ustxtxb_obs_1962_06_15_50_00002-00000_000.pdf

M E N Learn to Operate HEAVY EQUIPMENT Drag Lines Bulldozers, Scrapers Pull Shovels Clam Shells, Graders Trained men are earning $165 per week and up. Thousands of additional men are needed right now to operate the heavy equipment used in building roads, bridges, dams, airfields, etc. Complete training gives you actual experience on heavy equipment at resident center, with employment assistance upon completion. For complete information, send name, address, age, telephone number and working hours to: UNITED EQUIPMENT OPERATORS SCHOOL 4215 Graustark Houston 6, Texas \( A NIGHT IN GEORGE’S JAIL Duval’s cent moves by County Atty. Carib and other county and district officials who were elected with Parr’s endorsements have caused many here to doubt that Republican nominees will be allowed to appear on the November ballot. Schroeder’s jail sentence, however, appears to have been an accident of the dapper young Carillo’s overanxiousness. The spotlight of publicity the episode has turned on the county could, others here believe, cause Parr to call off the investigation of the GOP primary and concentrate on his peculiarly efficient vote-gathering technique. \(Parr’s favorite candidate, John Connally, for example, got 97 percent of the runoff votes on June 2. Margins for Jim Turman, Waggoner Carr, and Woodrow Bean were almost Carillo’s eagerness first showed on the morning of May 28, the day Schroeder was arrested. Testimony at the contempt hearing in week revealed that the subpoena for Schroeder to appear before the grand jury with his primary election records was issued by grand jury foreman G. R. Chappa, another friend of George Parr’s, at 9:45 a.m.-15 minutes before the grand jury convened for the first time since April 2. Why did he issue the subpoena? Purcell asked Chappa. County Atty. Carillo asked him to issue it, Chappa said. Later, however, Carillo testified that Chappa had asked for the subpoena, which is the usual procedure. “Mr. Chappa testified that you asked him to issue the subpoena,” Purcell told the county attorney. “Mr. Chappa made a mistake on that,” Carillo said. Regardless of the answer to the “who’s on first?” testimony by Carillo and Chappa, the subpoena was issued and Schroeder walked into the grand jury room two hours later to be met by Carillo’s query: “Would you like to plead the Fifth Amendment?” “That’s when I decided I better talk to a lawyer,” Schroeder said later. “I didn’t know what I was charged with, but being asked a question like that sure scared me.” The fact isaccording to the testimony of all county officials who were witnesses at the hearingSchroeder was never charged with anything until the judge said he was in contempt. Carillo testified that he asked the Fifth Amendment question only because he wanted “to make certain Schroeder had been informed about his rights.” Schroeder said he would have brought in the elec tion records as soon as he was given a chance to if Carillo hadn’t asked him that fearsome question. Lawyer Contacted The records Schroeder had were copies of the originals sealed in the GOP ballot boxes and placed in the custody of county officials on May 5. Schroeder had requested that the GOP ballot boxes be deposited in Alice after the election, but District Judge C. Woodrow Laughlin ordered them placed in a cell in the Duval County jail. After he told the grand jury that two deputies dragged him from his office before he had a chance to get his election records, Schroeder was given until 9 a.m. the following day to comply with the subpoena. He returned to his office, he said, and telephoned Neil Terry in Alice \(Terry preceded Schroeder as Duval County Several local lawyers were contacted but, for various reasons, were not interested in getting involved in the case. Finally, Ralph Curry, a Dallas attorney of Terry’s acquaintance, was called. Curry told Schroeder to mail him the records so he could photostat them before they were turned over to the Parr Democrats. Schroeder returned to the courthouse the next morning and informed Judge Laughlin that he had followed his lawyer’s advice. This news sent Judge Laughlin and Carillo into a long conference in Laughlin’s chambers. After the conference the GOP ballot boxes were brought up from downstairs and opened, and their contents were passed about the courtroom “Box 13,” which was reported four days after election day and gave Lyndon Johnson an 87-vote statewide victory margin over Coke Stevenson