Newspapers: The Lone Ranger Rides Again

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If ever a lone ranger has ridden out of the West, it is the tiny (circ. 7,000), fearless Texas Observer. In 14 stormy fears, the Austin-based biweekly paper las tangled singlehanded with oil and gas interests, exposed statehouse scandals, often made life painful for politicians in the land of Lyndon. The Observer's founder is Ronnie Dugger, a prodding, provocative University of Texas graduate who came back from one year at Oxford with a passion to unmask corruption and hypocrisy. With a number of equally talented and brash companions, Dugger has made his influence felt far beyond the state borders. Admirers often call the Observer he political conscience of Texas.

Like most consciences, the Observer operates under trying conditions. Its budget barely pays the phone bill. Its edtorial headquarters is one shabby room near the University of Texas. Its fulltime writing staff has rarely numbered more than two. Its most distinguished alumnus, Harper's Editor Willie Morris, recalled last week: "Every Friday afternoon we'd have a full-fledged story conference at Scholz's beer hall. Then one of us would go out of town, and the other would stay behind and put out the paper. The guy who remained had to do everything: editing, copy-reading, makeup. He would even set up a desk next to the Linotype operator and read over his shoulder."

Vanishing Sting. Yet no paper managed to cover Texas with more vigor, enthusiasm and sensitivity. Only the Observer, Morris says, ever bothered to show any interest "in the last words of a 17-year-old rapist on death row, or in the terror of a seven-year-old Negro child in an adult ward for the mentally ill, or in what Norman Mailer said or did not say to the college students in Austin." Unabashedly liberal and outspoken, the weekly was often exasperating, sometimes wrong, never humdrum or stale.

Then, a few years ago, the paper began to wilt. The exposes became rarer, the style more turgid. Weary of the 40,000-word weekly grind, Dugger turned to more leisurely writing, including a soon-to-be-published book about Lyndon Johnson. His most gifted cronies took off in other literary directions. Robert Sherrill baited the occupant of the White House with The Accidental President and Gothic Politics in the Deep South. Larry King began a successful career as a freelance writer and gadfly. Perhaps the greatest loss was Morris, who headed for New York in 1963, wrote North Toward Home and became the youngest editor in Harper's century-long history. Its liveliest writers gone, its sting vanished, the Observer piled up greater deficits, reduced its size and published only fortnightly editions.

McCrocklin Caper. Though moribund, it did not die. And lately, it has shown every sign of revival. One recent issue reported the revolt of black athletes at the University of Texas' El Paso branch; another took up the cudgels for a long-neglected tribe of Indians. As usual, both stories had been largely ignored by the daily Texas press. So was the Observer's inside account of the editorial revolt and shake-up at the Austin American-Statesman, where pinchpenny management refused to replate for another edition on the night of Robert Kennedy's death.