ustxtxb_obs_1999_08_20_50_00003-00000_000.pdf

FEATURES The Voice That Shook San Antonio 5 by Jan Jarboe Russell The late Emma Tenayuca was the fiery defender of the powerless in old San Antonio. May her memory live on. Smoke and Water by Nate Blakeslee 8 Alcoa has fouled the skies over Central Texas for nearly fifty years. Now it wants more coal, more water, and ‘tore air. California on $1,000 a Day by Robert Bryce 14 Dazzled by the dollars funneling into the Bush Juggernaut? The money rolling out tells its own tale as well. 2 3 BOOKS AND THE CULTURE Gracefully into 24 the Wilderness Poetry by Jo LeCoeur Janis Joplin 25 and Her Times Book Review by Mark Smith Afterword 29 Miss Piggy’s Diplomats by Gabriela Bocagrande The Back Page 32 A Canadian in the Bush Cover Art by Kevin Kreneck DEPARTMENTS Dialogue Observations Willie Morris Goes Home by Ronnie Dugger Political Intelligence 16 Molly Ivins 20 Water Tablets Jim Hightower 21 Money Primary, Casino Evil & The Flo Chart Las Americas 22 Crises by the Hour THIS IS SUE OBSERVATIONS South Toward Home Dear Willie gone. He was a sweet, gentle man. I first became aware of him when I was editing the Ob server a block off the U.T. campus, and he, the feisty young editor of the Daily Texan, started raising hell about the oil depletion allowance and such. When his elders censored his editorials, he ran blank space with a note saying that’s where the censored editorial would have been. That’s when we knew that someone real had arrived. But he was never a hard political case; he was closer to what Molly Ivins is now, enjoying the comedy of the sold-out Legislature while looking, and looking, and looking, for the good up ahead there somewhere. He was always a Southerner in the outrageous way. I remember once while he was editor of the Observer, we were visiting his house in Austin, and were sprawled all over the living room floor, drinking beer, or maybe it was Jack Daniel’s, and listening to classical music on the radio. Suddenly the music was interrupted and an announcer came on with a news bulletin that Russia had dropped an atomic bomb on New York City. We all leapt up in alarm and horror until damn! we remembered that Willie was from Mississippi. Sure enough, he had taped the interruption and rigged the sound system to take us in. He was in the bedroom, doubled up, Orson Welles from Yazoo City. Willie Morris Neil Caldwell Those days, we embattled and self-embattled Texas liberals in Austin were very close personally, and many’ s the night Willie, Bob and Orissa Eckhardt, Tony Korioth, Whiskey Bob Wheeler, Charlie Hughes, Bob and Claudette Mullen the old gang beered away the hours at Scholz Garden, with other drifting-in, drifting-out politicos, drunks, the outdoor types, and demurely conspiring professors, whiling away the nights and marking off the days till justice would surely prevail. Honestly, I wonder what we’d have thought, if a prophet had glided up to our long table under the trees in the open garden and told us, “You might as well know, that after you’ve worked your young hearts out, not to mention your asses off, at the turn into the new century in the year 2000 your beloved Texas and its Legislature, and except for your golden boy Doggett, the Texas delegation in Congress, are going to be leading the parade for such a cynical and entrenched corruption you will wonder why you hadn’t just drifted away together to some island in the Caribbean and gotten even more all mixed up together.” Would we have cursed the news, and given up or might we just have seen sooner than some of us did that we had grossly overestimated the puissance of our ringing appeals to justice, and had grossly underestimated the triumphantly incorporated greed of our half-century? After Willie wended his way to New York City and Harper’s I didn’t see much of him. I visited him once in his office in the city. \(A story he told in a book about my visiting him there never happened, though. Like the late Walter Prescott Webb, and sometimes, though only when she is sorely tempted, Molly, Willie never Sometimes he’d blow into Austin for a weekend and we’d run together in the old haunts through the afternoon, and the AUGUST 20, 1999 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 3