Corner Column

By Phil Major
publisher@wood.cm
Posted 5/6/21

A couple of incidents in recent days brought back a flood of memories from early efforts at political activism.

A week before the city election, two young ladies came through our neighborhood with …

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Corner Column

Posted

A couple of incidents in recent days brought back a flood of memories from early efforts at political activism.

A week before the city election, two young ladies came through our neighborhood with door hangers. One was the granddaughter of a mayoral candidate and the other was one of her friends.

The other incident was a connection from John Epps whose uncle, Don Gladden, once ran for Texas lieutenant governor.

The two incidents are actually related, so follow along.

It was 1972, presidential election season and my senior year.

In those days state elections were also held during presidential years, as terms of office were for only two years (they switched to four years soon after).

The two big races included President Richard Nixon seeking a second term, facing Democratic Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota and his running mate Sergeant Shriver of the Kennedy clan.

The other was one of the most interesting governor’s races Texas has seen in the past half-century.

The incumbent, Democrat Preston Smith, was running in the primary along with Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes, former state rep Dolph Briscoe – a wealthy rancher from Uvalde, and Frances “Sissy” Farenthold, a state rep from Corpus Christi who was a member of the Dirty Thirty, a bipartisan group of legislators who had famously opposed the leadership during the 1971 session.

Smith and Barnes, whose rising star was once boosted by a comment from LBJ that Barnes would some day be president, had become entangled in the Sharpstown banking scandal and finished third and fourth, with Briscoe getting the nod in a runoff over Farenthold.

Barnes was first elected lieutenant governor in 1968, after beating Gladden in the primary. The 1972 defeat effectively ended Barnes’ political career.

What the girls reminded me of was going door-to-door in my neighborhood, knocking on doors and passing out Farenthold literature.

A group of us also passed out info for a state senate candidate, not that we cared anything about his politics, but because his daughter was one of our classmates and we were glad to help her out. He did not come close to winning.

Later I stood in front of the Gibson’s Discount Center near the North Texas (now UNT) campus passing out McGovern literature.

In the days when school annuals had only a few color photos, one was of my good friend Allen wearing a Nixon-Agnew t-shirt and me and my McGovern-Shriver shirt. The next time I saw Allen at the 10-year reunion, I had to gig him about the Nixon scandal, and he admitted he had switched from Republican to independent.

He had come about his political views honestly. His Dad, an American Airlines pilot, had flown Agnew’s plane during the campaign and later became our hometown’s mayor.

On election night, of course, Nixon won a huge victory, marking a shift in Texas politics in a state that never voted for Republicans, other than Sen. John Tower. I was convinced that my grandfather, who lived in Longview, and Tower were the only two Republicans in Texas. Granddaddy was a Republican before Republicans were cool, to borrow from that line in the song. Nixon’s fall from grace devastated him.

The folks at the local Democratic headquarters seemed truly depressed by Nixon’s landslide, but our group of high school students had not a care, as we were just hanging out with friends on a school night.

Political activism waned after that, as happens with life’s changes. The community newspaper business actually has given me another window into politics at the local level, something I have enjoyed (mostly) ever since.