ustxtxb_obs_1958_02_07_50_00001-00000_000.pdf

SDEC vs. DOT: No Decision AUSTIN The state Democratic committee has ‘agreed to study Governor Daniel’s plan to abolish precinct conventions in favor of elected precinct delegates, a party registration bill to keep Republicans out of Democratic Party affairs, and ways to prevent “usurpation” of the party name. In vowing strict adherence to state laws on party matters, state party leaders also pledged indirectly to honor the selections of senatorial district caucuses for members of the state committee as the law requires. These were the responses of Governor Daniel’s controlling officers to the onslaught of the code-of-ethics armed Democrats of Texas group. While a rhubarb may be developing over whether a subcommittee was instructed to report on the proposed code within the month, the liberal minority on the committee received the vivid impression that this was the case. These rnPtters were obscured by the more colorful if less concrete by-plays of insult and inveighing that have characterized politics in one-party Texas for some time, to wit: National committeeman Byron Skelton of Temple called on DOT to disband at once so that Texas Democrats could unite behind Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson and go to the 1960 convention “as one man.” National committeewoman Mrs. R. D. Randolph of Houston, asked if she would disband DOT, replied, “Indeed not. For one thing I couldn’t if I tried. For another, why should I, when we have ’em on the run?” Carl Hill of Amarillo, a cornmittee member, said the DOT might lead to the control of Texas by “northern labor bosses.” Dist. Judge Jim Sewell, Corsicana, and Fagan Dickson, Austin, responded with feeling. Mrs. Randolph and Mrs. Marietta Brooks of Austin, vice-chairman of the state committee, met briefly, did not smile, saw the photographers, and smiled \(but too late to evade the shutter of photographer Russell Leesee Jerry Holleman, president of the Texas AFL-CIO and member of DOT’s board of directors, said the Daniel plan on precinct con-s ventions would “do away with the people’s forum” in Texas party politics and “take the democracy out of the Texas Democratic Party.” DOT met Friday night and adopted a resolution suggesting a Houston Post story that DOT might back Sen. Yarborough for president to foil Sen. Johnson’s possible candidacy was “a planted rumor.” DOT asked the reporters for more details on its reported position. DOT, said the resolution, has taken only one position on 1960: it will support the party’s nominees. `Loyal and Active’ There were perhaps 150 spectators at the state committee meeting in the Driskill, divided about half pro-DOT, half proSDEC. Among those present: Tom Moore, Waco DA; Rep. Joe Pool, Dallas; Holleman and Fred Schmidt, state AFL-CIO executives; Sen. George Moffett, Chillicothe; Rep. Tony Korioth, Sherman; Alex Dickie, president of the Texas Farmers’ Union and DOT vice-president; Rep. Bob Hughes, Dallas; John Osorio, former insurance commissioner; Zollie Steakley, Secretary of State. Nineteen reporters, one of the largest assemblages of the political press corps in recent months, covered the SDEC session. Photographers steamed up and cocked their cameras every time Mrs. Brooks and Mrs. Randolph neared each other. Mrs. H. H. Weinert of Seguin, former national committeewoman, proposed as the meeting opened “Nsolk 7:\\. .;:4 Photographs by Russell Lee A CONFRONTATION Mrs. Randolph : a Code of Ethics ; Gov. Daniel : a Change of System The one great rule of composition is to speak the truth. Thoreau Vol. 49 HARLINGEN He comes into his house he never locks about ten o’clock at night. He is six feet four and a half, sockless in sandals, khakis, wrinkled shirt ; his large hands hang gently at his sides, conspicuous there, as though they held things. He is sixty-three. His face is enfolded in gentle agedness. He says hello and sits down on a hard folding chair too small for him and tells you he has been in Matamoras, across the border, giving medicine and bread to a few hundred Mexicans at his clinic there. He found one girl whose finger had grown to the palm of her hand, and he’s going to bring her over tomorrow at noon, paroled to him by the customs officials, so she can get treatment from Dr. Pearson, Dr. Bernard Pearson, the surgeon who operates free on the poor he brings him. He has found many Mexican children, their eyes glued shut with an eye sickness, and penicillin stops that. He brings out a little bottle with a bulb attached, he opens his palm and sprays a yellow fluid on it and says, “You see, it’s sanitary, they sent me twenty gallons of it, it cures it right up.” He gets up and takes off his sandals, made in Mexico cheap, he says, and he stands flat, his big bare feet on the board floor. He walks past an old iron cooking stove \(“Perfection”: four round lids: a stovepipe rising and curvbasin held to the wall by wooden braces. He pours some water from a large bowl into a little bowl and lifts one foot and washes it, and then the other, then his hands; he dips a hand into the big bowl and drinks a little. He comes back and sits down and talks some more. His ‘name is Frank Ferree. The Mexicans call him “El Samaritano,” the Samaritan. He is a legend for many of them and a joke to a few, a very few of them. He has been. helping m since 1943. He has been hell, g them with all his time since , 46. Nobody asked him to. Mary people have asked him not to. IT/. goes on with it. He will talk about himself, and show you his clippings, and have you read his book?for he is a lonely man, he did not finish the eighth grade, and this is all he does. He writes press releases about himself, about “the Program.” He also takes food by the tonload to the hungry poor across the border in Mexico; and medi Ronnie Dugger cine, which he gives them, and puts on them; the unused ends of rolls of newsprint, which they use to make their houses warm; clothing, which they use to keep their bodies warm. He doesn’t belong to any church but the Christian one. He reads tracts published by the Seventh Day Adventists, the Oral Roberts crusade, things like that. “You know Jesus said help the poor. They forget that now. But that’s what Christianity is, helping the poor. But they forget it.” He has certain strange ideas about numerology, and about faith healing. He does not worry about whether he is selfish or unselfish. Once he was angered when someone said no one is entirely unselfish, but he is not given to such arguments. He just goes out all his days but Thursdays and Sundays and feeds them and gives them medicine. Most people are skeptical of him at first, but now the Rio Grande Valley believes in him. The Valley Transit Company simply gave him one of its buses. A list of the people, merchants, and authorities that have helped him includes both the Mexican and American governments. civic clubs on both sides of the border, lawyers, preachers, a Sunday School class, a girl writer, a Mexican cotton millionaire, packing sheds, a bakery, a bank, a cam’ A., k 19, Sot radio station, international pharmaceutical houses, the Salvation Army, a statewide grocery chain, and the Harlingen daily newspapertopside and printing crew. Except for pride in his work, in “the Program,” pride never occurs to him. He lives in the midst of chaotic litter and cast-off furniture. He dresses in rags: he takes better clothes to the Mexicans than he wears himself. He calls on a millionaire with a hole in his coat-tail and heel-clopping huaraches and socks more holes than cloth. He collects the wastes of the abundant Valley society like a rag-pickerwaste paper, old clothes, used lumber, damaged tins of food, day-old loaves of bread, scrap meat, poor grade vegetables: it is all for the poor, and he is their friend. `They All Come’ Sitting in his chair by the stove in the glare of a light bulb hanging from a cord on the wall he seems sad and inadequate to his life-giving work. Ears too large, ,S, FEBRUARY 7, 1958 LiberalWeekly Newspaper , ,<:;;;,;. , hstrurr 10c per copy No. 44 W e will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it iznd the right as we see it. FRANK FERREE This Is a Part of His Work Too 'Otherwise Without Hope'