ustxtxb_obs_1957_08_02_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

Sheriff Boycotts Newsman 1956 AGAIN? L B J for Vote Bill ROSENBERG-RICHMOND One day last week a tall, eager young journalist walked into the Fort Bend County courthouse and cordially inquired about the condition of Sheriff Ruel Zenith Cowart, who had suffered minor injuries in a car wreck. To the newsman’s surprise, the deputy on duty refused to answer. Instead he pointed to a pencilled message on the department bulletin board which read: “Any officer who intentionally gives out any news or other information to the Fort Bend Reporter will be relieved of his duties.” It was the first indication to 25year-old Clymer Wright, editor and co-owner of the Reporter, that his six-week anti-gambling and prostitution campaign was being felt. He pulled out his notepad, OJohn Ben Shepperd told the Texas Sheriff’s Association convention at Houston recent decisions of the U. S. Supreme Court and the Texas Court of Appeals have made it tough for law enforcement men and agencies. OGalveston’s A. J. Adams, once high up in the Maceo syndicate, went on trial in federal court at Austin for income tax evasion. The government claims he evaded payment of $87,000 in three years. OThe Travis County grand jury, third in a row to give most of its time to statehouse scandal, has other business until Aug. 1, DA Les Procter said. OState Senator Charles Her ring told Austin Kiwanians he favors cutting membership in the legislature by half and raising the salaries of those left. OThe Houston Post carried as a double truck advertisement, paid for by “Patriotic Citizens From All Sections of the State,” a recent speech of Railroad Commission Chairman Olin Culberson. Culberson’s message: Stop imports of foreign oil. OState Rep. Jerry Sadler says all this talk of a special legislative session is “playing politics.” He thinks no special session is necessary. OMrs. R. D. Randolph, of the Democrats o f Texas and Texas’s national Democratic committeewoman, says she’ll spend three days in El Paso beginning Sept. 21 as guest of the El Paso DOT. The NLRB has dismissed charges of unfair labor practices made against Hicks-Hayward Co., a clothing manufacturing concern, by the AFL-CIO Amalgamated Clothing Workers last October. OBenJack Cage says he may get around to coming back to Texas by Aug. 7 or 8. Meantime, his old company, ICT Corp., has picked three new names, Unior Big State Industries. Directors are checking to see if the names already are in use. OThe Dallas Citizen Charter Association, active in city council races since 1931, plans to reorganize on a year-’round, “fullfledged political party basis,” according to its president, Laurence R. Melton. OThe Railroad Commission, for the second month in a carefully copied down the warn ing, and set about outlining a new editorial blast for the next issue. For 32 years, the tiny Fort Bend County Reporter \(circulation ing any trouble getting news from Bob Bray the sheriff’s office. But last February young Wright bought a half interest in the paper and proceeded to inject a sharp new editorial view. Wright, a 6-foot-one, 195-pound journalism graduate from Mississippi Southern, started out slowly but gained momentum fast. He resolved to make up with determination what he lacked in experience. In 4.1 i s sparsely populated county, which for years had had row, ordered production on a 13day basis. OThe State Highway Commis sion has okayed the highestever operating budget for the Highway Department. It totals $72,498,650. ODallas has been awarded the annual “Prestige of France” certificate of the Paris, France, Committee for Prestige and Publicity. OThe Civil Aeronautics Board reported that there were 26 near collisions of airplanes over Texas in January, February, and March of this year. The University of Texas an nounced completion of an $850,000 ROTC building. The announcement said $16 million worth of other buildings are in progress or have been authorized. ODallas school board presi dent Edwin Rippy said the new state anti-integration law to deny funds to public schools which desegregate is “probably unconstitutional and won’t stand up in a court of law.” The school board will “follow the law of the land,” Rippy said. The U. S. Court at New Orleans has ordered Dallas to desegregate its schools with “all deliberate speed.” ORep. Joe Pool, Dallas, an nounces he will oppose Republican Congressman Bruce Alknows the GOP has doublecrossed Dallasites “who thought they were voting for a conservative party.” OGov. Price Daniel is still ad amant about his special session for October, and he scoffs at Waggoner Carr’s idea they might serve without pay. The Speaker is polling legislators on that idea, but Daniel says he’ll pay no attention to the results and that they will “mean nothing.” Daniel says there will be plenty of money en hand for the costs of the session. OThad Hutcheson, GOP state chief, says his party will seek legislative seats in such areas as Dallas, Bexar, Tarrant, Harris, the Midland area of West Texas, and Hill Country counties such as Kerr and Gillespie. OU. S. Judge Lamar Cecil of Beaumont denied a temporary injunction to open Marshall’s city swimming pool to Negroes. He said it might lead to violence, and “I would as soon be hurt or killed myself as to sign an order which might result in someone else being hurt or killed.” several bawdy houses and gambling joints operating virtually unmolested by local law enforcement officers, it was inevitable, friends said, that he would crusade for cleanup. He started his crusade shortly after Atty. Gen. Will Wilson had cracked down on wide open Galveston County, quickly taking advantage of Wilson’s statement that the cleanup would be extended to any county where local law enforcement wasn’t doing the job. Wright really drew Sheriff Cowart’s ire when he credited State Liquor Control Board agents with taking the lead in a recent raid on open saloons, bawdy houses, a n d gambling joints. The young editor reported that the raid was inconsequential because all the cases were misdemeanors filed in city court, which could only mean fines for the offenders. He urges padlock injunctive action and felony gambling charges. Another point of disagreement between the youthful editor and the veteran sheriff has been whether the county isor has beenopen. The sheriff declared: “Fort Bend County is shut tight as far as I know, and it’s my business to know. Atty. Gen. Wilson, the Governor, or any other state law enforcement officers are welcome to visit Fort Bend County any time they want to. I have nothing