Close to the Land

(See Cover)

"It's too hard to find the ranch if you don't know the country," explained the Governor's press secretary in Austin. "You drive south from San Antonio to Floresville. You turn left on the road to Pleasanton. You go exactly seven miles west out this road. There, at exactly 9:45 a.m., a car will be parked at the side of the road. It will either be a Pontiac or a Land Rover. The Governor will be in it."

He was. Texas' Democratic Governor John Connally wore Western boots, a big felt Stetson, checkered sports shirt, tan twill pants. His right arm, in a cast from the wrist to the elbow, was supported by a black-bandanna sling. "I'll ride with you," the Governor told his visitor. "Turn right and go on down that road. We've got some work to do on these roads, but they aren't as bad as they look."

The hills around Floresville (pop. 2,126) projected gentle arcs of tans and greys against the blue sky. Most of the dull-colored range grass lay dormant, the landscape enlivened only by the greenery of prickly pear cactus. But on the 4,500-acre Connally family spread, the cactus had been routed, mesquite trees dragged out by chain, the land plowed deep, and a lush cover of coastal Bermuda grass planted. "Five years ago, there was nothing here, nothing at all," said Connally. "The land had been all but given up for hopeless. Now it will support up to ten times its former number of cattle, besides being good for cutting hay and for pulling up sprigs of grass to sell to other ranchers."

A herd of fat cattle, their high flanks glowing deep brown in the sun, blocked the narrow dirt road. "I didn't know they were going to be here," said Connally. "But since they are, let's get out and look at them.

"They are fine heifers--deep-bodied, fine animals. They are the product of Santa Gertrudis heifers bred to Hereford bulls--a fine combination." A young Mexican cowhand drove the cattle from atop a ponylike animal. "It's not a pony at all. It's a Galiceno horse, a direct descendant of the horses the Spaniards brought from Europe. They've got the lines of a thoroughbred in miniature. Look at him go."

Away from Things. The car passed through a gate marked "Four C Ranch." Said Connally: "This is my children's property. The Cs stand for children.* I bought this spread for them, and I like them to come down and use it as much as they can. It's good for a person to get back to the soil, away from things, back here where you can think."

Near an earthen dam squatted a low, one-room camp house where Connally, 46, and his wife Nellie, 44, spend many weekends. Mounted deer heads, shot by the family, adorn the walls. Indian blankets cover the beds. Changing his clothes, Connally stepped out of his trousers, took off his shirt. "Here is where the bullet came in," he said, pointing to a small pink scar on his right side. "That is where it went out. These scars are where they had the tubes. This is where they made the incision." The wounds, of course, came from the sniper's fire that killed lohn F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22.

Later, the trim, tall (6 ft. 2 in., 190 Ibs.), grey-haired Texan pointed out some more sights. He waved toward an aging white wooden farmhouse. "This is the family home. My mother still lives here. This is where I lived just before I went away to college. We used to ride horses, work cattle. One of the things that meant the most to me was breaking the land with a turning plow. Believe it or not, that's a fine sensation. You get under a layer of turf with a plow and it's got sort of a crackle as it breaks loose. I used to take off my shoes because the soil behind the plow just felt good to walk in. It had a good feel, good smell. It had a sort of life to it."

Something in Common. John Connally's love of the land is something all Texans seem to share, perhaps because there is so much of it, often stretching to the horizon, unfettered by so much as a fence. Even the trees--mesquite, cedar and scrub oak--shun the sky and hug the land. Except for a handful of city skyscrapers, most buildings, including acres of suburban-tract homes, sprawl rather than climb.

But that sense of closeness to the earth is about all that Texans have in common. The state is so diverse that not even many Texans understand it as a whole. Outsiders think they do, but their notions are nurtured by pulp fiction, Hollywood shoot-'em-ups, and the rapacious oil and cattle barons of Edna Ferber's Giant.

Worldwide, Texas has long been one of the best-known U.S. states, a fascinating topic of conversation and argument. Other millions who had given little thought to the state became painfully aware of it on Nov. 22, and Texas will long be remembered--perhaps unjustly --for the events of that day. With Lyndon Johnson catapulted into the presidency, everyone is certain to hear more and more about Texas.

