Panhandle's Friend

It was eleven years ago that Amarillo's big, bald, newspaper-publishing Gene Howe called Charles Augustus Lindbergh "swell-headed," "simple-minded," "lucky"; nine years ago when he made more front-page headlines by loudly proclaiming that Singer Mary Garden only had a "fair voice" and was "old, very old" and "almost tottered about the stage." Since then Amarillo's other famed asset, helium, has made far more national news, and Gene Howe, admitting that it was smarter to be polite, has settled down to making himself the Texas Panhandle's best friend.

He has come near to succeeding. He now controls five newspapers--two Amarillo dailies (plus a Sunday edition), two others in nearby Lubbock, and the one his father Ed, the late famed Sage of Potato Hill, left him at Atchison, Kans. He controls four Texas radio stations. His headquarters are in Amarillo and there he organized and now operates an annual Mother-in-Law Day, attended last year by Eleanor Roosevelt. His own mother-in-law lives with him, his wife & daughter. He has helped dedicate Amarillo's new post office, given Postmaster Farley an Arabian saddle horse, acted as chief entertainer when Franklin Roosevelt dropped by, been sponsor to many a local sporting event. In his largest role, Gene Howe is known to his Amarillo readers as Old Tack, the generous, convivial, duck-hunting, dog-finding, golf-playing conductor of a column of chatter called "The Tactless Texan." Last week, beneath the smudgy picture of cross-eyed Ben Turpin which daily tops the column, Old Tack, 53, fresh from a visit to Washington, made an announcement which might lead him once again to the nation's front pages. Wrote he:

"Well, everybody, the fat is in the fry, politically, as I hereby formally announce my candidacy for Congress to succeed Marvin Jones. My latest information is that Marvin will resign this summer to accept a Federal judgeship. . . . And [his] successor will be me."

Interviewed privately, Mr. Howe declared he was dead serious. He explained away a similar announcement last January by saying that that had simply been a feeler. His strongest campaign card, said he, would be his pledge to write a daily column "on what goes on in Washington so it can be understood out in this part of Texas."

What goes on inside his Amarillo News-Globe office most West Texans already know. He is popular with his 511 employes. He pays his workers well for an oil & cattle town publisher. Each year his employes have owned more and he less of his publishing properties. (His holdings are now down to 20%.) Only last week he let it be known that next January he would turn management over to some of his old hands.

What some old-line Texas Democrats questioned, however, was the precise color of Mr. Howe's political complexion. His father was a stand-pat Republican. His Atchison Globe is still Republican. Moreover, Texas folk are still quoting a public address Gene Howe made two years ago when, kidding on the square, he said that before moving to Texas, he and his late partner, Wilbur C. Hawk, nipped a coin to determine which would be Democrat, which Republican. Until his death in 1936 Hawk supported Alf Landon. But if Gene Howe never gets to Congress, he probably won't be too sorry. Never has he returned from a trip to his Texas duck blinds, daily golf, bridge & poker that he hasn't cried: "I'm never, never going away again!"

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