ustxtxb_obs_1975_12_12_50_00017-00000_000.pdf

OURCRAD IS A NT STUFFY. Unstuff a crab at Kangaroo Court. Interesting food. Fabulous drinks. On the River. Hop on over. 11:30 AM-11 PM Daily. Till 12 AM Fri. and Sat. All major credit cards. 512 Riverwalk. San Antonio, Texas. December 12, 19 75 17 Since I am an Arch addict and a Fullingim freak, everything I say should probably be taken with a pound of salt. After a mere five years as an Outspoken, Texas, Liberal, Newspaper Editor myself, there are only two things I brag about. One is that I was once banned from the campus of Texas A&M, and the other is that Arch Fullingim once stole one of my lines. I peacocked around for two weeks afterward. Not long ago, Fullingim drew up the currently definitive list of the ten best of the 500 weekly papers in Texas but there were only nine on it because he couldn’t think of another one he liked. The tenth, of course, should have been Fullingim’s Kountze News. For those of you who have not had the pleasure, the News has been chronicling the goings on in Hardin County for 25 years now and its front page has been graced by Fullingim’s column “With Both Barrels,” which contained his thoughts on Divers Matters. During these years, Fullingim was the paper’s editor, printer, reporter, ad man, etc., etc. As Roy Hamric points out, Fullingim always had a fondness for disaster stories: TICKS KILL ROY McCORMICK COW PRESIDENT OF SCHOOL BOARD BEGS MEMBERS NOT TO CURSE IN MEETINGS TERMITES ATE UP FOUNDATION OF HOUSE WHILE GILMORE WATSON WAS SICK IN BED Then there was the famous occasion on which Fullingim ran a 60-point apocalyptic headline reading: HE KNOCKS OFF TOE NAIL GETTING TO BED! Fullingim’s most famous crusade was for the preservation of his beloved Big Thicket. Lord, how he loves that place. He can make it come alive for you better than any movie or picture book; it’s lights and shadows, plants and trees, birds and wildlife, streams, ponds, swamps, and flowers. 0, the flowers. He is retired now, and off in pursuit of a glimpse of the Thicket’s fabled ivory-billed woodpecker, which is something between the Holy Grail and the white whale for Fullingim. There is a tendency now, I think, among those who love him, to try to turn Fullingim into some kind of totem figure, some saintly, white-haired \(this is excepting the time he took to dying his hair “natural” like a country Texas St. Francis. Fortunately for all of us, Fullingim is far too human for that role. He is a wonder ARCHER FULLINGIM Being a 25-Year Chronicle of Writings by Texas’ Most Outspoken Liberal Newspaper Editor with Irreverent Reflections on LBJ, Nixon & Sundry Political Matters, Commenting on Vietnam, Ecology, Youth & Journalism, with Excursions into the National Conscience, Reminiscenses of . the Depression Era & Tributes to Poke Salad, Country Pleasures & Other Matters. Edited by Ron Hamrick, Heidelberg Publishers, Austin, Texas, 1975. $12.00. fully cantankerous man, who suffers from guilt feelings over being that way because chief among the people he hates are the haters . . . the Birchers, the intolerant people he still believes killed his main man, John Kennedy. Perhaps the most fascinating theme in the well-rounded, diverse selection of Fullingim’s work chosen by Hamric is Fullingim’s struggle with his own racism. In 1966, Fullingim said, “It was in 1952 when Adlai Stevenson was running for president that I got religion and ceased to be a segregationist. It Was in 1954 that they began calling me a nigger-lover.” But he was wrong. It was later than that. In 1957, Fullingim was in one of his deepest furies because Eisenhower had sent federal troops into Little Rock. “What makes me maddest about the prevailing integration situation is that you and I love the colored people,” he wrote his readers. He did, too, that’s the funny part. One of the first articles he ever wrote in the Kountze News was about how pleased he was to have a colored woman as one of his first subscribers. He wrote about Kilraine, the legendary black hunter, and about all kinds and classes of blacks just as people. But in a Nov. 7, 1957, piece, a paean to the cooking of a black woman named Ruby Marshall, he noted, “I’d eat down there more often . . . but when I do I get dirty looks from the colored people whose looks seem to say, ‘You are always preaching segregation. Why don’t you practice what you preach?’ ” SOCIOLOGISTS interested in the roots of racism will find this a fascinating book. Fullingim is a brass-collar Democrat, and once wrote that he wasn’t against the Republicans because of Hoover and the Depression. Shoot no, it was because of Reconstruction. And he was serious about that. He had branded in his mind the misery inflicted on the South by the North, and when it seemed to be starting over in Little Rock \(federal troops in the wrote about how he had been a fanatically intense student of “The War.” He read everything, knew everything about Lee and The Outpost Austin’s Best Barbecue 11:00-7:30 Monday-Saturday Closed Sunday David and Marion Moss .345-9045 Highway 183 North Personal Service Quality Insurance ALICE ANDERSON AGENCY INSURANCE & REAL ESTATE 808A E. 46th, Austin, Texas 459-6577 HALF 1,11KM RECORDS AAGAz IN E AUSTIN: twit LAVACA WACot 29 14 COLUMBUS DALTAS: 4 535 PiciatintaVg 1405 ZL.M Slici LoVERS Lit BIG205 S. ZANG altactrobr PRICES The collected Fullingim