The Petrified Forest
Both trees and the past surround life in deep East Texas, where lumber is king and the Civil War was yesterday.
(Page 7 of 7)
In November, the board had to return a new school bus because they could not afford its $15,000 price tag. In December, Dr. Bennett tried unsuccessfully to remove from the school district’s textbook committee two teachers who had been hired through a federally funded program. In December, board member Sarah Sharp called Superintendent Glyn Williamson’s proposal to extend, as people throughout the country were doing, the Christmas holidays an extra day because of yearend football game telecasts “a communist plot to weaken the moral fiber of the nation.” Gesturing wildly as she complained of the “plot,” Ms. Sharp, the largest of the school board members, fell out of her chair.
As comic-opera as the school board seems, its lawsuit (joined by the Leander school district) is deadly serious. Last August, Federal Judge Jack Roberts denied San Augustine’s request to stop the state’s disbursement of school aid money, but the said the East Texans had a “substantial probability” of success in a trial based on the merits of the case. There is no doubt, said the judge, that the “Official Compilation” does not include intangible wealth in its figures and that “rural districts are forced to raise a larger proportion of school operating costs than is required of urban districts. This violates the federal Constitution and state law.” The school board’s case suddenly looked good.
It was now time to meet Smith Ramsey. I had been in San Augustine almost two months and not a day had passed that this man’s name was not mentioned, no matter what the subject: blacks, timber, politics, money, doctors, school taxes, religion, and most of all, power. He seemed to dominate the place with his personality; when his fellow citizens spoke his name they followed it not with smiles, but with respect and fear. Smith Ramsey and his law firm represent the ruling class in San Augustine. As in small towns in the Deep South, as it was one hundred years ago when the state’s finest attorneys and jurists practiced out of San Augustine County, those in control are a closed clique composed of lawyers, bankers, selected cronies, and yes-men who all but monopolize available credit and business opportunities. They are men of property.
The office of Ramsey, Ramsey & Smith is squeezed between the J. B. Smith is squeezed between the J.B. White Store and the Toledo Automotive Supply on the west side of the courthouse square. There is no shingle out front, just a glass door that opens to a reception area and a long narrow hall leading to the library and offices of Smith Ramsey, J.L. Smith, Ben Ramsey, and Smith’s young nephew, John Mitchell. Ramsey is a slight, solid, keen man with handsome white hair and wary but confident eyes. I have seen those eyes before on other men of power who, if they like you and you stay hitched, will ride with you all the way. If you don’t stay hitched, you will ride alone and at your own peril. At 75, Ramsey’s face shows the creases of a shrewd man who can at once call up a perfected poisonous expression or unexpectedly light the room with the child-like, vulnerable smile of a kindly town preacher.
Ramsey speaks calmly and deliberately, confident of dates, sure of opinions, reminiscing fondly about his years at UT when he played catcher on the championship team of the early twenties, of coming back to San Augustine in 1927 and practicing law with his brother Ben. That was the same year Smith Ramsey became city attorney, a post he held for 45 years, thus beginning a remarkable dynasty of family and law firm members who would hold positions of power in the city, county, and state.
The law firm of Ramsey, Ramsey & Smith provides legal counsel for all timber companies working in the county except Louisiana Pacific. They have represented the town’s two banks and the savings and loan. Until a young lawyer named Macon Strother came to town seven years ago and founded his East Texas Title & Abstract Company, Ramsey had the area’s only abstract business. His law firm did all the title work in the mid-sixties when Sam Rayburn Reservoir inundated thousands of acres of land and began a vacationland real estate boom.
Ramsey has prospered. When Macon Strother came to town fresh out of Texas Tech University law school’s second graduating class and asked Ramsey if money was to be made in a small town, Ramsey replied in his characteristically blunt fashion, “Yes, if you work hard, you will do well,” and added that for years he had made as much money as any of the top ten partners of Leon Jaworski’s law firm. The younger man was impressed. So in 1971 Strother and his wife Shirley moved to San Augustine from West Texas. They found San Augustine different, all right. People talked of great-great-grandfathers and the Civil War as if they were yesterday. They were clannish, skeptical. During his term as Chamber of Commerce president, Strother couldn’t get the town leaders to offer industry anything to bring them into the county. It was as if they were saying they didn’t want anyone else to move there.
