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.