TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: A.R. “Babe” Schwartz (BS)
INTERVIEWERS: David Todd (DT)
DATE: June 20, 1997
LOCATION: Austin, Texas
TRANSCRIBER: Judy Holloway

Numbers refer to 2 60-minute audio tape copies of the interview. “Misc.” refers to various off-camera conversation or background noise, unrelated to the interview.

DT: This is David Todd, and it’s June 20th and I’ve got the good fortune of interviewing Babe Schwartz today. We’re in Austin, Texas, and we’re gonna talk a little bit about his participation in the environmental and conservation efforts in Texas over the many years, and particularly some of his contributions to coastal protection.
DT: I just want to start out by thanking you.
BS: Well, it’s my—it’s more my pleasure, David, than anything else and no thanks were ever necessary and, you know, never a part of the consideration really.
DT: Thank you. And, I wanted to start by talking a little bit about your parents and your upbringing and how that might’ve contributed to your interest in conservation.
BS: Well, I really don’t think that any specifics contributed to my general attitudes about the environment generally. Being born on Galveston Island and being raised on Galveston Island is a culture of sorts and it places you in some tune with the environment because you really—you live with nature all the time if you live there and grew up there, and particularly if you grew up as I believe I did, and I think I grew up poor. But we all grew up poor in those days and we didn’t know the difference. But I was—you know, I was the son of the—immigrant parents, both of ‘em. A grandson of the first immigrant in our family who came to this country just before World War I and got caught here, and then he brought the rest of the family over piece by piece, including his wife and daughters, after World War I, and when I was born in 1926, you sorta lived with Nature. I guess if I’d been born on a farm, why, I would’ve lived with that nature. If—but born on an island, the first experiences you have are going to the beach, and you go to the beach automatically because that’s where the recreation is and that’s what’s free. And you—when you go to school, your activities are centered around beach activities because school parties or group parties or things that you participate in just because you’re a student occur on the beach. You know, people don’t have parties in parks. [Laughs.] I don’t even remember if we had a park, and if we did, why, it wouldn’t’ve been much of a park. But, we certainly had the beach, so every time there was anything that I recall that we planned it in growing up, it was on the beach. My first job was on the beach, renting beach chairs and umbrellas, and I was only 11 years old but you could get a job. And I was on the beach then, you know, from, like, seven o’clock in the morning until six o’clock, 6:30 in the evening, and we rented things that we called—in those days we called ‘em floats. Today they would’ve been called surf boards but they were not boards. They were inner tubes in canvas. They were straight tubes, rather, an invention of a man named Silvernail in Galveston, or Bill Curry, who had two places. Ma Silvernail is the first lady I worked for. I was on one end of Murdoch’s, which was a pier in a building in the Gulf there on a—between 21st and 23rd—22nd and 3rd really, on the boulevard across from the Jean LaFitte Hotel. And Bill Curry was on the east end and she was on the west end, and they rented these floats, as they were called, and the beach chairs and umbrellas, and the kids worked for ‘em, and I worked there every summer I guess, when I was 11, 12, 13 years old. Then I got other jobs but my jobs in my youngest period were in the water and on the beach. I was—of course hung around with the lifeguards and—who then used paddle boards which had come out of Hawaii. They were long, beautiful mahogany boards, with which the lifeguards not only rescued people but surfed as well. And then they had a big lifeguard boat which they would take out sometimes, and ‘course as a kid that was all very fascinating.
Also, in those days, you know, I’d fish. When I was not working, I’d fish, and we fished on the beach and you fished in the bay, and ‘course I never went deep-sea fishing, I didn’t know any—didn’t know you could get offshore. Nobody invited me to go out in any boats, nor did I have a boat, or expect to have one. So that—you—when you get into those basics and you grow up on the beach and finally, when you’re a senior in high school and you’re having all your fun, the beach parties are, you know, a No. 3 washtub and crab boil. And you take a net out in the surf, and everything you could catch in a net you put in the boiling water. I mean, if you could—if you were lucky enough to get fish and crabs and shrimp as well, why, you were damn lucky. But whatever you got you threw in the water with a crab boil, and it was pretty good eatin’, and of course in those days, nobody threw fits about having a lot of beer on the beach. If you were 15, 16, 17, nobody—I don’t ever remember anybody making a damn fool of themselves. I certainly don’t remember any violence in that crowd. I mean, this—well, we were all 16 and 17—15, 16, and 17-year-old kids, and I can’t ever remember anybody worrying about us getting’ in trouble. I mean, I can’t even remember anybody worrying about us drowning or—I mean, that would’ve been unheard of if one of us had drowned. And if—we’d—you know, we’d have to go out there and die in the water to’ve drowned. But it—that’s just the nature of being raised in that environment. But, it’s so shocking, even in raising our own kids, and we raised four sons…
I was already surfing in those days. We surfed with the floats, as I called ‘em that were the invention of these people I mentioned, but I also surfed with the paddle boards that the lifeguards used. And whenever I could borrow the surf board—I mean, you had to really—you had to stand in line to borrow that damned board, if the surf was good, why—and I mean that board. I don’t mean—I don’t mean one of those boards. And—but, in a hurricane, in a hurricane season, we used to take our floats—again, as we called ‘em–that we could surf on—and you could stand up on ‘em. And we would—we would go to the end of the Balinese Room Pier, and wait for a—wait for a good wave at the end of the pier—and this was during a storm. If you get a wave at the end of the Balinese Room pier, you know you got a storm in the Gulf. And we’d throw the surf board overboard, jump in behind it, and get on it and ride the wave all the way to the Seawall. And I mean all the way to the sea wall. I don’t mean that you got off—because if you got off that damned thing, you might get banged up against the sea wall. But the waves were breaking right to the sea wall, and it was your own contrivances how not to hit the sea wall with your head. I mean, you just—well, however you got to the Seawall with that float, you hit it as best you could and you hit it low. And you gotta remember that there were granite rocks at the base of the Seawall as well. So you better have enough water already so that you’re not on the rocks, and you better have enough skill to avoid being bashed up against the Seawall when you get there. But we could stand up and ride away from the end of the Balinese Room Pier in those days during storm periods, all the way to the toe of the Seawall. Could—I mean, easy.
DT: Do you remember how the beach looked back then, both on the east end or down towards the west end?
BS: Well, we had beach. We had beach in front of the Seawall in those days, and we had beach there, particularly at Murdoch’s there, and there was a good beach between 21st Street and about 25th Street, in those days. They were groins, as the Corps of Engineers called ‘em, and they would stop the circulation of water, and that permitted those beaches to build in there but the beaches existed there until–oh, sometime after I came back from the Navy really, and that was in ’46. And there were still beach areas in front of the Seawall, all the way down the Seawall. And then this erosion occurred and scouring during various small storms, and particularly then with Carla in ’61, the beach just disappeared, and has been restored now—artificially restored two years ago–this being of course ’97.
But that’s the nature of how you develop attitudes about the environment, and the coastal environment and the beaches. I mean, I’m—that’s what I believed, and that’s where the—my feeling about the beaches occurred is that–they were free. They were—they belonged to all the people of Texas. Nobody had a right to own the beach. Nobody had a right to tell anybody they couldn’t be on the beach. And from that I evolved into the individual legislatively who wondered why there was a class of people in the world who believed that because they lived in 1960 or 1970, when I first met ‘em in the Legislature in the ‘60s and the ‘70s, who believed, “Well, I’m rich enough to buy a hundred-foot beach frontage, and I don’t want any God-damned people out in front of me, eatin’ their chicken and watermelon and—and all that kind of crap and runnin’ around here naked, and actin’ like they own the beach.” And that’s exactly what they would tell you. “Why, those people act like they own the beach.” And I’d sit there and chair a committee and I’d say, “Well, Sir, (or Madam), you know, I really hate to tell you this, but those people do own the beach. The state of Texas owns the wet beach. The public has the easement on the dry beach, the—toward the vegetation line. And you’re SOL if you don’t believe that, and if you bought down here thinking that you own something that you’re not entitled to, then you ought to go talk to your title company.” And I take it you know what SOL stands for.
