Maury's Back!

"Look at the dirt in that gutter. And the spots in that park ... no grass at all. And the bumps in this street. This town is falling apart, piece by piece."

Bullfrog-dumpy little Maury Maverick was pointing out how shabby San Antonio had grown since it turned him out of the mayor's office in 1941. Maury had gone on to Washington and had headed the Smaller War Plants Corp. during the war. But San Antonio. . . . "Look at that rusty sign!"

Now Maury was taking an interest again in his home town. This week he filed his candidacy for mayor. His chances looked good. He was a little greyer, a little fatter; he was almost broke, and he no longer talked with his old sass. But San Antonio seemed to want a man without too many surprises in him.

Memories. San Antonio remembered Maury even better than she did his grandpa, Sam, who had made his surname a common noun in the U.S. language and had once been mayor. During his two years in office, Maury had been credited with reducing traffic deaths and crime by 50%, rebuilding the health department, getting $6 million from the Federal Government for slum clearance and $4 million for civic beautification, reorganizing the police and fire departments and keeping San Antonio (and himself) in the national spotlight.

He had also been credited with terrible public manners, being "a radical and a New Deal crackpot," allegedly buying poll-tax receipts with union funds (although he was acquitted in the courts), and turning the civic auditorium over to a bunch of Communists for a meeting. That last move brought on one of the worst riots in San Antonio's history.

But all that, the good & bad, was past. When Maury went to Los Angeles to practice law a year ago (he sold his San Antonio house in 1941), the city began to wonder about him. She looked tacky, her policing was sloppy, she had floods and bad drainage. Then a polio epidemic caught her health department off balance. Citizens were getting fed up with the bumbling, fix-nothing administration of spluttery Mayor Gus Mauermann. Even Maury's old enemies began phoning him in Los Angeles and Maverick-for-Mayor stickers began to appear.

Alterations. Without admitting that he might be easy to get, Maury paid a few courting calls, waddled brightly around hotel lobbies, bought himself a plot in the city cemetery, and visited refuse-clogged Alazan Creek, which had flash-flooded San Antonio time & again. Some of the old machine bosses tried to head him off. And round-faced Sheriff Owen Kilday, who had engineered Maverick's defeat in 1941, had yet to declare for anybody.

No matter how much opposition, Maury would run a good race. Something had gentled the old Maverick. He was something to see and listen to. Last week a businessman in the crowded lobby of The St. Anthony Hotel told him: "I never did vote for you in my life." In the old days, Maury's reply would have been: "No, you son-of-a-bitch, and I don't want you to vote for me now." But this time he said: "Maybe you did right. I made a lot of mistakes. . . . But now I'm for what it takes."

For a conservative city like San Antonio, that was more like it.

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