ustxtxb_obs_1969_07_04_50_00010-00000_000.pdf

TEXAS’ LEADING BUMPERSTRIP SIGN MAKER IFFUTURA PRESS ,,,, Phone 512/442-7836 1714 SOUTH CONGRESS P.O. BOX 3485 AUSTIN, TEXAS tion in mental health work, quickly found a position with the New York mental hygiene department. He was scathing in his assessment of mental health care in Texas and has expressed interest in seeing that practices of the state in this field are aired publicly. His attorney is David Richards, who recently moved to Austin after having been associated for a number of years with the important Dallas labor law firm of Mullinax and Wells. A RWY Victory Sen. Ralph Yarborough has won a face-to-face confrontation with the Nixon administration, staving off efforts to close the 30-year-old federal narcotics hospital in Fort Worth by flexing his muscles as a Senate committee chairman. The hospital, operated by the National Institute of Mental Health at HEW, treats some 400 patients and has several hundred employes. It serves the western half of the United States. Yarborough, chairman of the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee, called HEW Secretary Robert Finch on March 27 to question rumors that the hospital was to be closed, at the same time announcing his Health Subcommittee would hold hearings during April in Washington and Fort Worth. Finch promised the closing would be delayed until after the hearings. The Texas senator conferred with Finch regularly, urging that the facility be kept open. Sen. John Tower and Cong. Jim Wright of Fort Worth and Earle Cabell of Dallas lent their support. On June 12, Finch called Yarborough and informed him that the administration had decided against closing the hospital. Yarborough’s committee handles all legislation affecting Finch’s agency, a fact which did not go unnoticed by the Nixon men during the hospital debate. A dozen senators, led by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, have announced plans to form a liberal Senate club along the lines of the activist Democratic Study Group in the House. Yarborough has not indicated if he will join, but he was not at the organizational 10 The Texas Observer On Conservation In the July issue of Playboy magazine Justice William 0. Douglas, a zealous conservationist, labels the Army Corps of Engineers “public enemy number one.” He says that due to faulty construction by the corps, “some dams in Texas lose 8% of their capacity annually due to silting. Numerous ones lose 2% a year and at least six lose 3% or more. “The Waco dam in Texas is a classic failure of the engineers,” Douglas says. “Inadequate testing of the foundation shales below the embankment were the cause of the disaster. Parts of the embankment slid 700 feet from the dam axis. Correcting the failure amounted to about 4% of the original estimated cost of the dam. “Texas, as might be expected, was granted 24 projects for construction during fiscal 1969 that amounted to almost $40 billion,” the Supreme Court justice writes. “Everybody is taken care of. Under the cloak of flood benefits, recreation benefits, and the like, great vandalism is committed. Beautiful river basins are wiped out forever and one of our most pressing problems water pollution and sewage goes begging.” Douglas also writes, “Will Rogers used to joke that the best thing to do with the Trinity River at Fort Worth, Texas, was to pave it, the stream being a bare trickle at times. That wild idea is now a reality. Construction of a 370-mile canal from Fort Worth to Houston is under way, with 20 “Playboy magazine,” responded Cong. Earle Cabell of Dallas, is an appropriate place for him to lay out his inaccuracies,” he said of Douglas. The Trinity River Authority, the Trinity Improvement Association, and seven Texas congressmen recently asked a House subcommittee to appropriate $6.1 million over President Nixon’s $3.2 budget for the next year. Miscellany Another Ben Barnes business note: the lieutenant governor, his business sidekick Herman Bennett \(the Brownwood Prairie will build a $2.5 million, nearly Kountze editor Archer Fullingim is re covering at home from a heart ailment that hospitalized him for several days. Fullingim, in a recent column, speaks highly of the medical care he received but seems to believe most of the credit for his recovery goes to a prescription he had sneaked into the hospital, copied from a “doctor book” his father bought in 1912, which called for one ounce each of milkweed root, horseradish, mandrake root, black elder bark, juniper berries, root of the box elder, bark from the root of bittersweet, and a half-ounce of mustard. Larry L. King Wins Nieman Fellowship Cambridge, Mass. Larry L. King, a contributing editor to Harper’s and The Texas Observer, is one of 12 journalists appointed for the 32nd class of Nieman Fellows for the academic year 1969-70 to study at Harvard University. King, who will suspend his writing activities for the duration of his Harvard experience, will study American history and American literature. A former Midland and Odessa newsman, King now lives in Washington, D.C. Before beginning a free-lance writing career in 1964, he served on Capitol Hill for a decade as an aide to former Cong. J. T. Rutherford of Odessa and Cong. Jim Wright of Fort Worth. He is the author of the novel The One-Eyed Man, and a non-fiction collection entitled … And Other Dirty Stories. His book on rural America will be published by Viking Press of New York, and is currently in progress. meeting, in Kennedy’s office. Raymond Telles, the former mayor of El Paso who received several appointments during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, has returned to El Paso and is considering a Democratic primary race against Cong. Richard C. White next year. Telles, something of a liberal, had remained as head of the U.S.-Mexico Border Commission until President Nixon replaced him in April. Prior to assuming that post Telles was U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica. 30-acre shopping center in Brownwood. Several major firms already have been announced as tenants. Bennett’s construction firm will be the general contractor. A. Y. Allee, captain of Texas Ranger Company B, often the target of complaints by Mexican-Americans in South Texas, was commended recently by former Gov. John Connally, Atty. Gen. Crawford Martin, and Highway Department Commissioner Herb Petry, Jr. At a barbeque for Ranger Company B, Connally said, “We are here because we are a few people left in the world who appreciate the sacrifices and courage of Captain Allee and other Rangers here today have made in the performances of their duty in protecting the lives and security of people of this state.” Midlothian editor and Warren Report . critic Penn Jones, Jr., now faces competition from another weekly in his town of some 1,500 persons.