though he obviously had a lighter side."

In 1967, he also married Wendy O'Brien (no kin to Bill O'Brien) from a prominent ranch family. She graduated from Smith College and the University of Texas Law School.

She winked at many of her husband's escapades. It was said he once persuaded her to wear a flesh-colored leotard and ride through downtown Amarillo as Lady Godiva while he filmed her for a movie he later abandoned.

Their house, Toad Hall is a baronial estate that at various times has had a camel, peacocks, zebras and ostriches with a run of the place. The estate rests on the northern edge of the city where their five children were reared. For years, Marsh made his well water available at the edge of his property for those who wanted to stop and fill up their containers.

When he learned a development might go up near Toad Hall, he erected a billboard that read "Future Home of the World's Largest Poisonous Snake Farm."

As novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "Let me tell you about the rich. They are different from you and me."

Art, pranks

and whims

It was the 1970s that Marsh became legend. His pranks and his outdoor art got national attention that left locals either mesmerized and bemused, or appalled and embarrassed. Marsh relished the attention, and public opinion be damned.

"Stanley never worried about what people thought about him," O'Brien said. "He couldn't care less."

Not when you appear at former Texas governor John Connally's bribery trial in Washington, D.C. dressed in Dude Ranch clothes and carrying a bucket of cow manure. Not when refereeing a pro 'rasslin' match with Dory Funk, Jr., in red tie, tails and sneakers.

Not when getting in the background of a national televised stand-up from a reporter on the Weather Channel wearing an Indian head dress with mock Indian chants. Not when hosting a reception with Japanese investors, not inviting anyone less than 6-feet-4 to promote the tall Texan image. The list goes on.

"Stanley has all this wealth, power and privilege," O'Brien said, "but all his life he's campaigned against entitlement and this notion that people are entitled to something. He believes all these self-important people need to have their bubble pricked. That's what got him on Nixon's Enemies List."

Marsh brought his vision of expressionist art to the people, forsaking stuffy museums for more earthy - and curious - presentations.

McSpadden, a renowned photographer in Austin, worked for Marsh for four years after graduating from Tascosa in 1970. A self-described Amarillo hippie at the time, he was one of a group of boys who worked on the grounds and the ranch. McSpadden also took photos of Marsh's parties and other events.

"Stanley never shied away from attention," he said. "He was always happy to thumb his nose at convention. He was part of a small but wealthy group of people who have always sort of dominated Amarillo, but he was apart from that crowd too. That's because no one did the outlandish things he did."

In 1974, he commissioned the Ant Farm, a San Francisco-based art group, to partially bury 10 vintage Cadillacs hood first at supposedly the same angle as the Great Pyramids of Egypt along old Route 66 west of the city. They have become an iconic venue on the American Road, a modern-day Stonehenge immortalized in the movie "Cars" and by rocker Bruce Springsteen.

"I fulfill whims," Marsh told Sports Illustrated in 1977. "Most people have whims and dreams and I'm lucky enough to carry out my whims...If more were like me, it would be a more interesting world."

To various levels of bemusement, Marsh has commissioned the "Floating Mesa," the "Amarillo Ramp," and "The Giant Phantom Soft Pool Table." That was designed on 180-by-100 feet of dyed grass, with balls 42 inches in diameter, and 100-foot cue stick.

"These are all things that maybe to people who live here don't have a lot of meaning or add a lot of value," O'Brien said, "but these are things that make Amarillo different and special, and more bigger and global in a sense."

Marsh's most visible art project could ultimately be part of his undoing. The Dynamite Museum is mostly a group of young boys, self-described "art rebels" who have worked on kitschy art endeavors starting in the 1990s. They've either been in the wide open spaces or on the 12th floor of the Chase Tower, which until November had been Marsh's expansive office domain for years.

Dynamite Museum's most famous and visible project was nearly 20 years ago, the hundreds of ersatz street signs across the city often with nonsensical sayings on them: "Bring Back Public Hanging," "Anything You Say About Lubbock Is A Waste Of Words," and "I Love The Touch Of Silken Flesh."

That erupted in controversy in 1994 when Marsh led a group that locked Ben Whittenburg, 18, in a chicken coop for stealing one of the signs. It was further evidence, it's been alleged, of a feud between Marsh and the prominent Amarillo family, which once owned the Globe-News.

In 1998, in the aftermath of that, Marsh pleaded no contest to misdemeanor charges of unlawful restraint and criminal trespassing in exchange for dismissal of five felony charges. A judge ordered him to serve 10 days in jail and pay $4,000 in fines.

O'Brien smiled, calling the incident "vintage Stanley." Preddy wonders if that's when the public began to see a different side of Marsh.

That was one of several brushes with the legal system. In 1996, a youth claiming to be a victim of sexual contact of Marsh agreed to drop a civil suit after Marsh paid him money to do so, Houston attorney Dick DeGuerin then said.

That same year, three indictments charged Marsh with indecency with a child/sexual contact. Those criminal charges were eventually dismissed.

In 2001, parties involved in four civil lawsuits, including allegations stemming from the Whittenburg incident, agreed to settle their case. Allegations included imprisonment, sexual misconduct and harassment of teens. Marsh apologized but no details were made public.

But all pale in comparison to the indictments and the 14 criminal charges on April 10. They stem from allegations against boys in Marsh's employ that got their start with the Dynamite Museum.

All boys were ages 15 to 17 with the alleged sexual crimes occurring in 2010 and 2011. The civil suits claim Marsh plied them with cash, alcohol, drugs and gifts, some even cars, to curry them for sexual favors.

In November, police executed a search warrant on Marsh's 12th, once described as "The People's Republic of the 12th Floor." Officers took away cushions, comforters, unsigned legal documents that released Mash from any liabilities or claims "of any nature," and 70 envelopes of "blue pills,"

"I've been around Stanley in a lot of settings, and never saw anything or had reason to believe what I read or heard about was going on," Overstreet said. "I think of myself as someone with eyes wide open, and I was shocked. I know nothing is impossible, but this is not something I ever saw on the horizon."

Monuments

to himself

One of Marsh's last major public quirkiness works of art are statues of two legs, one 34 feet high, the other 24 feet, just off I-27 on the southern edge of the city near Randall High School.

The statues, done by artist Lightnin McDuff, are a likeness from Byron Shelley's 19th century sonnet, "Ozymandias." It tells of the futility of monuments. An ancient traveler happens upon a decayed monument of some long-ago king, who built a monument to himself, thinking his name would carry forever, but no one knew him:

"And on the pedestal these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

In a way, Marsh has seen himself as king, Preddy said, and those around him as supporting actors and actresses in his grand play of indulgence.

"He's certainly self-absorbed, at least that's been my experience when I've been around him," said Preddy. "He reminds me of that character who looks at everyone else as an accessory to his own personal experience."

Preddy sees the irony of the - here we go - eccentric multimillionaire and his last public monument. He sees it clearly.

"In the poem, this king built a monument to himself and the tides of history buried him like it did everyone else," he said. "Stanley said one time that he makes monuments, and a better meaning of that is he makes memorials to himself.

"It's kind of tongue-in-cheek, but Stanley is really seriously mindful about making monuments to himself, to have his name remembered, no question about it. But now you wonder if it will be in the way he wished or hoped."

Marsh's world, which to observers seemed one of whimsy and flamboyance, privilege and power, is tearing at the seams by sordid criminal charges.

So will Stanley Marsh 3 be exonerated, remembered as he and friends hope, or will his name eventually end the way "Ozymandias" did?

"Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the one and level sands stretch far away."