Texas Knockdown

Undaunted by 100DEG heat, two slugging Texas Democrats mixed it up last week in the rousing, extravagant kind of party club fight Texans love.

In one corner, the titleholder: U.S. Senator Ralph W. Yarborough, 55, darling of the state's liberal Democrats ("Put the jam on the lower shelf where the little fellow can reach it"). Elected last year to fill out the unexpired term of Price Daniel, who left the Senate to run successfully for Governor, Ralph Yarborough now wants the full six-year term.

In the other corner: Multimillionaire Contender William A. Blakley. 59 ("I want to be yawl's Senatuh''). anointed heir to the conservative Democrat legions of exiled ex-Governor Allan Shivers. Blakley was appointed by Shivers to warm the senatorial seat between Daniel's departure and the special election that put Yarborough in. After that 103-day stint he did not stand for election--probably on Shivers' orders. Probably at Shivers' request --and surrounded by ex-Shivers speechmakers and advisers--he is running now.

Yarborough's haymakers last week rained down in a crowd-pleasing attack on Blakley's bulging money belt. Blakley, charged Yarborough, is spending $60,000 a day on the campaign, which has been enlivened by barbecues, hillbilly bands and beauty queens. "Seats are bought on the New York Stock Exchange." Yarborough told a statewide television audience. "Now we see an effort to buy one of Texas' seats in the Senate." Noting that Blakley is the largest single stockholder of Braniff Airways, Yarborough told Texas peanut growers: "He has stated that he is opposed to federal subsidies for farmers-- is he opposed to a subsidy for Braniff Airways?"*

These thrusts stung Missouri-born Bill Blakley, who heaped his pile from nothing to an estimated $200 million (he once drew a $5,000,000 check) in Texas banking, oil, insurance and ranching. In the classic bob-and-weave, Blakley both deprecated his riches and boasted of them; after all, he said, his parents were poor and he was "earning a man's wage" at 14. Then he uncoiled some flickering jabs of his own.

Yarborough's campaign kitty. Blakley charged, is being fed by Eastern organized labor. He dared Liberal Yarborough, who straddles the race issue, to get off the fence. "I challenge him," said Blakley in a resonant drawl, "to deny that funds for his past and present campaigns come from the same source as the funds which financed the attack on our public school system by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People."

By the old rules of the game, Yarborough should be far and away ahead in next week's Democratic primary because he is well known from four unsuccessful statewide campaigns prior to his election to the Senate. But Yarborough forces have grown unaccountably edgy as the primary nears, are alibiing in advance that a man with Bill Blakley's money could even buy an upset.

*Braniff has had no subsidies since July 10, 1957, when subsidies on its international routes were terminated.

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