ustxtxb_obs_1973_10_05_50_00011-00000_000.pdf

‘411111IP IDA PRESS 901 W 24th St Austin Multi copy service. Call 477-3641 N MEXICO CITY MOTEL wdZU MA Calle Orizab 16 Mexico 7, D.F. Repres. Wolfe International New York A truly distinguished hotel located within strolling distance of the best of Mexico City . . . key business areas, superb restaurants and exciting night spots. E SWB U.S. $7.60$9.00 DWB. U.S. $9.00$10.00 150 Rooms, Group Rates Available. site, but environmentalists’ outrage there got in the way. Bentsen and Tower may find themselves at odds not only with the Pentagon, but with the American Legion as well. The Texas Legion News has endorsed the idea of a Sanguined Hill Country, and the Legion’s Texas adjutant says the opposition there is “definitely unpatriotic and extremely shortsighted.” Legionnaires make up a good part of the new “We Want Sanguine in the Hill Country Committee.” That group, and the Texas State Committee to Stop Sanguine, will undoubtedly be represented at a public hearing in Dallas Oct. 2. The meeting was called by Arthur Busch, regional coordinator of the EPA, to examine and publicize the possible environmental effects of Sanguine construction. The project director and the Navy’s head of submarine service will also attend. Academic what? The executive committee of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors met in . Amarillo in mid-September to talk about academic freedom, especially the AAUP’s censure of Amarillo College and Frank Phillips College at Borger. Some 324 personally-addressed invitations were sent a month in advance to regents, faculty and administrators of the two censured schools, but nary an invitee bothered to attend the session. “Farenthold for President?” asked a recent editorial by Neil Wood, editor of the Progressive Press in Bellmead. “We Americans need to run home to Mother or some Mother Figure after the disastrous shape the latest Father Figures have gotten us in. . . We need a woman president to spank the bottoms of those who have gotten us into this mess to get our economic affairs back into some semblance or order to rebuild our military might.” Wood writes that the “Walls of Washington need to come tumbling down. [Farenthold’s] the only American I can think of at this time who has the integrity and courage to do the job. Find me a man with more guts and I’ll vote for him. But right now there just doesn’t seem to be any around.” Local-option porn Dallas We find once again that one man’s poetry is another man’s smut or at least that there’s some doubt about which is which. Five folks got sent up the river Aug. 10, by a 12-person Dallas jury for showing “Deep Throat,” the nationally recognized porno flick starring Linda Lovelace \(who apparently, with Dallas County Assistant D.A. Norman Kinne that the film was smutty trash with no redeeming social value, because they almost stood up in the jury box to hand down their verdict. The 7-man, 5-woman jury in Judge Ed Gossett’s criminal district court took only 16 minutes to decide the film was obscene, and only 45 minutes more to strap the maximum penalty five years in prison and a $5,000 fine on each of the five defendants. And then, on Sept. 12, members of the jury in a trial on “The Devil in Miss Jones,” another highly acclaimed porno flick that contains the same sex acts as does “Deep Throat,” deliberated for 15 hours over a three-day period before announcing they couldn’t agree on a verdict. District Judge R. T. Scales had to declare a mistrial in the case. The district attorney’s office indicates it will try the matter again before a different jury. The charge in both cases has been not obscenity itself, but conspiracy to exhibit obscene material. In the “Miss Jones” case, the six-man, six-woman jury divided with nine in favor of the state’s position and three for the defense, although at times during the deliberations the defense contingent got as high as five, one jury member said. The juror, Ray Cox, said the jury had its main problem on deciding what the “utterly” in “utterly without redeeming social value” means. The five people convicted in the “Deep Throat” trial Robert C. Thetford, who the state said owned the Arcadia Theater where the picture was shown; Robert J. Moore and Larry R. Jones, theater managers; and Cynthia Stringfellow and Shirley Phillips, ticket-sellers plan to appeal the verdict in the case. In the meantime, they are free on bond. As with so many issues that involve regulation of morals, the initial problem the state faces is defining what constitutes immorality especially since the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, left it up to local people to decide local obscenity standards. In the “Throat” case, that issue was apparently quite clear to the jury. But the jury in “Miss Jones,” seeing a screening of essentially the same things, couldn’t make up its collective mind. Shortly after the “Miss Jones” mistrial, Joe Allen of Boyd, Tex., in a letter to the editor of The Dallas Morning News, noted that he hadn’t ever been to a skin flick during his 50 years “and no one has attempted to force me to go to one against my own free will. If the current wave of censorship stops with the curtailing of pornography, I don’t suppose it will matter much,” Allen wrote, “but somehow I kind of resent the fact that some preachers and other self-appointed censors spend so much of their time reading these dirty books and going to these movies and then telling me they’re not fit for me to see.” Shortly after the “Throat” trial, someone in the D.A.’s office was showing “Throat” to at least one local organization. Different strokes for different folks. DAVE McNEELY McNeely is a reporter for The Dallas Morning News. October 5, 1973 11