to hide.” Wright reported in his news columns that two nights after the gamblers and bawdy house operators were fined in city court, the places were wide open again. He said he sent men into the places to check and “they dropped money in both dice and poker games.” His little paper sold out on news stands all over Rosenberg when he took pictures of cars crowded around one of the cathouses in Richmond a shot showing half a dozen automobiles. “It caused some stir,” Wright grinned. “All the guys were joshing each other about seeing his car in the picture. Of course, I guess the wives of a couple of the fellows weren’t joshing when they saw the pictures,” he added. One advertiser who runs a grocery store reported Wright’s’ paper sold out on his stand 20 minutes after they were delivered. Editor Wright has not restricted his crusade to the news columns. In one editorial he noted: di . . . It’s a disgrace that gamblers and their associates have to be arrested by law enforcement officers from outside the county … It also reflects badly on county officers when the Reporter has to point out gambling operations …” He later warned in an editorial that “…. Attorney General Wilson says that law enforcement officers who fail to enforce the law are as guilty as criminals and will be treated as such.” Sheriff Cowart said his news ban on the Fort Bend Reporter was not applicable to other newspapers and news agencies. He declared: “As far as I’m concerned Mr. Wright is no newspaperman. I have tried to cooperate with him as I have with other newspapermen but he has not acted in. good faith.” Wright, busily preparing another anti-gambling barb, paused to comment: “He’d consider I was acting in good faith if I’d stop printing the truth …. I think I’ll be able to get enough news without the sheriff’s help.” WASHINGTON Texas’s two senators this week were eyeing election days as they bid in speeches, news releases, and legislative acts for areas of political support in and out of Texas. Lyndon Johnson, who, it seems, wants the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, said in public and in letters to constituents that he will vote for, and, what is probably more important, work for, passage of a right-to-vote civil rights bill with “proper safeguards.” Ralph Yarborough, up for election to a full Senate term in 1958, maintained his threeweek-old barrage of criticism of the Administration on the question of oil imports. There were signs the tactics were paying off, for both. Yarborough drew praise for his “brilliant work” in helping to pressure the Administration into asking voluntary cutbacks of foreign oil by the importers \(from Railroad Commissioner Ernest lieved to have made himself more palatable as a national candidate to Negroes and to Democratic liberals outside the South. Lest Yarborough should be charged with shining up to Big Oil, he carefully teed off on the Administration from a posture of “… the whole economy of the Southwest and the security of the national are being undermined by the dangerously high level” of oil imports. This is also the posture assumed by independent oil men, many of whom, especially from Houston and the Permian Basin, have contributed heavily to past Yarborough campaigns. Yarborough also pitched a strong antiRepublican line, saying the Administration was out to “Bensonize” the oil industry. Johnson’s specific stand on the AUSTIN Three of the working committees of the Texas State AFL CIO convention came up with recommendations that union people read the Texas Observer, and all their reports were adopted by the convention here this week. The public relations committee recommended “that the Texas State AFL-CIO and its affiliates support, insofar as they are able, the Texas Observer and such other liberal and objective publications as have proved themselves to be fair to the organized labor movement of Texas.” The convention’s committee on political education produced a longer resolution on the Observer, also adopted by the convention. It reads: “The members of the AFL-CIO in Texas need reliable, unbiased, and factual information in order to make political decisions intelligently. The daily press of Texas in most localities has proven its inability or unwillingness to present the whole story on the political events, the candidates, the scandals, and the issues in our state. civil rights bill was this: He is “ready and willing to support and vote for” the right-to-vote bill if it provides for jury trials in criminal injunction cases. This is the stand taken also by many Northern Democrats and Republicans. Columnist Roscoe Drummond said the Johnson position makes him “a formidable candidate” for the Democratic presidential nomination, since “the senior senator from Texas is at one stroke removing from his path the single barrier which … has made it impracticable for the Democratic Party to select a Southerner … the barrier of opposition to civil rights.” Yarborough’s civil rights stand, meantime, was unclear. He has written Texans that he is against “forced integration,” that he had recently said this publicly, but “hadn’t seen anything in the Texas papers” about it. However, it seems certain he, too, will vote for the right-to-vote bill sought by Johnson, the one observers here believe is likely to emerge at the end of the current Senate debates. Final action on civil rights by the Senate is forecast for midAugust and estimates of the Congressional session ending run from two weeks to a month and a half after that. Much important legislationincluding appropriations of $33.7 billion for Defense and $3.6 billion for Agriculture for the corning fiscal year await the ending of the civil rights hassle. Also stalled are: The foreign aid appropriations bill, in the neighborhood of $3.5 billion and the $880 . million rivers and harbors appropriations measure, which includes funds for the Atomic Energy Commission and military public works. tionary opinions of most other Texas publications be balanced. “We urge all members of the AFL-CIO to read the Texas Observer, and we endorse the proposal advanced by the education and research committee of this convention to increase the circulation of the Texas Observer among the AFL-CIO leaders in the state.” The proposal of the education and research committee was: “The committee recommends that all officers and members. carefully study the weekly publication, The Texas Observer, and, upon finding it favorable, enact the following program: “a. Buy subscriptions for executive board, business agents, shop stewards. b. Buy subscriptions forpublic information, that is, to in