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$14,006 in the last three months: “burning buildings, burning trucks, putting sugar into equipment.” “Slashing tires,” Petersen added. They said there are only 20 or 30 strikers \( the union says 70 or 80 people are actively striking of its several thoumy witness,” Rochester said, “not one of my people walked out and joined them, outside of my normal turnover.” Rochester has been quoted in dailies that one did and another four former La Casita workers are among the strikers, but they had been discharged before that for cause; he qualified his statement to Bernal by adding that one worker had gone over. Lettuce workers make $2.50 an hour, produce people $3 an hour, so the $1.25 promise an hour does not attract such workers, nor those getting $1.15 an hour at La Casita, Rochester said. By converting to piece work, Rochester said, “What I’m going to do is pay $2.50 or $3 an hour, I’m going to get rid of half the people” and “turn ’em loose on the community, let ’em do what they want to with ’em. I’m not gonna fight this thing again. They can do what they want to with ’em.” Cellam said his children had been cursed and abused, and his wife suffered from harassment. “Brother, there’s two sides,” he said. Petersen said the strikers were “vigilantes. Why you think they want to get rid of the Rangers? To take the law in their own hands.” Speaking of the Rangers, Cellam asked, “When did it become a law you can’t hove a man, just simply shove a man?” the Rev. Grout said, “Simple assault.” “OK, simple assault,” Cellam responded. At another point Petersen, a sunburned, rough-made farmer, said, “If a man gets out of line he certainly oughta get pushed around a little bit.” Of La Casita Rochester said, “They will close before they sign with them, because I won’t sign with those people, and when I leave, they’ll close up. Starr Produce is the same thing. They will not sign with these irresponsible people.” Rochester said his firm had been $300,000 from previous vegetable crops and that if he’d been shut down during the last ten days of the melon harvest, it would have cost La Casita $200,000. In contrast with such considerations, and giving more than 300 local people jobs, he said, “Here’s a bunch of people from California got a few people outa the pool hall and off welfare.” Two months ago, Cellam said, south off Falfurrias “this bunch of goons” broke coke bottles in front of workers on their way to La Casita, ruining two new tires. The Revs. Grout and Gonzalez concurred that the civic leaders of the community wanted the Rangers there. George Boyle, manager of the local chamber of commerce as well as proprietor of the Ringgold Hotel, shraed this view. He also made the point that migrants like to go on the road, a point Bernal did not accept. AT MISSION that evening, four pickets waited until Bernal arrived, and then they began picketing. In a flurry the Rangers arrested the pickets. Bernal said to Allee he’d always heard “one riot, one Ranger,” but here it looked like four pickets, eight Rangers. Allee told him, “I never thought I’d live to so see the day some senators would come down here” and do as Bernal had. Bernal said he’d stick to being senator and Allee shoUld stick to being a Ranger, and Allee said for him not to tell him what to stick to. Allee told reporters then, “I told him he had his flash, what he’s looking for he’s got it.” “I’m thoroughly convinced,” Bernal said to reporters, that Allee is “on the side of the growers.” Bernal did not think they should have come in at the request of the growers. The Rangers were correct legally in arresting people for secondary picketing, but they had just violated Kathy Lynch’s rights by arresting her for this though she was not carrying a picket sign, he said. He thought the governor should call them out of the Valley and that despite the governor’s saying he did not have this authority, he did. Did Bernal think the Rangers were acting as strikebreakers? “If they aren’t, they’re doing a darn’ good job at it,” Bernal said. The Rangers, he concluded, are “the MexicanAmericans’ Ku Klux Klan. All they need is a white hood with `Rinches’ written across it.” After Bernal went back to McAllen, there occurred, that night, whatever the events were that are now referred to as “the Dimas incident” and have led to a full-fledged investigation by’ the Federal Bureau of Investigation. THE DIMAS INCIDENT WHAT HAD happened in that house? Captain Allee was relaxing in front of the Ringgold Hotel in one of the big wooden armchairs when he gave the Observer his account. He began by drawing from his shirt pocket the police “rap sheets” on the two men the Rangers had arrested. Showing Dimas’ record, he said, “See what the Starr County put on there, ‘Criminal Specialty: Murder’,” and he showed the place on the form where the county authorities had, indeed, written this onto Dimas’ record. They had received the page-and-a-half-long , record, itself, from the Texas Department of Public Safety three days after Dimas had been arrested for unlawful picketing last November. A U.S. citizen, Mexico-born, 29-year-old Dimas is heavily tattooed. There is a dragon on his right arm, and there is a rose on his left arm. He was deported to Mexico in 1954, and, four years later, Dimas was convicted of “murder without malice, assault to murder,” sentenced to five years from Wilson County, and evidently served three years. He was charged with driving without a license and passing on the right in Brownfield, and he paid a $25.50 fine there for being drunk. The record says he got a year in Starr county jail in 1963 for aggravated assault. That same year he was fined $100 and given three days for driving while drunk in Farwell, Tex. In 1965, at Del Rio and Lubbock, he was in trouble about smuggling aliens; the disposition is unclear from the record, but evidently he is on a probated sentence in this connection. The last entry of this kind is dated Aug. 25, 1965. On Nov. 9, 1966, at Rio Grande City, he was charged with secondary picketing. Benito Rodriguez’ record shows charges of being drunk, vagrant, and of disturbing the peace; he was jailed on a twoyear sentence in 1963 for attempted burg ATHENA MONTESSORI SCHOOL Children Ages 2 to 6. Call AT 2-1719 or write: Box 442 in Austin 78767. lary. He was fined $30 for drinking, although a minor, in 1960, he paid $21 of it and served three days to satisfy the rest of it. C APTAIN ALLEE said that he got a call that Dimas was seen walking down at La Casita packing shed with a rifle. “He had already threatened a man’s life, Jim Rochester said he’d get even with him.” Allee had received information, he said, that Dimas told Jim Rochester last November “that he was going to June 9, 1967 23 PROFESSORS . . . STUDENTS Group subscriptions to the Observer for the summer session will be just $1.00 per student for the June through August biweekly issues if 10 or more subscribe and provided we may mail all copies of each issue in a single pac