Still, Strother got along well with Smith Ramsey. The older man took the younger lawyer hunting and fishing and out to the Fairway Farms to play golf, even after Strother established a competing abstract business. Macon and Smith remained good friends until the 1972 sheriff’s race when Smith Ramsey’s secretary’s husband, county game warden Sherman Bales, decided to run for sheriff. Macon Strother’s candidate was John Hoyt, a former Texas Ranger and district supervisor for the then Liquor Control Board, now the Alcoholic Beverage Commission. Strother liked Hoyt and thought he was the most qualified and became his campaign manager. Hoyt won, and his election was the first defeat for Ramsey in anyone’s memory. Strother felt the brunt of the older man’s rage.
Nor did it smooth thins out when Strohter’s law partner, Bill Weems, became one of the three members of the Tax Equalization Board appointed by the school board to oversee the new tax evaluations. Weems fought Ramsey head on. No quarter. When it was over, Weems had made too many enemies and had earned the wrath of Smith Ramsey. He moved to Nacogdoches. Another equalization board member, Robert Baker, also ran into trouble. Baker was fired from his position as manger of the local Brookshire Brothers supermarket. Although Brookshire’s officials denied Baker’s dismissal had anything to do with his work on the equalization board, few believed that the competent Baker was fired strictly for problems at the supermarket.
Ramsey and Strother have since made their peace. The younger man lost a race for county attorney. Ramsey’s candidates have lost the mayor’s race the last two outings. The older man has taught the younger lawyer that in San Augustine County those who have group up steeped in the traditions of the Old South don’t’ get too interested in outsiders, in industry, in people drifting in for a quick buck. “This area is exactly like South Carolina, where my first wife was from,” said Smith Ramsey. “She’s been dead for 24 years, but I still go back every summer. Near Greenwood. The race relations are the same. The old Nigras are the best, like the maid who works for me right now, a fine religious person. Not like these younger ones who say, ‘You pay me so much or I don’t work.’ Those kind that make a lot of money playing football and if they don’t’ make it, get addicted to drugs. Integration is all right if you give them freedom of choice. Let them go to the white school if they want to.
“I tried to reason with that superintendent about the tax rolls. He was a very prejudice fellow. I called him up and said let’s talk about this. If you want to stay over here and make a good superintendent and learn to like the town, then let’s compromise. Let’s raise the taxes gradually. Oh no, he wouldn’t do it my way. He had to bring in that outside firm and raise them so high the poor people couldn’t pay. Well, he’s-gone and we won the suit and we got a new board that operates on the East Texas basis. Real conservative. That bond issue passed and it shouldn’t have. They spent the $600,000 on school renovation and didn’t do it right.
“At least they didn’t spend the two million for a new school. People try to blame the school building as the reason the children can’t read or write or multiply. Only one thing you can blame and that’s the teachers. We’re a poor county here. Not much farming anymore. No cotton, just timber and raising cattle. Those poor people with only fifty acres or so couldn’t pay those high taxes. They came to me with those tax notices and I took care of them.”
In Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie, Amanda warns Tom “that the future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don’t plan for it!” What will change and improve life for the people of San Augustine County? Will planning make a difference in this region of unchanging social classes, of nostalgia for the charming and elegant days of the Deep South’s planter aristocracy, of strongly held customs and repudiate innovation?
Death and old age will change some of San Augustine’s ways. Smith Ramsey’s once-iron grip on the town’s politics and financial decisions is already loosened and will soon be released altogether, perhaps to make way for a Macon Strother dynasty or a John Mitchell barony. It is a continuing irony that the town could, in theory, be controlled by the votes of the not-quite-penniless, the blacks, rural folk, insecure small-town people who outnumber the middle class and wealthy by a huge margin. It is unlikely, however, that leadership—white or black—will mobilize this voting force.
The optimistic say the two huge new lakes not far away, Sam Rayburn and Toledo Bend, will bring money and new residents to the county. Tourism could be the next industry. Certainly some of the new developments around the lakes have opened up the county to outside influence. But nothing seems to have changed in spite of it. perhaps it is the woods and the burden of history that insure no change, that keep San Augustine deep in sleep, never to be awakened by prosperity, social integration, or a better standard of life for those unlucky enough to be born without a land title or a great-grandfather who died at Gettysburg.
My Library
