ustxtxb_obs_1970_04_17_50_00020-00000_000.pdf

Good Job, .. Sen. Yarborough rellow Rose” bumper stickers are now available. Y\( BUMPERSTRIPS: 4 for 50c, 15 for $1, 100 for $3, 500 for $14, 1,000 for $25. Send check and Zip Code; we pay postage and tax. FUTURA PRESS AMC Phone 512/442.7836 1714 SOUTH CONGRESS P.O. BOX 3485 AUSTIN. TEXAS harshly guarded. It considers that anyone who does not conform to the narrow vision is a threat to the common liberty, so should be deprived of his. In that sense, much of what officialdom here calls “keeping things under control” becomes essentially political repression, even if that repressed aspires to nothing political. Toward that end of “keeping things under control,” taxpayers here a couple of years ago paid for the installation of a genuine barber chair in the sheriff’s office. A few sadists. have left the department since then, and business is not as brisk as it once was, but for a good while business there, if not the skill and care in rooming, was about as steady as a country barber shop’s. A man who has seen the deputies in action has described the lurid and gleeful expressions of their faces during head-shavings and has likened them to sex fetishists engrossed in their fetish. After the barberings, the slick-headed young captives were usually charged with vagrancy or some other charge possibly trumped up after an illegal search of a vehicle and placed in jail in lieu of illegally exorbitant bonds to wait for long periods of time for a hearing. At the hearings, eager to get the hell out of here, they usually pleaded guilty, paid a fine, and left town under a threat of death if they returned. An interesting system was worked out for capturing the longhairs in the first place: owners or employees of several businesses on U.S. 66 in Amarillo were recruited to aid deputies by quickly calling one of them when any of the offensive types stopped to buy something. So zealous were some of the deputies at protecting the citizenry from long hair that they told their informers to call them any time, day or night. Realizing the unlawful nature of some of this, the sheriff’s department has slowed down this type of activity, but some of it undoubtedly continues. DURING A RECENT amiable Amarillo policeman told me, seemingly 20 The Texas Observer CLASSIFIED BOOKPLATES. Free catalog. Many beautiful designs. Special designing too. Address: BOOKPLATES, P.O. Box 28-1, Yellow Springs, _ Ohio 45387. ANNE’S TYPING SERVICE \(Marjorie Anne Binding, Mailing, Public Notary. Twenty years experience. Cali 442-7008 or 442-0170, Austin. ASTROLOGY in Houston: Full chart service available. Special consultations by arrangement. 668-3107. THE TRUMPETDigest of Independent Liberal Goleta, Calif. 93017. with all the sweet reason he could muster, that policemen know that young men with long hair are law-breakers, or some kind of enemies of society, and need to be arrested. So, he said, just because you don’t catch them breaking the law doesn’t mean they aren’t guilty of something, so the thing to do is figure out a charge to take them in on. He went on to explain that there is always a charge to get someone on, no matter who he is, where he is, or what he is doing, and that if you follow a longhair or talk to him long enough a violation will present itself, and then you’ve got him in jail where he belongs. He may not stay in for long, he explained further, but at least he will have to cool his heels for awhile and probably pay a fine and bondsman’s fee and lawyer’s fee. Justice will be served to that extent, he said. \(One has to be blas about all of this. We should not be surprised, much less shocked, at anything we are told a policeman does in what he considers his “line of duty.” Chief Cop Mitchell is trying, among other things, to eliminate those he considers undesirable by searching souls and minds for intentions and thoughts for which they can be The odds demand that when the tactics described above by the policeman are employed, some longhair will eventually be busted on a substantial violation of law. \(It would also work, with perhaps a Nigher percentage of arrests, on corporate days ago an officer here stopped him some hippies travelling through town in a van nicely converted into a carpeted efficiency quarters, and after taking them to jail, searching them, and tearing the van’s interior apart while searching it, police charged two of them with possession of marijuana and an instrument for the use of smoking it. This last episode is what last week brought to town, straight from the Ed Sullivan Show, Michael James Brody, Jr., the young man who showed he knows how to touch the real heart of this nation when he announced in January that he was prepared to distribute his oleomargerine $millions to the public on a first come, first served basis. The two youths charged and retained in jail were Roger DuBois and his girl friend, Iris Newman. DuBois is the brother of Brody’s wife, Renee, and when the Brodys heard about the jailing here, they jumped on a plane to come down and bail the couple out of jail. Brody, who feels, rather superiorly and with some justification, that the press fell into the trap of his sensational publicity stunt, also feels, rather regretfully and with some justification, that the press mistreated him. But he was a natural for the press here, and he said the right things and was treated kindly. These closing sentences and inadvertant revelations from a local newspaper feature say something of both sides: “He makes you believe him, in spite of the fact that he appears typical ‘of his generation, his time and place, but he isn’t typical at all. Michael James Brody Jr. is an American paradox, a pleasant I mean, who in the hell ever heard of a nice guy, a guy you can believe, who is young and has long hair? BRODY TOLD the press here that he is “the Martin Luther King of the American youth movement” \(invoking that that the big give-away was over, that he will now proceed to apply his fortune “in a businesslike and orderly manner” to end poverty, hunger, violence, disunity in America, etc. And then, allowing himself to be billed as a “right-wing hippie,” he went on to discuss the things that made the contradiction pleasant, the things important to the paper, offering such quotes as: “I don’t think anyone should dodge the draft … I’m not physically fit for military service, but I’d go anywhere the Army or Marines sent me.” “I think president Nixon is doing a fantastic job, but we’ve got to give him a chance to do something about all the problems. People aren’t giving him a chance.” “If Jerry Rubin’s name is never mentioned on television or in the news media again, the SDS will die quickly.” etc. It was not surprising that when Brody first showed up in public here he had already been taken in tow by Stanley Marsh III, a wealthy young Amarilloan who has pulled off a few stunts himself, and who does what he can to capture and display oddities of all kinds that show up here. Marsh ushered Brody about town like a gloating, doting but pranksterish agent with a great new find, “protecting” him, feeding him lines, smiling a broad proprietary smile, pleased as Richard with Liz’s big diamond. And that evening Marsh and his wife, Wendy, parlayed Brody’s visit into one of those spontaneous get-togethers they occasionally have at which diversity converges in peaceful, often delightful fellowship. Rag-tags, big-shots, the concerned, the complacent all kinds of people showed