ustxtxb_obs_1989_07_14_50_00016-00000_000.pdf

Spiders . . . the first thing that springs to mind when you mention the word “web.” But, our web is a press high speed and economical! From newspapers to quality book work, in black and white or color. Call us at 389-1500 for a quote on your next project. Em loyee Owned and Managed COMMUNICATIONS, INC. AUSTIN.. TEXAS 3019 Alvin DeVane, Suite 500 389-1500 Data Processing Typesetting Printing Mailing does a person, without any significant financial resources and without any big backers, manage to get 50 percent of the vote two times running? . . . There was not a single newspaper in the state for him except two county weeklies. Every radio station was against him, every television station was against.” In preparation for the presentation of the social justice award to Yarborough, Billie Carr of Houston, a member of the executive committee of the Democratic National Party Randolph, saying, in part: “She was my mentor and she was my friend. You know, she came from a family of wealth and social proMinence and , we would have never crossed paths. I was the wife of a steelworker with a house full of kids, and yet we came together out of the concern and a compassion for what we wanted this country and this state to become.. . “We never called her Frankie, I couldn’t do that to this day. We always called her Mrs. Randolph, sometimes Mrs. R., we had that kind of respect and she liked that .. . One day the phone rang and someone answered it and said, ‘Mrs. Randolph, it is the President, it is the White House.’ And she picked up the phone with her everpresent cigarette and said, “Yes,” and they were silent for a little bit, and then suddenly she said in her nice husky voice created by Scotch and cigarettes, she said: ‘Whoever told you you could call me Frankie?’ And hung up the phone. And we said, someone was in awe, you know, and said, ‘Mrs. Randolph, you hung up on the President!’ And she said, ‘Oh, it was just Lyndon.’ ” “And now I want to close my remarks exactly the way she closed every meeting I ever heard her make, when she said, `Well, this has been good tonight, but now I want you to go home and organize your precinct.’ ” The story of the first Frankie Randolph award was told in the published program for the night. Fred Schmidt, who sculpted the award was a Texas union leader during the first Yarborough runs, executive secresecretary treasurer of the Texas AFL-CIO Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez and as a professor at UCLA, Schmidt turned to painting, writing, and finally to sculpture. He and his wife Sonia Portales Schmidt, a studio potter, live and work in Fredericksburg. Fred, whose sculpture has been exhibited at the Carnegie Museum in Oxnard, California and the Cunningham Fine Arts Museum at Bakersfield, California, has been represented by six galleries in California, Arizona and Texas and now sells pieces at the NanEtte Richardson Fine Arts Gallery in downtown San Antonio and Woodstone Gallery in Kerrville. When asked to design the social justice award, Fred Schmidt said, “I thought I’d do it out of stone, as I do most of my pieces. However, when my thoughts went back to Mrs. Randolph, mesquite seemed more appropriate; it’s native, it’s tough, and it’s beautiful, as was she. So with some of the bark left on, as she would have it, here it is, cast from mesquite into bronze and set on a solid chunk of oak.” The original sculpture was cast into bronze by another Hill Country sculptor, Jonas Perkins, who has his studio in the country near Comfort. With the help of his two sons, Krishna, 10, and Balaram, 6, Perkins is now building his own house near his studio. Across about three weeks, Perkins cast the award into bronze by using the lost wax casting process. He made a hard rubber mold from the original wood sculpture, then made wax moldings, and finally melted the wax and poured in the bronze to fill the space the wax had filled. “Then you sandblast it and then put on patina . . .” Schmidt said. Finally, it is ,mounted. At the end of the evening, then, around 10:30 that Tuesday night, on behalf of the Observer I presented Senator Yarborough the first Frankie Randolph Award for Social Justice. I sought to say what I thought Mrs. Randolph would say, by telling what follows. “When Mrs. Randolph was publisher of the Texas Observer and I was the editor, she always respected my self-asserted authority as the editor. It is an unusual newspaper, the editor actually runs it. But she and I also loved each other and we spoke very freely to each other about the politicians of the time. She felt ‘about Ralph Yarborough as she felt about only one other officeholder from Texas at that time, and they are sitting here together tonight, Bob Eckhardt and Ralph Yarborough. She had a way of seeing to the roots of things and describing what she saw in a hard few words that she would repeat, the same words, in different circumstances. For instance, as Billie has told you, she said to everyone on diverse public occasions, ‘Work in your precinct,’ and then she would sit down. In the hundreds of talks that we had we discussed Ralph Yarborough a lot of times, we discussed Ms prospects in the elections and stands he was taking and exasperations he had with one or the other or both of us and that we had with him. But all I really remember, Senator, about those talks is Mrs. Randolph saying in always the same husky way she had of saying, ‘He has integrity.’ There it is, the central golden truth about him, and here are Mrs. Randolph’s hard few words to name it, ‘He has integrity.’ ” 1=1 16 JULY 14, 1989