Many of the world's ideas about Texas and Texans--even before Nov. 22--were unflattering. An Australian describes Texans as "flamboyant, loudmouthed, easygoing exhibitionists." To a resident of Hong Kong, Texas is a "dry, flat land with cowboys and their herds ringing waterholes while city oilmen in ten-gallon hats prop fancy boots on polished desks and flick cigar ashes into deep-pile rugs." A Vietnamese bar girl says: "I have had many Texas fiances and all give me big presents--but they can be rough." A Londoner's impressions of Texans: "A lot of loudmouthed bigheads telling everyone they've got more than anyone else."

"Pickin' Cow Chips." Even in the U.S., non-Texans tend to share such notions. In fact, many Texans tend to be shy and reticent, mainly because most are only recently removed from rural areas where talk is scarce. If there is one thing the average Texan detests, it is "puttin' on airs." Scoffs one Texas woman about a millionaire who moved to New York: "I don't know why he's puttin' on airs. I remember when we were both pickin' up cow chips for firewood." Much Texas bragging takes the form of understatement. Thus an oil man may say that he owns "just a few lil ol' holes near Tyler" -- when everyone knows they bring him millions. Some of the statistical superlatives about Texas actually defy the boaster to top them.

Texas is so big that it is 866 highway miles from El Paso to Orange, more than 800 air miles from Brownsville to the northwest corner of the Panhandle. El Paso is halfway between Houston and Los Angeles. Of Texas' 254 counties, 77 are about the same size as Rhode Island. Its 267,339 square miles are exceeded only by the state of Alaska. Texas has the world's largest vegetable farm (at Edinburg), the nation's deepest hole (a 25,340-foot dry well in Pecos County), even the world's largest factory for medical-school skeletons (Gatesville).

Texas industries produce half the nation's supply of synthetic rubber, one-third of its oil, one-fourth of its rice, up to 20% of the world's cotton. Its natural-gas pipelines serve half the U.S. Texas has some 10 million people, ranks fifth among the states in population. It has an equal number of cattle--more than any other state.

Myth and reality merge in Texas. Past and present, there have always been those characters who are the stuff of legend. One saloonkeeper built a large stone mansion but insisted on an outside privy because "having one of those things in the house strikes me as un-Texan." The oil-rich Tom Slick was convinced that some men had the occult power to make sick cows well merely by thinking about them, hunted oil with "black-box" divining devices, financed expeditions (unsuccessful) to find the Abominable Snowman in the Himalayas and the animal that left a legendary footprint in the woods of California. Mrs. Clara Driscoll, a socialite and political manipulator, got so mad at the service in Corpus Christi's White Plaza Hotel that she vowed: "I'll build a hotel right beside the White Plaza. I'll build it taller, and I'll stand on top of my hotel and spit on the White Plaza." She built--and she spat.

Thus almost every myth about Texas has an element of truth. Yet such is the sprawling complexity of the state that no generalization about it, mythborn or otherwise, really stands up. "Texas is so big," says Governor Connally, "that you have to describe it in parts. It is huge. It is also changing." At the cost of oversimplifying, Connally sometimes talks about "the five worlds of Texas."

Stealing Oil. Among those changing worlds is the northeastern "Blacklands" area, which runs roughly south from the Oklahoma border through Dallas and Waco. There the once aristocratic cotton-plantation society has deteriorated. The gooey black clay that attracted some of the state's first permanent settlers is no longer fertile. Farmers are fleeing to the big cities, their lands taken over by a few big cattle operators who strip the fields, turn it back into pasture, graze huge herds. This is where such oil millionaires as H. L. Hunt, Sid Richardson and the Murchisons hit big money in the 1930s. And it is where the "whipstock," a curving drill stem that steals oil from other wells, was long king.

The "Piney Woods" area, from Beaumont north to Texarkana, is the farthest western reach of the great Southern U.S. pine forests that begin in Virginia and North Carolina. Skinny pines, including a kind rather pleasantly known as the Loblolly, grow thick as weeds over some 35 million acres. The area provides a poor living for its older residents, most of whom crossed the border from Deep South states and are poorly educated. A majority of Texas' roughly 1,000,000 Negroes live in East Texas, and it is the only area in the state where Negro-white tensions run dangerously high. Moonshining is a major industry (the better distillers drop a cherry into the bottle for color). But far more profitable are the timber and paper-pulp businesses that have sprouted in recent years like the pines themselves.

