ustxtxb_obs_1962_08_24_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

1862 in Comfort: Treue der Union COMFORT It was August 12, 1962, and the midday sun beat down on a triangular monument in Comfort, Texas. Several hundred people had assembled for a centennial observance. The four inscriptions on the monument were all in German. “Treue der Union” \(True Aug 1862″ \(Killed on tenth day genommen and ermordet” \(Taken prisoner and murder1862 am Rio Grande” \(Killed on 18th of October, 1862 on the were the German immigrants who came to Texas in search of liberty. After the devastation of the Napoleonic Wars, Germany experienced growing economic ehaos and political unrest. First to suffer from stringent censorship were the universities. In time the masses of the people encountered deprivation. The Germans began to eye distant Texas, and in 1842 an organization known as Verein zum Schutze deutscher Ewinanderer in Texas was formed to facilitate immigration. To the hill country north of San Antonio and west of Austin the exodus began. Many of the newcomers were cultured and educated people who brought music, art, and good books to a land that could use them. More than any other people they were trusted by the Indians. One of the legends of the hill country is the story of an old German reading the classics in Greek to his wife on the front porch of his home while wild Indians sat at their feet in friendship. They despised slavery and in overwhelming number s voted against secession. S To these German settlements came James Duff of Scotland to lynch and murder the Northern sympathizers. Duff would be described by the San Antonio Express as, “The Rebel Butcher of Texas.” By August 1, 1862, a group of 69 Germans began a long march of escape to Mexico. One man, Pablo Diaz, went along as translator. By August 9 they reached the banks of the Nueces River, where they decided to camp. That night a festive mood came over the men. A favorite poem of the old country, “Black Crows are Still A-Flying” was recited, then speeches and debates on such subjects as “America,” Citizenship,” “Slavery,” and “Refugeeing to Mexico.” Finally, a silence fell over the Germans. With no organized effort, they began to sing the songs of their mother country. This was a moment when brave men could feel a pang of honest sadness. One by one they wrapped themselves in blankets and went to sleep to the tenor howl of ,the coyotes. For many of these men it was their last night. In the morning a group known as Partisan Rangers, some say Texas Rangers, engaged the Germans in battle. Those captured were brutally murdered on the spot. Now the Germans of 1962 had come to honor the collected remains of their dead, brought back to Comfort shortly after the Civil War. The men’s chorus first sang “Das Ist Der Tag Des Herrn.” Then the ladies’ chorus sang “Ween Die Rosen Bluehen.” An old man made a speech about the evils of slavery over a loudspeaker, provided, as the sign said, with the compliments of Lone Star Beer. Little boys dressed in blue uniforms of Yankee soldiers darted back and forth in the crowd. S Today most political analysts will tell you that the vast majority of Texas Germans have turned strongly conservative. I do not know if that is so. Certainly it is not entirely correct, for the Fred Schmidts and the Robert Eckhardts, Texas Germans, they know about liberty. So it was on an August Sunday, 1962, at Comfort, Texas. Treue der Union, indeed! MAURY MAVERICK JR. Young Generation Goes for Broke a b et -1 I tc -e THE VULTURES DESCEND Marilyn Monroe We like to keep in touch with what the younger generation is thinking. This article was written by Marta Davidson, a former cheerleader at Winters, for the freshman issue of the Daily Texan, student paper at the University. According to the preface, she “puts into words , the feelings of most incoming freshmen to the University.”Ed. I ath not alone. Like thousands of other graduating high school seniors, I am about to enter a very different world from that which I have known for the past eighteen years. It is a bright world composed of dormitory life with new friends and acquaintances, three hour courses, and Saturday afternoon football games. Though besieged by many doubts and misgivings, still I face this new life with optimistic anticipation. Yet there is a certain degree of apprehension. But I am not alone. 10, not alone. There are many ” others like me who, after having been completely loyal to the football team of their high school alma mater for four years, are now contemplating the problem of exchanging that old loyalty for a new one. Because I was a high school cheerleader, the creation of school spirit has more or less been my major occupation. In September, as a freshman, I will enter a uni versity which is the proud possessor of one of the greatest football teams in the nation. What emotions will I and others like me experience in this change? First of all, I’m terribly excited about seeing my first college football game. I’ve heard a lot about the Texas Longhorns. What lover of football hasn’t? The Longhorns have established a record which will not soon be forgotten, either by supporters of the Orange and White or by their many unfortunate opponents. I’m very proud to be attending a school of such reputation, but I’m somewhat bedeviled by a large number of uncertainties. Still, there is comfort in the realization I am not alone. . . . I graduated from a small high school in which I knew and was known personally by nearly every student. In a university of twenty thousand, this is quite impossible. I will know the football players only by name here, and I will back the Longhorn team as a unit instead of specifically caring whether Joe or Jim or John made the winning touchdown. I’ll be yelling for the Texas Longhorns, not for a bunch of boys with whom I’m well acquainted and whose welfare is important to me. Can football in this situation mean as much to me as before? Perhaps it will mean less, probably be of even more significance; but I have the consolation of knowingI am not alone. A high school football game meant a week of feverish preparation not only for me but also for many others from other schools. There were posters to be made, skits to be prepared, and a pep rally to be staged. I’ve heard that a comparatively small percent of students gather for pep rallies here at the university, whereas