DT: I don’t.
BS: You don’t?
DT: No, I don’t.
BS: Well, that’s an old Navy expression—well, it’s an old Aggie expression. It means shit out of luck. [Laughs.]
DT: [Laughs.]
BS: Having said that—because that’s just what they were told. But they insisted that they could buy the beach. And I have a picture of myself and Ben Ramsey and Bob Baker, the day I was sworn in as a member of the Senate, standing by a row of pilings, on the west end of Galveston Island, where the folks down at Sea Isle, the developers, had decided that they were gonna keep the public off the beach, and—because they own the beach. And that’s the ultimate arrogance, to believe that you can come along, in a millenium, and because you’ve got enough money and you’re living in the right period of your life to go out on the beach and buy the property, that all of a sudden you can take that property simply by purchase from somebody else who is as dumb as you are, and believe that you’ve got a right to it exclusively, and you can tell the public that they don’t own it.
And, so, you know, that is–as Gary says in his book, I began preaching even then the Justinian Code, that the public has been entitled to the beaches since time immemorial. And, I began preaching the line that, from Biblical days—was it John the Baptist? Was he the great fisherman or was it Peter that was the great fisherman, in the Bible? [Laughs.] Sometimes that’s the stuff I can’t remember. But fishermen spread their nets on the beaches of the Sea of Galilee, biblically, because they were entitled to the use of the beach. And in English Common Law, the public was entitled to the beach. Even exclusive of the Crown, they still had a right to use the public beaches, and it—you know, the law goes back that far.
And yet there are nit-pickin’ numbskulls that come out of somewhere, and buy a lot on the beach in Galveston and will insist forever that not only can they exclude people from the beach in front of their house, but when the storms come and remove the beach, that they can leave their house there on the state land, because they somehow bought it and own it for all time. And they will never listen to a lawyer; they will never read their title policy. They will never believe that they don’t have some exclusive God-given right that they bought. Now we may be doing better today. I think we’re doing a lot better today because we provided for notice of many of these things in real estate transactions, which I struggled to pass, you know, for 25 years in the Legislature. Actually had somebody on the—that lost their house to a hurricane, and who somehow expected the state to pay for it, tell me that they did not know when they bought their house when they came out of Oklahoma, when they bought their place on the beach, that there was such a thing as a hurricane, or that they might lose their house someday, and somehow we had some responsibility to this God-damn Okie, to replace whatever they lost on the beach. They didn’t like me very much. [Laughs.]
DT: Well, I understood that you also got some inspiration from your wife about trying to advise people about coastal hazards? That she was sort of alarmed about people moving down there and not knowing what the risks were?
BS: Well, actually, we…
DT: Does she share a lot of your concerns?
BS: We—well, we shared those concerns. She was from Harlingen. Her first experiences on the beach had been to go to South Padre but they had to get to South Padre by boat in those days when she was in high school. They got to South Padre for parties and picnics and whatever, and fishing. Anything they wanted to do—dates, boys and girls—they got there by boat. And so—but she had her own coastal experiences. But in everything we did politically, why, she was as cognizant of all these problems that we ran into, and that the people in that area ran into as I was, and we were sympathetic with people who actually didn’t know.
I was not sympathetic with people who I thought lied to me or lied to my committees that I chaired, and said, “Well, we didn’t know this and we didn’t know that and we didn’t know something else,” when I did not believe a depth of stupidity that deep existed in normal human beings, particularly rich human beings, because you weren’t poor if you bought a house on the beach. And so I didn’t—I was not very tolerant. I was not very tolerant of people who believed that they somehow–deserve to be compensated for some loss which they bought into, and I used to use the expression that—you know, when you buy into a dice game such as the one on—about—that you’d buy into when you buy a house on the beach, that when the dice don’t favor you, why, you know, you’re the loser. There are winners and losers. I don’t know any winners on the beach, by the way, except the ones that get to stay there the longest before they get wiped out. But I made a speech in 1973 to a Junior Chamber of Commerce bunch, in—no, in ’73 or ’63 probably to a Junior Chamber of Commerce bunch in Galveston that—since J.C.’s can only be J.C.’s until they’re 35 years of age and all those young guys who were then in their 20’s, and very active in young politics, ought to go buy the second lot on the beach front, on the west end of Galveston Island. This was in the early ‘60’s. And I said, “You go out there right now and buy the second lot on the beach. And sometime, in your young lifetime before you’re 35 or 40 years old, you will own the beach front lot, because there won’t be any beach in front of you. And you—all you have to do is go down there and buy the cheapest lot. Buy the second one, but, you know, when you grow up and be big boys, you know, like we’re all gonna be some day, why, you get to own a beach-front lot, and you don’t have to pay $100,000 for it.” In 1983, there was a hurricane. It wiped out a fairly significant bunch of houses on the west end of Galveston Island and on that beach front, and on the…
DT: Is this Alicia?
BS: No. I think it was Celia or Alicia. What…
DT: In ’83?
BS: Yeah, ’83.
DT: Yeah, Alicia. Yeah, you’re right.
BS: O.K.
DT: Went through Houston?
BS: Yeah. Anyhow, believe it or not, I went and found the clipping from the 1963 newspaper article about my speech, and sent it to some people in 1983, reminding them that—you know, that none of these things were secret. Nobody was hiding anything from ‘em. But enough said on that.
Basically, I was—and that’s how my nature developed about my attitudes about the environment, and my conscious—consciousness of the fact that it was fragile at best and what man did on the beach was temporary at best, in Texas, where the beaches are in a constantly eroding position. And by the time I was chairing committees in the Legislature and had the U.T. Bureau of Economic Geology testifying before my committees, they were saying—and they were saying repeatedly and we were publishing repeatedly that the beach was in a constantly eroding condition, not subject to any natural restoration, for the lack of sand to replenish the beaches—the paucity of sand, as they called it–because the Delta of the Mississippi had changed over a couple–a hundred-year period. The Corps of Engineers had changed it even more over a 50-year period, and Nature, in its own way, had created a condition, with the Corps of Engineers’ cooperation, that established for all time there would be no more natural replenishment of the beaches on the northern coast of Texas from Sabine to North Padre, and from the Rio Grande to that part of the central Padre which they described as a 50-mile area in which the convergence of the two currents—the littoral drifts or whatever they were, from south to north and north to south, on the Texas Coast–left only a 50-mile area in the central coast in which there was not only a non-eroding condition, or stable condition, but perhaps a building condition from that convergence. Anything else that occurs on the Texas coast is gonna have to be through artificial restoration, or through very temporary periods. That testimony was given to one of my committees in the ‘60’s.
When I was chairman of the Coastal Marine Council, in the late ‘60’s and ‘70’s, we discovered—Joe Mosely was my executive director, and it was Joe, really–discovered that the U.S. Bureau of Economic—let’s see. The U.S. Geological Survey had published a report on the phenomenon known as subsidence, and from that report we learned that in an area of perhaps a 50-mile radius, there was a phenomenon known as subsidence, and the lowest point of that subsidence, if you view it as the bottom of a saucer, was in the Baytown area at the site of the Humble Refineries. And the extraction of water from that Alta Loma sand, as it’s called, A-L-T-A L-O-M-A, which by the way is the name of a town in Galveston county. The Alta Loma sand water extraction had caused the earth’s level to subside by as much as seven to nine feet at the bottom of that saucer, ascending to the surface at Katy, and right at the edge of the Galveston Bay shore—not the island but the mainland, on the Bay–to its sea level—well, sea level level, which was usually four or five feet above sea level, which placed the center of that subsidence area at Bay Town in an area where a subdivision had even begun to go underwater under normal tide conditions. So here you’ve got this seven-and-nine-foot subsidence, and here’s this natural phenomenon which has occurred, while the real estate developers are busily developing a whole flood plain in that area without letting the public know that they’re selling ‘em underground—underwater lots, without any reservations—I mean, with no apology, just—just sheer thievery.