The "South Texas" area, south of Del Rio, San Antonio and Houston, is diverse, soil-rich and generally booming. Oil derricks and natural-gas fittings rise among the cactus and grapefruit, and offshore in the Gulf of Mexico itself. So many pipes snake between refineries and new petrochemical plants along the gulf that the area has been dubbed "The Spaghetti Bowl." The lower Rio Grande Valley is one of the nation's most productive winter-citrus fruit and truck-gardening sites. The western part of the south plains has huge cattle ranches, including the nation's largest: the million-acre King Ranch. Labor is cheap and plentiful, as thousands of Mexicans cross the border each day to work in Texas. Some cities--such as Brownsville, which overlooks the muddy Rio Grande and is closer to Panama than to New York--have a population up to 75% Latin. There the Texan lapses happily into the easygoing siesta life of the Latins. For a good time, country youths point their cars toward the bridge and the "Boys' Town" bordellos across the border.

Evils of Drink. The northeast "Panhandle" area around Amarillo is legendary as a harsh land smitten by wildly varying climatic conditions. Stories are still told of natives serving in the Navy during World War II and enduring an ice gale on the Murmansk run, saying happily: "God, I'm glad I'm not in Amarillo on a night like this." Actually the winters are often mild, but the Panhandler works from dawn to dusk to keep his cotton crop alive, fights dust storms, drought, pests and cloudbursts. He has no time for frivolity--and even if he did, he would be discouraged by the inveighing of his fundamentalist church against the evils of dancing, cardplaying and drinking. Lubbock, at the southern fringe of the Panhandle, has a population of 150,000, may be the largest U.S. city in which a man can't even buy a legal bottle of beer. Yet the Panhandle is thriving. Ranchers there are drilling as deep as 1,000 ft. to reach water sources, digging irrigation canals, finding cotton more profitable than cattle. Sweeping the plains with mechanized pickers, Lubbock County farmers lead the nation in cotton production.

And then there is "The West"--which, with numerous subdivisions, includes more than half the state, everything west of Fort Worth between the Panhandle and South Texas. This is the country that comes closest to legend.

Unlike the Panhandler, who prays, the rancher of the West spits and swears. Yucca plants, rocks, cactus and sand dull the eye, and the few irrigated cotton fields (like those of Billie Sol Estes' near Pecos) gleam like oases. Here cowboys really wear Levi's or Lee Riders, which are more popular nowadays.

The open emptiness can appall a non-Texan. South out of Alpine toward the Chalk Mountains, Highway 118 beelines for 100 miles. Alpine's grubby houses disappear. Roadside signs vanish. The telephone poles lie behind. There are no gas stations, no passing cars, hardly any vegetation. A cross of sticks tilts above a mound of rock. Who lies there? How long ago did he die? There is death out there in the sand.

What if the engine stops? There are only those barren, hot-rock peaks ahead. Apprehension sets in. Turn around. Speed back to Alpine at 80 m.p.h. Ah, a fence of barbed wire. A utility pole. The town. How about a cold beer, miss? Hot today, isn't it?

Yet even in "The West," the cowboy is more apt to ride a Jeep than a saddle. He smokes a filter cigarette, cares little for Bull Durham. He probably owns a gun but almost never carries it. He may be willing to fight if something really bothers him, but not much ever does.

Many authorities debunk those legends of saloon brawls and the fast draw.

"As a matter of fact, there were a great many Texans who didn't like fighting, but they didn't make as much noise as the ones who did," explains Austin's J. Frank Dobie, folklore expert and former English professor at the University of Texas. "Cowmen who wanted to make money out of cows didn't hire gunmen; they hired cowboys."

Best-Known Texan. In part of The West, a section called the "Hill Country," near Austin, is the permanent home of the best-known Texan of them all. Standing beneath the tortured limbs of an old oak during his recent trip home, the President of the U.S. pulled his windbreaker tighter, dug his hands into his pockets. "I love sunset and sunrise," he said. "And I see them both every day." He and Lady Bird find life on their 400-acre L.B.J. ranch stimulating. "It's dry country," he explained. "It seems there is always a breeze blowing. And there is always sun here. We don't have dreariness. We don't have those dull grey skies when you look up. Here you have birds singing, flowers growing, girls smiling." Added Lady Bird, who grew up in East Texas: "I fell in love with the Texas hill country before I met Lyndon. It was good courtin' country--a lot of wonderful places for picnics."

