ustxtxb_obs_1959_10_02_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

BOW WILLIAMS Automobile and General Insurance Budget Payment Plan Strong Stock Companies GReenwood 2-1545 814 LAMAR, AUSTIN Let’s Abolish the Poll Taxi Baptists Growing; Oil Merger Off AFL-CIO Questions Editorials Dr. E. S. James of Dallas, editor of the Baptist Standard, said there are now about 1,500.000 Baptists affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas and predicted that by 1974 Baptists will number 30 percent of the state’s population during a Baptist state brotherhood convention in Austin. A co-defendant turned state’s evidence to allege County Attorney George Morris of Montgomery County stole a load of oilfield pipe in a trial in Lockhart …Dist. Judge Joe Ingraham acquitted a man convicted by a jury of taking oil maps costing Humble $4 million to develop and selling them. The judge said the mapping firm involved lets its customers reproduce maps bought from it … Venue change away from Liberty County is indicated for the three key defendants in the “hot oil” scandal cases there. Rep. Zeke Zbranek, Daisetta, is defense attorney for Garth Christopher, who is under 117 indictments in the case …A Houston patrolman said he was offered, through his brother, $300 to $500 by Inspector Foy Melton to change his testimony that oilman Bob Milner was not drunk aboard a National Airlines plane. Milner is suing the airline for $2.5 million with respect to his arrest as drunk on a stewardess’s complaint after he returned to Houston from a New Orleans segregation meeting. A former credit supervisor of the consumer loan department of Bank of the Southwest in Houston was indicted on charges of embezzling $10,503. Superior’s Crew Rejoices at News HOUSTON When the proposed merger between Texaco and Superior Oil Co. was called off, there was much rejoicing in the Oil and Gas Building occupied by Superior Oil in Houston, the Post’s oil columnist, Jim Clark, reported. News of the merger enveloped the building in “a sort of film of heavy gloom,” Clark reported. “Since then the Oil and Gas Building has not been a happy place to live.” Superior paid the best in the industry and was a family company many of the employees had helped build. They did not know where they would stand with Texaco, if anywhere, he explained. Returning to the building, after the merger had been abandoned by the firms, Clark said an elevator operator shouted to him “the merger is off!” and traipsed merrily down Milam St. Reported Clark: “… it seemed as if some giant had pricked and burst the film of gloom and that the sunshine of happines had rushed in to resuscitate the victims. The building was buzzing. The barbers, the waitresses, the parking lot boys, the cooks in the drug store, the clerks, and the whole army of Superior people were laughing and patting each other on the back and doing everything except executing Irish jigs. There was a festive, holiday spirit in the air… “Someone said the Department of Justice had been credited with making the deal impractical and that was why it was called off. There were cheers everywhere for old DJ,” reported oil columnist Clark. THE TEXAS OBSERVER Page 8 October 2, 1959 Rep. Roger Daily proposed to the Houston Jaycees the designation of the University of Houston as a part of the University of Texas System. He said enrollment dropped’1,500 at U.H. because of high tuition fees. 4 Internal revenue collections in Texas in fiscal 1959 totaled $2,697 million. Corporation income and profit taxes decreased from $635 million to $545 million. Individual collections rose from $1,787 million to $1,869 million. OFive men face felony in dictments and two to four years in prison in connection with Texas Rangers’ and state police raids on a gambling house near the Dallas-Fort Worth turnpike. A daughter-in-law of the late financier, W. L. Moody, Jr., and her two sons received a $2 million cash settlement, and the two sons another $8.25 million of stock in American National Insurance Co. for the duration of their lifetimes, in a second-phase settlement of court disputes over family claims to the $400 million Moody estate. This may clear the way for the Moody Foundation’s first major project, a home for the aged in Galveston. “The Moody Foundation has a wonderful opportunity,” said Atty. Gen. Will Wilson, “to do for Texas what the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations have done for the nation.” OWCTU, in national conven tion in San Antonio, planned a program of youth temperance education. A speaker said that “The most reliable