ustxtxb_obs_1957_10_04_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

Over $80 Million Insurance In Force HOME OFFICE = 5011 FANNIN, HOUSTON. First life insurance Company in Texas with $1,000,000 Capital and Surplus paid in cash prior to writing business ORV L FAUBUS AT YELL COUNTY FAIR DANVILLE, ARK. Orval Faubus, the puttyfaced, wide-mouthed, ,authentic and professional ‘country boy who is the governor of Arkansas, got away from it all for a day. All morning his office had been denying he was going anywhere, but a few reporters took their stand outside the hedge surrounding his salmon-brick mansion in Little Rock. About 9:30 he stepped out the back door into a blue Highway % Patrol car, and he and a! trooper lit out, trailing two cars of reporters behbid him, for Danville, in Yell Founty, the heart of the Arkansas broiler country 150 miles north of Texarkana. The caravan whistled at 85 miles an hour along rolling, winding, and occasionally pebbly roads through the yellow pine, oak, gum, and fall-rusting shrubs of. Ouchita National Forest. As it passed through towns filling station attendants waved hap _pily at the Governor, but a Negro sweeping the sidewalk in front of a drug store saw hini, turned to a friend, and, curling his lip on the first syllable, said: “Faubus.” What kind of a man is he? He was returning to his i kind of country and his kind of people. Danville, a town of 892 people at the foot of the Ozarks, is more Midwestern than Southern, and its racial problem is defined by the fact that only one in 20 Danvillians is Negro. It is .shuff-dippin’, chicken-raisin’, Gdd-fearin’ country. The people wer gathering that day for the Yel County free fair. At 11 sharp the patrol ‘car coasted down the ‘folks -lined Main Street. Applaudin , whispeople welcomed Faub among them. “Just stay in there boy!” said an old man in a brown pinstripe shirt, with rubber lands to hold up his sleeves and Suspenders to hold up his pants. fleshy young girl in the last of her teens, hips shifted to the sidej in her tight beltless faded jeans, shook his hand as he passed. Faubus, dressed in a silkweave harcoal blue suit and a red and black tie, mounted a stanfl at the intersection in front of “Danville Hotel, Home Cooked Meals” and next to, a big red stop sign; and he started telling them. “Those of you who haVe read some of the national publications will note,” he said in a flat but fast-moving drawl, “that I I have been widely lowrated as a country boy. I’m glad to be home and I’m glad to be back with ;ny people.” Applause spread through the people assembled in the streets. An old man, faded blue dress shirt buttoned up to the neck, suspenders, khakis, limp black felt hat, gold rim glasses, lined face, sunken cheeks, turned to a friend in the crowd and smiled, “That’s right!” Faubus hoed and watered their earthy vanity. Here at the county fair, he told them, they could see “the display of the products of your toil” in “the way of #fe which produces the kind of people of which there are no finer on the face of the earth.” They were, he told them, “the salt of the earth, good moral Christian lawabiding hardworking country people” who work “by the sun that shines and the rain that falls” and whose county fairs reach back to the district fairs of old Europe and are seen “in the art galleries in the works of the greatest artists.” Of late the farmers have been losing powerare no longer “the most powerful bloc” in Congress. Ezra Benson, he told them, wants “to give to the big and take from the little” \(“That’s right!” said “The liberty-loving small freeholder” is a rare breed now: the Yankee reporters were probably seeing more of them at one time now than they ever had before. These are the breed, said the Governor, who “furnished the Minute Men of the Revolution,” “stood in the ranks when the first shots of the Revolution were fired at Lexington and Concord, then stood in the roadways as the British ran, finally laying on the ground in Boston with their tongues hanging out like dogs!” The small freeholders are “the backbone of the country. Theirs were the feet that bled at Valley Forge!” So, said Orval Faubus, “if the national magazines think that displaying me as a country boy is displeasing to me, then they are again mistaken. I am proud of my honesty and arduous toil from the ranks of people such as you are, faces stained by the sun of honest labor.” True, there f are “my detractors.” Take one of them, an attorney who used to be an instructor at the UniVersity of Arkansas who “had to be kicked out because of his drinking and carousing which was a corrupting influence to your sons and daughters” \(apa man best by the men who criticize him, said the Governor. But as quickly as he brought