Such land deeply affects those who live there. "This is strong country," said Lyndon. "Not only does it produce fearless soldiers and people with great courage, but the grass that grows in the rock has a lot of mineral in it and the cattle that eat this grass are more valuable." Said Lady Bird: "You are both the victim and the friend of nature. It is something to see Lyndon in combat with the land. The land is unrelenting. He is unrelenting." Johnson mounted a frisky filly and helped cut calves from the herd. An old cowhand, watching, said: "That fella's been in the saddle afore." Just then the pony skittered, Lyndon lost a stirrup and grabbed for the pommel. The old fellow added with a twinkle: ". . . but not fer some time."

Lyndon's father, Sam Ealy Johnson Jr., wrote his own chapter of the kind that gives life to Texas legend. Sixteen years ago, when he lay dying in an Austin hospital, he said to Lyndon: "Get my britches. I'm going home." Lyndon protested. Johnson City, he said, could not provide the necessary medical personnel and equipment that the old man required. Replied his father: "I'm going home where they know when you're sick and they care when you die."

For all its vast, wide-open spaces, the present and the future of Texas almost certainly lie in the quality of life, the industry and creative ideas of its cities. Some 75% of all Texans now live in urban areas; yet most of them retain an affinity with their country cousins.

"New York is 200 years away from its frontier," explains Governor Connally. "Texas is only 50 years from it. Fifty years ago, Texans were riding against Pancho Villa. That's history pretty close by. Here in Texas there is a first generation of city dwellers who understand the country. People who live in cities still know how to work hard, get up early, sew and cook. They still put up provisions and keep vegetable gardens. These are a thrifty people. These are people who say, 'If you don't need it, don't buy it.' Lots of city people, just like country people, have just one good suit for the man and one good dress for the woman to use for going to church."

Pyramids in the Flatness. As with the rural regions of Texas, each major Texas city has a character of its own, alike only in that the skyline of each seems to loom as an irregular pyramid in a desert of flatness. Houston is a lightly governed city that has outstripped all of its rivals partly because of its strategic location, partly because its people are free, unselfconscious, build for the pure pleasure of doing big things. Dallas, honestly but rigidly ruled by a business oligarchy, has been fretting about its image since long before Nov. 22. It quarrels with nearby Fort Worth, thumps its chest about its free enterprise--then complains that Houston gets more federal aid.

Fort Worth takes pride in being called a "hick cow town," says that it is "where the West begins." Yet its Armour meat-packing plant has closed, and its stockyards area is almost deserted. Its suburbs are growing, not because of cattle, but mainly because of General Dynamics' aircraft plant. The controversial TFX fighter-aircraft contract is increasing employment at General Dynamics, now at 12,500, by 1,500 a year. Businessmen don boots and Stetsons for the annual Southwestern Exposition and Fat Stock Show, one of the nation's top rodeos, but have to import Hollywood stars to lure a crowd. The only other time they dress Western is on business trips to Manhattan.

San Antonio, 50% Latin American in population, is a relaxed city of Spanish charm. Instead of erecting ostentatious skyscrapers, it has landscaped the banks of its downtown river, where shoppers can rest or stroll. It glories in its history, proudly displays the Alamo (although cynics have cracked that "if there had been a back door to the Alamo there'd be no Texas today") and a bar in the Menger Hotel where Teddy Roosevelt once recruited his Rough Riders. Its annual fiesta fills a night with color and song, and a $35 million "Hemisfair" is being planned for the late '60s to boost business. Yet as long as the Federal Government continues to pour $420 million a year into four nearby air bases and one Army post, why worry about manana?

El Paso is another G.I. town, and even more Latin than San Antonio.

Even the Anglos build adobe houses, use Mexican decorations at Christmas and Easter. El Paso has little night life, but its menfolk can walk over to Ciudad Juarez (just as large a city as El Paso), watch bullfights, place legal bets on U.S. horse races at Aqueduct and Pimlico. El Paso realtors get a kick out of selling retirement plots in barren, waterless hills to mail-order dudes in Chicago and New York.