And Harris County never passed the flood control legislation that I passed for Galveston County and made optional for all these other counties. But I passed actual—when we were able to create a condition under which we would be covered by Federal Flood Control insurance passed by John Kennedy as a member of Congress and Jack Brooks, I might add, from our district–when we became eligible, we had to pass certain flood control county ordinance-making capability. Harris County would never do that, because the developers were against the public having that information available to ‘em. But we did it for Galveston County. I did it in the Legislature for Galveston County before any other county in Texas had it. In ’71, I was able to pass the—after three sessions, six years really—I was able to pass the Wind Storm Catastrophe Insurance Pool, which gave us, for the first time since Carla, ten years before that, the capability of being covered for hurricane losses through insurance, and it was through the creation of this pool that the Texas coastal counties have been able to achieve some balance of insurance coverage. It’s…
DT: They’re in a separate pool from the rest of the state aid.
BS: They’re in a separate pool from the rest of the state, and only for the first tier of counties, that being the first county on the coast from Sabine to Brownsville. That’s a subject in itself, but all those pieces of legislation evolved out of—and by the way, the paper on subsidence was delivered in the United States for the first time at the University of Houston at a conference that we sponsored–the Texas Coastal Marine Council–and that was in 1968, if you can believe this. The paper was first delivered by the Geological Survey in Japan at an international conference, this phenomena being identified and being such a tremendous hazard to residents in the Houston area—Houston/Harris County/Galveston area. And the real estate developers, nor the politicians in Houston, ever published that in Houston, Texas, in any publication, any newspaper, or any—media of any kind or character, until I had it presented to us in 1968 before the Coastal Marine Council, just so we could get it in the paper. And that—I mean, that—and so I developed these attitudes from my first days in the House of Representatives when I learned that, you know, life was not fair, [laughs], and it wasn’t gonna be fair. That the public was the last consideration of anybody in the Legislature that I knew, with very few exceptions, and certainly no governors, from the day I got there in 1955 until the day I left.
DT: Well, it seems like you got a quick start, once you were in the Legislature, and I’m curious if some of it was because of teachers you had in school at Texas A&M or at U.T. Law School? Was there any interest in—I mean, either public interest in general or in that sort of coastal environmental work that you did later, that gave you some—spirit to do this?
BS: No. I think there are some—besides my—besides being born and raised in Galveston, which I indicated was my first best education, and the people that I hung out with on the beach, and the people who I fished with. And, you know, you don’t have to go very much further than a few good fishermen, and a few surfers, and a few people who—whose life exist around the beach in that kind of an environment to really understand that there is something to protect. You can’t define it very well and you can’t put your finger on your attitudes as they develop. But when I fished with people when I was a boy, I would go to these fishing piers that Galveston County had built, and to the—even to the Corps of Engineers’ groins, as they were called. They were built out in the water to slow down or protect the beaches from erosion. And what I learned, fishing with people, was that there were people on these piers and there were people fishing every day who were fishing for their food. I mean, people actually went out and caught their lunch, and then they went back and caught their dinner. Only they would—they went out and caught a couple of days of their food. I remember one lady very well who told me that everything she ate she caught on the beach, that she didn’t buy anything. I mean, in terms—she raised vegetables in her yard, and she fished, and crabbed, and whatever else she could get.
But those—when you spend your childhood around people who you know are living on those rations—pretty slim rations—and they’re dependent upon nature, and you hang around the wharf some and you see the fishing boats come in, then you realize, you know, what the natural environment means to the whole society or the whole of society. You sit around and listen to fishermen talk to you about how the baby shrimp have to mature and the larvae—they can’t even say the word, you know—have to propagate, drift into the very—almost fresh-water salt morasses in the very shallow water with lots of sunlight, and then get out through the bay and make it out to the Gulf of Mexico, and somehow make it back, in many circumstances, and how the fish propagate and how the birds propagate and how wildlife habitat has got to have fresh water and how they’ve got to have the marshes and how they’ve got to have—and, you know, you grew up thinking differently than people who think marshes are to be filled in, so you can build houses on it. And when you go to the Legislature with a concept that all the marshes are being filled in to build houses, and that’s gonna destroy the wildlife capability and the wildlife habitat, why, you suddenly come to the realization that man is not working very harmoniously with Nature except if they listen to…
[Tape 1, Side B.]
… a few biologists who care and listen to a few people who become conservationists and who listen to others or who have learned.
So, I began to listen to that drummer’s beat, instead of a lot of others, and when I was in the Legislature I paid some attention to it as a House member, but never really got into the battle. And then, when I ran for the Senate in ’58, I lost my first race, and when I—by the time I’d come back in ’60, ‘61—’60 was when I was elected in a special election—Bob Eckhardt had managed to pass the Open Beaches Act, the first bill—a very significant bedrock principle that the beaches needed to be free and accessible, that access to the beaches was critical. All right. Now I need to let you ask some questions, but I’m just gonna say that from–the Open Beaches Act, and then Bob and I had fought another battle on shell dredging even when I was in the House, against the shell dredgers.
The shell dredgers were paying 25 cents a cubic yard for shell—oyster shell—in Galveston Bay and Matagorda Bay and other bays, and they were the most rapacious, avaricious bunch of people in the state of Texas at that time, although the oil and gas lobby was probably their superior, but—25 cents a cubic yard for a natural resource that was finite. I mean, it was gone, it was just about gone then. We were cutting the last trees in the forest as far as oyster shell was concerned, and they were destroying live oyster reefs as well. And that battle was one of Bob’s early battles and then one of my very early battles, and under Price Daniel, when I was finally in the Senate, we were able to increase the price of oyster shells in the bays from 25 cents a cubic yard to 35 cents. You gotta understand, they were selling that stuff probably for, you know, tonnage prices, as opposed to cubic yards, and it was just incredible, what they were buying it for and what they were selling it for, and it made several families very, very wealthy in Texas, because they were taking a Texas resource that belonged to the people, at no price—no cost at all practically—and selling it at a pretty handsome cost, for road-building and those purposes.
Well, when the Open Beach Law was passed, it changed the nature of how we viewed public rights vs. private rights, as to coastland—as to the environment, particularly the beaches. And from that point—Bob went to Congress after that, and I was in the Senate, and from that point on, I began to look at an evolution of those laws that affected the coast and its environment. And we began to pas a whole bunch of laws, from sand dune protection, through local ordinance adoption by the counties, to limiting commercialization of the beaches. Making it illegal to place a sign on property that said, “Private Beach,” because there were such signs, and a host of other kinds of legislation that were new and innovative, some of which we passed which was not new or innovative, but which we got from other places. And Paul Burka, who worked for me during that period of time, wrote most of the coastal beach laws of that era and all of the reports of that era that were not written by Joe Moseley, who was my executive director of the Coastland Marine Council. So that’s how that 15-year period of evolution of beach laws occurred, from the ‘60’s to 1980, when I got beat. And, I mean, we covered the whole area, from there, from—during that period because I was involved in the beaches, I got involved in everything environmental.
DT: Well, do you think that the whole controversy over shell dredging was the first coastal environmental debate—that you were involved in?
BS: I really can’t—yeah, I really can’t place it but I imagine some of the earliest controversy I was involved in had to do with the shell dredging. It had to do with…
DT: Can you tell me a little more about that?
