ustxtxb_obs_1962_06_29_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

MARTIN ELFANT Sun Life of Canada Houston, Texas CA 4-0686 LONE STAR BREWING COMPANY S., An Issas 010M.m. Or, 01Ao ,.. Prayers Will Continue, Texas Schoolmen Aver Rev. Jones Passin’ Through AUSTIN Texas educators reacted variously to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-1 decision prohibiting recitation of a specified prayer recommended for New York State’s public schools by the state’s board of regents. Most of them said classroom prayers will continue. The decision went against “the American principles of democracy and a God-centered nation,” said outgoing Corpus Christi Supt. R. L. Williams. “We should teach the children to recognize a Supreme Being,” said Pasadena Supt. George A. Thompson. “It is necessary that we help our young people establish God in our lives. This decision will handicap us,” said John Gonder, superintendent of Harlandale district in San Antonio. But Supt. Virgil Blossom of that city’s North East district said, “We’re going to abide by the Supreme Court,” and San Antonio district Supt. Thomas B. Portwood was not sure what the implications were. A number of educators thought the court had struck down only required prayers, leaving non-required prayers in a constitutionally permissible category. A Fort Worth school official made this point. If that was the ruling’s meaning, said South San Antonio Supt. Morris Jennings, he had no such great objection. Dr. John McFarland, Houston superintendent, said that city’s schools would not stop having prayers. Supt. H. M. Landrum of Houston’s suburb Spring Branch said: “The schools have an obligation to teach the recognition of a Supreme Being. We will not change our policies unless a court orders us to do so. But we recognize the rights of any students who object to a religious exercise, and excuse them.” Thompson of Pasadena said 20,000,000 children who do not go to Sunday school would not get religious training if the schools did not give it to them. \(Justice Hugo Black, for the majority, ruled: “It is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of American people to recite as part of a religious program carried on by government. … When the power, prestige, and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is The Fort Worth Star-Telegram ran a cartoon showing a schoolboy reading a big magazine dripping drops and emitting heat waves labeled “Nudie Magazine cleared by the U.S. Supreme Court” with the schoolboy saying, “Oh boy! This is better ‘n saying a school prayer!” the caption was “Father Knows Best?” In a companion editorial condemning the court for carrying church-state separation to “a distorted extreme,” the Star-Telegram intoned: “… the regents’ prayer might justly be criticized in only one point: it contained no phrase specifically invoking divine guidance for the nine men who are in position to make the ultimate interpretation of ‘the law of the land.’ ” The Jacksonville Daily. Progress said the court prohibited only required prayers and then defended the ruling: “While to most people the decision appears shocking and severe, there is certainly religious protection in the decision. With that there should be no quarrel. … We want no state church in America. If we keep church and state completely separate in the smallest beginning, we’ll never have to battle against the state church in larger activities.” The Houston Chronicle editorialized that the U.S. House of Representatives’ chaplain only week opened a session with text: “The Lord shall guide thee continually.” The editorial’s title was, “What’s wrong with a simple prayer?” AUSTIN The prospects of survival in the event of nuclear war are not as bleak as some people have portrayed them to be. Rats can be made safe from radiation in any future nuclear war. So can monkeys. Captain George Melville, who directs the chemical radio-protection program at the Balcones Research Center of the University of Texas, gave this optimistic pre AUSTIN “Since 1932,” Ashton Jones said, “I have attempted to actually live the ideals that I preach.” The pursuit of this deceptively simple goalas men have discovered throughout recorded historyis likely to get a fellow labeled a nut and thrown in jail with disturbing frequency. Mr. Jones, for instance, sometimes winds up in jail when he simply stops in a town or city, even to buy a tank of gasoline. He is a Christian minister who travels the South protesting against segregation laws and customs. Mr. Jones was in Austin briefly last week on his way to Shreveport, La., where the jury trial of a civil-rights suit he filed against 17 city officials was scheduled to open Wednesday. The suit was initiated by Jones, who was reared in the South and now resides officially in California, as a result of his arrest and subsequent alleged mistreatment there more than a year ago \(Obs., Jan. 24, State Park though it is 185 miles from their ning through the land where “is always a rippling stream,” with catfish, bass, crappie, and perch in the backed up holes; “It could be Colorado except for the tempearture,” he said. about 40 diction: “In rodents, we feel we know a lot about certain drugs. We can protect rodents.” Melville, 37, is the acknowledged leader in the U.S. School of Aerospace Medicine’s program to develop a pill that will protect human beings from otherwise fatal doses of radiation. While progress toward this end has been madein fact so much progress that a pharmaceutical firm has been under, contract for a year to work out the actual pill the last time the drugs were used on human beings, in 1957, their effect was “nausea, retching, coughing, vomiting, burning of the eyes and face, dizziness, drowsiness, flushing, sweating, dyspnea, and diarrhea.” The bulk of Melville’s work is with thousands of mice and rats and a couple hundred monkeys \(he prefers to call them “subhuman primates” because that Melville was asked if, despite the “nausea, retching, coughing, vomiting,” etc., of the last human he has pending in several states, including Texas. “I never had much legal trouble until 1954 when the Supreme Court handed down its decision,” Mr. Jones told the Observer. Prior to 1957, however, he said