ustxtxb_obs_1978_09_22_50_00021-00000_000.pdf

San Antonio The Observer itself and the members of the Observer community are phenomenal. Nowhere else in the country has so vigorously humanist a regional periodical of dissent survived for long. We approach the beginning of our 25th year in good conditiononce again as a result of the remarkable combination of workers who put unfettered service to their values ahead of highest available pay, and the support and patience of that family of connected people I really do not know how to specify or describe. My frustration, formulating these thoughts, is knowing there is no way I can here adequately communicate with, much less in what I say represent, that community. I think helter-skelter of Otto Mullinax and Nat Wells and Chris Dixie and Bob Hall; Franklin Jones, the crusty sage of Marshall, and Huldah; Walter and Helen Hall, who practice small-town banking in the highest public spirit; J. R. Parten, the Madisonville oilman and rancher, once a Democratic national committeeman and chairman of the UT regents, a liberal maverick who disproves the liberal stereotypes about oilmen; Carl Brannin, the faithful nonagenarian idealist; Albert Perla, serving and leading the causes of the poor in San Antonio; Gertrude Barnstone, welding not only her metal sculptures and whatever welders weld for a living but also the multiple feminist and humanist causes within her ken; Ralph Yarborough, as unfailingly the alert public citizen out of office as in; printer Bill McAfee and his wife Anne, loyal friends from the first to now; Warren Burnett, who fights the people’s fight from his base in Odessa, and wins; Jess McNeel, the San Antonio rancher and merchant who has never forgotten that the New Deal helped him succeed; Bernard Rapoport, whose understanding and practice of free enterprise, if widely emulated, would produce again a system healthy in real competition, and whose support of the Observer through the years has been as important cumulatively as was that of Mrs. R. D. Randolph in our first 12 years; Ben Reyes, a great person and truly important chicano leader from Houston; Ben Ayres, the humanist Democrat I always know is in Floydada, although I’ve never been to Floydada; Zeke and Nelda Zbranek, keeping the faith in Liberty; Ernie Cortez, the most important organizer of the urban poor in the United States, now working in Houston. I think of the ones gone. Charles Hughes of Sherman was one of my close friends for 25 years. In the Legislature in the ’50s he suffered and fought thanklessly for the poor with Maury Maverick Jr., who still does it in San Antonio, and Don Gladden, who still does it in Fort Worth. Charley’s death, like the death of Jim Sewell, like the death of Fagan Dickson, like the death of Frankie Randolphthese are deaths we feel in a family that shares no house but the house of hope and conscience, the family of Creekmore and Adele Fath, Lloyd and Libbie Doggett, Babe and Marilyn Schwartz, Hector Garcia, Subie and Phil Green, Craig Washington, Bob and Claudette Mullen, Jose Angel Gutierrez, Mendel Kaliff, Ruth and Harris Kempner, Jack Hopper, Mickey Leland, Michol O’Connor, Bob and Celia Eckhardt, Bernard Lifschutz, Malcolm McGregor, Chris Harte, David Allred, George and Hundy McAlmon, Joseph Jamail, Cordye Hall, Lance Lalor, Herky and Loretta Bernard, Shannon and Bob Armstrong, a family with kinfolks in furrin parts, Joe Rauh in Washington, John Kenneth Galbraith and David Reisman at Harvard, Paul Taylor in Berkeley, Larry King in New York City, W. H. “Ping” Ferry in Scarsdale, Willie Morris in Long Island, Larry Goodwyn in North Carolina, Dan Noyes in San Francisco, Walter Morrison in Utah, Katherine Anne Porter in Maryland. . . . Some family. Not those I name but the futility of trying to characterize the community by naming any of usthis is what I am trying to communicate. For once again, in the last 18 months, members of the Observer family have given of their substance to match the Observer workers’ giving of theirs. The trouble with naming anyone is there is no one or hundred who could make the Observer last; what makes it laq is the community’s knowledge that the Observer won’t sell out, the community’s patience during our less exciting years, and its support when we have had to have that support. Thanks now also to especially significant help from two persons who have never failed us, our current bills are paid, we have the means to continue funding the expanded Observer under Jim Hightower at its present level, and we can fund Cliff Olofson and his business staff in a substantial program for subscription expansion. Our circulation increase from January 1977 through June 30, 1978 accomplished during a period when there was very little cash available to invest in promotionwas very encouraging. The percentage of subscribers we lost due to normal attrition declined slightly, and more than 4,300 new subscribers signed on. That’s twice the number of new subscribers acquired in the preceding 18 months. We have instituted quarterly budget meetings of the entire staff at which we will continue to monitor carefully our income, spending. and promotional plans and results. I continue to be profoundly pleased by the work Jim and his associates and contributors are doing. Where else in Texas but from the Observer, in a Buck Ramsey piece, are we going to learn that nuclear weapons are assembled at the Pantex plant 17 miles from Amarillo and are shipped from there, “ready for detonation,” to the military? Jim never lets us forget that Texas ranks 49th among the states in jobless pay, 46th in public school spending, 48th in aid to dependent children, 49th in old age pensionsyet he also, with Susan DeMarco. seeks out the state’s one independent brewery to celebrate business independence and true independence. Roger Baker’s work keeps us current on the Endangered University, UT, and its corporate polluters. In one special issue we learn the truth that ten big corporate chains own seven out of ten Texas daily newspapersand which owns what. Julie Ardery and Bill Bishop, with Professors David Perry and Alfred Watkins in tandem and Professor Donald Huddle riding outrigger, give us basic studies on the overconcentration of wealth and power in Texas. Chandler Davidson gives Robert Coles a well-deserved drubbing for Coles’s crucial flaking in his Children of Crisis, Volume V. Susan Reid opens up what must become a passionate crusade in the late ’70sStop the Nuclear Fission Power Industry with a cool, unanswerable review of the knowledge about that industry’s indestructible carcinogenic wastes; Lisa TH,E TEXAS OBSERVER 21 Publisher’s report Part II