for U.S. senator. But even before Box 13, the Parrs had friends in high places. George Parr was on parole from the federal prison, where he had served three years of a sentence for income tax evasion, when Harry Truman became president. One of Truman’s first official acts was to award a full pardon to the Duke of Duval. Unlike most U.S. political bosses, Parr does not rely primarily on political astuteness to maintain his power. His methods are of the old-fashioned school most Americans thought went out with Prohibition. “People are physically afraid to god against Parr,” Walter Purcell, a former Duval county attorney, said. “His deputies, all wearing pistols, line up around balloting places and leer over your shoulder when you vote. There’s no such thing as a secret ballot in Duval County. Parr’s pistoleros, as the Mexicans call them, naturally don’t lean too hard on some of the more established white voters. But in the Mexican precincts, they really throw their weight around.” -Y: >:Clarence Schroeder blink ed MARTIN ELFANT Sun Life of Canada Houston, Texas CA 4-0686 to be examined by the grand jury and others present. \(John Campos, a young assistant to the district attorney, happened upon this scene and declared it “somewhat irregular.” He was promptly told Later that day, District Attorney Sam Burriss, who had been out of town throughout the controversy, returned and apologized to Schroeder for his arrest and said he was free to go. This was a Thursday afternoon. By the following Monday, June 4, Burriss had changed his mind, and joined in filing the delayed-action contempt of court charge against Schroeder. He helped Carillo argue the case at the June 7 hearing, which ended with deputies again pulling in Schroederthis time toward a jail cell. But when the contempt citation was served on the Republican county chairman June 4, he contacted Walter Purcell in Alice and James Leonard at state GOP headquarters in Austin. “After talking to Leonard and Purcell,” Schroeder said, “I felt for the first time that some of us in Duval County would no* be alone in this fight, We had made protest after protest in the past to the state Democratic Party and nothing happened.” “I saw it was a typical example of Duval County justice,” Purcell told the Observer. “It is just this sort of thing that is driving Duval countians into the Republican Party. They figure that nothing happens when protests are made to the state Democratic Party because George Parr has too much influence in the Democratic Party against the harsh South Texas sunlight and grinned apologetically when he walked out of the courthouse and shook hands with the men who waited there for him. Meeting those who had worked to free him from jail obviously embarrassed the mildmannered oil company agent who has only one gasoline station in his Mobil district. As he posed for a news photographer, Schroeder was asked to comment on his jail sentence and the events leading to it. He nodded, pulled a folded paper sack from his right hip pocket, and squinted at words penciled dimly on the wrinkled brown surface. “I did a lot of thinking in there last night,” he said. “I wrote some of it down . . . this sack was all I had to write on. . . .” But he had scribbled those words in the midnight loneliness of a jail cell, waiting for the courts to act on his appeal. Reading them again in the bright afternoon sunlight, standing among his friends, caused businessman Schroeder’s face to redden. He stuffed the brown sack back into his pocket. “I never was one for writing,” he mumbled. Then he added: “What it all amounts to really, is that we hope to restore civil rights to all the people of Duval County. What I wrote on that sack last night was something about how when I was fighting in the war I thought I was fighting for our civil rights . . I was with the Second Division from Omaha Beach to Czechoslovakia. . . . But guess that’s pretty corny . . . You can just say that the one main plank in our platform is to get a secret ballot for Duval County, like the Constitution Nays.” J.M. because he has always delivered the votes to the winners.” Heated Exchanges The procedure of the contempt hearing was as surprising as the air-conditioning which cooled the interior of the courthouse. Judge Laughlin, who issued the contempt citation, interrupted defense attorney Purcell six times with the remark, “Objection sustained; let’s stick to the facts,” when no objections had been made by .the prosecuting attorneys. Purcell