up this unpleasant point he passed over it and told the people to go on with their holiday. He dropped to the street. “Good people are behind you,” a lady in a blue dress told him. He hopped back up on the stand and generously admonished the crowd to treat the “visiting reporters” with “the same courtesy and respect as you would treat your neighbors.” In the street again, starting uptown for the county courthouse, he was told by a young field hand, “Governor, if our people here aren’t a hundred percent for you I haven’t heard otherwise.” “He’s certainly our kind of people, the Governor,” said a man at the microphone. `Not a Homburg’ ..The county courthouse, a houselike two-story building of white painted plaster with a spreading elm before it, is at the head of Main Street. The parade assembled there. Faubus stood alone a while on the reddish ,dirt and pebbles at the edge of the street. Three small boys came up, and he shook their hands. He went forward to them eagerly, as though he was glad not to be alone there, with the reporters standing off a distance, watching. A horse was led to him, a handsome tan palomino quarterhorse mare. He mounted it easily. Then a huge American flag was brought to him. Reins in left hand, staff in right, he sat well in the saddle. He said it was the first time he’d been on a horse in ten years, but then he reflected a minute and amended this, saying “hardly a year passes” he’s not on a horse. He had on a grey felt hat, the brim turned up all the way around. A reporter asked him what kind of hat it was, and he laughed and said, “All I know it isn’t a Homburg.” He was gentle with the reporters even though some of their publications had pilloried him. Buford Compton, Yell County sheriff for 16 years, a tall tough aging man under a white Stetson, took the Arkansas flag and went ahead on his mount. Together he and Faubts stood at a corner of the courthouse lawn and watched the parade pass. And it was a paradegreenjacketed high school band, a float bearing a pink-and-white horn of plenty and seven high school queens with gold-painted cardboard crowns, ribbon-draped cal s full of happy young students, a “Gospil” Train, “Glory Bound … Esau I hat but Jacob I love,” with a middleaged woman in a white uniform on board flourishing a Bible and telling of her personal glories with it … 77-year-old George Calvin Gooch, leaning on his baby blue broomstick cane, hobbled up to Faubus on his horse and told him from under his white stubble beard: “I’m glad you’re the man you are.” Faubus and Compton rode side by side up the street, flags flapping. Faubus carried the American flag because he has a gift for countervailing symbols, for ordering the National Guard to prevent integration as he boasts he has children in integrated schools, far defying federal courts as he withdraws the National Guard under a federal court order, for personally opposing a special legislative session as he says he’ll probably call it. It was a sight almost as incredible as the federal troops in the street and on the school grounds in Little Rock, this picture of a smiling, nodding, jogging governor and the old sheriff riding down the Main Street of Danville with those flags flying. The people greeted Faubus along the way with short bursts of strenuous applause. “We’re for you!” “Stay with ’em Orval!” A merchant jerkily flashed a V sign at him. Perhaps forty Negroes were in the crowds, watching somberly, none applauding, but a few smiling. The parade wound up at the high school gym of the Danville “Little Johns.” Here Arkansans of all ages enclosed Faubus and lionized him. He was reaching around waists to get at hands in the crowd. “Thank yore doin’ a good job,” said one. A high school girl said everybody liked him, “leastwise around here.” Said a white mother: “My little girl wants to shake hands with you. She’s of school age.” he really was christened “Boss” because his parents knew another boy named Boss and had never heard the name on anybody else, mounted the horn-of-plenty float where the seven high school queens stood waiting. Seven Queens He had on a dark blue suit, too, and a red tie with black dots. Skinny, angular featured, with a beard-shadowed chin, he told the crowd in an emphatic but thintextured voice that shortly they would be presented “the grandest product that this county produces” \(girls ranking chickens in “The man who needs no introduction,” said Boss Mitchell, has a life story “similar to a story II book, a fiction, only it’s true. The Honorable Orval E. Faubus was borned in a rural house, on a rural farm, at the foot of the Ozarks.” He was educated, “not in one of those ‘big consolidated schools, but in a little red schoolhouse.” “Governor Faubus was always ambitious. He