ustxtxb_obs_1961_09_01_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

RELIABLE REAL ESTATE SERVICE Arthur Hajecate METROPOLITAN REALTY CO. 4340 Telephone Road HOUSTON, TEXAS 1.T.:Tar T T :a J. J. Sadler Against Nationa I Seashore Miller Under Fire NOTES IN MEXICO Poverty’s Sights , Sounds TEXAS AT LARGE Henry Miller was still having his troubles in Dallas this week. The City’ Council got into the act, praising Big D police and DA Henry Wade for their actions against Tropic of Cancer, Wade, meanwhile, said he would welcome a test case on Dallas pornography. “If we or the police decide something is pornographic,” he said, “there isn’t much to go on. But if a jury finds a party selling pornographic material, we will have a verdict which I believe will be upheld.” Also in Dallas, citizens prepared for a historic stepschool integrationwhich will take place in Praise for Fred Sirs: After the Maverick-Gonzalez wrangle, I am no one to be critical about a family fight such as Texas labor recently had. Furthermore, I wish my old and good friend, Hank Brown, and my new friend, Roy Evans, the new state leaders of the AFLCIO, every success in carrying out the program of their predecessors which called for action in behalf of the general good of the community, adequate wages and fringe benefits, a respect for the basic civil liberties of businessmen, and an unselfish kind of liberalism whereby labor concerns itself with problems which range from water conservation to racial justice. In this sense I want Brown and Evans to succeed and will help them. But a word about Fred Schmidt, a country boy who left Cuero in the ‘thirties for the University of Texas to be a Presbyterian minister and turned instead to working within the ranks of labor. , I hope union big-shots and little-shots from Texas to Washington, D.C., will understand just how much this man has meant not only to the AFL-CIO, but to the independent liberals as well. Schmidt, the heir of Jeff Hickman, is a good and scholarly man who has the limitations and greatness of another man who lost. Fred Schmidt is the Adlai Stevenson of Texas labor. Maury Maverick Jr., San Antonio. THE TEXAS OBSERVER Page 6 Sept. 1, 1961 MARTIN ELFANT Sun Life of Canada Houston, Texas CA 4-0686 TA.”‘ T T compliance with a federal court order Sept. 6. Estimates of the number of Negro children who will finally be admitted to white elementary schools vary from 12 to 24, but officials say the figure will be kept secret up until the last moment. And although the police have also kept mum, the Dallas News says it has reliable information that a list of around 25 or 30 local “top extremists” possible troublemakers who might try to encourage another Little Rock or New Orleanshas been compiled by law officers. Elsewhere on the integration front, a suit seeking to integrate the A&M Consolidated School Station was filed in federal district court in Houston. The petition, signed by NAACP leaders Thurgood Marshall and W. J. Durham, declares that two Negro childrenDorothy and Lawrence Washington are being denied their rights under the 14th Amendment. Four reserve and national guard units in Texas were called to active duty as part of the Defense Department call-up for 76,500 reservists and guardsmen over the nation. Also in Austin, Land Cmsr. Jerry ‘Sadler came out for state development of Padre Island seashore area and against national ownership. In a letter to Gov. Daniel, Sadler said he did not see “how the Land Board can, in good conscience, surrender … jurisdiction to any agency of the U.S. government. … Did we fight and ‘win the tidelands only to hand them back piecemeal?” he asked. “Are we to cast aside every principle of state’s rights because of hasty enthusiasm for a proposal that is strictly a one-sided bargain?” CLASSIFIED HOUSTON READERS ORDER YOUR PERSONALIZED CHRIST-MAS CARDS NOW WIDE SELECTION WIDE PRICE RANGE. SHIRLEY JAY MO 5-5266 evenings. UNION DEMOCRACY IN AC-TION reports rising reform movements in labor. 10 issues $3. Sample free. Box 62 Knickerbocker Sta., NYC 2, NY. =-=-=-=-==.==C-1=.=.