ustxtxb_obs_1966_02_18_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

It’s good to get home… after a day of hard work or hard play. And it’s pleasant to relax with cool, refreshing beer. In fact, 65 % of all the beer produced in this country is enjoyed at home. It cheers your taste as it renews your zest. So, make yourself at home .. . with beer. UNITED STATES BREWERS ASSOCIATION, INC. 905 International Life Bldg., Austin 1, Texas pointed out that enacting a permanent registration system keyed to the poll tax would be “inconceivable,” for might not the voters in November strike down the poll tax, even if the court has not? Peeler and such battle-scarred dissenters as Reps. Howard Green of Fort Worth and Bob, Eckhardt of Houston \(who has announced for Congress against the gravely Monday, attempting to drum up the 50 votes needed to keep the governor’s plan from going into effect in time to provide the “conditional” registration before the party primaries.. Fifty votes would be needed in the House and ten in the Senate, where Sen. Franklin Spears of San Antonio, another candidate for attorney general, was working the floor against the administration bill. House sponsor of the Connally bill is Rep. Gene Fondren of Taylor, whose measure seemed assured of success; it was to go before the state affairs committee of Rep. Dick Cory of Victoria, a Connally man. Peeler admitted that his bill’s chances in committee did not appear 8 The Texas Observer good. In the Senate, Grady Hazlewood stood behind the Connally bill. Spears and Eckhardt were exercised Monday by the governor’s plan. Eckhardt said he felt that most of the people of Texas, including many of the journalists, believed that the session had been called to bring the state’s election laws in line with the court’s decision and to enable the state to abide by that decision until the U.S. Supreme Court affirms it. The Houston lawmaker said that it was not made clear, nor did Connally intend to make it clear, that those who register in the special two-week open period in March would be unable to vote until the Supreme Court’s final ruling or the people’s decision to jettison the poll tax. “Who’s going to go down there, put his name up, and take a chance that he can vote?” Eckhardt said. “What we now find is that the governor has called the session to open voting if the Supreme Court does what the Supreme Court almost never does,” that is, offer an immediate answer to the state’s appeal of the district court decision. Eckhardt said that it would be most unlikely for the high court to offer its ruling before the October term of court. By that time, of course, even conditional registration would be over, and the unregistered would have missed the opportunity to vote in the primary of the party so firmly in control of Texas politics. “This speech, this sessionthis is all just window-dressing,” Eckhardt said. Spears, unoptimistic about a Senate blockade of the Connally bill, told the Observer, “Since I heard that the special session had been called, I don’t know what to thinkI don’t know right from wrong any more. At least we may be able to draw the line clearly for the election.” Spears’ major opponent, Secretary of State Crawford Martin, an administration man, suspended, until the session’s end, his plan to resign and campaign. Houston lawyer John Hill is expected to become Martin’s replacement. L.L. LETTUCE Baytown My country boy introduction to the nowsophisticated, practice of inhaling smoke came via the grapevine and cedar bark. Grapevine produces a thick, acrid plume of smoke through numerous tiny holes in the wood. It makes the mouth taste horrible for at least an hour. Cedar bark, when stripped from fence posts and wrapped in a piece of paper, makes a cumbersome awkward cigarette which usually comes apart and bursts into flame after one or two puffs. As I now recall, I was never able to get enough smoke out of one to compare its flavor with that of grapevine. Both were so unpalatable that they delayed my use of tobacco until I was about ready to vote. But now, according to the public prints, a new substitute for tobacco has arrived and we may be proud of the fact -that it is a Texas product. Dried lettuce has been introduced as the ersatz cigarette stuffing, and it has excited a group of North Texans enough that they have gone into business, created a packaged product, and put it on the market. An early story announces that the first day 4500 packages were sold in Amarillo. It would have been more significant, of course, to learn what the second day’s sales amounted to, but the possibilities have encouraged lettuce growers down in, the Rio Grande Valley, who see a lucrative market for the once-worthless outer leaves from heads of lettuce. Experiments are continuing to create cigar and pipe stuffings out of the big green leaves. We bear no ill will towards the tobacco companies, which have never given anybody cancer on purpose. The industry maintains a stable of scientists who are constantly releasing evidence which seems to satisfy everybody in Winston-Salem that the proof of a cigarette-cancer link is inconclusive. Every now and then we read of the industry’s lobbying efforts to delay and minimize the government-decreed labeling of cigarettes as dangerous. But as soon as a formula has been perfected to make pipe tobacco out of lettuce, I’ll try it. I earnestly hope it won’t taste like grapevine or burst into flame. AL MELINGER