ustxtxb_obs_1959_11_27_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

Page 5

by

“BOW” WILLIAMS Automobile and General Insurance Budget Payment Plan Strong Stock Companies GReenwood 2-0545 624 LAMAR, AUSTIN Let’s Abolish the Poll Tax! `The Isles of Greece’ AUSTIN “Why is it that so many sons of pioneer Texas families are ripsnorting liberals?” The question was put by Bob Eckhardt to a select group, which included Tom Sutherland, Elmo Hegman, and others I forget, at the Diamond Bar on East Sixth Street in Austin, a beer-drinking place for us young intellectuals some eighteen years ago, and at the same time a popular resort for hillbillies of the oldfashioned type, each with felt hat finger-creased into personal shape and hometooled belt studded with colored glass; there were also lots of Mexicans, all speaking Spanish at once, and the efforts of the young intellectuals to raise their voices above the babble, and especially above each others’ voices, made it hard to get a clever word in edgevvise. Bob answered his own question; I don’t remember what he said; I remember what I tried to say, because when I went home , I wrote it down. Eckhardt made up a poem once about the. Diamond Bar, a parody of Keats’s verses on the Mermaid Tavern, where Shapespeare, Ben Jonson, and others of their kidney consorted in Elizabethan times; it begins, as you may remember: “Souls of poets dead and gone, what Elysium have you known ” The comparison seemed a little far-fetched. Perhaps the most Elizabethan thing about the Diamond Bar was the men’s room, so-called, really an open court or backyard. You pushed a wide barndoor affair and you were in it. Just one of us young intellectuals turned out to be a writer. Eckhardt became a lawyer and legislator, Sutherland a teacher professions that afford ample exercise for the spoken word, also a captive audience. HERE is the answer I never got HERE chance to deliver orally: “The reason why so many descendants of Texas pioneers are liberals is that their ancestors were liberals, rebels, or non-conformists: If they had not been, they would not have come to Texas in the first place.” There was not, it stands to reason, much point in coming to a wild, comfortless, dangerous land, OSeventeen employees of the American Oil Co. sued the striking OCAW local for $375,000 in lost wages and other damages, saying they had been prevented from working by picketers’ “intimidating, threatening, and coercing” them. Their lawyer said two withdrew from the suit because of threats to their life. Union spokesmen said no one had The Week in Texas been prevented from working. Monday police escorted 18 exstrikers back to work. Total on strike: about 1250, since last July 1. H. H. Coffield, chairman of the Texas prison system, blamed idleness for much juvenile delinquency and added: “When most of us were young we were encouraged to , work after school and during vacations, but today child labor laws cause much shyness among employers.” A Houston man sued 20 loan and insurance firms charging they cost him two jobs and hurt the health of his wife and himself and asking $88,150 damages. Page 8 November 27, 1959 THE TEXAS OBSERVER if a man was satisfied where he was. Those who came were the unsatisfied, the restless, and, in many cases, the unwanted: those who were chased out of their former habitations by tyrants, bailiffs, sheriffs. Of course, there were a few aristocrats, a few families of the “better” or moneyed class. But not nearly as many as the Daughters of This and That would like to have us believe. It is true that Stephen F. Austin took pains to bring into his colony, while Texas was still a part of Mexico, planters from the Southern states, along with their Charles Ramsdell platoons of slaves. These “substantial” men, he thought, were essential to the development ofthe country. He battled vigorously and on the whole successfully against the measures to abolish slavery taken by the Mexican liberals, who wanted to advance their country alongside the civilized nations of Europe. Austin did not approve of slavery; on moral grounds, he was opposed to it. But he thought of ‘ it as a necessary evilat least in the Brazos bottoms of Texas. Austin has been compared to Benjamin Franklin. They were indeed alike in some respects. Austin had a cultivated mind; his large library in the log cabin that was his home at San Felipe was admired in 1828 by visiting members of the boundary commission from Mexico. He had, too, the heroic virtues of tourage and perseverance. But he was primarily a businessman. He shared the great American faith that so many of