=-=-= DALE BAKER’S Bar-B-0 & Catering 3303 Lake Austin Blvd. Was back in 54 when mah pappy stopped our wagon an homesteaded hereabouts an seein as I wasn but a lil tad and he din have nothin fer me to do I sat down one day an invented Bar-B-Q an that’s . how Texas got invited into the Union, cause without me an Texas the Union wudn’t a had no Bar-B-Q an . . . I’ll tell yuh more bout this nex weaktil then call me at GE ‘7-8961 T SAN LUIS POTOSI, Mexico Companion belltowers, replicas, but one is rose and sunlit tan, as though sandblasted, the other dull grey. The sandblasters forgot, or drifted on. A man of 30 in rags, his goods hanging in a dirty white cloth slung like a sack over his right shoulder, a child on his forearm, against his chest; begging. The many, oh the many turned up faces of children, above the passive turned up palms; their mutterings, pleading and hopeful. The many, oh the many nos. “You cannot undertake to reform a nation’s economy with the change in your pocket,” I said. One followed my wife Jean so long, she came to me in the restaurant for change for him. “Now go home to your house,” she said. Later she took a bus ride through the sprawling adobe slumsno water, no sewers, dirt floors, miles and miles of mud streets. Around the corner from El Banco Central, the blind musican, crippled, flattened as on a base on the sidewalk; his upturned straw hat, with the willow leaves for cooling still in the crown. I could not see his tiny instrument, a whistle of some kind, cupped in his thumb and curling forefinger. He blew, he wheedled, he sucked from it notes of creeping melancholy rhythm, haunting, repetitive, like the curling sounds from a snakecharmer’s flute. I stopped in respect for his skill and for the pleasure of hearing him, but a way up the block, so he would not sense me and expect money. Mexicans in new Fiats, old Chevrolets, new Fords, drove past in the narrow street. The middle class one walked. by. A tired old streetcleaner shoved along his garbage can on wheels and upended shove-broom. I grasped the change in my pocket heavy, eight or nine coins, perhaps 20 centsand went to the musician and let it gently into his hat, my eyes on my knees as I bent down, so not to spy. Late one night among the Chiclet hawking, begging boys there was one with a band-aid across his forehead. As usual I said no to all of them. At La Lonja, the best restaurant, we had steak and tipped as expected. As we stepped into the chill night air I saw the boy with the band-aid he was about seven sitting, legs doubled under, inside the open stone vestibule of a hardware store. Jean said he would probably spend the night there. The defenses I had built up \(there is, for instance, the eminently practical fact that where so many are starving, you could not logically stop giving anywhere, you burst beneath the subtly registering shame for every urchin refused, every mother and child lying on the sidewalk sidestepped or ignored. I walked back and dropping all the change-60 cents perhaps, some silver pesosinto his hand, rested in his. lap. He fixed his eyes on the money and was lifting his other hand toward it when I stopped seeing him. The children on the streets, the failure of the revolution, the failure of socialism, the failure of the human spirit. Let them take their children off the streets! WE ARE TRYING, they answer. Benito Coquet, director general of the Mexican Institute of Social Security, dedicating a new public housing community in Mexico City: “Social and human, our liberating movement sees every worker and peasant as the hard-working man who looks and strives for a personal future, which is, at the same time, the future of his homeland. “The President of the Republic has expressed on various occasions that which is central to the aims and goals of the Revolution: raising the standard of living of the majority of the country. In order to do so we have to be in constant struggle against poverty, ignorance, sickness, and social insecurity. ‘The realization of those aims basic to the policy of the ggovernment has not been feasible in the desired proportion. This has been due to obstacles of all kinds. We have to take into consideration the very poorest and most unsanitary conditions of the thousands of dwellings lived in by the country’s workers and their families. And, too, we must note that in the last decades this has been aggravated both by a demographic explosion and industrial growth, especially in the large urban centers of the country.” The President of the Republic, Lopez Mateos, addressing the sixth meeting of the Inter-American :Social Security Conference in 6o “A great part of the world’s populationas it happens this includes our peoplesis still victim of a situation in which basic human needs go unsatisfied . . . Mexico is conscious of such problems . . .” Mexico’s social security law has been modified, and “in these changes are to be found the bases for a gradual extension of protection to farm workers, small farmers, sharecroppers, and gathers forming part of the