and Carillo engaged in several heated exchanges and Judge Laughlin intervened each time in Carillo’s behalf. In his final argument Carillo asked only that Schroeder be given a threeday jail sentence, but Judge Laughlin included the $100 fine on his own. Purcell’s argument centered upon his contention that “the grand jury is not a body authorized to investigate a primary election unless a member of the party involved complains. “If the county attorney is going to make charges of fraud to the newspapers, which Mr. Carillo did,” Purcell said, “let’s investigate charges of fraud in the Democratic primary in Duval County. I’ll ask the county attorney now to investigate and find out how John Connally got 97 percent of the vote on June 2. Will you do that ?” Carillo, flushing, nodded and said, “Yeah.” “He says he will,” Purcell then told the judge. “but I had no right to make such a request. I don’t even reside in Duval County.” Later, Purcell charged that the Republican ballot boxes were opened in private by someone in the courthouse to see who had voted Republican. Judge Laughlin, red-faced, said angrily, “Mr. Purcell, those boxes were never examined except in Mr. Schroeder’s presence. Let’s stick to the facts.” When Judge Laughlin made his ruling the papers necessary to put Schroeder in jail immediately were already filled out and waiting. It took Purcell and Leonard 25 hours and 10 minutes to get the new but already battle-scarred Republicanout of jail with a writ of habeas corpus secured from Federal Judge Joe Ingraham of Houston. Part of the delay was caused by U. S. Commissioner James C. Martin, whose Corpus Christi office was decorated with a large “All the Way With LBJ” banner. Leonard and Purcell arrived in Martin’s office with a bond signed by Dr. Dunlap and other substantial Duval citizens, but Martin insisted that the bond had to be signed in his office, with Schroeder present. “But how do you expect us to get him out of George Parr’s jail?” Leonard asked. “That’s your problem,” Martin said. Leonard then dashed to a Corpus Christi bank and got a cashier’s check for $1,000, which Martin accepted as sufficient bond. Civil Rights Suit? Monday, Federal Judge Reynaldo Garza ruled that Schroeder was technically guilty of contempt when he mailed the primary records out of the county after he had received the subpoena and ordered that the $100 fine must be paid. But he deleted the jail sentence. Thursday, Schroeder’s attorney said their next move had not yet been plotted. Earlier, however, Purcell said he believed Schroeder “has legitimate cause for a civil rights suit against Duval County.” J.M. Baptists Criticize The Trend SAN FRANCISCO Conservative delegates from the West and Southwest, with strong Texas leadership, retained control of the Southern Baptist convention meeting in San Francisco and gave the impetus to a key resolution reaffirming faith in the Bible as “the infallible word of God.” The resolution accused some Baptist theologians of teaching false ideas about the Bible and urged trustees of church institutions “to take such steps as shall be necessary to remedy at once those situations where such views now threaten our historic position.” At the center of the controversy over Biblical infallibility was a book by Ralph H. Elliot, The Message of Genesis. Elliot, a teacher at Midwestern Seminary in Kansas City, said in his book that the creation of the world as set forth in Genesis should be interpreted figuratively rather than literally. The resolution, which passed 2-1, was introduced by K. Owen White, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Houston. His motion stated: “That the messengers of this convention reaffirm their faith in the entire Bible as the authoritative, authentic, infallible word of God. “That we express our abiding and unchanging objection to the dissemination of theological views in any of our seminaries which would undermine such faith in the historical accuracy and doctrinal integrity of the Bible . . .” A move to ban Elliot’s book, calling on the Baptist publishing house to withdraw all copies and cease circulating it, failed when Dr. W. T. James, editor of the Baptist Standard in Fort Worth, and others branded the effort as too extreme. Houston’s White, in speaking for his motion, argued: ..”We believe the Bible says what it means and means what it says. We find it difficult to accept some views which indicate it does not. “We do not believe any revelation that comes to us now will