ustxtxb_obs_1955_09_07_50_00004-00000_000.pdf

SAVE Do. it -Yourself EASY-TO-ERECT, LOW-COST NOW ONLY 21995 20′.x 10′ Fascia in natural aluminum finish Nothing Down 1.65 a week PROTECT your car. Erect the Childers Do-It-Yourself Carport yourself. Save up to 50%. Fabricated of structural steel and aluminum, the beautiful Childers Do-It-Yourself Carport will last as long as your home. So simple, so easy to assemble. Any home handyman can install it with ordinary tools. Beautiful, trim lines harmonize with any style home. Increases the value of your home. It’s self-supporting. Lower priced, attach-to-home model also, available. HOUSTON LETTER HOUSTON Not even a Fourth of July speech will draw much of a crowd nowadays, so nobOdy was surprised when fewer than 300 Houstonians turned out for a Founders Day observance in Hermann Park and a speech by H. R. Cullen, the philanthropist. That is about average attendance for Founders Day. Houston, as is often recited, was founded as a real estate promotion by those enterprising brothers, A. C. and J. K. Allen, in the summer after the Battle of San Jacinto. The same spirit of enterprise has persisted hereabouts for 119 years, whether for so large a devlopment as the Ship Channel or for any subsequent subdivision as the town keeps. spreading outward. The most recent such celebration, coming just before Founders Day and drawing much larger crowds, was aided by a band of Coushatta Indians, imported from Polk County. There was also a Davy Crockett Fort. In praising the sagacity and foresight of the Allen brothers, Mr. Cullen noted Big Spring Appeal Pending . In Austin; More Schools Decide To Delay Action With the legal situation clearing slowly, San Antonio and Austin schools accepted’ Negro pupils last week, but the public schools of Houston, Waco, and Laredo decided to delay any integration. The Texas Citizens’ Council suit against paying state mimey to integrated schoolsdenied in Big Spring district “We’d been up there a few days when the editor and the movie house man who had demanded his dismissal called and wanted to see Mewhinney. He told them he’d stay right there, for them to come see him. Well, they came, through the brush and up the creek, and they talked to Mewhinney. Told him movie attendance had been dropping off since his column had been suspended. Hubert came back after a little persuasion and probably a five buck raise. Movie attendance flowered again.” Mewhinney moved up to telegraph edi-. for and later sports editor, then went with the Associated Press in Dallas. There followed a series of other newspaper jobs and then, in 1945, the Texas Spectator. He joined with his old city editor on the Post, Horold Young, and along with Badger Reed they established the Spectator, expecting a release from the pressure of daily newspapering. The Spectator’s masthead proclaimed: “Fear no more the frown o’ the great; Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke.” It was a good life for a while. Jack o’ Diamonds, the cartoonist, said the Sunday night editorial sessions “frequently included quotations of Greek and Latin poetry by Mewhinney, a tremendous amount of general conversation, and a little sour mash whiskey.” Mewhinney soon came to feel, however, that the pressures of the daily newspaper were still present on the three-man weekly. He had little time for the brilliant essaysreading proof, corrected proofs, and corrected corrected proofs., “We had a lousy printer,” he says. The Spectator carried on until 1948, but less than a year after its inception Mewhinney was back on the Houston Post, which Mewhinney thinks is the best big daily in Texas. “I got a reputation as a liberal working on the Spectator,” he said, but I’m Roosevelt New Dealers, but I once voted for Tommy DeVrey. There was nothing political about the alliance; we were just good friends.” INDEED, Mewhinney startled -a good many of his liberal friends in 1952 by turning out an eloquent , convincing series defending Texas’s claim to its tidelands. Mewhinney’s THE TEXAS OBSERVER From aur Correspondent that his own. grandfather, Ezekiel Cullen, had shown no such confidence in the future of Houston. The earlier Cullen thought the capital of Texas should be on higher and drier ground \(as indeed it now “Houston is an abominable place,” said Ezekiel Cullen in 1838 in a speech to the Texas Congress. “It requires no other argument. to sustain this position than to look at , this wretched mudhole, this graveyard, the city of Houston …. courthas been appealed to the Supreme Court and may be heard this week. Meanwhile, Waco’s school board announced it will not integrate its firstgrade students this fall as previously planned because of the legal risk occasioned by the Council’s suit; and Laredo, -which has but half a dozen Negro scholastics out of 15,000 pupils, decided not to integrate until 1956-57 for the same reason. The ColIncil applied for a charter from the Secretary of State, and that office announced it has asked Attorney General John Ben Shepperd whether a char contention was that Texas fought for the land and won it, and that oil or no oil, he didn’t believe in “a small group of men in the Interior Department taking it away.” Said he after a moving description of “Old Ben Milam’s” siege of the Alamo The dearest thing that Texans can own -is not oil, not cattle, not moneynot even money from oil royalties that might educate their children. It is the bright, shining memory of how and why they inherited these things … “The late Sam Maeco’s blue-chip gambling joint on the seaward side of alveston Island is standing on \(what we nowend of a long pier protruding well beyond the low-tide mark. Sam built that pier so long so he could keep the Texas Rangers out. Little did he know that he was letting Oscar Chapman in.” So Mewhinney, a rebel by nature, is now in a way the child of a corporation. At 50, he is concerned with life’s economics. He fears no more the frown o’ the great, but he must live under it. The Post is therefore a lucky newspaper. He says of himself: “I should have done more. Perhaps I should