most of his activity was aimed against “militarism.” During World War II he served seven months of a year-and-a-day prison sentence for failing to register for the draft because he was a conscientious objector. “After seven months,” he explained, “the prison officials got tired of me and let me go. I preached to the prisoners.” CONSTRUCTED somewhat along the gaunt lines of the prophets of old, Mr. Jones’ fervor for his mission is rather classic also. He travels about in a car painted white and bearing messages urg ing brotherly love in large letters. After he is arrested in one town for “sitting in” with a Negro ac quaintance, local officers often Collins said: “We participate in federal programs every day. A private citizen of Texas wants to give us that land. Landthey’re not making any more of it! He’s not asking one penny; just to see it developed during his lifeitme.” Prospects for a long Padre Is land national park area looked up in Washington when Rep. Joe Kilgore, McAllen, who has favor ed a 65-mile park as against Sen. Yarborough’s 88.5-mile park ap proved by the Senate, offered an 81-mile compromise park in the House Interior Committee. Kil gore said he is confident his bill will pass the House and that a Padre bill cna pass Congress this year. Yarborough did not com ment on Kilgore’s proposal; he said it is too early to predict whether a bill can pass this year. R.D. participation, he considered the compound now used in his laboratory to be worthy of massive manufacture and distribution to the population. He answered: “Provided other problems are licked, the protection now given would warrant manufacture. I have attended meetings where men have stood up and said they’d rather dig a hole than rely on the compounds we have. But I don’t agree. I think what we have would give you a pretty good choice. After all, it takes time to dig a hole.” Dr. Joseph McGlashan Hill, director of the J. K. and Susie L. Wadley Research Institute, Dallas, and clinical professor at Baylor Medical Center, says: “There’s no question but what you can protect from radiation. If I knew there was an atomic bomb coming, I’d sure take some of the “and carry my bone marrow around in a lead box.” That last remark is in reference to the fact that nothing soaks up radiation quite so well as bone marrow. Nuclear war is the event these pills are being prepared for, but the scientists also say they would be invaluable for space travelers \(passing through the radiation persons with advanced cases of cancer. The hope for the cancer patients is that they could be protected by the pills while the cancerous portion of their body was being pelted with heavy doses of radiation. At this point the trou telephone ahead, alerting officials of other cities, and as a result he has been arrested for “disturbing the peace” while merely pausing enroute to buy gasoline. In Clinton, Miss., in 1961, he stopped to let a hitch hiker out and was questioned by a policeman, who then followed him the remaining 20 miles into Jackson where three bullet holes were put in his car and he was warned by a notoriously volatile local White Citizens Council member to “get out and stay out of town.” He was arrested in Jackson in 1960 for “disturbing the peace” and given a suspended sentence, then arrested again on his way outin Brandon, a Jackson suburbfor “reckless driving” and served a 15-day jail sentence. Despite his many arrests, however, his 15-day sentence may be his longest term in jail for breaking segregation laws and customs. “Mostly, they try to scare me by roughing me up a little . . . or a lot, in some cases . . . and try to get rid of me,” he said. His hazardous occupation as a sort of prof ession31 Freedom Rider is financed by contributions from his lectures and sermons and from “some people who just read abou* my work, or my beino, arrested, in the newspapers.” The two civil rights suits he has initiated in federal courts are being financed by the American Civil Liberties Union. HOW DOES Mr. Jones believe his :actions improve race relations in the South? “Focussing publicity on the injustices of segregation does more to break it down than anything else,” he said. “There has been more progress made in the past three years-1- sine 3 ACTION protest projects beganthan in the previous 50 years.” In Austin, Mr. Jones traveled in an unmarked car. “My wife’s with me,” he said, grinning.J.M. ble is that nobody seems to know whether the anti-radiation drug shows the right kind of discrimination. Dr. Hill said they stopped using the anti-radiation drugs at Baylor Hospital for this very reason: “It seemed the drug may have been protecting the tumor as much as it was protecting the patient.” The drugs used are aminoethylthiuronium-like compounds. There’s no question about what they can do for rats and monkeys. Usually 500 roentgens of radiation is considered a lethal dose for monkeys, but Melville works with 800 and 900 roentgens, and even at that super-lethal dosage up to 85 percent of his monkeys survive. With rats, protection is about 100 percent. Although right now human beings don’t have the stamina shown by rats, Melville sees no reason, theoretically, why the protection given monkeys should not extend to human beings. Four years ago, the AET-like compounds took about 15 minutes to become effective and their effectiveness lasted about one hour. Melville and other scientists have now worked out a compound that will take effect in five minutes and will last a “few” hours. Extending the duration of the pills’ effects is the next objective. It shouldn’t be long before everybody can pop an anti-radiation pill into his mouth and settle down to receive the city-leveling bomb with much more equanim ity. B.S. THE TEXAS OBSERVER Page 6 June 29, 1962 The land is located miles from Austin out the Fredericksburg highway. It is nine miles south of Johnson City and Lyndon Johnson’s ranch. Texas Tech’s horticulture and park planning department, which is now preparing a master-plan type last study for the Texas park system, the would probably plan the improvements to the new park. Will the legislature make the necessary appropriation? Thinking ahead to that question, Bill Scientists To The Rescue: Radiation Pills