The Texan

There is no Texan like a Texan born some place else. Texans think this quip perfectly tailored for Amarillo Publisher Gene Howe, who has become the voice of the vast Texas Panhandle by outshouting the natives and trying to forget that he was born in Kansas. In both his Amarillo Globe and News, his garrulous daily column, "The Tactless Texan," is the fountainhead of authentic Panhandle lore.

"Old Tack's" reverence for Texas is fanatical and often funny. Panhandle women, he wrote, have the world's prettiest legs, made strong and muscular by leaning against the fierce Panhandle winds. Panhandle dogs are tougher; Panhandle skunks are twice as odorous. Even in the dust-bowl days he bragged that no other place could produce such suffocating dust clouds. According to legend, the Northwest Texas Hospital took Tack's tall boastings so seriously that it ordered beds a foot longer than normal to accommodate Panhandle patients.

Last week, at 64, Gene Howe was rounding out 50 years in the newspaper business with a four-day open house at the Globe and News's new million-dollar plant. Above the main entrance was his one-line journalistic creed: "A newspaper may be forgiven for lack of wisdom but never for lack of courage."

The two-story building itself made plain that while Old Tack had rattled out his folksy nonsense, Publisher Howe had become a no-nonsense businessman. He had built up a string of eleven newspapers and a radio chain reaching to the West Coast. Later, he trimmed to an easily manageable five papers (at Amarillo and Lubbock, Texas; Atchison Kans.), two radio stations, and a deposit box full of blue-chip stocks.

Gene Howe had been bent on such Lone Star independence ever since he fled from the towering reputation of his famous publishing father, Old Ed Howe, Kansas' "Sage of Potato Hill." When Gene was 15, sharp-penned Old Ed wrote: "Three Atchison young men disgraced themselves . . . Saturday. The publisher's son was the drunkest of the bunch." Gene struck west, and after six years as a reporter, came back and soon took over the Atchison Globe.

Eleven years later, Gene bolted for Amarillo and started his own paper. He gave his editors free rein, spent most of his time making Old Tack the independent character Gene Howe wanted to be. In his battered Stetsons, his rumpled--and expensive--suits, he soon mastered the look of Texas, then acquired the substance by buying a 15,000-acre cattle ranch and a herd of Herefords. But it was not until Texas mothers and fathers began naming their children "Gene Howe" and cowhands took to calling their ponies Old Tack that he knew, for sure, he had arrived.

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