ustxtxb_obs_1967_11_24_50_00013-00000_000.pdf

Did you EVER hear of an insurance company . . . which allows its CLAIMS to be ARBITRATED! We do! Specifically, Part Five of our Special Union Labor Disability policy states that .. . “In the event of a disagreement between the Insured and the Company on any question arising under the policy, the matter under dispute may, on the request of the Insured in writing to the Executive Offices of the Company be referred to a Board of Arbitration, said Board to consist of three persons, one to be selected by the Insured, one by the Company, and a third selected by these two. The award or decisions of the arbitrators, or a majority of them, if not =ominous, shall be binding upon both the Company and the Insured.” This provision is in the policy that pays you $200 per month when you are disabled and unable to work due to sickness or accident. Something else. Ours is one of the few Unionized insurance companies in the United States. Our employees are represented by Local 277 of the Office and Professional Employees International Union. And we’re proud of it! A MERICAN INCOME LIFE 1Am/tame Executive Offices, P. 0. Box 208, Waco, Texas BERNARD RAPOPORT President and none of the prospective candidates are really going to level with the people, and we just ought to organize communities and work for peace, that’s all, and specifically nothing more. I suggested that one could actively oppose the violents among the young and the Negroes, organize communities and work for peace, and encourage trends worth encouraging in both the Republican and Democratic parties; that different kinds of people would do, as they would, some or other of these things, but that there is something wrong with insisting that nobody do some of them and everybody do others. “No, no,” he said”don’t you understand? These kids, they have wonderful built-in shit detectors, they know the governor’s race doesn’t amount to anything.” I gave up on this conversation before I thought to tell him that when people get so rattled by the times and the opinions of others they give up on doing whatever kind of good work expresses them and their desires for a better society, the hope for one is gone. I think I knew what he’d say: He’d ask again, Don’t you understand? Although they’re quite different, what these two good men have in common is the belief that they have the title in fee-simple to the best thing everybody ought to do, and anybody else who thinks he has a right to stand on his own ground is stupid or a sell-out and ought to be locked up for the protection of the innocent. Both these men are in panic. I would be glad to name them but it wouldn’t be fair because I’m so prejudiced against what they were saying. One day about five years ago, after reading a particularly , somber morning paper, \( say, something about revolution and murder in the Congo, the decapitation of a pregnant mother, and the trial of the Beast of Belsen, in addition to a gangI remember standing still a moment, on the threshhold of the Observer office, it was, and thinking, “Balance in process. You have to keep your balance in process.” I admit it gets harder and harder. A Community The Knights of Scholz!thus were the large and happy company assembled to celebrate Willie Morris addressed in a wire from his editor in Boston. Larry Goodwyn, back from a trip to New York, and his wife were there in the garden, under the trees. Mr. Bales, the proprietor of Scholz’, had not meant to open up the garden, nights being nippy, but there were so many people this night come to see Willie and have him sign their copies of his book, the garden opened by itself. What could they do but bring beer? Charles Ramsdell, given to long absences from hereabouts, during which his friends receive spotty reports of his adventures in his brief pauses from his creative labors in Mexico, was there. Dan Strawn, the Scourge of Kenedy and the presiding specimen, for two twelve-year terms, of the Horses Associates of Scholzgarten, took no offense, so general was the euphoria, when people kept telling him how surprisingly well groomed he looked. Strawn bore for Willie a condemnatory note, scrawled in ink on a newspaper clipping, from “Henderson,” not the Rain King. Strawn said that as soon as he had shown the message to everyone in the garden, he was going to show it to Willie, though it would make him mad. Otherwise, Strawn said, he’d never be able to look “Henderson” in the face again. Strawn actually thinks he knows who this mysterious bird is. Bill Brammer was somehow missing; Fred Schmidt, who is out there, too. But people had driven in from Denison, from San Antonio, from the country around Austin. They lined up three hours to see Willie again. He talked with everybody so long people seemed to be waiting hours. There has come into being a community, far-flung, disparate, dyed with all the foibles and flights of life, but a community, the last dozen years or so in Texas. We are journalists, political hacks, professors, plumbers, rustics, wives, girls, renegade businessmen, iconoclastic ranchers, students, shysters, labor stiffs, preachers, painters, wenches and wenchers- God, we are all sorts of people, a marvel that we are a community. It is the community of the post-war, a Texas-foundationed community who know each other one way or another and laugh at each other and love each other. Willie’s coming back was one of those events that made us know again, as we know periodically, that we persist and continue. He had floated down one of the canyons of the Big Bend with a bunch of people. I heard Dave and Ann Richards of Dallas had to swim for it, and their rented canoe was crushed. There was a long, wild party in San Antonio. Don Kennard’s throwing a goat roast in Fort Worth. Houston sounds formidably formal, speech and banquet and all that; but that won’t last, something real will happen. Willie has written a fine book and he is doing fine work in New York; we back November 24, 1967 13