"All together now, SLIIIME in the ice machine."

Marvin Zindler was a consumer reporter for Houston's ABC affiliate, KTRK/Channel 13. He died last Sunday, age 85. The Houston Chronicle has an extensive obituary. His "fame" came from investigative reporting about - and forcing the closing of - the Chicken Ranch in LaGrange, Texas, the oldest and continuously run brothel in the US. It was made famous in the movie starring Dolly Parton, Burt Reynolds, and Dom DeLuise.

"I didn't care that they had a whorehouse," he'd say in later years. "We had plenty here in Houston."

Zindler seemed to enjoy the spotlight the musical and movie shone on him — he kept a poster for the film on his office wall — though he always said he felt his most important stories were 1985 reports on financial mismanagement by the Hermann Hospital board of trustees.

And those Hermann reports spurred investigations of the policies of other Texas Medical Center non-profit hospitals. As a result, Methodist, St Luke's (where I worked), and Texas Children's - all excellent hospitals - expanded their charity and outreach to the city and beyond. No more arbitrary refusal of indigent trauma patients (well, claiming the census was full, when it wasn't) and sending them to the county hospitals, Ben Taub and Jeff Davis (it was against the law, anyway!).

My ex and I used to watch his weekly Channel 13 "roach and rat" report of unsanitary conditions in area restaurants (sliiime in the ice machine). Marvin could make or break a restaurant. I remember one citing the New York Deli, a sandwich shop we frequented near the Galleria. A week later it closed up shop for good, the queues for take-away having slowed down to a trickle.

Zindler also loved to talk of the thousands of children who'd received free medical care from Marvin's Angels, doctors who donated their services because Zindler asked them to. In addition to his frequent on-air reports about such cases, Zindler started a foundation with his friend and plastic surgeon Dr. Joseph Agris that helped children around the world.

These activities, he told a reporter last year, were why — in his 80s and after enduring open-heart surgery and surviving a previous bout with prostate cancer — Zindler continued to work.

Marvin also traveled extensively, documenting how Houston doctors helped alleviate suffering in developing countries. Recently, for example, he helped seven Iraqi men get prosthetic devices to replace the hands that were cut off during Saddam Hussein's regime.

Watch some of Marvin Zindler's stories from the 1970s here and here. Gonna miss that good ol' sign off in his inimitable Texas twang, "Maaarrrrvin Zindler, Eeeyyyewitness News." R.I.P.