ustxtxb_obs_1976_03_12_50_00007-00000_000.pdf

ly’s 1973 switch to the Republican Party. Connally made the switch with the assurance that Richard Nixon would support him for the 1976 Republican nomination, according to the book. On the freebie-watch: Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby and a slew of Dallas and Fort Worth officials took a junket in midFebruary to Hawaii, Pango Pango, Australia and New Zealand. The allexpenses-paid trip was courtesy of Pan American World Airways, which began service to the South Seas from Dallas/Fort Worth Airport last Dec. 4. Among the invitees were Dallas City Manager Alex Bickley and former Mayor Wes Wise, who is now running for Congress in Dallas. Sharkey Stovall, former mayor of Fort Worth, Mayor Clif Overcash, City Manager Rodger Line, Chamber of Commerce officials, the airport director, and Joe Dealy, president of The Dallas Morning News, were also along. Hobby took his son Paul. Loyalty oath This month’s The-Price-of-Liberty Is-Eternal-Vigilance Award goes to Del Mar College in Corpus Christi for reinstituting the loyalty oath. The State Oath of Office and Allegiance was passed during World War II and is royally ignored. None of the state’s 47 junior colleges messed with it until last fall, when a reporter raised the issue at Amarillo College. A work-study student at Del Mar refused to sign the oath and was canned from his $2-an-hour job in the machine shop. HEW pays for 80 percent of the work-study program, so the student appealed there. HEW said the oath was “not a prerogative of an institution participating in this program.” Under an agreement worked out between the attorneys for the kid and for the college, the kid will write out why he doesn’t want to sign, the college will re-hire him, he’ll give up his claim to back pay, and the college will ask for an attorney general’s opinion. Good luck, John Hill. The dean of the UT Division of Ex tension, his son, two other extension employees, and an engineering firm executive have been indicted by a Travis County grand jury on felony theft charges. Dean William E. Barron, Charles Kelso, director of the Industrial and Business Training Bureau, and John C. Hunt, a bureau training specialist, were subsequently fired from their UT jobs. The grand jury is not yet finished with its deliberations. Other allegations that have reached the press are that the division paid consultants for services they never rendered, accepted federal funds to hold conferences that were never held, used state and federal funds to finance a Christmas party, and improperly shifted funds from one division account to another. Meanwhile, down at Southwest Texas State University in San Mar cos, the comptroller’s office is finding that state funds disguised as “consultant fees” were probably used to pay job interview expenses. U.S. Rep. Jim Wright \(D-Fort line to succeed Rep. Robert E. Jones \(DTransportation Committee. Jones says he won’t seek reelection. That would give Texans the chairmanships of five committeesPublic Works, Science and Astronautics, Appropriations, Government Operations, and Veterans Affairs. UT President Lorene Rogers has been elected to the board of directors of Texaco, Inc. She’s the first woman to sit on the Texaco board. It would have been easier just to change the name to Dallas. The San Antonio Express has been running a contest to find a new slogan for San Antonio. Day after day came a drumfire of calls for a new and resounding slogan to sum up the delights of the Alamo City. When suspense was at a fever pitch and even the air over the Paseo del Rio was still with anticipation, the Express announced the winner on its front page. A retired military man and his wife got $100 for the immortal sobriquet: “Tenth in Size, First in Business Opportunity.” Rep. Joe Wyatt of Bloomington, chairman of the House Revenue and Taxation Committee, pled no contest to a drunken driving charge in Austin. He was fined $150 and ordered to serve a 30-day jail sentence probated over one year. In mid-February, the Texas Depart ment of Corrections noted a severe outbreak of gonorrhea in the Ferguson Unit, 15 miles north of Huntsville. Of the 1,600 men in the unit, 201 were found to be infected with the venereal disease. The TDC’s medical director said it was not confined to the area where homosexual prisoners are housed. Anti-abortion Rep. Sarah Weddington of Austin filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission in an unsuccessful attempt to stop federal matching funds for the anti-abortion presidential candidacy of Ellen McCormack. Weddington, who was the attorney in the landmark case that led to the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling in 1973, was not sanguine about the outcome of her complaint even before the FEC’s decision. “The commission is feeling wobbly because its own existence is in danger,” she said. \(The Supreme Court’s ruling on the new federal campaign law struck down the FEC, which will die an untimely death if statute itself is so unclear as to who is entitled to federal matching money,” added Weddington. Weddington said about 70 percent of the money McCormack has raised for her campaign is not given to a “McCormack Bob Wieland Rep. Weddington for President” fund but to the Pro-Life Committee, an anti-abortion group. Weddington said McCormack is not campaigning for the presidency, but is using her ads to spread anti-abortion propaganda. McCormack is vice-president of the National Right to Life Committee. Press gag Dist. Judge James E. Barlow of San Antonio seems to be afflicted with the idea that he has a Patty Hearst trial on his hands. Or as The San Antonio Express succinctly headlined an editorial, “Judge Catches Gag Fever.” In late February, Barlow imposed press gags in the murder trial of a San Antonio man that had been moved to Corpus. Barlow ordered the press not to take pictures of the defendant, in or out of the courtroom, not to interview any witnesses or attorneys, and not to print the names of prospective or seated jurors, even though the names are part of the open court record. In the Nebraska gag order case now pending before the Supreme Court, the order stopped the press from printing “evidence and testimony that strongly implicated the accused.” Justice Harry Blackmun, in his preliminary ruling on the Nebraska case, noted that “the accused … bears the burden of showing that publicizing particular facts will irreparably impair the ability of those exposed to them to reach an independent and impartial judgment as to guilt.” Can jurors’ judgment be irreparably impaired by seeing pictures of the defendant or learning one another’s names? March 12, 1976 7