BS: Well, shell—oyster shell was the base product for roads. It was base road product, instead of limestone. In the rest of the state it’s just limestone, which is quarried and is still quarried for road base materials, and concrete—for the same basic element, which is calcium, which oyster shell provided the same source of. So—and you dredge oyster shell from so-called dead reefs and formerly active reefs that have died for a variety of reasons. But the truth is there’s no such thing as a dead oyster reef, because they’re only temporarily dead. The spat fall, as it’s called, from oysters, again simply drifts on the water until the spat of the oyster—the reproductive sources—finds a place to light. And if the conditions are right, and if there’s enough rain and enough fresh water provided to the base which the spat falls on, then you have an oyster reef that’s a live oyster reef. Well, the shell dredgers never did anything to respect reefs, and if they could kill a reef or keep it dead, then they could take that reef and—for 25 cents a cubic yard. So the big battle was always to keep ‘em off the live oyster reefs and preserve the oyster reefs, both for the wildlife habitat it provided and the fishery it provided, as well as the oysters which were taken.
And as the bays became more and more polluted, it became more and more dangerous from time to time to even eat oysters out of Galveston Bay. And to this day, until the Health Department has certified certain areas of the Bay as being eligible for the taking of oysters, the Bay is still in such bad condition most of the time that you can’t eat oysters out of Galveston Bay except during very specific periods where the Health Department says it’s okay. But there’re all kind of admonitions out by the Health Department now not to eat raw oysters anyhow. And there’re not many good reefs left because the shell dredgers took most of those, and destroyed many, many live oyster reefs just in their rapacious taking of that resource, because–while they could take it and while they could get away with it, because of a friendly state government, they took everything they could get and sold it. And when they got put out of business on the reefs for shell dredging, which is now illegal, they had to switch to limestone, and they had to switch to gravel.
DT: Do you remember any of the players, the different companies and the legislators that were involved in that?
BS: Well, the Haydens were big shell dredgers, and—on the lower coast–that is, on our coast. The Haydens were big shell dredgers in the Galveston Bay areas—the Hayden Company, and the Hayden family. The family in Matagorda was the Parker family. Bob Parker, I think, is still with Parker Brothers but they’ve been acquired by a different company now, and they’re one of the first companies to move from shell to sand and gravel, and into limestone. I later lobbied for a company that quarries limestone in Cancun, Vulcan Materials, V-U-L-C-A-N, and I began lobbying for them in the ‘80’s, and they import limestone cheaper from Cancun to the Gulf Coast than you can bring it by rail from central Texas, in the—from the Edwards Plateau. So that generally is what happened to the oyster dredging situation. But during the battle—there was a battle to just keep them from taking everything there was left, which would’ve ruined the source in the Bay for all time, and we did run ‘em off early enough to save something.
DT: Did you…
BS: The Heldenfelds dredged in—down in the lower coast it was Heldenfeld. They were in the road business. Concrete and roads.
DT: I’d read that the whole shell dredging issue was real divisive for the Fish, Game and Oyster Commission, that there were…
BS: Yeah.
DT: …two battles royal there. Do you recall much about that?
BS: Yeah, I recall they were a sellout to the shell dredgers. You know, I stayed mad at ‘em all the time. They, like the oil and—they, like the Railroad Commission, belonged to the people they regulated, like the so-called—let’s see. What was Mr. Eunice’s outfit called, the Water Quality Board? The oxymoron of all time? I mean, they’ve—the Water Quality Board belonged to the polluters, the Railroad Commission belonged to the polluters in the oil and gas industry and to the trucking industry, and the so-called Fish and Game and Oyster Commission belonged to the dredgers and to the commercial fishermen. At least—well, the—not to the commercial fishermen so much—they had their own trials and tribulations—but they certainly belonged to the oyster shell people.
Interesting—just jump in again. The interesting thing about that period, or what I call that period of evolution of my interests, was that I first started out just to—‘cause I really believed in the beaches and the open beaches doctrine and protection of the beaches and the rights of the public to the beaches, ‘cause that’s all I knew about. And when—the first interim committee that I created and chaired included Bob Armstrong as a member of the House of Representatives in those days. It was Bob Armstrong that invited Ed Harte to speak to the committee in Corpus Christi, and I’ve always given Ed Harte credit for enlightening me to the coastal environment as a whole, as well as the committee of course, but Ed spoke to us and said, you know, “Your vision is too narrow, that this is not a question of the public right to the beaches. You can protect that and you should. But it’s a question of protecting the dunes that protect and restore the beaches. It’s a question of protecting the coastal plain on the islands and peninsulas behind the dunes, and protecting the wetlands of those plains and islands and peninsulas, and protecting the wildlife habitat, and protecting the fishery and wildlife habitat in the estuaries and bays behind the islands leading to the mainland, and then protecting the coastal plain on the mainland, so that those wetlands and those freshwater inflows are protected, so that you still have bays and estuaries, and they propagate wildlife.”
And in that very simple presentation of what our responsibility was, the whole Coastal Management Program had its birth, because those of us on the committee who began to think in those terms, if we had not already thought in those terms, understood the chain of events that led to a healthy environment in that first tier of counties, and without it—and without which we couldn’t exist, and couldn’t grow. And for the fresh water environment, for the fresh water availability, coming from the upper reaches of the rivers that flowed into the bays and estuaries, we learned again that it was not only the quantity of water that was important but the quality of that water, that if every stream that flowed into every estuary was a sewer, then the estuary became a sewer.
And that’s when I learned for the first time that most of the fresh-water inflow into the Houston Ship Channel was from sewage, and from outfalls and discharges of chemical plants and refineries that were simply polluters, and their philosophy in those days was pollution by dilution. So I began anti-pollution fights on the upper reaches of Buffalo Bayou. I began my involvement in what the hell—what happened in the Trinity River. I began my involvement and concerns about what happened in the lower Colorado, and in the Brazos.
And my fights against Dow Chemical Company came from studies by Parks and Wildlife—early studies—that showed that there was not a single living organism in existence from the Dow Chemical outfall to the Gulf of Mexico, 11 miles–Not a single living organism, including the bottom-feeding organisms—all dead from the Dow outfall. And Dow was the genius of pollution by dilution. They just—the more water they had in their flow the more chemical they could put into it, and ‘course it didn’t make any difference really, ‘cause when they polluted by dilution, they still put their total amount of chemical in those rivers. And that fight existed from my first days of battling Dow. In the first satellite picture I saw, you could determine Dow’s outfall for 42 miles into the Gulf of Mexico from a satellite picture. They probably—until Wang came along in—after my time. Wang came along in—the Port O’Connor area–I think that’s where it is. It’s in Calhoun County, I know, that the Korean company—I forget what they call the company. But Wang is the owner of the company. Between the ‘60’s and the ‘80’s in which Wang became prominent as the worst polluter in the state of Texas, maybe in the United States, Dow was the worst that I had ever read about or heard about, and had less regard for the public, and for its responsibilities, than any company that I ever heard about since. They were the most despicable company and the most despicable client—not client, the most despicable—thank God they were never my client nor would they ever be my client. But they were the most despicable company in business and polluting the environment in Texas during the entire period I was in the Senate. And I’ll stand anybody’s ground and I’ll fight with ‘em to the death to establish that that is a sorry company, and their attitude is no better. Their advertisement’s better but their attitude’s no better today, in my opinion. Dow was one problem. There were countless others.
Monsanto in Galveston County, with its–just obnoxious practices of waste disposal. They would give their waste to somebody at their plant gate, and then they would think they would’ve absolved themselves of responsibility. They gave us what can be called the Motco dump site at the Texas City Y—that’s Y as the letter Y—in Galveston County. And, when it became a Superfund after my insistence over a 15-year period and others’ insistence, including Congress for a long time after that, and we created our own Superfund legislation and everything, the Motco dump site has probably cost the Superfund—being me and you, ‘cause we pay the tabs of these companies to clean up their own mess—I would—I believe the last figures I had on that were somewhere between 60 million and $100 million to clean up that site. That’s one Superfund site.
