ustxtxb_obs_1989_06_30_50_00002-00000_000.pdf

HE TEXAS b T server A JOURNAL OF FREE VOICES We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of humankind as the foundation of democracy; we will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powetful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit. Writers are responsible for their own work, but not for anything they have not themselves written, and in publishing them we do not necessarily imply that we agree with them because this is a journal of free voices. SINCE 1954 Publisher: Ronnie Dugger Editor: Dave Denison Associate Editor: Louis Dubose Editorial Interns: Pauline Cashion, Jim Lacy, Brian Maffly Calendar: Elisa Lyles Washington Correspondents: Mary Anne Reilly, Richard Ryan Contributing Writers: Bill Adler, Betty Brink, Warren Burnett, Jo Clifton, John Henry Faulk, Terry FitzPatrick, Gregg Franzwa, Bill Helmer, James Harrington, Amy Johnson, Michael King, Mary Lenz, Dana Loy, Tom McClellan, Greg Moses, Debbie Nathan, Gary Pomerantz, John Schwartz, Michael Ventura, Lawrence Walsh Editorial Advisory Board: Frances Barton, Austin; Elroy Bode, Kerrville; Chandler Davidson, Houston; Bob Eckhardt, Washington, D.C.; Sissy Farenthold, Houston; Ruperto Garcia, Austin; John Kenneth Galbraith, Cambridge, Mass.; Lawrence Goodwyn, Durham, N.C.; George Hendrick, Urbana, Ill.; Molly Ivins, Austin; Larry L. King, Washington, D.C.; Maury Maverick, Jr., San Antonio; Willie Morris, Oxford, Miss.; Kaye Northcott, Austin; James Presley, Texarkana; Susan Reid, Austin; Geoffrey Fred Schmidt, Fredericksburg; Robert Sherrill, Tallahassee, Fla. Layout and Design: Layne Jackson Typesetter: Becky Willard Contributing Photographers: Bill Albrecht, Vic Hinterlang, Alan Pogue. Contributing Artists: Eric Avery, Tom Ballenger, Richard Bartholomew, Jeff Danziger, Beth Epstein, Dan Hubig, Pat Johnson, Kevin Kreneck, Michael Krone, Carlos Lowry, Ben Sargent, Dan Thibodeau, Gail Woods. Managing Publisher: Cliff Olofson Subscription Manager: Stefan Wanstrom Special Projects Director: Bill Simmons Development Consultant: Frances Barton SUBSCRIPTIONS: One year S27. two years $48, three years S69. Fulltime students S15 per year. Back issues S3 prepaid. Airmail, foreign, group, and bulk rates on request. Microfilm editions available from University Microfilms Intl., 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106. Any current subscriber who finds the price a burden should say so at renewal time: no one need forgo reading the Observer simply because of the cost. 1989, is published biweekly except for a three-week interval Texas Observer Publishing Co., 307 West 7th Street, Austin. paid at Austin, Texas. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to THE TEXAS OBSERVER, P.O. Box 49019, Austin, Texas 78765 That Dogie Won’t Hunt Your paper is a great delight, even when there is too much of that cute urban Texasstyle cowboy talk. Now and then one of your fine laddies shows that he does not know a DOGIE from a DOGGIE, and blows his cover, revealing that he is really just an asphalt college boy who probably doesn’t know one end of a horse from the other any more than your President Bush and his predecessor. \(Who put him on the right are different species. I grew up in Texas from dustbowl plains days, and knew many cowboys, including my father and his friends. None of them ever spoke in the terms I see in current day Texas books and papers such as yours. That review by Bryce Milligan of the Range Wars, etc., book \(TO, in Dallas, sounded like a parody of a parody. I lived in Dallas long ago a town known for Banks Rag Peddlers, and Football players and their consorts. What they prided themselves on while they sneered at Fort Worth I was never able to figure out, but they did show themselves to be the nadir of provincial thinking, even in Texas, never noted for a world view of any kind. What does it take to be a Texas Writer? A knowledge of the language for one thing, including any slang or regional jargon one may use to brighten otherwise dull prose. Frank Dobie was the best of his kind. Few writers or newsmen and women today, aside from Bill Moyers, appear to know enough about even my own generation of Texans to recognize real lingo from that brought on by such cowboy phonies as Reagan and his gaggle of bully-boys. Doggies, indeed!! Shades of Bush and other east coast ignoramuses! I love you all anyway even if you don’t know a dogie from a doggie!! Hasse Bunnelle Santa Barbara, California Small Banks and Small Business Re: Megabanks \(TO, Ever since Andrew Jackson closed the Bank of the United States in 1832, frontiersmen, and later small-town businesses, have resisted branch banking, in which their deposits in megabank branches are funnelled to commercial centers to be loaned to “big business.” summers in a small, independent Chicago bank. There were 70 independent banks in Chicago at that time, so the small businessman who couldn’t get a loan from us had 69 other doors to knock on. One summer I visited a friend at his family’s summer place in Little Current, Ontario. My friend’s father was convinced that the reason Canadian industry had never developed the way American industry had was that Little Current’s branch of the Royal Bank of Canada had little interest in loaning money to the local butcher or baker. It took their deposits and funnelled them to Montreal for “big league” loans. After the war I worked for an independent San Francisco bank for a year. We competed with the biggest branch operation of all: Bank of America. B of A would go to cities like Oakland and Santa Barbara and set up branch offices, at each end of the financial district so as to be closer to potential depositors than any other bank. But small businesses who applied for loans of more than the “floor limit” had their application sent to San Francisco for “committee action”: not a . good idea from the small businessman’s point of view. We moved to Dallas in the early fifties and found financing a small business readily accessible. However, by the late seventies the holding company loophole was being exploited and the equivalent of branch banking was rampant. Fortunately I had cashed out of business before the megabanks started acquiring all the independent banks in sight, but you know the rest. Now I’m retired and my interest is purely academic, but I wish a small businessman could once again go into a bank and discuss his needs eyeball-to-eyeball with the man who has the authority to make the loan. E. B. Washburne Dallas CORRECTIONS In the Political Intelligence section in the June 16 issue of the Observer we misstated the name of the organization chaired by Rep. Pete Laney, D-Hale Center. It is the House Democratic Campaign Committee. We also misidentified the Houston Democrat who supported Republican Charlie Hartland in a special election for a House seat. The Democrat is Sonny Bosworth. Our story on school finance used an incorrect figure. The figure, first incorrectly stated in a quote from House floor debate, suggested the amount of state funding going toward an equalization plan was $250 million. The correct figure is $450 million. In the “Cast of Characters” section we wrote that Corpus Christi Senator Carlos Truan killed a loan shark bill in committee. Truan killed the bill on the Senate floor. 0 DIALOGUE 2 JUNE 30, 1989