ustxtxb_obs_1969_01_24_50_00012-00000_000.pdf

. . twiWAkzar.V.i.4 tackled playing football. He said that’s all right. He told me if I didn’t walk straight I couldn’t go home.” Suarez got through his going-away medical examination by swinging away quickly while he was in the act of dropping his pants down to conceal the bruises on his legs. He got on the bus only with great difficulty, “I holded onto them bars, took my time.” His mother took him to Hermann Hospital, where she is an LVN nurse, and he was X-rayed “just bruises, stiff muscles,” he says and was given a prescription, which his mother told him wouldn’t help. The week after he got out he started work and fell from the truck. Suarez says he and “everybody” saw a guard, whom he names, beat up a inexicano boy in “this little room,” opening a cut on his head, and then, Suarez says, the guard made the boy sign an incident report saying he slipped in the shower. This boy’s offense, according to Suarez, was answering a question the wrong way because he didn’t understand English well. Suarez saw the guard who beat on his legs hitting another boy in the temples for talking. Once Suarez and another boy were horsing aroundnot fightingfor which a guard gave Suarez five swats on the rear with “an old piece of stick. He swing hard.” He would have given him ten, but the boy walked to the office and protested, and the supervisor looked at his bruises and “got mad” at the guard. No incident report was filed: the supervisor told Suarez it might keep him from going home. The guard who gave Suarez the hard time mostly racks on Spanish boys, because he doesn’t like them “because they count.” This, Suarez explains, means that Spanish boys greatly resent being touched on the rear and this somehow, Suarez thinks, angers this guard. 12 The Texas Observer CLASSIFIED ANNE’S TYPING SERVICE: Duplicating \(multiNotary. Specialize in rush jobs, including Sundays. Formerly known as Marjorie Delafield Typing and Duplicating Service. Call HI 2-7008, Austin. BOOKPLATES. Free catalog. Many beautiful designs. Special designing too. Address: BOOK-PLATES, Yellow Springs 8, Ohio. YAMAHA: For the best soundpianosorgans guitars available at Amster Music & Art Center. 17th & Lavaca, Austin. 478-7331. MEETINGS THE THURSDAY CLUB of Dallas meets each the Downtown YMCA, 605 No. Ervay St.. Dallas. Good discussion. You’re welcome. Informal, no dues. CENTRAL TEXAS ACLU luncheon meeting. Spanish Village. 2nd Friday every month. From noon, All welcome. AUSTIN WOMEN FOR PEACE /WOMEN STRIKE FOR PEACE meet twice monthly. Call 477-1282 for more information. ITEMS for this feature cost, for the first entry, 7c a word, and for each subsequent entry, 5c a word. We must receive them one week before the date of the issue in which they are to be published, Suarez saw about fifteen “real bad beatings” in his months in Gatesville last year. “There’s one Anglo boy who gets beat up every day. Well, he’s a mess-up-but still they don’t give him no chances, just beat him.” David Fancher NOW AN OILFIELD roughneck, David Fancher, a 21-year-old Anglo, got off to a bad start as a boy, robbing two places with guns and stealing a car. He was in Mountain View Aug. 4, 1964, through Jan. 26, 1966. He finished high school there and took half a year of college on his release. He is willing to testify and take a lie detector test. “My main gripe, the main thing, was the exercises,” he says. “They get you in there just to get you used to rackin’.” He had been exercising according to orders, but “One night I know he hit me just beciuse I hadn’t got it yet. He came behind me and kicked me in the tailbone. It’s never been the same since.” Fancher gives this guard’s name. Every night of the exercises, Fancher says, one or two boys would be ‘beaten for flubbing up. The exercises were “non-stop, with no water.” One night Fancher and another boy were alternately trading pokes in a halffriendly way and reading. A guard saw it and came and knocked a radio out of Fancher’s hand, smashing it, and hit him four or five times. “There was four Spanish boys in Dorm 13 who honed down some screwdrivers at shop and stabbed a guard.” The guard was not killed. The boys ran to the football field, and, Fancher says, he saw about 12 or 15 supervisors, one of whom he especially remembers by name, make a circle around them. Fancher says he was watching as the boys threw down their weapons and then the guards started beating on them and dragging them over to the gym, where “they kicked their teeth out. One of the boys’ lower lip was missingI saw that.” It was Fancher’s understanding that the boys were tried and sent up for deadly assault; boys who lived in the dorm with them told him they had figured they might as well go to Huntsville, where at least they would know how long they were in for. Fancher has two general observations. The extra-duty work is, stupid. Once they dug up dirt and moved it half a mile, only, the next week, to dig it up again and move it back. Second, James Turman, the director of the TYC, is almost never at Gatesville. He came through a couple of times, always with visitors. Fancher thinks he ought to be inspecting the place frequently to see for himself what goes on. `Tom Finn’ THE TENTH BOY to tell his story has made it out of his teens into the best situation of this group. An Anglo, now 20, he is a computer operator for a major corporation in Houston and is still taking courses at South Texas College. He lives with his attractive wife, the girl he has known since the seventh grade, and their year-old son in a modern apartment house off Westheimer. He has written Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes what he saw in Gatesville between 1962 and 1965, is willing to testify and would take a lie detector test. In these circumstances, the fact that because of his job he does not want his name used would seem to be irrelevant to the credibility of his account. He had ordinary troubles of the kind that can lead to Gatesville . . . truancy, shoplifting, then a car theft. He served nine months in 1962-1963 and 14 months in 1964-1965. Let’s call him Tom Finn. He was 13 when he arrived at the reception center at Gatesville. Things looked spick and span, and he and his pal, who was sent up from Houston with him, were greeted and signed in. Then the deputy sheriff from Houston left and as Finn took a shower, the guard told him to wash the grease out of his hair. He was doing so when the guard told him, “You didn’t understand me.” “Yes, I did,” said the boy, and the guard slapped him so hard he knocked him down. “They put on those gloves so they won’t bruise you.” A Mexican boy who was planning a run was beaten with fists during Finn’s first day or two there. If boys were caught talking, they were made to hang onto a hurricane fence with their hands and stockinged feet for 15 or 30 minutes. “My friend got beat very bad” in this reception center, Finn says. A year older than Finn, the boy had been in Gatesville at an earlier time for a couple of weeks, but had been quickly transferred to a boys’ home in Beaumont. The authorities at Gatesville could not find a record of this and determined to get the boy to say he was lying. The office attendant “was kicking him all over the floor, he was trying to get away, fallin’ over mops, telling the guard he’d say whatever he wanted to.” His head was “all knotted up,” and blood-bruises were raised beneath the surface of his skin all over his torso. Another boy’s beating at this center, Finn remembers because “I could hear him screaming down the hall.” The boy, Finn says, had tried to get under the bunks to escape the beating. His face looked “like a vegetable,” his eye was beaten shut, and there was blood on his T-shirt. Assigned, his first time at Gatesville, to Terrace School, Finn and about 45 other boys came under the power of a certain guard, whom Finn names and calls “a real sadist, man. He was sick.” Weighing about 250, possibly a former football player, this guard, according to Finn, beat up boys “as if it was just nothin’.” At 13, Finn says, he felt awfully