And Monsanto and—I think Monsanto and Carbide may be—but Monsanto’s the principal contributor. There was a private disposer down there in Galveston County that just got closed this last year. It got sued by the state, and there’ve been judgments against it for the last ten years by the state of Texas. It violated every permit that it was ever given, and it took 15 years to close it from the day they first started complaining about it, and they never quit–those disastrous practices, down there on the bay shore. During that entire period of time, they could never be stopped by all the laws and the lawsuits and the judgments written by the state, and finally they closed ‘em up a couple of years ago, maybe last year. That’s not the worst part of it.
In that same area, less than ten years ago, probably six years ago, a Japanese company, Mitsubishi, decided that they were gonna build a copper plant in Texas City. Oh, and the Texas City government couldn’t wait. They were lickin’ ‘em behind the ear to get ‘em to come down there, provide all those jobs. And, Buck Wynn was chairman of the Water Commission and I never had much respect for Buck, for any protection of the environment ‘cause he didn’t have that in his—he just didn’t have that in his vocabulary. Poor ol’ Buck went off in a diving accident here—not an accident but a diving incident of a couple of years ago and his heart stopped on him. He was—died of heart failure and I regret that ‘cause he was a nice guy. But his environmental attitudes—and he was always getting appointed by Republican Governors like Clements and people like that, to chair things that had to do with issuing permits. Well, it was his Commission that gave Mitsubishi a permit to discharge, among other chemicals, heavy metals, and chemicals–a permit to discharge 967 pounds of cyanide into Galveston Bay at Virginia Point, in the outfall of the copper plant, along with cadmium and nickel an copper and all that stuff. But 967 pounds of cyanide—forever, ‘cause cyanide doesn’t disappear, you know. Heavy metals don’t go away. They just—they stay in the bay. And, our state Water Commission gave them a permit to do that, even based on all the experience we already had about Wang down in Calhoun County. But utter disregard for any environmental principle, as most Europeans and Asian industry does. I mean, they just—they just don’t know what these permits are all about. I mean, they can destroy the environment in their country, they don’t know why the hell they can’t destroy it here. But here’s this 967 pounds and—we were trying to get the City Council at Galveston to demand a zero-tolerance discharge. And the Texas City government was just raising hell, and everybody had fallen over playin’ dead and lickin’ these guys’ boots and behind the ear and everything else. That’s as nice as I can put it. And I spoke to the Council on that issue and I pointed out to the Council that day that–we achieved this zero-tolerance resolution, by the way. I pointed out to ‘em that if they could multiply, in very simple numbers—the 967 pounds was close enough to a thousand pounds to be calculated as a ton—a ton of cyanide every two years in Galveston Bay forever. But let’s just assume the copper plant lasts 20 years. That’s ten tons of cyanide. And that was all in the ‘80’s, for Christ sake. I mean, this is all going on in the Goddamn ‘80’s, maybe the early ‘90’s! Texas! Texas granting a permit to somebody to give us ten tons of friggin’ cyanide, in a public body of water, with a highly dependent commercial fishery, with a highly dependent recreational facility and fishery, with boating, with water skiing, with every recreational sport you can entertain in salt water, less than two miles from the Galveston Bay shore? I mean, hell, this is on the mainland of Galveston County, for Christ sake, two miles to Galveston across the West Bay. We’re gonna have ten goddamn tons of cyanide out there, thanks to the state of Texas. Guess what. They—the Japanese could never understand why everybody stayed outraged. ‘Course we kept ‘em outraged for a year, and they finally decided not to locate the plant there. I mean, I just—I couldn’t—I could not believe for the life of me—and we didn’t even talk about—besides the cyanide, we didn’t even talk about what nickel and cadmium and every other goddamn heavy metal and chemical does to the water of the bay, and how it will get into the food chain at some point, no matter what you do.
So having said all that, you know, I got no respect yet for all these agencies that are dying to give away the goddamn state of Texas and what we love most about it, which is our environment. And I really don’t love most about Texas the fact that they produce a lot of goddamn oil and gas, or that they produce a lot of frickin’ chemicals down on the Gulf Coast in my district. I’m still amazed that I managed to survive politically for 25 years down there in elected public office because I never had any respect for ‘em, and nor did I hide my contempt for ‘em. None of it, ever. I never made any speech in which I was any less fervent about what they were doing to us, the public, than I’m making right here today. Not from any public platform, not from any Chamber of Commerce meeting, nowhere.
DT: I’ve read that you tried to sort of cut them down to size a number of times, and once through the Sunset Law, and I was curious if you could tell a little bit about why you came up with that and what sort of effect you think it’s had?
BS: Well, Doggett originally came up with the Sunset Law idea but I served on the first Sunset Commission. And, what Sunset gives you is an opportunity to get into the agencies as they’re being reconsidered after their first ten years or after their first years of existence. Our original Sunset schedule was set up on agencies that had never been reconsidered before. So it didn’t make any difference which agency you dealt with but if the Water Quality Board came up during—for consideration under Sunset, then you had a chance to really grill the executive director of that agency. In the Air Control Board, you see, which was another one of my pet peeves, poor ol’ Bill Hobby happened to’ve been on the Air Control Board, when I got after him the first time, and he was really a friend already. I mean, he was a friend, in a lot of other areas, but he was a member of the Air Control Board. And the Air Control Board—well, I was as contemptuous of the Air Control Board as I was of the Water Quality Board and the Railroad Commission, and once published a report in which my committee chapter heading said, “It takes the Railroad Commission to make the Water Quality Board look good.” [Laughs.]
DT: [Laughs.]
BS: I mean, the Railroad Commission had received objections against the discharge of brine from the oil well productions of the Gulf Coast into the estuaries in a hundred separate cases one year, from Parks and Wildlife to the Railroad Commission, and had not granted a single objection. In other words, they approved a hundred brine discharges detrimental to the bay and estuary systems for oil companies, as opposed to the interest of the general public espoused by the then Water Commission. And General Cross, who had been L.B.J.’s pilot, by the way, which is how he got to be CEO of Parks and Wildlife—it was General Cross’s reign in Parks and Wildlife that was the best, in terms of trying to protect the environment from the oil companies back in those days. Very unusual, because he was not an—you know, he was not a biologist or an environmentalist or anything. He was just a hell of a good guy with a public conscience. But that’s how the Sunset process came into play, and – in other circumstances…
But … what I managed to flesh out of the Air Control Board was that the Asarco Plant—that’s an aluminum plant—was discharging millions and millions of pounds per day of suspended solids into the atmosphere, in their smoke screen—in their discharge cloud, over Amarillo. In all that—I’m trying to think of what it was that was settling, ‘cause my memory fails me here, but whatever their—whatever the by-product of the plant was—it was not nickel, it was cadmium, I think. But I’m not sure. And I began to raise hell about that and determine whether it was permissible. Well, they said it was non-toxic. And I said, “Well, it’s non-toxic, but a suspension of particulate matter in a water stream kills fish because the fish can’t inhale the oxygen through—they can’t assimilate out of the water the oxygen, or whatever it is they do to retrieve oxygen from the water—if there’s so much particulate matter in it that it chokes ‘em. So they die from suffocation. What the hell are the people in Amarillo doing, you know. They’re bound to…”
[Tape 2 of 2, Side A.]