us \(ineluding the most celebrated hisus have prosperity; then all other good things will follow of themselves. Morality. Culture. And freedom? Ah, but freedom is an old-fashioned concept. Nobody knows what it means any more. On the book page of the Dallas News “freedom” is enclosed with quotes, thus. And Robert Penn Warren in his study of the Alamo, pooh 0 The U. S. Department of , State, through Asst. Secy. of State Roy H. Rubottom, has protested to the Atomic Energy Cornmission against dumping radioactive wastes in the Gulf of Mexico. “Seriously harmful effects on cur friendly relations with Mexico and with the other countries of the hemisphere,” who think the plan “arbitrary,” said Rubottom. Mexico filed another protest, warning of “the unfavorable impression … on Mexican public opinion.” LEGALS CITATION BY PUBLICATION THE STATE OF TEXAS TO Elizabeth Gilliland Defendant, in the hereinafter styled and numbered cause: You are hereby commanded to appear before the 126th District Court of Travis County, Texas, to be held at the courthouse of said county in the City of Austin, Travis County, Texas, at or before 10 o’clock A. M. of the first Monday after the expiration of 42 days from the date of issuance hereof; that is to say, at or before, 10 o’clock A.M. of Monday the 21st day of December, 1959\( and answer the petition of plaintiff in Cause Number 115,993, in which Don. F. Gilliland is Plaintiff and Elizabeth Gilliland is defendant, filed in said Court on the 6th day of November, 1959, and the nature of which said suit is as follows: Being an action and prayer for judgment in favor of Plaintiff and against Defendant for decree of divorce dissolving the bonds of matrimony heretofore and now existing between said parties; Plaintiff alleges that defendant began a course of unkind, harsh, cruel and tyrannical treatment toward plaintiff, and that during this time defendant was guilty of excesses, cruel treatment and outrages toward plaintiff, making their further living together insupportable; plaintiff alleges that poohs “the romantic idea of freedom.” And yet, Austin, who was no revolutionary, said in a speech myself out inch by inch rather than submit to the military despotism of Santa Anna.” Some of his wealthy planters, however, did not feel so strongly about the “romantic idea”; they hastened to welcome the Mexican general who occupied Brazoria after the fall of the Alamo and the massacre at Goliad. “They assured me that they had never condoned the rebellion,” he repeated. On November 11, 1836, when .a bill was before the first Senate of the Republic of Texas to provide vitiate the strength of the energy yielded. “Stability” of the gases producing the energy, under high ternperatures is also a very serious problem. The state of the science in this regard was embarrassingly well illustrated in the questionand-answer session between the Texas-financed General Atomic scientists and the visiting physics teachers Saturday morning. Dr. Donald W. Kerst, project leader for the Foundation-General Atomics program, had just concluded speculating, with a drawing he had chalked on the board, on the possibility of a stable plasma subjected to different kinds of heat in certain ways. Rosenbluth rose to dispute with his slender, professorial colleague. Before the assembled scientists he told Kerst, “On the basis of what we know now, that would be unstable.” There was a nervous laugh among the scientists assembled. “I don’t believe this has been done,” Kerst said. “I believe it has,” said Rosenbluth. Well, said Kerst, another scientist had only started the work. “I finished it,” Rosenbluth said. “Well, I might say,” Kerst parried, “that a lot of mistakes have been made over this.” There was an appreciative laugh. “I’ve found them,” Rosenbluth replied. The gentlemen did not resolve their difference, Rosenbluth persisting that the stability problem was not subject to solution in Kerst’s illustration, and Kerst insisting that mistakes might have been made in inquiries up to now and that variation of heat magnitudes might produce other results. Later on, when a ‘scientist from the crowd asked Kerst about some experiments the questioner had heard about second hand, Kerst thought they might involve a good new approach. Raising an upright bounty lands for the men who had taken part in the revolution, William H. Wharton, senator from Brazoria, declared that the names of the large land-owners, the wealthy planters and merchants, did not appear on the rolls of soldiers at the battle of San Jacinto. “I have examined the list of those who won the battle,” he said, “and