ustxtxb_obs_1958_03_07_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

NO THANKS, PALS SAN ANTONIO Efforts of a zealous supporter who thought it would be a good idea to give Sen. Henry Gonzalez cash Christmas presents and wrote a letter to the Houston Informer proposing people do this have been repudiated by Gonzalez. The letter resulted in checks of $145 and cash of $12 being sent to David Halpenny, San Antonio, Gonzalez said. “To my insistence that the monies be refunded or returned … I was countered with the charge that I would offend,” Gonzalez said. So he gave $120 of the money to the Travis County Voters League and invested the balance in banquet tickets in San , An tonio for the annual NAACP dinner, he told the Observer. Halpenny’s letter in the Informer proposed “Christmas presents” to Gonzalez as a way of expressing gratitude for his opposition to segregation bills. Gonzalez said he did not know of the letter until a week after it was published and told Halpenny he should not have done it. Halpenny agreed to drop the matter, Gonzalez said, but the money was sent in Houston Informer editor Carter Wesley encouraging the idea in his column. Gonzalez said he acknowledged receipt of everything to each donor and pointed out what he was doing with the money. He said he thinks very much of Halpenny and his family and knows he was motivated by “a genuine feeling of helpfulness.” He added, “Boy, that French king who said he needed protection from his friends, for he could take care of his enemies, was speaking a mouthful.” He said recently some friends proposed giving a dance, with Gonzalez using the proceeds for a TV and radio program. “I was able to stop this cold because the people involved first consulted me,” Gonzalez said. The Week in Texas 2 Houston Firms Taken to Court OGov. Daniel told the Texas daily newspaper publishers the lobby control bill would never have passed “without newspaper support.” The association tentatively planned to fight for antisecrecy bills next legislative session requiring all public records be kept open, that public agencies hold open meetings, and that public officials who remove official records to alter them or who use the fifth amendment to avoid explaining their official actions be punished or removed from office, respectively. Felix McKnight, executive editor of the Dallas TimesHerald, told the publishers to “be realistic in appraising \(the newsduct and give him a starting salary commensurate to his background and talent.” OThe newspapermen heard these capital correspondents say these things about statehouse coverage: Jon Ford, San Antonio Express: Newspapers must fight all government attempts to suppress news”the burden of proof should always be put on the government to prove why the information should not be made public.” Bill Gardner, Houston Post: The next legislature will be “a tax session above everything else. It .will be of more personal interest to Texans than any in many years because it will hit at everybody’s pocketbook.” Margaret Mayer, Dallas TimesHerald: There is “growing antipathy” toward reporters, especially from legislators. Dave Cheavens, Associated Press: “Chaos and confusion” is the political outlook for 1958. Sam Wood, Austin American: Editors ought to get more use out of their Austin correspondents. ODr. Edwin L. Rippy, presi dent of the Dallas school hoard, told a meeting of the Palestine Classroom Teachers Assn. that integration of the nation’s public schools was “inevitable” and that he believed the Supreme Court had no choice but to order integration. But, he said, “personally I am not in favor of it because it legislates social change.” ORobert V. Spears, former head of the state Naturopathic Physicians Assn., was arrested at Oak Cliff in a motel cabin. Arresting officers said Spears was taken in the act of performing an abortion on a 32year-old Dallas oil company secretary in the presence of her boy friend, a Dallas department store executive. An Oak Cliff pharmacist, Napoleon B. Barbee, was arrested as the go-between who arranged for Spears to perform the illegal operation. Speaker Waggoner Carr of Lubbock said in Dallas that he favors annual sessions and higher pay for the legislature. “Let’s get the best possible representation … and pay members commensurate with the magnitude of their responsibility.” OInsured unemployment in Texas dropped slightly for the week ending Feb. 28, but, said a TEC spokesman, “the figures are insufficient to show a trend.” There were 79,079 persons drawing unemployment insurance for, the week compared with 79,604 for the preceding week. New claimants for the week ending Feb. 28 totaled 10,036. OC. H. King, Jr., of Dallas, came to Austin, told the City Council he wants to organize municipal workers into a local of the AFL-CIO American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers. OThree persons got four years in jail, and two 18 months, for their parts in the check-kiting scheme that broke River Oaks State Bank in 1956. The scheme cost the bank $882,000. OCorpus Christi Caller report ed that Southwestern Bell in Corpus, which is asking for a rate increase, was taxed in 1957 on a property value estimated at $1.3 million less than the fair value of the property the company now claims for rate-making purposes. Phone company profits are allowed as a percentage of fair value. OThe state parks board will ask the next legislature for $427,000 to make improvements at Palo Duro state park. The board’s total budget request will be $4.2 million, including $563,000 for cabins. HOUSTON A suit for $2,038,876 has been filed against officers and directors of Columbia General Life Insurance Co. of Houston, a few days after a similar suit was filed for $1,039,103 against Columbia General Investment Corp., its officers and directors. The actions were brought by Joe Lerner of Galveston, who runs the Starr Furniture Co. in Texas City, and Mr. and Mrs. Ray Yelkin of Houston. Yelkin is an instructor in the radio and television department of the University of Houston. The company claims to have more than 6,000 stockholders, “located in 34 states, Canada, Hawaii, South America and Europe.” Many of the stockholders are Race Debits; Credits listed AUSTIN What are the “debits and credits” of the present racial situation?to this problem in balance Rev. Merrimon Cuninggim, dean of the Perkins School of Theology at SMU, addressed himself recently in a talk in Austin in liberal terms. The four debits he listed: The alleged disappearance of ‘moderates,’ with the impression growing that a ‘moderate’ is one who has not yet spoken on the problem. The irrelevance of fact people don’t want to know the truth or to decide on the basis of it. Thus the difficulty for educators and churchmen to be helpful since they tend to respect facts and logic and find themselves helpless in a different kind of debate. The resurgence of a McCarthyite temper. We see their increase in Dallas, crying `Communists!’ at those who don’t go down a strict segregationist line. The still feeble witness of educators and churchmen, two groups! whose professional premises require their testimony. “Among the many credits,” Dean Cuninggim said, are these four: The witness of educators and churchmen is less feeble than in the immediate past; there is a growing willingness on their part to make effective testimony. We may have underestimated the significance of public statement; certainly the statements of Atlanta and Houston pastors did much good. The healing powers of fellowship: When confrontation across racial lines takes place, hate becomes that much less possible. with the subject. This weariness is or should be on the credit side f the ledger, because educators and churchmen do have a witness to make, and being more conscious of the substance of their faith, ought to be less subject to weariness in the present ordeal. name with the segregation effort. The segregationists have twisted many sacred things Bill of Rights, Bible, etc.but as Ashi more says in his Epitaph for Dixie, ‘Not even the most determined bigot can make a segregationist out of Jesus Christ.’ ” residents of Texas. President, and one of the principal defendants, is Thomas E. Hand, Jr.; vice president and treasurer is J. Ed Eisemann III. Hand is also chairman of the board of the investment company of which Eisemann is president. The name W. R. Quinan is cited in Lerner’s petition against the insurance company as one to whom the “major part” of commissions of $726,000 was paidfor the sale of stock of the company. Quinan is identified in the petition as “a former employee of Jack Cage & Company \(a BenLerner and the Yelkins are suing Hand and Eisemann and other directors of the insurance company and investment corporation alleging breaches of trust and fraud on the part of Hand and Eisemann. They charge that Hand and Eisemann personally profited through the acquisition of the company’s home office building in Houston, through manipulation of stock orders, through “churning” of the insurance company’s investment portfolio, and through acquiring a company to sell office equipment to the insurance company. \(“Churning” means buying and selling investments unnecessarily and rapidly in order to realize Hand said, “The life insurance company has over one million dollars in net capital and surplus and is obviously in a strong financial condition, and the annual report of the life insurance company together with the yearend financial statements confirmed the company’s strong financial position and earned profit for 1957…” Lerner and the Yelkins claim the stockholders of Columbia General Life invested $4,102,166 and that after the payment of the stock commissions to Quinan and others and losses between 1953 and the end of. 1957which they say totalled $2,955,563the capital and surplus at the end of last year was only $1,178,892. Stock of the insurance company was sold to the public for from $10 to $30 a share, while Hand and other organizers of the company got stock for from $1.06 to $1.58 a share, according to testimony by Hand before Securities and Exchange Commission Examiner Maurice Miller at a hearing in Houston in 1956. AL HIEKEN CANDIDATES Rep. Joe Lee Hensley, San Antonio, has announced for Bexar County district attorney. Also in the DA race: city judge Harold Hall. Ed Small, Dallas barber, has announced for the House seat vacated by Rep. Barefoot Sanders. Travis County’s House dele gationReps. Obie Jones, Charles Sandahl, Jr., and Wilson Foremanwill seek re-election. A. L. LaRue will oppose one of themwhich one he hasn’t said. *. Rep. J. M. Heflin, Houston, is retiring. He served eight terms on the legislature, then figured in the Cox-naturopath scandal. `ALMOST’ AUSTIN “Congressmen are anxious to know what the people back home want,” reports Dr. Denton Kerr of Houston, president of the Texas Medical Assn. and vice-chairman of the White Citizens Councils of America in Texas, Inc., in the current issue of the Texas State Journal of Medicine. Therefore, writes Dr. Kerr, “only by taking an occasional evening or week off and studying” pending bills, “can we become familiar enough with them to write our congressmen intelligently.” Dr. Kerr adds: “A golf game, a fishing trip or an outing would be much more pleasant to the busy physicians. But by making these sacrifices we will be contributing almost as much to our profession and our country as the soldiers at Valley Forge, the heroes at the Alamo, or the small victorious band at San Jacinto. “There is no other way of preserving our glorious heritage.” DOT’s Code Is Sidetracked Lindsey Asks ‘Right Kind of People’ AUSTIN The state Democratic executive committee’s resolutions committee, called to meet at chairman Mrs. H. H. Weinert’s home in Seguin, could not muster a threeout-of-five quorum, Mrs. Weinert said. Therefore. the committee will not be reporting on .. the “Democrats of Texas” proposed code of ethics for some further timepast the 30-day deadline set in the original instructing motion of Fagan Dickson of Austin. Mrs. Weinert, who asked for suggestions from other SDEC members, received a letter from committeewoman Mrs. Jud Collier, Mumford, suggesting that the party convention seat persons on SDEC elected by senatorial caucuses; that SDEC endorse a party registration law; that SDEC bar armed police from the state convention; and that SDEC “adhere strictly to that ‘honesty and integrity’ we hear so much about; particularly in the matter of contesting delegations.” Meanwhile, SDEC’s chairman, Jim Lindsey of Texarkana, went to Fort Worth and vigorously attacked DOT. “They do not place Texas first,” he said. Their aim is party control so they can put over their “philosophies,” even though it means overriding majority rule, he said. “Go through the literature of DOT and you’ll never find anything of first interest to Texas,” he said. “There are no problems that can not be solved with the right kind of people,” Lindsey said. The