All of the big cities have large slum areas, occupied mainly by low-income Latins and Negroes--who sometimes feud furiously with each other. Even Austin, the state capital, has its slums but is otherwise a clean-looking city of broad streets, nicely integrated architecture in its state offices, and the University of Texas campus. Austin has two other distinctions: a network of 30 towers, 150 feet tall, which bathe the city in fluorescent moonlight, and a house of prostitution in which the hostess, a Negro woman, always seems to be washing collard greens in the sink and the star attraction has a skunk tattooed on each buttock.

The Big Two. There are a number of industrial cities--Beaumont, Freeport, Texas City, Corpus Christi. But Houston and Dallas dominate the state's commerce. Houston (pop. 1,040,000) is now the sixth largest city in the U.S., operates the third busiest port through a 50 mile channel to the Gulf. It is flanked by a $2 billion complex of oil refineries and chemical plants--petrochemicals have become Texas' biggest single industry. It is home base for moon-bound U.S. astronauts, is already reaping the benefits of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's $200 million Manned Spacecraft Center, a complex of 49 buildings nearing completion 23 miles south of the city.

Dallas has more glitter than Houston. As the regional headquarters for scores of national corporations, its offices and light industry stretch for miles in spanking new modernistic structures. Industrial areas have such street names as "Dividend," "Profit," and "Currency." The city spurted when East Texas oilfields came in and farsighted local bankers had the courage to lend money on the basis of oil still below ground. Now, in its frantic effort to keep up with Houston, it is building two 50-story office buildings--mostly, it seems, because Houston has the tallest west of the Mississippi in the 44-story Humble Oil Building. Mrs. Edward Marcus, wife of a Dallas Neiman-Marcus executive and an admirer of her city, concedes that Dallasites tend "in this first-generation wealth to put money into things that show. It is not comfortable with its money the way Boston and New York are."

For gaudiness nothing quite compares with Dallas' Cabana motel, owned by the improbable combination of Doris Day and the Teamsters Union. Five fountains jet water 50 ft. into the air under red, yellow and blue lights. A life-sized lobby mural of naked Romans embroiled in orgy entices--or repels--the traveler. A Texan can stand tall on the lobby balcony, see 37 images of himself in gold-tinted mirrors. In his room he finds huge mirrors above his bed or covering an entire wall. Yet Dallas also has a good symphony orchestra that is pressing Houston's, its art museum is expanding, some residents have top-flight private collections. "It's a good place to be an American," says J. Erik Jonsson, Chairman of the Board of Texas Instruments.

Diverse Politics. Politically, Dallas is the city that spawns notions that Texas is chock-full of ultraconservatives. Statewide, the really radical right has little political power. But it does influence Dallas. Being newly rich, many of its millionaires worry constantly that their money may go just as easily as it came. Their fears are fed by the Dallas

Morning News, which rails against the St. Lawrence Seaway as a socialistic boondoggle--and then pleads for federal help to build a 294-mile Trinity River Canal to make Dallas a seaport. Somehow Dallas manages to reduce most public issues to a simple question: Is it pro- or antiCommunist?

But Texas as a whole is just as varied in its politics as it is in its natural resources. It has one of the nation's most conservative Senators in Republican John Tower. Dallas Republican Congressman Bruce Alger is well to the right of Barry Goldwater. Democrats normally dominate state politics, but they themselves are torn between "liberals" (who nonetheless supported Republican Tower instead of a Democratic nominee from the rival faction) and "conservatives" like Lyndon Johnson and John Connally, who are not conservative at all.

Would-be Catalyst. Obviously, no single man can bring together and coordinate all the conflicting interests of

Texas. There is only one who is even in a position to try--the Governor. And though the Texas constitution severely limits his powers (the legislature only recently gave him a degree of control over the state budget), John Connally is determined to act as a catalyst for all of the various worlds of Texas. A blend of folksiness and sophistication, he seems singularly well-equipped for the attempt.

"I'm not trying to play the humble-beginnings record," he says, "but I studied by kerosene. We had no electricity. There were no paved roads. In my childhood, this country was still raw frontier." Connally's grandparents lived in the Floresville area, as did his parents. His father had been a tenant farmer, then ran a meat market and worked as a laborer before the family moved on to San Antonio when John was ten. There his father drove a bus from San Antonio to Corpus Christi, covering the 144-mile, one-way round trip each day.

