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against the race and Harrison steadfastly maintained that she wouldn’t consider it. That left the Dallas business Establishment short of a candidate, and R. L. Thornton, Jr., recently retired board chairman of Mercantile National Corp., offered himself for the post. The late R. L., Sr., was mayor of Dallas in his day and Jr., 65, was willing to serve. But the businessmen rejected Thornton for a younger man, Robert S. Folsom, 48, a millionaire and former SMU football star who is ironically also on the Mercantile National board. Thornton, bitter, said his friends had “knifed -him in the back.” The move seemed gratingly obvious even for the notoriously obvious Dallas oligarchy. Several prominent business leaders met at the City Club, among them Robert Cullum, chairman of the board of the Tom Thumb Stores; his brother Charles, president of Cullum Companies, Inc.; Robert Stewart, board chairman of First International Bancshares; Dave Braden, president of the Citizens Charter Association, the Establishment’s political arm; John Schoellkopf, investor and former CCA mayoral candidate; and Ton Unis, attorney. Folsom is the grandson of J. A. Skillern, founder of the Skillern’s drug chain. It all seemed so impossibly tidy, and foreordained, even in the face of the hurt of Thornton, one of the Establishment’s own. One wonders how much longer Dallas can possibly go on being ruled by the meetings of fewer than 10 men at the City Club. Back to the closet The Houston Post has once again censored Doonesbury, the topical comic strip by Gary Trudeau which Post readers overwhelmingly voted \(by write-in Post cartoon in a January poll. In the past, the Post’s comic strip snipper has excised some of Trudeau’s panels on the Vietnam War and Watergate. Doonesbury disappeared for an entire week this time when Joanie Caucus’ new love interest told her that he’s gay. “I’m usually cheerful too,” she answered. On Monday, Feb. 19, the first day the strip was axed, the Post received 400 calls from irate readers. Then the Houston Gay Alliance announced that it had copies of the cartoons from the University of Houston Cougar and Alliance members would be happy to read the daily installments aloud to anyone who called their Houston number. On Wednesday, Feb. 11, the paper printed the following explanation in the space usually reserved for the cartoon: “The Doonesbury strip is not appearing this week. It will resume on the daily comic page Monday. This week’s strip dealt with homosexuality. This is a subject Post editors believe to be inappropriate on a comic page, considering the high readership of children of the Post’s daily comic page. The Post will continue to treat this subject in a serious manner in the news columns rather than in comic strips of a popular cartoonist.” The Dallas Times Herald, The San Antonio Express, The Austin AmericanStatesman, and The Corpus Christi Caller all ran the Trudeau strip without interruption. Sighs of relief were heard from sea to come.” He said revelations about the CIA “have been magnified for political purposes” and he considers it “deplorable” that the agency has been “made a political football.” “The CIA has done well for a long time,” he added, and he sees nothing wrong with the CIA’s use of American money to “preserve a democracy somewhere in the world.” He favored American involvement in Angola. We will all sleep sounder at night for knowing that Connally is our watchdog. Also reportedly under consideration for appointment to the Intelligence Board is Edward Bennett Williams, the Washington lawyer who successfully defended Connally on the bribery charges. President Ford just can’t seem to stop appointing Texans. After Am named Houstonian James Hargrove ambassador to Australia. The Australians were apparently not thrilled, but Hargrove turns out not to be a fat cat oilman, just a plump cat who actually has diplomatic experience. 01′ Mailbags is back “New Good Neighbor Chief is Cited as Tax Delinquent” said the head lines, which sounded mildly shocking, until one noticed that it was just good ol’ Henry Sanchez putting his foot in it again. Former Rep. Sanchez of Brownsville, who became deputy director of the Good Neighbor Commission last October, always did have a reputation in the House as an amiable bumbler. \(He once brought several fat mailbags to the front mike with him to bolster his contention that he was receiving avalanches of letters about whatever he was trying to get through the House at the timerepeal of Daylight Savings Time, as we recall: a mischieveous colleague opened the bags while Sanchez was in the midst of his emotional peroration and displayed the Sanchez was a partner and major investor in an East Texas asphalt company that February 27, 1976 . 9 shining sea when it was reported that none other than Texas’ own John Connally was to be appointed to help keep the errant Central Intelligence Agency under control, on the straight-and-narrow and all that. Connally, it will be recalled, helped in the secret arrangement by which the Shah of Iran supplied arms to the Kurds. The word was that President Ford planned to name Connally to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, perhaps because Connally did such a terrific job last time he was on it. Connally was on the board, which is supposed to advise the President on intelligence objectives, until he resigned in 1974 after being indicted on bribery charges. Ford reportedly plans to beef up the board’s role and give it responsibility for overseeing the CIA. Connally was apparently annoyed that word of the impending appointment had gotten out. He said it was “obvious that it was a leaked story” and that “may be a harbinger of things to DOONESBURY