ustxtxb_obs_1955_03_14_50_00004-00000_000.pdf

CHILDERS TRADEMARK !I A I UMINUM Just four pieces, that’s all you have to put together with a Childers door canopy. It comes complete in cartonyou can put it up in 20 minutes. CHILDERS MFG, CO. 3620 W. I Ith St. r Houston 8, Texas N7PW…M.TOMPIIRWAINOVIMIIMMII,110,11011041getr iffIFWOreir.if , . . A NEW BALINESE ROOM is in the planning stage and should be ready by’the end of the year. It burned at the end of a Galveston pier, above, and Galveston’s tourist trade has suffered badly since then. “One of the greatest weaknesses of the teaching profession has been that they have not had the initiative and courage to stand up for their rights.” The teachers applauded this. Speaking of the political clique the ousted group believes acted against them. Ward went on: “They tried to start at the bot Open tom by taking away your political and professional rights. They could not get past the man at the top and go down the ladder. Is that right?” Many of the teachers said aloud: “That’s. right.” “Yes.” “There is no protection for a teacher in Texas,” Mrs. W. M. Crabtree, 45-year-old MA -graduate who had taught in Irving five years told this newspaper. “There is no tenure law to protect us from any capricious action of a Board. “This is all you can saythis I will not take,” said the gray-haired, dignified Mrs. Crabtree. Another teacher, 35-year-old Mrs. Sarah Kendrick, who taught third grade at Keyes Elementary until she was replaced, declared: “As a profession we have never stood together strongly. They say that the teachers struck against the children. We felt that we were doing this as something for our children and for ourselvesthe kind of community we havethe independence of teachers from political coercion. “And we’re fighting for our profession,” Mrs. Kendrick s a i d. “Many of us worked hard for what we have, and we have left it for a cause and a principle.” She said that teachers in Irving worked in “confusion and insecurity.” “We knew that certain school people had been questioned on their voting in a precinct election,” she said. “The School Board made it known that.they objected to the fact that teachers and principals were participating in precinct con ventions. How did we know that we wouldn’t be the next ones to be picked off one by one?” A citizens’ group, the Federation for the Betterment of Irving, is led by Jim Biddle, business prof at SMU in Dallas. He says the group is against “those who continue to stir up the community and try to close our schools.” The federation “supports the Board in all actions in breaking the strike,” Biddle -said. Robert B. Farson, vice-chairman of the federation, said that he took no interest in the school fight until the teachers “literally went on a strike against the children..” “We felt it was not right to let an issue between the adults injure the children,” Farson said. Langston told this newspaper that internally the school system is in “very fine” shape, although the community is still divided. He said that all new teachers had been required to present their teachers’ certificates. “We saw every one of them,” he said. However, one of the new grade school teachers said she had never taught a day in her life before., and that she did not have a teachers’ certificate, although she hoped to get one “next summer.” spair. Not being financed at the moment for such diversions, I stopped at a Gulf station to go to the bathroom. There was a sign at the door telling of a city ordinance forbidding tourists to change clothes in public restrooms. I can hear the city fathers now. “People don’t come to. Galveston to go to church.” “Make ’em pay, I say.” And so on. The Turf Grill is downtown. There is a cafe with good food. You go through a’ lobby into the gambling hall. Men and boys stand at the marble tables trying to line up numbers on the electrical board. Once in a long while somebody gets ahead and quits, and a man behind the rim pays him. I saw one guy win $15, but after they paid him they rolled the machine away and put in one that was better adjusted. The rim is a horseshoe-shaped table, chest high, where more penny-ante gamblers sit on high stools and “pull tips.” For a dime you pull a. “tip,” a number on a slip of paper. It it’s a good one you have a shot at a small jackpot. There’s no limit to how many t5ps you can pull. If you and the other players use up one tip sheet, there are many more. Sort of a socialized punchbcard g a m e. There’s big money in it if you’re on the right aide of the rim. The house men were knee-deep in discarded scraps of paper. I paid for some of them. To the right of the rim, a tickertape, much enlarged by a projection device, flashes in the late basketball returns. A blackboard that lists the day’s odds and returns covers the right wall. A sign hangs above the rim: “10 per cent tax on, all bets.” In the middle of the room, men sit and stand watching television or the tickertape returns. The Turf Room is upstairs. A character out of Damon Runyon stands watch at the elevator. He told me it was “off limits” to me because I was a newspaperman. You’re required by such places to show identification, Thenceforth, I was a foraging student or a seaman on leave. The Turf Room has been the plushest place in Galveston since the burning of the Balinese Room. I’m told they have a roulette wheel and four crap tables up there. I walked around, taking in the second and third-rate joints that honeycomb the town. The island is in a depression, as Sam Serio, the chief bookkeeper for the Maceo interests in 1953, told me. The reopening of the Balinese Room should pep things up, he said. All the “clubs” serve mixed drinks, get raided very occasionally always on a Friday nightpay their fines, and are never closed. One-armed bandits are in most of these clubs, even though the 53rd Legislature made it a felony punishable. by two years in prison Page 4 March 14, 1955 THE