In the depths of the Depression, Connally's father mustered enough money to send John to the University of Texas, where he studied law, stacked books in the library for 17-c- an hour, picked up pocket money as college campus representative for Beech-Nut Chewing Gum. He ran for student-body president--mainly because it paid $30 a month--and won. He also met Idanell Brill, a coed who had won such titles as University of Texas Sweetheart, Cactus Beauty and Relay Queen. They were married in 1940.

Either by luck or foresight, Connally hooked up with two extremely helpful men after passing his bar exam in 1938. He became Representative Lyndon Johnson's congressional secretary, won a Legion of Merit as a lieutenant aboard the carrier Essex in World War II, managed an Austin radio station, then became attorney for Fort Worth Oil Millionaire Sid Richardson. Tips from Richardson brought Connally a personal fortune of millions through deals in oil properties. The friendship of Johnson, whom Connally served as top strategist in every L.B.J. election campaign since 1937, brought him appointment as Secretary of the Navy under Jack Kennedy.

In Washington, Connally quickly proved himself an able administrator, came to be remarked upon as a tasteful dresser, preferring silky mohair suits, white-on-white shirts--and almost never a ten-gallon hat. His wide travels as Secretary gave him a new view of Texas. "I saw Adenauer in Germany," he recalls. "I saw the emergence of the Common Market. I saw the vitality in Italy. At the Pentagon I saw what education meant, how basic it was, and how lacking Texas was. I looked at Texas, and I saw we were going to miss the boat completely."

Resigning as Navy Secretary in 1962 to run for a two-year term as Governor, Connally won, mainly on a pitch for better education so that Texas could continue shifting from an agricultural to an industrial economy. "People told me only the well-to-do cared about education. Well, that's wrong. My father cared about his children's education. The laborer cares. The tenant farmer cares. The city man cares. The average man can't send his son to Yale. But he knows his son needs a good education."

"When People Struggle ..." As Governor, Connally has faced plenty of problems. For all of its talk about frontier self-reliance, Texas is overdependent upon the Federal Government, which pumps some $3.5 billion into the state annually--a sum greater than its agricultural income. It has 43 active military installations, a figure exceeded only by California. Some 99,000 airmen (14.8% of the U.S.-based Air Force) and 70,000 Army troops (11.4%) are stationed there. Cotton men roll up to Federal Government offices in Cadillacs to vote for cotton subsidies. Elevators bulge with Government-stored grain. Declares University of Texas Historian Dr. Joe Frantz:

"The Westerner can rear up on his hind legs and shout that he and he alone wrested that land from the desert or wind or Indian or whatever possessed it. But the truth is that from start to finish he was subsidized from his brogans to his sombrero."

There are some other unpleasant statistics about Texas. It ranks 44th among the states in the literacy of its population over 14 years old, 34th in per capita expenditures of state and local governments for education. It has 93 colleges, most of them too tiny to be good, and only Rice, the University of Texas and Southern Methodist have some top-rate departments. In the 1960 presidential election, Texas ranked 44th in the percentage of voting-age population that bothered to go to the polls. Says Dr. John Stockton, director of Texas University's Bureau of Business Research: "Texas is just not keeping pace with the rest of the country, and there is no getting around it. The people think we are doing fine because we have a great football team at the university. They just don't understand what we need is more brains and not more All-Americans."

Governor John Connally is one Texan who knows well how to separate myth from reality, has precious little patience with any tall tales about Texas superiority. "When people struggle like Texans have, it builds strength of character, some stinginess, also a provincialism," he says. "The people want better and they want change, but they are very conservative in how to go about it. Texas is really still in the throes of joining up with the rest of mid-20th century America. Our people are demanding it; yet they still don't quite understand it. This vast area of Texas is not here just to be bragged about, but to be used."

* The children are John III, 17; Sharon, 14, Mark, 11. The oldest child, Kathleen, was married at 16 in 1959. Later that year, according to her youthful husband, he came home one night and found her threatening suicide with a shotgun. He said he tried to take the weapon away from her, and in the scuffle it went off, killing her.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.