yearned to accomplish all the things any farm boy would want to.” If the youngsters in the crowd would follow his example, they, too, Might “climb the ladder of success.” Faubus, who, during this discourse, had crossed his arms, leaned back, and gazed off toward the horizon, as in a reverie, came to and told them it was nice to get away from “the hectic turmoil” of the last few weeks. He crowned the seven queens, obligingly kissing the prettiest one on the cheek for the cameramen \(but she was not crowned the Queen Queen, because they have decided it is better to have a lot Then t h e people clustered around him again. “Proud for you.” “I know you’re tard shakin’ hands but I’m just proud of you.” “If you wanta run ten. times we’ll be for you every time.” Mrs. Lilli Wells, 76, a lovely little old lady, came up to him merrily and told him, “I’m not agoin’ home till I shake your hand. You’re a man right down my alley.” He laughed and hugged her. “Ohhh!” she screamed, clapping her hands, “I got a hug from the Governor!” An intent looking woman of middle age shook his hand. “My mother said shake hands for her. She said you was gain’ right down her line o’ business.” While Faubus disappeared for a private luncheon with Boss Mitchell and other local politicos, the people and their children ate “kotton kandy” and popcorn and amused themselves at the fair At the ferris wheel, the whirlaround, the roll-o-plane, the pennypitch, the bingo shed, the junior train girding a small and faded American flag, the toy cars, the tan and white ponies on re, volving steel hitches, the tents with popguns and prizes and slatternly girls smoking cigarettes waiting for the customers: The big tent sideshow of “Hi Steppen Glamorettes, Exotic Burlesque Review” with the barker calling for customers before the show starts in three minutes … two and a half minutes … half a minute … and Arkansan males young and old passing inside, drawn there by already-disappeared nude-thigh samples in the flesh and silhouettes of anatomically wondrous girls standing marvelously on clouds of blue, red, green, yellow, and purple balloons. It was as wholesome, as country, and as American as any county fair ever was, and whatever hate and passion Arkansans have loosed is inside the nation’s spirit. Faubus never went out on the fairgrounds but he toured all the exhibits in the sheds. In the home demonstration section he looked at the preserves and the safety exhibits and the flowers, and a 42-year-old Negro, Henry Torrence, shook his hand and said “carry on” and told reporters he thinks segregation is best. A man in a brown suit told him horses are “a sacred matter” and he said back “I wouldn’t profane it for the world.” Out in. the sun Boss Mitchell said he thought Faubus ought to be nominated for President. Left hand in pocket, right hand free for shaking, Faubus was relaxed, happy, confident, genial. The people were not wrought up, they were having a good time, and they obviously liked Orval Faubus. “My cousin carries the mail there. You know him?” Faubus asked one. “Well,” he told another, “I’ve got a lot of relatives in Oklahoma. My grandmother was …” `How You Know’ He passed through the hog exhibit. Amid the smells of sawdust and swine he said “That’s a nice looking Hampshire,” and the major domo obligingly leaped into the stall and kicked the garglingmad 600-pounder and pulled him to his fret by his tail. Faubus explained to reporters that the razorbacks used to run wild in the Ozarks but are scarce now, are found mostly in the swamps of Louisiana. In the acrid-smelling chickenshed, superintendent of poultry George Ryan showed him all the chickens, ducks, Japanese quail, and bobwhites. A mother introduced her son, who wordlessly shook with the Governor with his left hand, his right one being occupied with a half-eaten candied apple on a stick. Ryan took a chicken out of its cage and had Faubus feel its sturdy breast. “And these’re silkies Dja ever feel of his fuzz?” Faubus hadn’t and did. In the cattle shed Faubus and troupe were greeted by the pleasanter bucolic fragrance of cow manure and hay. A young man in khakis told him “up here better’n 99 percent of the people are for your” A reporter, cleaning off his shoes, asked the Governor how he had avoided the stuff. “That,” said Orval Faubus, “is how you know a country boy.” Outside again five women accosted him and told him they were 100 percent for him. His reply: “I’ve got a sister in Fullerton.” One of the women crossed her arms and rocked back and said, “Well, Well!” Faubus turned to reporters. “This is the grass roots. This is the people,” he said. Ninety miles away federal troops were patrolling Central High School with bayonets fixed and ready. RONNIE DUGGER The Stump