ustxtxb_obs_1970_06_26_50_00009-00000_000.pdf

Happiness Is Printing By [FILITURA Newspapers Magazines Political Specialists Signs and Placards Bumperstrips Office Supplies 100% Union Shop PRESS J., Phone 512/442-7836 1714 SOUTH CONGRESS P.O. BOX 3485 AUSTIN, TEXAS 9 1 An open letter to the Ex-Students Association New York City Gentlemen : Your junk mail has attained avalanche proportions since the Longhorns earned the dubious and fleeting distinction of being number-one football team in the nation. Now it’s threatening to reach new peaks of hysteria, as well, with consequences not easily imagined by you home folks in sleepy old Austin. Do you really know what you’re offering? And, since you’re now apparently up to your bandanas in mail-order selling, do you really know what an ex-student of anything that calls itself a “university” really wants? I frankly doubt it. Since February, I received more letters from you than I had in the 121/2 years since I fled the state. And no wonder. Your increasingly colorful flyers lead me to believe that UT has been turned into a vast gift shoppe stocked with reminders of the Longhorns’ triumph: bathmats, posters, plaques, decals even whiskey glasses all emblazoned with “We’re Number One!” How timely that phrase will be this winter I neither know nor care. The only football game I give a damn about is Texas vs A & M, where a Texas victory symbolizes the temporary rout of the forces of darkness by Western Civilization. There’s no harm in shouting, “We’re Number One!” The world will merely interpret it as yet another chauvinistic outburst from a breed already notorious for its mystifying pride in simple bigness and in being the state whose natural resources are the most exploited by Easterners. I am troubled, though, by the latest line of memorabilia offered in your most colorful flyer to date. CAN YOU REALLY be ready to mail across the land plaques showing The Tower, resplendently orange, or a fist, with index finger and pinky extended? I showed the picture of your Tower product to a girl she said, with a leer: “Is it National Sniper Week?” I protested that long before Charles Whitman lugged his arsenal up to the observation platform, an orange Tower meant “I know what a tower of any color means,” she snapped. She was beside herself with glee when she saw that “Hook ’em, Horns!” plaque, and I did not dare explain its provincial symbolism. To the rest of the Western world and maybe, who knows, in Vietnam now the gestures slurs both your wife’s fidelity and your virility. I’d watch it, if I were you. I’d start thinking, too, about what it means to many of us to be an ex-student of the university of a state whose most notable citizens haven’t exactly won the affection of the world. Lyndon Johnson, Joan Crawford, Bonnie & Clyde none of them on your mailing list, thank God, but Texans, without doubt. No wonder I look, with hope and desperation, to the younger generation and specifically to the present student body at UT which, somehow, produced 20,000 young protest marchers last May. I had to wait until a friend at UT mailed me The Daily Texan before I could read about this outpouring! Not even a newspaper as devoted to fact as The New York Times had reported it in adequate detail. How ignornant others on your mailing list must be, living out of Texas and out of the reach of a good newspaper. IF YOU REALLY want to give ex-students something to cherish, whip up a few plaques and stuff commemorating that epoch-making march. A university, you should know, deals with matters less tangible than footballs, less easily grasped though more easily fumbled and deflated. The student march, protesting the hideous, needless and indiscriminate slaughter in spots as disparate as Ohio and Cambodia, affirmed the respect a true university makes students feel for the life force pulsating behind fine old terms like “art” and “truth,” “beauty” and “justice.” I was unnaturally proud of the old school for having done its job so well. A recent UT ex-student an ex-teaching assistant there, too presently a lance-corporal in the Marines \(they’re into whatever spot on the map Nixon feels he must devastate in the name of peace, told me: “At UT, you know, our dream is to have a university worthy of the football team.” The student march shows this dream to be closer to reality than I dared hope. Put me down, please, for one full-color plaque showing the crowd massed on the drag, and another showing them engulfing the capital. And if you can run off a decal of Frank Erwin, Jr., jumpingfor joy as the bulldozers upend trees on Waller Creek, I think I can find a suitably degrading spot in the apartment where it can be stuck quite nicely. Harris Green Class of ’56 Since 1866 The Place in Austin GOOD FOOD GOOD BEER 1607 San Jacinto GR 7-4171 MARTIN ELFANT Sun Life of Canada 1001 Century Building Houston, Texas CA 4-0686 CLASSIFIED BOOKPLATES. Free catalog. Many beautiful designs. Special designing too. Address: BOOKPLATES, P.O. Box 28-I, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387. ANNE’S TYPING SERVICE \(Marjorie Anne Binding, Mailing, Public Notary. Twenty years experience. Call 442-7008 or 442-0170, Austin. WE SELL THE BEST SOUND. Yamaha pianos, guitars; MoeckKungAulus recorders; harmonicas, kalimbas and other exotic instruments. Amster Music, 1624 Lavaca, Austin. 478-7331. ASTROLOGY in Houston: Full chart service available. Special consultations by arrangement. 668-3107. FOR MEXICAN AMERICAN NEWS in Central per year. Published twice monthly. Box 6354, Austin 78702. June 26, 1970 1