Nation: THE ODYSSEY OF HOMER

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HOMER?!" A distinguished Democrat could hardly believe the news that Lyndon Johnson had nominated his friend of two decades, William Homer Thornberry, 59, to the Supreme Court. Equally incredulous was a clutch of conservative Republicans, who saw the nomination as a political payoff to an old crony whose judicial credentials fall somewhat short of the standards demanded by the nation's highest court.

Old crony he certainly is; yet this assessment could prove to be unfair. A protegé of Sam Rayburn's, the late Speaker of the House, and of Johnson's, Thornberry had an indifferent record during his first years in Congress, but eventually established himself as a man of moderately liberal views, responsive to the needs of an urban America. In 41 years on the bench, most recently as a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (covering most of the Deep South and the Panama Canal Zone), he consistently fought segregation.

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Born in Austin to deaf-mute parents, Thornberry used sign language until he was three, when he first learned to talk. When he was an infant, William and Mary Thornberry slept in shifts so that one could always keep a vigil beside his cradle, since neither could hear Homer's cries. The family was so poor that when William, a carpenter built a home, the windows were boarded with wood for two years until he could scrape together money for windowpanes

Attracted to politics at 14, when he served as a page in the Texas legislature Homer worked his way through the University of Texas Law School as a deputy sheriff. He was elected to the state legislature in 1936, later became Travis County district attorney. After a 3½-year wartime stint in Naval intelligence, during which he rose to lieutenant commander, Thornberry opened his own law practice, served on the Austin city council and as mayor pro tem. The nonpaying city post wound up costing him money, for Homer's law clients expected him to fix such things as $1 parking tickets, and rather than lose the clients, he paid the fines himself. It was as a city councilman in 1941 that Thornberry first showed his clear commitment to civil rights by fighting to keep two new subdivisions at the edge of Austin from becoming parts of the city unless they dropped clauses barring Jews from living there. Though there was scant political profit in his position, Thornberry helped persuade both to drop the clauses.

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