pretending to lose his grip a few times to thrill the audience below. Organizations The Nueces became a meeting place for Corpus Christi and South Texas leaders. Mr. Jones liked to spend part of the day in the plush lobby talking over old times with other ranchers. The barbershop had a shelf for the personal shaving mugs of prominent citizens who regularly patronized it. Some lived there part- or full-time. Pat Dunn, known as "the Duke of Padre Island" because he had owned much of the land there that later became county and federal parks and housing subdivisions, finally moved into town and lived at the Nueces. He died in his hotel room in March 1935. Much of the business—government, private, and cultural—of south Texas was said to have been conducted at the Nueces during the first part of the century. An incident involving some community leaders on March 7, 1916, was reported in The Corpus Christi Caller the next day, Ash Wednesday, and again by local historian Murphy Givens in the Ash Wednesday edition for 2016. Incited by a Reverend Ham's fiery sermons in favor of alcohol prohibition, R. I. Blucher and Tom Cahill began fighting outside the door of the Nueces Hotel and were stopped by a policeman upon which Matthew Dunn told the officer to let Blucher go, threatening him with his cane. Sheriff Mike Wright "slapped him in the face" according to the 1916 article, which mentions that "several hundred people" witnessed the fray. The officers took "Blucher & Cahill to city hall, walking west along Peoples Street". The 1916 article suggested no charges would likely be filed; the reverend soon packed his tent and left town. Evidence of the hotel's formal participation in public affairs is easily found though of course "back-room" dealings have left little trace. In 1913, the Texas section of the American Society of Civil Engineers was established by the Texas Good Roads Association in a meeting at the Nueces. One of the few remaining early local newspapers reports that the Texas Daughters of the Confederacy met there in November 1915. The Woman's Monday Club met on July 12, 1916, when Mrs. G. R. Scott, president of City Federation of Women's Clubs, gave a lecture on her New York trip to the 13th biennial meeting of the American Federation of Women's Clubs. In early 1923, the Corpus Christi Golf and Country Club