National Affairs: Professional Texans

Professional Texan, old-style, is Owen P. White, storyteller. Professional Texan, new style, is Gene Howe, editor of the Amarillo Globe-News, son of old-time Ed Howe, “Sage of Potato Hill” (Atchison, Kan.). Story-teller White lately helped Collier’s magazine into a million-dollar libel suit by flaying, old-style, the political monkey-business of Rentfro Banton Creager and other Texas Republicans in Hidalgo County (TIME, Sept. 16). Editor Howe has obtained publicity for his little cow-&-gas town of Amarillo by flaying, new style, such national figures as Mary Garden and Charles Augustus Lindbergh (TIME, April 1)*

Last week Texan Howe got some more publicity by attacking Texan White on a question of prime importance to all professional Texans, namely: What does a Texas rattlesnake do when you go to blow its head off with your six-shooter? Texan White had written, old-style, that the snake will follow the movement of the gun-muzzle so closely with its head that you cannot fail to hit the snake’s head when you pull the trigger. Texan Howe experimented, fired many a shot at many a Crotalus adamanteus atrox, missed their heads again and again, then angrily wrote: “It is such bunk as this that is making the development of common sense in this country slow,”

*Amarillo’s three claims to fame are Editor Howe, Soprano Mary McCormic of the Chicago Civic Opera Company who was born there,and one of the world’s few deposits of natural helium gas.