TEXAS OBSERVER allIPOINOMMI.IMM011. Special Report merely to have one of them on the premises. One evening a seaman friend of mine and I made the rounds together. He has a lot of friends, good people, in the clubs. We played friendly craps and talked and drank in one place for a while, then we drove to another place and got drawn into a bigger dice game at a table in a back room. A whiteskinned, dark-haired girl with a defiant decollete kept tossing the dice across the soft green felt. Fascinating. She lost, too. One day I dropped in at a horse parlor. There’s no signjust a door and a stairway. The front wall of the room upstairs lists all the horses ‘racing at the various tracks and the latest odds and scratches. Returns came in by telephone and are simultaneously recorded by a man at the phone, who reads them aloud, and by a man who keeps the board up-ta-the-minute. I bought a racing form, checked the sixth at Fair Grounds, put $2 on Sister Bigger to win, and she paid $10.80. I heard about the Longhorn Bar from another friend. It’s across the street from the First National Bank of Galveston \(behind which is a this long, narrow bar, you hear the projector whirring at the back. A cold, unfriendly guy, sort of ner vous, serves you a drink at the bar. “What’s going on tonight?” “Oh, pictures, some movies back there.” “Good ones?” `Yeah, -pretty good.” “How much?” “Dollar apiece if I can get three people wanta see ’em.” There were threea guy about 23, a Chinese fellow in his late twenties, and I. We paid iv dollars and saw the show. You go back through a passageway into a small storeroom. He’s set up a projector at one end, some chairs, and a portable roll-it-up screen. He shows two films lasting half an hour. He doesn’t let women see them. Two girls about 21 came in with a little guy in a zoot coat and they wanted to see, too, but he said no. Two years ago, there were 42 whore-houses in a roaring foursquare-block , area. Post Office , Street was the main stem. The streets used to be jammed with cars and people every night. Most of them have closed up. It’s a ghost town now. The run-down. two-story colonial houses can’t be unloaded on sellers for a sixth of their value; they stand empty and lonely in the dark. The word about Post Office Street got around. There are about twelve brothels in Galveston now. Half a dozen of them moved two or three blocks further into town on Post Office. The worldly ones in Galveston say that many of the bawds simply scattered into the residential areas when most of the houses were closed. Others left town. My first walk down P.O., a voice called from behind a latticework door at the stairway of a brothel. “Hey honey comere. Comere honey, Cornere won’t ya?” I stopped and we talked. She was a squat tired blonde from Pennsylvania. She said business was bad; not many ships coming in, the Balinese closed. She said she was gonna catch a train to Pennsylvania next week. “I can make more money legitimate up there, so what’s the percentage?” , RD \(Next: “I Ain’t Gonna Tell You Beard charged in an interview at his home that he was fired because the trustees were “pressured by a small political clique that has been joined by a few radical people.” He said it seemed to him that it was the liberals versus the conservatives, although not without exceptions. The “radicals,” he said, try to discredit the schools; “seem to have the idea that the school is in the wrong to accept federal and state aid for school lunches and help on buildings”; want the State to help less and the local community more; and “have the attitude that the school is not any good because it does not require Latin or has some vocational courses.” Mrs. Loeta Guard, a Board member whom Beard blames for much of the turmoil, “says that people’ who work with their hands ought not to go to high school,” Beard said. “She believes the school is to train minds, not hands.” Mrs. Guard was unavailable for commentas were all the Board members except Charles Young, the chairman. The people of Irving will vote on March 26 on whether to abolish the Irving school district. The real issue is whether to fire the present school trustees and re-instate till fired superintendent, principals, teachers, and auxiliary workers, who number between 165 and 215. Here is the pattern of the teachers’ grievances as it emerged from the teacher-principal meeting last week: A number of Irving teachers participated in summer preciwillib., conventions and caused them `to go for Ralph Yarborough against Allan Shivers. Dr. Beard has related that Young, the Board of Educa tion chairman, came to his home the evening after the conventions and said he had had a call of protest about this activity. “Don’t you think they had he right to go the same as anybody else?” Beard says he asked Young. ” `Yesbut I got a telephone call,’ Young replied. ” `Do you expect me to do anything about it?’ ” ‘No but the call indicates there’s gonna be trouble’.” This conversation has become a part of the situation in the minds of all the teachers and principals. L. C. L_ehmberg, 49 yea’ old Irving teacher said he told by a community leader, Spencer, that he and other t should not have. taken part precinct conventions. “They not to go up there and \(` ontinued on next r Galveston Seedy but How to Protect Your Doorways . from Rain in ,.ust 20 Minutes . Install this Childers Door Canopy yourself with just pliers and screwdriver. “;;M:143r The attractive low-cost way to protect your doorways is this Childers Aluminum Door Canopy. So easy to install you can cio it yourself. Dress up that uncovered doorway today. Save at this special sale price! Beautiful styling that harmonizes with the lines of any home. Painted by a special process to stay new looking for years. Every Childers Awning and Door Canopy is fully guaranteed. “e s t :: price $29 After sale you pay up to $47.50 Order direct or write for the name of your nearest Childers dealer.