statistics show a relationship between home drinking, women alcoholics, and the trend of the child.” OTexaco, assets $3 billion, and Superior Oil, assets $260 million, abandoned plans for a merger when the Department of Justice opposed it on anti-trust grounds. Spokesmen for the firms said the merger would have withstood a court test but that the test would mean “several years of litigation and a longer period of uncertainty.” OThe perjury trial of J. Byron Saunders, former Texas Insurance Commission chairman, was climaxed by evidence, brought out at the height of the insurance scandals, that Saunders received $7,900 from ICT and ICT affiliates on order from BenJack Cage. OCongressman John Young, Corpus Christi, returned a national seashore area on Padre Island will be held in Corpus Full Coverage in Post Sirs: In the Sept. 25, 1959 issue of the Texas Observer, you state that the Galveston County tax equalization program “has not been reported in the daily newspapers of the state.” The story has been covered fully in the Galveston edition of the Houston Post, beginning with Walter Hall’s first raising of’ the issue and continuing through the subsequent proceedings of the Galveston county court. W. P. Hobby, Jr., Associate Editor, The Houston Post. \(We stand corrected. Perusing clipping files we find good summary coverage in the Post and occasional stories in the Chronicle and Press. The Galveston News has handled news events in the case. The point we wished to AUSTIN Texas State AFL-CIO News for September raises an interesting question about the source of some daily newspaper editorials. In its editorial column, the labor movement’s official Texas journal reproduces identical editorials which appeared on the labor bill in the McKinney Courier-Gazette, Midland ReporterTelegram, Victoria Advocate, and Nacogdoches Daily Sentinel. Each of these editorials carry the headline, “Time to Grow Up,” except for the Victoria version, which was captioned, “Time for Labor to Grow Up.” Each of them begins, identical ly, “The country’s top labor lead ers are aggrieved over the turn of events in Congress, for they are assuming that a reasonably stiff labor reform bill will emerge and continues, in the same ABILENE D. D. Dillard, Abilene district manager for Southwestern Bell Telephone, has responded to inquiries from the Abilene Reporter-News concerning the now established fact that telephone calls are more costly within Texas than they are if they cross a state line and fall within the rate-making jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission. A news story in the Abilene newspaper reported, “Long distance rates in Texas are established by Southwestern Bell itself. The FCC has no jurisdiction within a state. “The state has no board or commission which regulates rates of utilities, including telephone companies. Texas and Iowa are the only two states without such regulatory authority,” the story continues. “Under present schedules,” the newspaper says, “it has been a better bargain in most instances to call out of state than within Texas.” Lyndon, Johnson, “faced with the yapping of Butler” and vetoes from Eisenhower, saved the government from grinding to a halt. The Cuero School Board voted to hire Ehrenborg Appraisal Co. of Dallas for $15,000 to revaluate the properties on the board’s tax rolls. The vote was unanimous. The study will take five months. School board members said the study is expected to find some property that has never been on the tax roll and other property that is undervalued. make was and is that the story has been handled as a local one when in fact it is of tremendous Gilmer’s Friends Sirs: You exposed the Gilmer Road last March a year ago in the Observer. This road has now received publicity in about twelve newspapers, and lots of people have heard of this horrible road. I think that the fact that the state legislature has not made an official investigation of this road looks very very bad. I do not think that the investigating committees of the legislature should be composed of Claude Gilmer’s friends. I believe that Senator Harden:an is Claude Gilmer’s friend, and I. heard that Claude Gilmer worked very hard trying to make Jou Burkett Speaker of the House. Joe Harry Bower, 227 W. Oak, Uvalde. words as the other editorials, describing the situation on the labor legislation last August. The editorials appeared between Aug. 24 and Aug. 27. The AFL-CIO News’s editorial comment, under the caption, “Four Minds … But a Single Thought,” was as follows: “Did you ever wonder how it is that newspapers