Back to a One-Paper Town

The sun-baked citizens of the West Texas town of Pecos (pop. 12,700) had always got along with one newspaper, the semiweekly Independent and Enterprise (circ. 3,000). The Independent seldom showed much enterprise, but Pecos needed another paper about as badly as it needed Billie Sol Estes. Thanks to Billie Sol, Pecos has been a two-paper town for nearly a year.

Unlike his other activities, Billie Sol's adventure in journalism was no get-rich-quick scheme for skinning the big-city rubes. Billie Sol was out to get even with some local types. He had been beaten in a school-board election last spring, and it was the Independent that had helped to beat him. Billie Sol was sore; he had wanted to get on that board to keep the boys and girls in Pecos High from swimming in the same pool or dancing on the premises. He retaliated by buying his own printing press. The first thing anybody in Pecos knew, he had hired 38 newsmen at handsome wages--some got as much as $200 a week--and he was publishing the Pecos Daily News. The News's first issue last August boasted an impressive page of congratulations. There was a letter from Lyndon Johnson, one from Sam Rayburn, even a nice little note from President Kennedy himself.

Forgiving Verse. The Independent was not exactly amused by the competition, especially when Billie Sol scooted around town corralling most of the advertising and shooting off his mouth about those right-wingers on that other paper. For the first time in its history, the Independent really began to scratch for news, and in Pecos the news, as usual, involved Billie Sol. The suspicions of Independent Editor Oscar Griffin, 29, zeroed in on the 15,000 fertilizer tanks that Billie Sol was supposed to own. Week after week, the Independent needled Billie Sol. That was well before anyone else thought of saying anything out loud.

Billie Sol tried his best to talk back. He brought in a new editor, Tracy Sloan Byers from Odessa. His paper broke out in a rash of loud headlines--NOTHING DEROGATORY ABOUT ESTES GRAIN STORAGE, and POLITICAL HACKS KEEP UP STRUGGLES FOR HEADLINES--the sort of things Billie Sol could show off to friends. A passel of reporters came to town, and Byers almost hollered up a fit: "One concludes that the newspaper hatchet men sent to Pecos are instructed to find and write any fictitious or fabulous story, without regard to its truthfulness . . One cheerful thought is that Pecos will continue growing lovelier with the years, long after the mountebanks and charlatans of the press have departed." Mayor Cecil Coth-run himself wrote a poem about Billie Sol and contributed it to the News:

I'm not trying to defend the weak or

the strong,

But I'm tired of reading the newspaper's song, That Pecos is dead and gone: A town

of sin

That's coming from the biased, reporter's pen.

I challenge all decent people, and reporters, too, To come to Pecos, with an intelligent

view.

People in Pecos could read the News any day and come away thinking that Billie Sol Estes was just about the best man ever to walk God's earth. Broke though he might be, Billie Sol seemed determined to go on running his paper.

No Grudge. Now that Billie Sol is in trouble up to his freckles, Dr. Harlow Avery, Dentist Charles Sullivan, and Accountant Alan Propp, who own the Independent, are easing up a bit. They have fitted their paper with a new slogan: "Any erroneous reflection upon the character, standing or reputation of any person or concern that may appear in this newspaper will be gladly corrected." Dr. Avery seems no man to nurse a grudge. Said he last week: "I didn't feel we were fighting Estes. We were fighting immorality."

Whatever they were fighting, the fight seems to have gone out of Pecos journalism. Independent Editor Griffin departed last week to work on the Houston Chronicle. Over at the News, the staff has dwindled to 18, and a posse of Pecos businessmen is dickering to pick up a bargain and keep the paper going. For all that, Pecos seemed headed back for the good old sleepy days when it was a one-paper town.

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