have been a schoolteacher, but then I like newspapers. I’ve never written anything of importance. I can write. English prose effortlessly, but I never had the artist’s imagination.” A classic lament, but listen then to one of H. Mewhinney’s early sonnets \(circa Helen Unattained Of all that ever lent to me their lips Unpurposed, or in earnest, or in jest; Of all that learned with me how morning strips Remembrance of romance with certain test; Of all, I have this thing alone to tell: How, sleep upon her eyes, Queen Helen _ lay In each bright mouth’s encarmined citadel, But being wakened, softly went away. She sleeps on every mouth we never kissed; Lovely and unattained; desirable An undesirous; there awaiting tryst With one that seeks the fleeting beautiful In each new love; that winning speedily To kiss her, learns how little a Helen is she. “Sir. it would be better to legislate or Jive in tents in the high, healthy climate of the country than to inhale the poisonous atmosphere, drink the bad water and be subjected to the privations and wants of comfort incident to a life in Houston.” Ezekiel Cullen may have been wrong about; the real estate and it is obvious that he foresaw neither the Ship Channel nor the petrochemical industries. But he was a sound judge of climate, anyhow. The presentation of awardswhether for beauty, citizenship, sportsmanship, or whatnotis one of the fundamental devices for getting publicity. But a faint surprise was felt among the citizens when some functionaries of the National Association of Traveling Salesmen popped up here to give a salesmanship award to Mayor Roy Hofheinz. Since the city council had spent a large part of the summer in trying to remove the mayor from office \(an enterprise only was felt that the donors must not have been reading the papers attentively. Or perhaps they read only the Dallas papers. The president of the association is Elmer Wheeler of Dallas, coiner of the profession’s most famous apothegm: “Sell the sizzle; not the steak.” ter can be granted under the Council’s statement of its purpose as educational. The Harris County Council of Organizations, composed of 50 Negro groups, asked U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell to investigate the Citizens’ Council, which the Houston group said uses methods that “are outright conspiracy to deprive segments of the American citizens of their civil and economic rights as guaranteed by our Constitution.” Some leaders of the Council have urged economic pressure against Negroes seeking integration; others deny this intention. Three Negroes have been fired in La Grange and three in Rusk because of Negro petitions seeking integration. In Houston, the school board decided to hold up any integration until after the Big Spring suit is finally settled, but. liberal members of the board alluded to the possibility that some experimental integration may occur in January, 1956. The San Antonio independent school district will permit Negroes to enter any _high school unless they are already en , `rolled in the Negro high school. Integra tion will also be accomplished on other levels except for some limitation in five junior and four elementary schools be cause of possible overcrowding. Negroes were enrolling in Alamo Heights and other S.A. schools. Erect it in one afternoon Easy to follow instructions Modern design Architecturally approved Lasts as long as your home Texas Labor, 1955 Texas which is Much more hoTriogeneous in these terms,” Meyers said. Meyers suggests that the need for a social organization in industry comparable often to closely knit farm communi: ties from which the new employees come is one cause of unionism in Texas. In Jefferson County \(Beaumont-Port Arlesser extent, Houston, he finds that “the new pressures to conform impinge upon the ethic of the older work society” and bring about unionism. Fort Worth-Dallas is also a strong union area. THE TEXAS Legislature has, since early in the war. been developing a series of laws affecting labor which restrict unions. Under some of the provisions of these laws: Secondary boycottingthat is, a union attempting to coerce an employer into stopping business relations with some other employeris illegal; no person can be denied employment because of membership or non-membership in a union; any contract denying employment for this reason is held to be a conspiracy under the anti-trust laws, subject to civil and criminal sanctions; a strike is unlawful unless a union represents a majority of all the employees of an employer \(regardless of whether only a portion may violence by a union agent on a picket line is necessarily held to . be a felony, while a violent act by a company agent is not necessarily a felony; and picketing may not bring more than two pickets within 50 feet of any entrance of the premises being picketed: It is unlawful in Texas to fire a worker because of membership in a labor union, but there is no penalty in the statute for doing so. Texas also has the usual laws protecting-workers against dangerous or unwholesome working conditions. Many were on the statute books before the restrictive provisions began to be written into the law and cover obsolete equipment. Texas workers are protected against late pay checks and blacklisting, and any .employee who has been fired has a right to a full written statement of the reasons of his discharge if he works for a corporation. \(This does not apply, for ment and workmen’s compensation provisions are written into the law. Texas has no labor department. The “Labor Department” in the State Government regulates certain sports events. There is no legal machinery whereby Workers in intra-state Texas commerce may demand and obtain recognition for their union as a bargaining agent, as interstate workers may do under the TaftHartley law. You can order from your local dealer or mail your order direct to us for immediate shipment from the factory. H. MEWHINNEY OF THE POST Negives Enter the Texas Public Schools CHILDERS MANUFACTURING CO. 3620 W. 1 I th Street HOUSTON 8, TEXAS Page 4 September 7, 1955 B.S.