ustxtxb_obs_1964_02_07_50_00004-00000_000.pdf

I was a student there, and they spend much more time in bed with each other than then ; but they seem, most of them, overimpressed and overburdened with things that have been given to them. As always, some of them think a lot and want to make love to the future, too, even though it’s more difficult than the customary engagement. I WOULD NOT have you think I claim there is anything discrete or unique in things and people worth seeing and knowing in Texas. We do not need that or any kind of specialness in my state any more. We are become strong enough as a culture to know that we will most of the time fail as individuals, against our highest goals, and to be able to accept this, and honor the more those who do not fail, against our highest standards. We are not so uninformed about the razz-ma-tazz nightclub life and the frenetic business pace in Arizona and New York, Chicago and California, that we feel any generically Texas shame about our own gaucheries and vapidities. There seems to be enough of these to go around without our making special stock of ours. But you know, the race will be in a hell of a shape if we lose our sentiment. If the sneer ever overpowers the hope that someone will get the messagewell, do you know what Lee Oswald told a Dallas Republican about his visit to Russia? He said Russia is “incredibly boring.” Texas is not. It’s credibly real and it’s full of willingness for sentiment. People love here as though we’ve just discovered love and there’s a future for it. We haven’t learned to believe yet that everybody, down deep, is a son of a bitch, or the prospective mother of one. I think we’re right, and I fear we’re wrong. I hope you who do not live here will let us who do join you as ordinary equals in the attempt to keep life, and to keep it from being incredibly boring. Say whatever you like about any one of us, we will, too; but say not “about Texas,” for as it is not anything in particular, so, to we who love it and are here, it is everything that surrounds us, and the places our intelligence lives, and hears, and grows. R.D. A Marker, Kennedy Prizes, A Razing . . . The Memorial in Dallas Dallas, Austin A two-by-three foot, one-inch-thick plaque mounted on a postthe same kind of historical marker that is used along highways in Texas as a tourist marker will be placed at the assassination scene in Dallas, and there will be no monument at the scene, if present plans and tendencies become fact. It is contemplated, also, that the book depository building from which President Kennedy was shot may be bought and torn down. Mayor Earle Cabell and Dallas Cty. Judge Lew Sterrett appointed a committee to consider what to do about the many suggestions for memorials to Kennedy. Many Dallas citizens wanted to do something. Mayor Cabell said very early that he is opposed to a monument at the scene of the assassinationthat he favored sending money to Washington for the erection of a proper monument there, where all Americans could see it. Then, however, some Dallas people began to insist on a memorial at the scene. They included Maurice Carlson, former county Republican chairman, and Mike McKool, a Democratic leader in Dallas, both of whom testified on the subject at a city council meeting. Cabell announced the committee, and it has been deliberating since. Not waiting on the committee, Mrs. Barefoot Sanders, wife of the U.S. district attorney in Dallas, has formed a committee to establish a Kennedy Book Memorial Fund, which will place books about the late President in the public school libraries of Dallas. The Cabell-Sterrett committee proceeded deliberately at first and sought not to take haste, according to Rev. Luther Holcomb, executive of the Dallas Council of Churches and the committee secretary, but now the members have decided they must hurry to a conclusion. They were to meet Feb. 6 4 The Texas Observer and for the first time discuss specifically what each member favors. THE CHAIRMAN of the committee on the memorial is Dawson Sterling, who is also president of Southwestern Life Insurance Co. and president of the Dallas Assembly. The Dallas Assembly is an organization of business executives aged between 25 and 50; in effect, therefore, it is a lower-echelon Dallas Citizens Council. \(The,Council is composed of the top busiThe committee had received 540 suggestions as of last week. They fall into two broad categories, a memorial or fountain, or a living memorial, Sterling said. Sterling mentioned that the Texas State Historical Survey Committee, a state agency, “has said it would like to put a marker there,” at the scene of the assassination. The tendency in the Cabell-Sterrett committee, Sterling said, is “more in the direction of a living memorial, rather than a monument at the site.” The state marker would not be considered a monument, as it is simply a small highway marker. Mayor Cabell says a member of the committee who knows John Ben Shepperd of Odessa, the chairman of the Historical Survey Committee, got in touch with Shepperd and proposed the marker at the site. The state agency voted at Brownwood recently to erect “one of these standard markers at the place of the assassination,” Cabell said. As for the Cabell-Sterrett committee considering suggestions in Dallas, Cabell said, “I gather that they’re leaning toward something of a living memorial, rather than an obelisk or a point for curiosity seekers.” Concern for “the Dallas image” is very much a part of the indisposition among Dallas civic leaders to have a monument at the assassination scene. Cabell says, on this point : “Well, they don’t want it to become a mark of shame, shall-we say, and one that would attract the morbid curi osity 7seekers and your hawkers standing on the spot, selling pictures. It’s not matter of playing it down.” Rev. Holcomb says the Dallas committed has not yet contacted Mrs. John Kennet to ascertain the wishes of the family, bui wants to do this. It is not contemplated, hE said, that the historical marker woulc preclude the possibility of a monument at the site, but “there’s a strong feeling for a living memorial.” Specifically, the committee might be inclined favorably toward something of value or assistance to culture or to health, \(such as something to fight mental refor the creation of something of beauty. Stanley Marcus returned to Dallas from New York City with an idea for a living memorial given him by a New York advertising man. This plan would be to create a Nobel-like fund to honor distinguished achievement in fields that are not covered by the Nobel Prizes. The Kennedy Prizes would be awarded in Dallas. Three or four million dollars could endow three $50,000 awards. Marcus, \(the proprietor, of course, of the famous Neiman-Marcus store in Dalprogram would depend wholly on the integrity built into the judging process. N AUSTIN, George Hill, executive secretary of the 18-member Texas State Historical Survey Committee, confirmed that, contingent only upon approval of the Dallas County local historical survey committee, which he expects to be forthcoming, the state agency has agreed to erect an historical marker on a post at the assassination scene. This decision is associated with proposals to erect similar markers at the birthplaces