the entire student body attended the high school. This was, of course, due to the fact that they were held during class hours and no one seemed to prefer studying to yelling. Will I care enough to be present at the Longhorn pep rallies? Or will I find that other affairs are more pressing? That is a difficult question to answer now, but I am confident that I am not alone. ANOTHER great difference which we will encounter is that of game time. Saturday afternoon has never before held the big moment which has so anxiously been awaited all week. Friday night brings either the desired victory or the dreaded loss for high school football fans. Will the excitement for the fifty thousand unknown spectators be more contagious than the smaller high school crowd? Will I experience a bigger thrill from hearing the “Eyes of Texas” played by the Longhorn Band than I did from my high school alma mater? Will football be better when it’s biggeron a much larger scaleor will the impersonal aspect be too great? I doubt if I shall be able to sit passively in the stands while the Longhorns battle for a victory, for at that moment, I shall certainly know that I am not alone. Thus I face the new world I am about to enter eagerly with what I hope is a healthy attitude. Positive I am that it is not a unique one. We can’t help excerpting this appreciation of Marilyn, written by Charles Marowitz for the Village Voice.Ed. No sooner had she been draped away than the press vultures descended. How ghastly and despicable was their thoroughness! To papers like the Daily News and the Mirror, her death was merely the hottest angle they had ever gotten from her. The Post \(why do we think of this foul tabloid as being in a special laid it on for the greater glory of circulation, keeping it headlined for three days running and encouraging its crassest hacks squeeze the story dry. Max Lerner, dribbling lay-analyses and that wholer-than-thou attitude which makes him of all the hacks the most repulsive, once again demonstrated the stilted little onestep of his mind. Even our own Jerry Tallmer was culpable, manufacturing angles and irrelevancies, commingling snide film criticism and in memoria. THE PATRONIZING psychologi cal analysis was invoked by most. Little girl lost, friendless, alone. Poor kid, she should have been better adjusted, should have been able tcp kick the drugs. All this from hacks, punks, and disguised psychotics who have neither the stamina for life nor the courage for death. Let us eulogize her. Let us spin hot copy and nod our moral nods. The real history of Marilyn can never be written by the pressboys who get their education from handouts and their morality from gossip columns. They are too hung up on their own fantasies. Sidetracked in her teens, vulgarized in her twenties, a crassly vaunted glamor-puss and popular masturbatory image, she had something in her nature which retained a purity circumstances could not tarnish. This is what made her special. In her early life she was persuaded that Hollywood success was a kind of meaning in life. When she achieved it, she found how cockeyed her dream had been. Not being able to dignify the movies, she attempted to dignify herself by plying acting as an art. That she failed at this in no way detracts from the admirable instinct that led her to try. As she herself said, her greatest fear was losing her uniqueness, becoming a “thing”. Early in her career she had become a “thing” for press agents, film producers, and studio directorsall those men to whom tangibility is the measure of truth. Methodically they nibbled her innards, dividing their percentages and ignoring the person behind the “thing”. She sought in marriage what she had lost in herself, and naturally she. couldn’t find it. DiMaggio was probably her most natural ally: both could share the loneliness of each other’s myth. Miller could have saved her if he hadn’t been so corrupted with perception. It was a mismatch from the first. She brought animal grace, and he only mundane consciousness. Confused, gullible, at once too young and too old in her spirit and in her nature, she was too good for him. BUT LET US NOT spin fantasies upon fantasies. She was never an actress nor a comedienne of any real standing. She was something much rarer, a woman in whom physical beauty ‘was so dynamic that it shaped her spirit: even when that spirit began to `sag, it could not mar that beauty. To turn a camera upon this was to reveal a living principle of life. What filmmaker could devise anything half as compelling? Those who believe she was nothing more than the creation of the Press Mind have no understanding of either publicity or women. The hacks tried to make her a glossy-photo goddess with untouchable boobs and mystic buttocks. But her elegance lay in the fact that she was quintessentially a woman and not a cold deity. And yet she was a goddess in the sense that a goddess exemplifies and makes divine certain human traits which most of us possess so ordinarily. I am being neither slushy nor whimsical when I say I loved her. She was for me, as for so many, a voluptuary. I desired her with that purity of passion that men always experience for women they can never have. / 6 A But I am too angry to mourn, for her death was neither suicide nor accident, but a premeditated act of spoilage. She was a woman deified and then dispossessed, forced to mingle with grubby heathens entirely unsuited to cope with gentility: Miranda at the mercy of an island full of Calibans. She was part of that world as its captive, not as its accomplice. How can we mourn the woman when the papers and television’ and all the other orifices of communication continually remind us of the forces that killed her. TO INDICT Hollywood is to in diet America, for Hollywood is only the launching pad from which American mores and ideas are flashed to the nation. The Hollywood ethosthe workaday malice, the worship of elephantiasis, the cunning that passes for intelligenceis to be found just as readily in any urban metropolis of millions or suburban community of thousands. Hollywood may have pulled the trigger, but America loaded the gun. ‘It is odd the way her friends would dignify her death by discouraging the idea of suicide. An accidental death perhaps assuages their own guilt. It distracts us from the moral implications and conveniently files her into the annals of Hollywood exo