find that very few men who are esteemed men of property were there. I find that the battle was fought and won by the poor men of the country, at least half of whom had never located a headright in Texas.” AS FOR EDUCATION, or culture, it is easy to see how the early Texans would have among forefinger he said, “That’s what we need!more ideas like that!” So the scientists are still a way from harnessing the power of the sun to the uses of man. And what, when they do? One troubled Texas physics teacher approached the reporter afterwards to wonder about that. “What worries me,” he said, “is when we get this process going huge quantities of energy, and only a few thousand workers being used to produce itwhat mechanism are we going to use to get purchasing power in the hands of the people?” The scientists of General Atomic, and the speakers for the Texas Atomic Energy Research Foundation, had not addressed this problem. R.D. AUSTIN, SAN ANTONIO The district attorney of Bexar, Charles Lieck, is taking on the Attorney General of Texas, Will Wilson. Lieck announced that as district attorneyhe will subpoena Wilson to ascertain whether he discriminated in filing against companies in Bexar County on usury charges: Lieck owns a company which buys paper from co-signers of notes. Wilson has sued this firm, charging usury. Lieck charges “piecemeal enforcement” of loan laws, saying his firm does business with a dozen other loan companies besides another one Wilson has sued on a usury brief. Lieck said he does not operate a loan or finance company and his firm’s activity is. legal. Said Wilson in Austin: “We have treated him exactly the same as we have other folks who we think are violating the anti-usury laws,” which exist “basically to prevent the exploitation of the them both men of learning, like Austin, and rugged frontiersmen who were illiterate. What is surprising is the number of men who, although almost entirely selftaught, were eloquent with the written word. First among these, of course, is Sam Houston, who is seldom quoted in the textbooks or the anthologies, but who, language that for clarity and power is comparable to Lincoln’s. What little writing we have by James Bowie and by William Barrett Travis is impressive, too. But more for its naked urgency than for habiliments of style. In Travis, particularly, we find the flame of Byron, who kept the fires of freedom alive from the cataclysms of the American and French revolutions until 1824, when he died fighting for the liberation of the Greeks. It was from Byron that some dreamer at Washington-on-Brazos in the fearful early days of March, 1836, took the words that he scribbled on a discarded draft of the first Constitution for the Republic of Texas: “The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece.” He was helping to build a brand new nation, where freedom would be the way of life, from the very beginning, an early morning freshness. In those days freedom was more than a “romantic idea,” more than a dream. The freedom of the individual from any goad of subjection, the freedom of peoples from any yoke of tyranny this was no glimmering vision, but a thing tasted and felt, a thing to be savored and fought for, the salt, the sunlight, and the clean air. lower income wage earners. Under the law Mr. Lieck, in his ca..’ pacity as district attorney, has exactly the same duty as I do to enforce the anti-usury law ‘s. It seems wholly inconsistent with his position for a district attorney to be in a business where “there is even a question about its legality … Under the circumstances … his criticism of our Office” is “irresponsible and wholly unjustified.” on the part of Defendant towards him of such a nature as to render their further living together as husband and wife altogether insupportable; Plaintiff further alleges that there are no minor children now living who were born of said union; Plaintiff further alleges that the following community property exists, towit: 1 house and lot at 300 Braeswood, Austin, Texas; household furniture and furnishings; truck and trailer used in Plaintiff’s employment and which is not yet paid for and for all of which property plaintiff prays for order of court partitioning same;. Plaintiff further prays for such other and further relief as the Court shall deem proper to grant; All of which more fully appears from Plaintiff’s Original Petition on file in this office and to which reference is here made; If this citation is not served within 90 days after date of its issuance, it shall be returned unserved. WITNESS, O. T. MARTIN, JR.. Clerk of the District Courts of