BS: “… be breathing it.” Well, Asarco—I got one letter, ten years later—seven years later, maybe–from Mr. Blackburn, who was an old-timer up there, and he wrote me and thanked me for the creation of a new Asarco plant. They tore down the old plant and built a new one. That did not occur, however, until eight children in El Paso were covered from Asarco for the brain damage that they suffered from the lead piling, or discharge, from one of their waste sites up at—in El Paso. And they were of course permanently brain-damaged, and their lawyers recovered an enormous verdict out there, and Asarco was finally, you know, found out. And as much hell—I raised as much hell about Asarco’s brain damage in El Paso as I did about the discharges in Amarillo but nobody cared about the Amarillo discharge ‘cause nobody had suffered any brain damage. You know, these all had emphysema, or whatever the hell they got. But that’s what’s wrong with Texas. That’s what’s wrong with Texas past, that’s what’s wrong with—that’s really what’s wrong with the Republican attitudes about industry. They can do no wrong, you see. And while we sit here and talk about all–this shotgunning approach I’ve taken to the hundreds of things—and I can’t even begin to tell you how many different issues, and how many different battles we fought—not just me, but I mean it took a host of people to do it–to fight ‘em at every step.
Low-level radioactive waste discharge? When that started they wanted it to be private, and I pointed out, just horrified, that what happens to private companies is that they go broke, they take bankruptcy, they put it all in the court’s hands, and then the state pays for the cleanup. And in the meantime, the damage persists to the environment, to the public, to the health and safety of the citizens, and nobody’s doing a damn thing about it ‘cause the company’s in bankruptcy, and the son of a bitches that do that know when they go in there they’re gonna do that. I mean, I don’t think this—I mean, I just think they’re ugly people. I don’t think they care. And if you give those permits to a Japanese, or a—or any Asian company or you give it to a European company, hell, they care less than the American company. At least Exxon or somebody has to worry about the down side, you see.
I passed the first oil spill bill in Texas, tried to pass the first Coastal Management Bill, which we did pass, and which no governor would certify but the Federal Government so we could have a coastal management program. And…
DT: Well, tell me about the Oil Spill Bill.
BS: Oh, the Oil Spill Bill was great. I just—out of a series of public hearings we determined that the Coast Guard was useless as a tit on a fish in an oil spill. And I was trying to prevent our reliance upon the Coast Guard to give us a state program, which, by the way, Gary Mauro finally evolved, 30 years later. The truth is that Gary Mauro has been probably the best thing that ever happened to Texas. I’m not only one of his greatest admirers in the whole world, but obviously at least he’s gonna make sure that I get remembered, [laughs], deserving or undeserving. He’s—he certainly makes kind remarks about me, but nobody has done more for the environment of Texas than Gary Mauro.
I mean, this whole state oil spill program is designed to make sure that we are not relying on a bunch of non-interested entities to protect our coastline, you see. When I authored the bill, the Coast Guard sent a Captain over from New Orleans and the Eighth Coast Guard District, and he testified brilliantly about how unnecessary my bill was because the Coast Guard was in such good shape to do all these things, and they could better protect the Coast of Texas than we could, and it was totally unnecessary. And when he got all through testifying, I said, “How did you get here, Captain?” He said, “Well, I flew over.” And I said, “Did you fly commercially?” He said, “No.” I said, “Did you fly Coast Guard?” He said, “No.” I said, “Well, who brought you over here?” He said, “Well, I came in an Exxon plane.” [Laughs.] He testified under oath that the Coast Guard had the capability of controlling any oil spill in the Gulf, and they could be on site within four hours any place in the continental limits of the United States, dropping booms, and corralling this oil spill. And two years later, I had the pleasure of calling him back over here and asking him why he hadn’t done that at a particular oil spill. They said, “We found that it didn’t work. That was experimental at the time.” I said, “I remember your testimony as being an a fait accompli that you all could do it, you could do it then, and you already had the capability.” He said, “Well, I was wrong.” I said, “Oh, [laughs], that—who gave you that information, Exxon?” And he got real bristled about that. And I said, “Well, they’re the ones that brought you over to testify. I mean, did—who told you that you had that capability?” He said, “Well, that’s what they told me at the Eighth Naval District.”
So that’s what we were dealing with all the time. You dealt with public bodies that lied under oath, you dealt with public officials that lied under oath, you dealt with Coast Guard people that lied under oath, and they still—they’re still lying under oath. And it really is kind of tragic when you think about how far people will go to protect themselves and protect what they perceive their duty to be, and that is to defend their agency or defend their branch of service or defend somebody else. They-and I wonder sometimes why they don’t concern themselves about defending the right of the public, occasionally. It’d be invigorating to me.
DT: Well, can you talk a little bit about the right of the public to be involved in government? I know that you were involved in open government initiatives at the Senate early on, and there’ve been, I guess, continuing concerns with—recently about the audit privilege and…
BS: Yeah.
DT: …standing in public hearings, and I wondered how you see that whole course of Texas history.
BS: Well, I see—well, first of all, my biggest fight on open government—we passed the Open Meetings Laws, we passed the Freedom of Information Acts. The fight is to protect those acts from being narrowed by the bureaucrats who don’t want the public to know what they’re doing, particularly don’t want the public to know that they’re doing it privately.
The Board of Regents at the University of Texas is probably the worst. But, any bureaucracy tends to protect its members, and they perceive their duty as one of doing what they think is right, and making sure that nobody else who might question that or oppose it has the ability to challenge what they think is right, in—you know, before that’s already been determined. Now that’s the attitude of the University of Texas Board of Regents—past attitudes. They may have a better Board now. But under Bernard Rappoport, he lost all sight of the fact that there was a public out there somewhere that had a right to know what they were doing, and he believed because of his history of being a great liberal that he would protect the public and they didn’t need to protect themselves. Little did he know that he didn’t have enough sense left or enough brain working to protect the public, even if he wanted to, because he didn’t understand what they were doing to him, I don’t think. I hate to criticize my friend, Bernard Rappoport who used to be my friend, till I started criticizing him. But there’s a point in time when all of us get too old for our mind to work as well as it once did, and Bernard had already reached that point when he became chairman of the Board of Regents. And so they just took him by the hand and waltzed him around and did anything they wanted to do, and had all these private little clubby meetings and decisions they’d made privately.
And when Jeff Wentworth, the senator from San Antonio, complained about it, why, he was writing op-ed pieces for the newspapers and for public consumption, saying how important it was for gentlemen to do these things privately, so as not to offend anybody. And you know, that’s laughable. And I wrote him a letter in which I said, “I offended people in the Senate for 25 years at a time when you thought it was the most wonderful thing that was happening because we were exposing all this private chicanery to public view, and inspection. And—but when you come into a position where you might protect the public to their right to know, then all of a sudden it’s more important to you to protect yourself and your gentlemen friends than it is to let the public in on the game.” And he was really offended badly. He said that I was working at trying to be his enemy—no, working at trying to destroy our friendship.
Anyhow, having said all that, my biggest battle was in the Senate, opening what the Senate called executive meetings of the Senate to the public, and I started by trying to destroy this—the privacy of confirmation of appointees to these bureaucracies, you see, which is the way you get to the bureaucracy. You open the process first of who gets appointed, so that you can know their failings, and debate their failings publicly. Well, the Senate had determined that it was important for them to have these debates privately, and I pointed out to the Senate in my very first session that the United States Senate had confirmed people publicly and debated their qualifications publicly for 20 or 30 years before that time. And if you could appoint people to be Secretary of the Navy, or Secretary of the Army, or to any defense position or to the Commerce Department or anywhere–to the Cabinet, and debate them publicly and have public hearings on their qualifications, it hardly seemed necessary to protect some appointee to the Egg Grading Board, you know, or the Water Well Drilling Board, or the Pest Control Board, where you might want to know whether the guy can read and write, or the A&M Board of Regents–you might want to know how many of ‘em had ever graduated from college, or much less even from high school, which was not uncommon in those days. Anyhow, that made me no friends, and it took 11 years to go from that position to a position where the—there were no Executive Committee meetings, which had never been constitutionally permitted. There were no Executive Committees. The Finance Committee was a public hearing on everything they had going in the budget. The conference committees on appropriations and all other matters were all public, where they had been private, and Senate meetings on confirmations were public hearings on qualifications with no private hearings, and Senate meetings to vote for confirmation, in order to be closed, had to be voted upon by the membership and had to receive a two-thirds vote to close the meeting, instead of a two-thirds vote to open a meeting. I just reversed it. My 11th-year success was to require a two-thirds vote to close a meeting, as opposed to requiring a two-thirds vote to open a meeting. And—but nobody even thinks about it anymore. It’s not even—I mean, it’s just second nature to do it right.
