Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy

26. Small-Town Journalists

✥ 26 ✥ Small-Town Journalists Th e d eat h in December of former Pecos journalist Oscar Griffin Jr. reminded me once more of the importance of freedom of the press in this country, and the American tradition of smalltown newspaper editors and reporters standing up for what is right in the face of community pressure to sit down and shut up. Oscar Griffin was the city editor of the Pecos, Texas, Independent and Enterprise, a semiweekly paper, in 1962. In that town of 12,700 people Billy Sol Estes was “like God,” as a Pecos citizen told the New York Times, adding, “Anyone opposed to him might just as well pack their bags and leave town.” Griffin not only opposed Estes, he wrote four investigative articles about his money-juggling schemes that brought Estes six years in prison and won the Independent and Enterprise a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished local reporting. For my younger readers and recent Texans, Estes devised a bizarre method for securing $24 million in bank loans from out-of-state banks, using nonexistent fertilizer storage tanks as collateral. The tanks existed on paper because Estes convinced local farmers to purchase them, sight unseen, on credit, with the understanding that Estes would lease them from the purchaser for their cost plus “a convenience fee.” As one farmer told Griffin, “It’s like pennies from heaven.” After the scheme unraveled, Estes became the best-known Texan in America next to Vice President Lyndon Johnson. The Chad Mitchell Trio recorded a song about him called “The Ides of Texas” that included the verse, While other kids saved up their nickels and dimes / For jellybeans, liq’rice, and fudge / Well, Billy ✥ 101 saved too / And when he had enough / He bought him a federal judge. Griffin wrote and published his articles in the face of unrelenting opposition from most of Pecos’s businessmen and the other Pecos newspaper, the Daily News, which Estes had started the year before in hopes of putting the Independent and Enterprise out of business. Instead, after the scandal broke, the Daily News went into receivership and the Independent and Enterprise is still in business as the Pecos Enterprise. Another fighting Texas editor was Penn Jones Jr., who published the Midlothian Mirror in the 1950s and ’60s. If Jones is remembered at all today it is because he became obsessed with the Kennedy assassination, convinced that the Warren Report was a cover-up for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA, and published four books on the subject. But Jones was a dogged fighter for what he believed in long before the assassination. He was the son of sharecroppers who worked his way through college, and when he bought the Mirror after his discharge from the army in 1946, he announced that his editorial policy would be “to insult those people who fail to meet the obligations they have inherited along with their citizenship.” Jones once took on the city council of Midlothian, which at that time had a population of 1,100, for paving the streets of the black section of town with gravel that was laced with old nails. He displayed fifty pounds of nails that he had picked up there in his office window. He harassed the school board to such an extent that they refused to admit him to their meetings. He said that they informed him that, “We’re closing these meetings to keep things from getting out.” Midlothian, which is about twenty miles south of Dallas, was a very conservative town in the 1950s, and Jones became increasingly unpopular. He once told a Texas Observer reporter, “I’ve worked hard for my enemies and I deserve every one of them.” 102 ✥ Jones’s problems with the school board came to a head in 1962, when he published an editorial criticizing them for sanctioning a compulsory school assembly to hear a speaker representing the right-wing John Birch Society. Jones went to the school board office to suggest that they invite Dallas judge Sarah T. Hughes, a liberal Democrat, to present an opposing point of view. In the course of the discussion the high school principal, Roy Irvin, lost his temper and started pounding the five foot two Jones on the head. That same week the proposed speaker showed up in Jones’s office to ask him if he considered himself a loyal American, and a second fight...