from one end of the country to the other almost simultaneously come forth with the same editorial thoughts? Here you have just a random example of how the anti-labor editorial lines of newspapers just happen to jibe with each other. In one day’s batch of clippings arriving at the Texas State AFLCIO office were four identical editorialsone from West Texas, one from North Texas, one from South, one from East Texas. The answer, of course: These editorial gems you read in your local paper The story then gives a number of examples to prove this. For instance, a call from Abilene to El Paso costs $1.25, but Abilene to Albuquerque only $1.05. Dillard gave a detailed explanation of the higher per-mile charges for calls inside Texas borders. In sum, he said, the reason is “heavier usage” of the interstate lines, reducing cost per mile. His full statement: “Our position on Intra state and Inter state long distance is that Inter State Toll Service is basically designed and established for heavy volume routes, and to handle long haul traffic. “For this type of service it ig feasible to install the latest carrier and coaxial systems. “While initial investment costs and maintenance expenses for these advanced voice transmission techniques -are great, they afford economies in operation and WACO Horace Sherman Miller, selfdesignated Aryan Knight of the Texas Ku Klux Klan, continues to mail out anti-Jewish and antiNegro literature from Waco. The latest packet the Observer received from him, postmarked Sept. 23, asks such questions as, “What is a NIGGER” and “Will you refuse to be integrated by Communists?” For those not on Miller’s mailing list who wish to be acquainted with racial supremacy’s arguments when carried to the Ku Klux Klan extent, we summarize a few other views from “The Voice of Freedom, The Guardian of Liberty The Dependable Newspaper … White Folk’s News …make quality a tradition.” “Our ‘Conscience Clause’ of Aryan Primacy,” Aryan Knight Miller writes, “makes us ‘Conscientious Objectors’ in regard to integration: it relieves us from enforced integration or sex-ucational race-mixing, nor will we knowingly permit WHITE CHILDREN to be forced to intimately mingle with non-Aryans. “IN OUR CREED, intimacy with non-Aryans is a lower crime than rape and murder. The preexerted. by the priesthood over the masses they control, is sure to bring violence and general disorder… ” Again: “Integrationism is a drastic ,;nn of communism.” “Of course, there are mongrels arirl alWays will be, but should we deliberately plan and encourage it?” aren’t necessarily the brainchild of your own local editor. Newspapers have two sources of this subscribe to editorial services which provide ready-made ediThey receive donations of canned editorials from outfits with an axe to grind. This example, of course, isn’t just an isolated one; the odds are good that most editorials you read, except for those in the big metropolitan dailies, are of the ready-made variety. And many of those in the metropolitan dailies are changed . only slightly from the canned version received through the mail. “It makes you wonder why an editor who worries for fear unions will try to tell the American workers how to vote doesn’t get a little bit excited about whoever or whatever it is that tells American editors how to think.” lower investment costs per circuit-miles for long haul and heavy volume operations. These econo mies are possible because of the many channels for voice communication that can be provided by carrier systems over a single cable pair and by coaxial systems.” Dillard explained. “Intra-state toll service is basically designed and established for relatively short haul calls emanating generally from communities which produce a low volume of business. “As a result, these circuits are not as fully utilized, but this cannot be prevented if service is to be provided in each community. “In general,” the district manager said, “all costs are much greater on a per circuit-mile basis for Intra-state calls.” Dillard also said a 1953 -legislative study showed that Texas telephone rates are among the lower third of the states. On the Jewish angle, Miller asks: “Do they aid needy Gentiles with the fabulous tax-free donations to Jewish ‘charities’? What Jews do you know who are in need of charity? Their bureau of propaganda, the American Jewish Committee. and their secret police, the Anti-Defamation League, are they charities?” “How can a Jew take the oath of naturalization and becornt an American citizen?” “How can a Jew be relied upon as a witness or an official