But, everybody still tries to fight public documents, which the public has a right to. Everybody still tries to fight getting hold of information when they privatize something. Then you—they say, “Well, you can’t have it now, it’s private,” you see. But it’s still public business, and Dan Morales got a editorial today in the Austin American-Statesman for determining, properly, that the Barnes contract for his termination agreement with the lottery company, with G-Tech, was indeed a public document. That’s how we learned that his severance pay was 15 million up front for he and Ricky Knox, and $169,380 a month thereafter for X number of years, and Ricky’s getting $69,000 a month thereafter, the total amount of the contract being a $23 million buyout. So, you know, we would’ve never known that but for Freedom of Information. So we’ve come a long way.
DT: We’ve talked about some of the special interests and the agencies, and I was curious if you could touch on some of the public interest groups that you’ve worked with. I think you mentioned the Galveston Bay Foundation, but…
BS: Um-hmm.
DT: …I’m sure that there were ones before that that were active as well—the Texas Conservation Council and Texas Beaches Unlimited and probably many others. Do you—what do you know about that?
BS: Well, I worked with all of ‘em at one time or another, and the earliest conservation organizations I worked with got—and we worked on everything. I mean, I did resolutions, you know, to create places like–Enchanted Rock I think was one of ‘em. I mean, every time an environmentalist or every time an agency had an idea to do something pretty good that nobody else would do because it wasn’t important, they’d come around to see if I would be willing to do it. And I had reached a point in the Senate where—if I wanted to do it I could do it, and I didn’t want to do all those things. And I participated in all those things that came to pass, and many of ‘em had been forgotten, as they should be, except that they’re a part of our state heritage now, and we don’t think about how they got that way.
Joe Moseley popped up one day for me and said, “We need to make the Flower Garden Reefs out in the Gulf a National Marine Sanctuary.” I said, “How in the hell are we gonna create a National Marine Sanctuary?” He said, “Well, the Texas Coastal Marine Council’s gonna petition the Federal Government to create a national marine sanctuary if you sign off on it, and we do the work in the Council.” I said, “Well, hell, that’s wonderful. What is it?” And so he showed me some diving pictures of their damn Flower Gardens. But it’s in—and now, the Flower Garden National Marine Sanctuary is protected from ships anchoring there, protected from any other environmental damage that we can protect it from, and it is the beauty spot of the Gulf of Mexico. It is a—virtually the last existent true reef in the Gulf.
And, when we had the Coastal Marine Council, Joe Moseley came along and said, “You know that we can probably get ahold of some ships if we want to, and sink them, make fishing reefs out of ‘em?” I said, “No.” He said, “Well, we can get Liberty ships, but the Government has to give ‘em to us.” And he said, “We gotta ask for ‘em, though.” So we asked for ‘em, and we had a program to sink these 12 Liberty ships—three to each reef, four reefs. And Joe worked out a program with a yard down in Brownsville, and they paid us I think $84,000 a ship for the scrap. And we used the $84,000 to move the vessels, and to provide the necessary buoys to mark the vessels, and we now have the reefs. The last thing I read on the reefs is in Southwest Airlines Magazine, very recently, detailing that we have now got Gulf oil rigs laid down between the vessels, as well as any other kind of marine structure that anybody wants to get rid of. And these reefs have not only been in existence all this time, but now they’ve been enhanced, and several other reefs have been located in the Gulf as a result of that original program. So, you know. And a successor to me in the Senate, the guy who beat me, Buster Brown, is responsible for the succession of this—for this evolution of these reefs in the Gulf. I mean, I could sit here and just rattle off programs of the Marine Council.
DT: Well, why don’t you tell how it got started?
BS: The Marine Council got started—I believe a guy—I’m trying to think—of Ray Lemon from Houston got the bright idea—he was a House member, in the ‘60’s, late ‘60’s—to create something called the Texas Coastal Marine Council, out of—because of a lot of activity that we had created and I had fostered in committees which I had chaired and which he had been a member of. So he creates this separate agency called the Texas Coastal Marine Council. And then he got beat about four years later, and I became chairman of the Texas Coastal Marine Council, and I was chairman until—I think two years before I went out of office. I was chairman eight years. And during that eight years we evolved a whole series of programs, thanks to Joe Moseley, who was an outstanding executive director. And every time Joe came up with an idea we would run it by everybody and we’d decide to do it or not do it and they became good programs. But it was the caliber of the people on the Coastal Marine Council that counted. It was—Terry Hershey was on the Coastal Marine Council. The head of the Business Department at Texas University was on the Coastal Marine Council, who later became a self-made billionaire, head of Teledyne. What the hell’s his name? Dr.—well, I’m embarrassed that I don’t know his name but—Dr. Calhoun from Texas A&M was a member of the Council. I mean, there weren’t any second-rate people on this damn thing, and–Calhoun was later Chancellor at A&M. We just—it—they were just remarkable. It was House and Senate members and these very public people, the best of the best.
The Sea Grant Program in Texas, which is 30 years old now, came about during my tenure in the Senate and on the Finance Committee where I served for 11 years and I was on every Appropriations Conference Committee that ever wrote an appropriation bill during that 11 years, and I was also chairman of Natural Resources and chairman of the Texas Coastal Marine Council at the same time. So, given that spread, A&M can turn to me on the Sea Grant Program and say, “Well, what is Sea Grant?” And I tell ‘em “Well, Sea Grant is–how much y’all want in the budget?” And I’d take the A&M figures and whatever else had come to me, and that’s how we put Sea Grant together. And Sea Grant remains today as a very effective program, under the auspices of A&M. They still have marine extension agents over at A&M for the whole coast of Texas which have been very helpful on all coastal matters.
When I think in terms of how many areas you touch, if you happen to be chairman of Natural Resources—‘course I had been chairman of Rules and I’d been chairman of Jurisprudence, and I asked to be chairman of Natural Resources instead in my last four years. And so here I am, chairman of—I had been a delegate to the Coastal States Organization nationally, by Briscoe’s appointment. I was chairman of Texas Coastal Marine Council. And by the way, when I was CSO chairman nationally, we started the publication of a book, called The Public Trust Doctrine, dealing with the Government’s holding in trust these valuable rights of the public, which–our duty to protect and responsibility to protect for all time, to—its air rights, its water rights and its land and access rights. That—there’s a book called The Public Trust Doctrine, which will go into its second printing. A second–not just a reprint, but I mean a new Public Trust Doctrine book, an update, that’ll be out this year. And there’s a Public Trust Doctrine meeting every year, and this one’s in Boston on July 21st and I’m going again. I went last year as well. I became chairman of the CSO nationally, and during my period of time we lobbied for—we started this Public Trust Doctrine idea of publishing a book with all U.S. cases. And all—and the book—when it became public, when it was published, had contributing authors from all attorney generals and states—coastal states—and it is the best collection of cases for lawyers in the country that ever deal with the public’s rights. During that CSO period, we instigated and lobbied for the dedication of certain monies from offshore production of the United States in coastal waters to a fund which became the Coastal Management Fund, which Texas has been eligible for. If they’d passed my first Coastal Management Plan, we would’ve been getting two or $3 million a year for the last 20 years, but having missed all that, we’re getting it now for the first time, under our present coastal management law. Eleven or 12, 13 other states have been getting it for 10, 15 years. We were able to achieve that lobbying deal with the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee.
