ustxtxb_obs_1972_04_28_50_00028-00000_000.pdf

Farenthold for Governor P.O. Box 66, Austin 78767 \(paid adv. 0000000000 was standing in the last row, in the corner by the aisle, sobbing terribly. We all had our thoughts. W. Don Effinger. Fancy detail Joe Goulden is one of the best uncelebrated journalists in the United States. I first knew him when he was the anguished conservative columnist on The Daily Texan at UT. He came from Marshall where his father owned and ran a good book store. What you could see about Joe was that he was honest and could not stand hypocrisy. He went to the Dallas News for a while. Then the Philadelphia Inquirer. And he saw how the country works, and he was made sick. He wrote Monopoly, examination of the telephone monopoly, how it jacks up phone bills, took over the tax-financed communications satellite program, thwarts regulation, brow-beats the press, profiteers on government contracts and operates utterly beyond control of its shareholders, customers or the public. His biography of George Meany will be out next Labor Day and I bet it will be a corker. He’s not conservative any more, but it would be wrong to give him some other label, except that he is a journalist. He is a good journalist. One story will tell you what I mean. He was standing at a bar at a Washington party late the other night when some young woman thrust three glasses at him and said, “Here, the congressman wants another drink right away.” Joe said, “Let the congressman mix his own fucking drink.” \(Pardon me, ladies-whom-languageoffends, but how could I tell the story, Joe wrote me the other day to cheer me up with the news that Marvin Watson of Daingerfield, Texas, Lyndon Johnson’s gumshoe in the White House, is now living cross-country on the other coast. Joe had 28 The Texas Observer Personal Service Quality Insurance ALICE ANDERSON AGENCY INSURANCE & REAL ESTATE 808A E. 46th, Austin, Texas 465-6577 * * Restore honesty and decency to Texas government. Send your contributions to: marked the speech in the Congressional Record to call my attention, also, to the fact that nevertheless, as Congressman Wright Patman was saying, Watson’s home “will always be maintained on West Marvin Watson Boulevard in Daingerfield.” That detail struck my fancy. I thought the readers of The Texas Observer should know it, somehow. On being realistic Wanting more power, as power usually does, John Connally, the Republican secretary of the treasury, is worrying the state department by what appears to be a power grab for control of foreign economic policy. He said in a speech recently, “The conduct of foreign economic policy today is characterized by traits of ponderousness, division of responsibility, rivalry and, in some sectors, innocence.” We had noticed a certain ponderousness, but had not thought the secretary would be the one to be calling attention to it. We better understand his alarm about the innocence. That is one trait he has never had the slightest use for. Take ITT, for example. Where do people think defenders of big business are going to get their political money from, anyway? Now Dick, tell you what, let me handle it next time. .. . HLH vs. RMN Who said rich people get more reactionary the older they get? H. L. Hunt has taken up yoga, and when his pretty young teacher told him to please tell a Dallas reporter “how it gives you energy,” the reporter naturally asked him, “Well, if it gives you so much more energy, how do you plan to use it?” I read in the daily press that Hunt replied, “To defeat Nixon. He’s the worst president the country has ever had.” Land o’goshen. Of course, his candidate is probably Spiro Agnew. But you never can tell about old H.L. He’s an unpredictable old coot. Authoritarian affinities Nixon gets along better with the Chinese communists than he does with American peace marchers or the leaders of the free American trade movement I don’t care what I’m supposed to believe, ladies and gentlemen of the New Left, this makes me uncomfortable. I may take up yoga, too. R.D. Of the 16,300 prisoners in Texas institutions, 15 percent are illiterate, 95 percent are school dropouts, 65 percent are from broken homes, 40 percent had no sustained record of employment prior to their incarceration, 50 percent are under the age of 25 and 20 percent are mentally retarded. Communication In recent years a small fragile nucleus of chicano students aiming at a career in medicine has been established at New England schools such as Yale, Harvard and Dartmouth. The question has often been asked, “Why this development, so far away from chicano territory?” The answer is readily evident from a review of the grave health problems of Mexican-Americans. Statistics show a disproportionately high incidence of all reportable diseases among the chicano population. The tuberculosis case rate is double, and the neonatal death rate three times the corresponding rates for Anglos. The death rate for children under five years is more than double that of other population groups, and the mean age of death at 56.7 years compares to 67.5 for others. IN 1970, one third of the nation’s reported cases of paralytic polio were isolated in the lower Rio Grande Valley. In some communities less than half of the pre-school population has received basic immunizations against polio and other grave infectious diseases. Fully half of chicano families have no family physician, and only two of ten families have any kind of health insurance. The quality of medical care for the immigrant farm worker is even more deplorable. This health crisis is compounded by a great deficit in chicano physicians, but precious little is being done to meet the needs. Of 43,399 students in American medical schools, only 247 are chicanos 0.57 percent of the total enrollment coming from this minority group comprising 5 percent of the U.S. population. Texas, with its large Mexican-American population, has both the opportunity and the moral obligation to change this deplorable situation, on both the state and the national scene. It also has the corporate and individual wealth, as well as public funds with which to implement action toward this goal. In 1968, with the institution of programs at UT-Austin and UT-E1 Paso offering educational opportunities, scholarships, counseling and tutoring to minority students of disadvantaged background, it appeared that a start in this direction had been made. However, a critical article by Burt Solomon in the Feb. 18 edition of The Texas Observer [UT White Man’s School] indicates that these programs are now being phased out. FRANCES FARENTHOLD needs your help. DESPAIRING chicano leaders fear that their health crisis will not be relieved