rural scene, and to artisans, small merchants, and professionals in urban areas.” The Herald of San Luis Potosi, August 16, 1961. Dr. Francisco Padron Poyou, pediatrician, director of medical services for social security in the state, says infant malnutrition is the real shame of Mexico. The people often do not understand what is nutrition, he said; or they do not have enough money to feed their many children; in the cities, there are social problems for children; finally, sometimes fathers ?leave their families, or are vicious, or families dissolve in mutual infidelity. Dr. Payou wants medical and nutritional brigades organized to attend the sick children in Mexico . . . minimum wages for workers . . . laws against child abandonment . . . AT NIGHT the mariaches, returned from serenading their girls or singing for hire, congregate around the park below our windows in the Hotel Royal and sing, strum, and sing the night away. They perform solemnly, and walk along as in formation. Late in the still dark morning they go home, and the jukebox in the cafe downstairs blares until daylight. In the theater, the newsreel visits the graves of Rivera and Orozco and shows the new murals in a public building. We took a long walk down the Avenida Carranza, past the upper class homes, to the edge of the city. Rioting pastels. Bougainvillea of a deep purple dye. Each house’s sidewalk has some pattern of its ownplaster sucked up when wet, perhaps by planking or waved by a scratching comb; faint rose rectangles; fitted limestones. The adequately dressed middle and upper class school children. The park: trees planted in rows like an orchard’s. On top of the avenue there is a lookout tower, but the railings have been broken and dropped down the well inside, and lie askew in each stage of the tower like bombed metal; the steps winding upward inside the wall, railless; the broken red glass everywhere. On the bus across from us sat a handsome Indian woman. Cavities for cheeks; knuckles for cheekbones; head cocked upward, she gazed away, forward, into some distance the bus could not enclose, as though remembering her pride and freedom. By our clothes we are known. In the streets theirs seem grey, white, workblue, or khaki, except there are sportshirts. Our simplest pants and shirts, our plain dresses, are styled in ways that stamp us. Narrow streets open onto the parks everywhere. “No-ti-cias! No-ti-cias!” Two or three pigeons flutter in the cathedral tower. One reads or writes in public in tranquility. It is expected or respected. A few , glance, nobody stares. Bicycles everywhere. Fiats. Old cars. Left-over America. Secondhand American. Third-hand American. To walk through the food market, Jean says, is to walk through hell. On the open stands, oranges, purple grapes, lemons, limes, mangoes, green beans, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, corn, candy, profusions of food of all colors and shapes. Children eating their lunches on the sidewalks among the dogs. A girl 20 or so with her mouth hooked open gruesomely by hare-lip, her teeth fang-like. So much sickness in the foodfetid air. Pestilential. An infected cornucopia. I HALF-SAW, half-believed, the reflection of a green neon cross on a window of a balcony door in the hotel room. Later, walking at night, I saw the cross, shining from the top of a church, and another one that was blue. PepsiCola bottles 20 feet tall are being hauled into place on buildings around the squares. Soon perhaps, Pepsi-Cola bottles on top of the churches. Last night about tour I awoke to the sound of scratching or sweeping, below our room. It was cold, I, naked. I moved stiffly, carefully, to the balcony, between the open double doors. A man about 40 or 50, in a black suit and hat, worked in the street below, his broom a bound-around swatch of coarse fibers of uneven lengths. He was sweeping the gutter to the little pile of dirt in the middle of the block. Inches by inches. Moving along slowly, rocking a little, he seemed to sense someone watching; I began to draw back. He worked his arthritic way to the corner, stopped, returned, swept a spot he had missed, and disappeared, sweeping, into a side street. With the care of a housewife. Today in the sunlight on the square a man of 60, black pants and an old ggrey suitcoat, filthy at the pockets. A khaki hat. His walking cane, a wooden yardstick. He walks along the sidewalk in front of me. Across the street from us the bells of, the church suddenly begin bonging. The old man turns toward the great symmetrical, apricot-colored church