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ABJIN ’68 Anyone But Johnson BUMPERSTRIPS: Fluorescent, genuine peel-off bumperstrip stock. 2 for 25c 10 for $1 150 for $10 1,000 for $50 DISSENTING DEMOCRATS OF TEXAS 1505 Cloverleaf Austin, Texas 78723 rhubarb about policemen who were caught sleeping on duty in one of our cemeteries. They had been napping out there most every weekday night for months, several squad cars of them, so they got fired. I don’t blame the officers; things were so quiet they couldn’t stay awake, and nobody should drive a car when he is real sleepy. We do appreciate a pair of pretty legs in Oak Cliff. They have a Miss Flame beauty contest every year, climaxed on July 4th, and Miss Flame candidates appear pictured for months in the Oak Cliff Tribune. No football game is complete here without a parade of pretty girls in tights. Sivil’s Drize-In was momentarily famous when one of The early issues of Life magazine featured its car-hops. Sivil’s had the girls dolled up in majorette uniforms, tightfitting and bare legged, and wearing little white boots. You got your doubledip ice cream cone or coke, your hot dog or hamburger delivered to the car by strutting, long-stemmed Texas beauties. Real nice young ladies worked out there, the kind you see today in the high school drill teams and as airline hostesses. That was back in the Depression days when any job was appreciated and car-hopping was new and glamorous. I think it is significant that here is a Texas city of 300,000 people with very few millionaires, and not even a Cadillac agency. N MATTERS educational and cultural, Oak Cliff is again a bedroom area. We have no college, although we claim Dallas Baptist College which overlooks Mountain Creek Lake several miles west of town, and Bishop College \(colorliberally supported by Troy Post, Dallas millionaire, who sits on the college board of directors, and other philanthropists. We have four small branch libraries and several bookmobiles, a great stride forward from 15 years ago when we had one small library. There are two bookstores on Jefferson, the Baptist and the Methodist, stocked solely with devotional and inspirational books. Several greeting card and gift shops and phonograph record departments in the department stores carry a very few books, and Mickey Spillane is available in some of the drug stores. Dear’ old Mrs. King, across from Sunset High, does carry a few worthwhile paperbacks along with her school supplies, Bibles, dictionaries, and get-well cards. It would seem that Oak Cliff is a nonreading crowd of people, although in justice to my neighbors I must say that we are just minutes away from a number of good bookstores in Dallas, and colleges in Arlington, Denton, and Dallas. As for live entertainment, there is the P.T.A. The toddlers and the sub-teen girls perform at the annual dancing school rehearsals. The high schools also have surprisingly good symphony orchestras and choirs and stage musical productions such as “Brigadoon” and “South Pacific.” Kiwanis and other civic groups stage some interesting spectacles, a recent success be ing “Pajama Game,” which was quite risque, everything considered. Art films, foreign films, sex movies of the topless variety meet with considerable hostility in Oak Cliff, although the Rex on Jefferson now runs them, as does the Twin Drive-In on the Fort Worth highway. The Rex was picketed for weeks by the projectionists’ union, and has been under fire from various ladies’ pressure groups. The Twin Drive-In has been forced by court order to erect a great tall fence of telephone ‘poles so that people driving by on the highway are not exposed to the lewd scenes on the screen. Singleton Blvd., pronounced “Sangleton” by the natives, used to have a string of working class beer joints and dives, white and colored. It was a brawling section of a Saturday night, before Oak Cliff voted it dry. There is a gun store on Singleton which claims to have the largest stock of rifles, pistols, and shotguns in the Southwest. A friend of mine, in town from Kansas City, who is a gun fancier, was amazed at this arsenal. They sell to the whites, the Negroes, and the peace officers. An old house and service station on Singleton was home for the Barrow clan. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were the notorious boy and girl gangsters and bank robbers of the late twenties. A motion picture is now current, portraying their exploits. But this is West Dallas, not properly Oak Cliff, and we are getting some distance away from our missionaries and whaling schooners and topless brown beauties in that tropical paradise called Hawaii. THE GATEWAY TO TEXAS “Vamonos!” San Antonio Our mule-drawn wagon lurched forward down a dusty street of Villa Guerrero, creaking past two and a half centuries of history when Guerrero was known as Presidio San Juan Bautista \(Fort St. John bearing rafter inscriptions, “Viva Fernando, Rey de Espalha.” Charles Morris, a law The writera former state representative and member of the State Democratic Executive Committee from San Antonio, who, as counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union in San Antonio, has defended some of the most unpopular causes in Texas since Sam Houston opposed secessionis also a history buff. $ The Texas Observer professor < , at Sotithrn Methbalit trniversi ty, Texas State krefidedlOgist tUrtis nell, and I were on our way to Paso de: Francia along the Mexican side+ of the Rio. Grande below Eagle Pass. Some seven miles later we stopped at a bluff overlooking the river and hiked a short way to a point where the stream, Maury Maverick, Jr. except for a narrow channel, was mostly riffles, with small islands here and there. "There it is, Senores," our Mexican host announced: "the gateway to Texas." Between the time of LaSalle's expedition along the Gulf Coast to establish outposts against the Spanish, in 1684 and 1685, and St. Denis' trek of 1714 to the Rio Grande, ostensibly to open trade routes, the ford which now lay before us came to be known as Paso de Francia . . . France Way. Paul Horgan, in his incomparable two-volume work on the Rio Grande, describes it as St . . the beachhead for invasions, the supply depot, the station of reinforcements, the ecclesiastical headquarters, the wayfarer's haven, and the starting place for explorations . . ." For more than a century the Spanish used it as their most important pass into Texas. "Do you realize," Tunnell asked, "that this area of the Rio Grande is the beginning of Texas as it was colonized by Europenas? Can't you picture the people who were here before us?" Indeed we could. Governor Martin de Alacon, Fray Antonio de Olivares, and seven families, for instance, crossed the ford in 1718 and founded the mission San Antonio de Valero, today the Alamo, as a halfway station between Fort St. John and the hated French. The Canary Islanders crossed in 1731 on their way to found the village of San Fernando de Bexar, the first regularly organized civil government in Texas. A distinguished American soldier, Zebulon Montgomery Pike, was arrested at' Fort St. John by the Spanish on June 1, 1807, on suspicion of being a spy. Treated with courtesy, at evening he watched a troupe of entertainers, slack wire artists; in the morning he was escorted to France Way after estimating the fort to have a population of 2,500. Presidents of the United States later used Pike's intelligence reports to conquer areas north of the Rio Grande. Today people drive up Pike's Peak named in his memory. Santa Anna crossed here on his way to the Alamo with 1,600 infantry, 400 cavalry, six pieces of artillery. His personal wagon was loaded with the amenities of life .. . tea caddy, decanters, a silver chamber pot.