So, you know, CSO, Texas Coastal Marine Council, and then the Natural Resources Committee in the Senate, and then being on the Finance Committee with carte blanche from Akin to take care of the agencies and needs as I saw fit, permitted me to fund the U.T. Bureau of Economic Geology for all the studies that were required on coastal mapping of the wetlands and the shore lines. It permitted me to fund the fresh water inflow studies of the Water Commission in those days to determine fresh water needs, both quantitative and qualitative, in order to protect the bays and the estuaries. From the inception of that program it has never faltered. I mean, it’s always been a continuing program, and even today, it exists today. And it–‘course it does more than exist today. It’s a magnificent program today.
But, whether it was Sea Grant at A&M, the Extension Service, the Marine Biomedical Institute at Galveston at UTMB, the Marine Science Institute at Port Aransas, the creation of Texas A&M University at Galveston and Texas Maritime Academy, the University of Houston Upper Level Institute at Clear Lake—I mean, it just–you just kind of roll on here. I can’t even think of the myriad of things, the—you know, if you look at it in the context of 25 years of legislative service, it’s hard to determine how many things evolved from a simple background of appreciation for the coast and its environment, and then that first step by Bob Eckhardt when Bob Eckhardt passed the Open Beaches Law, and suddenly just kind of stuck a needle in me. And that—whatever Bob’s needle was, it created in me, you know, a desire to extend his Open Beaches Law, after Ed Harte told me what the duty was, then–from Bob Eckhardt’s needle, which he didn’t know he was inserting. [Laughs.] It’s almost as though I’d had some sort of infusion. It’s as though I’d had an intravenous infusion of something from Bob, and then from Ed Harte, which was more of an enlightenment. And if you view it as I view it now from a standpoint of ignorance, with a lot of appreciation in a quantum—[laughs]—well, the most extensive ignorance known to man, in terms of what it was that I might have done, had I had the capacity to do it–I had no idea that I was doing it. I mean, I had no idea that I had begun doing it, I had no idea where I was gonna go to finish doing it, or whether it was ever gonna be finished, as I now believe it can’t be finished. But, if I were gonna attribute–as you went back to earlier, the two main influences in my life, other than my natural acquisition of these concerns and loves, I would say it was Eckhardt and Ed Harte, and Ed Harte has heard me tell his story before but he’s never heard me say I think that he’d be my—he’d be one of the two choices that made up the whole of what I turned out to be.
DT: Well, I think those questions of the whys and wherefores—you know, where people get this urge is really interesting, and I—it makes me wonder as well. You once said—I’ve got it written down here, maybe I should read it.
BS: Um-hmm.
DT: “I have never seen an aesthetic oil corporation head. They almost destroyed our bays, and then they’re on the front row of every church in my district on Sundays.”
BS: [Laughs.]
DT: And I’m curious if you think that for some people, maybe for yourself, that there is some sort of spiritual urge that undergirds their interest in the environment, or if it’s more of a—sort of an aesthetic thing about blight and ugliness—you know, the signs along the beach that you mentioned earlier?
BS: Yeah.
DT: What is it that you believe?
BS: I think you’d—I think several things come about. I need to throw one other thing in here, ‘cause I have no—I’m not really a member of any—
[Tape 2 of 2, Side B.]
BS: … of an organized religious group of sorts in which I–practice of, you know, the Jewish faith. I’m a Jew. I belong to the temple in Galveston. I have been well educated in Judaic—in Talmudic heritage through my grandfather as a boy, and in my own reading because it’s so beautiful. And it’s pervasive in the Jewish faith–this respect for the environment is a pervasive part of Judaism, from the Talmud on. I mean, you just gotta—reading the Talmud, the–which is the Hebraic Law, leaves you with a feeling that from the earliest times of the nomadic tribes of the Jews, and the earliest settlements, that a regard for the land and its productive capabilities was an essential of Judaism. I never knowingly—and even when I go to services now—and I do occasionally but I mean I’m just not—I’m not an active, praying participant. I’m not a—every Saturday morning, every Friday night, kind of a guy in that respect, and I don’t think I could ever be. But I could never think about being involved in all this environmental stuff without remembering that the Talmud tells you, you know, what to cultivate and what to leave at the corners of your fields for the poor, and how historically that the worst of the armies of civilized nations didn’t destroy the olive groves of the areas of that time. That they might burn the towns and they might rape, rob and pillage and they might do anything else, but what you didn’t do, you didn’t destroy the olive groves, because you couldn’t live without the oils. You captured—you tried to capture the water and you tried to capture the salt mines and you tried to preserve the ability to preserve and produce life, rather than destroy it all.
These son of a bitches that I’m talking about that run these oil companies care little about what they preserve except the bottom line, the bottom corporate line. And the only reason I got religious here for a minute is that I think besides having to have somebody point me in the right direction, since I have — nor did they know they were pointing in the right direction. But having had all this great admiration for the things that made my young life happy—at no cost to me because they were the bounties of being a free man. Having done that, and then having seen the beauty—I mean, I gotta add this, too, that the United States Navy, thank goodness, took me out in the Pacific and took me to the Hawaiian Islands, and took me through the Panama Canal, and took me to the East Coast of the United States. And in those travels, it occurred to me that I had just never seen any beauty like that. I mean, God damn, I just could not believe that the Pacific looked like it looked. I mean, I was—I’d get on that carrier and just marvel at the fact that that water was so goddamn—almost purple sometimes. And you could just see down into it and I mean you could just—see, it seemed to me like you could see into it further than any body of water I’d ever seen into, ‘cause I’ve—you gotta remember I was raised on the Gulf of Mexico, and you can’t even see your hand in the Gulf of Mexico most of the time. Nor could I imagine the lush foliage of the Hawaiian Islands, or even the Panama Canal areas even in those days…
So—you gotta understand that you develop all these things and appreciate all these things, and then, you suddenly come to the realization that you gotta pass a law to protect the goddamn public rights of the beaches, you know, and I’d—it never even had occurred to me. I mean, I would’ve never independently, up to the time Eckhardt did it, believed that that was something that you had to do. I don’t even know why—I don’t even know how in the hell Bob did it, except that Bob was first to see these barriers on the beaches. And when Bob saw the barriers on the beaches and passed the law, then the day I was sworn in, in that picture I say with Bob Baker, who was the Senate author, and Ben Ramsey, who was the Lieutenant Governor—that first picture was taken standing next to those damned pilings on the beach—which are, you know, aimed at keeping the public off the beach.
And so, having started there, and gotten into it in the Senate, gone and had some enlightenment by Ed Harte, it was a natural flow of everything else, but there was one element that was still lacking in me. And I had to be a member of the Senate to receive that other element, and you hit on it a while ago when you quoted that statement of mine. It takes anger. The only way you can compel yourself to work the hours, make the sacrifices, anger the rest of the people that you must anger, inflame all the people that you must inflame to be on your side, is to be angry enough yourself, all the time, at these no-good sons of bitches that seem to be determined to wipe out everything that is good about our society. And as pompous as that sounds [sic] acquired. You have to be a part of the Government, and you have to be angry at people like Hugh Yantis, who was the Water Quality Commissioner, a CEO, and who is the whore—I mean, the worst of the worst. I mean, they—he did anything that any industry wanted to do. They’d have—they had to have permits, so he’d let ‘em write their own damn permits.
And I’ve already ranted and raved about the oyster rape and—you know, everything I come across in the Railroad Commission—I made an 18-minute speech about the Railroad Commission there at the Constitutional Convention that’s one of the—one of the classics that goes around in a tape. They’ve got it—people have got it on tape and still play it–and it’s in the Constitutional Convention. You know, they’ve recorded it, and it was transcribed, by the way, so it’s there. And, I—my classic remark in the Constitutional Convention was—I held up the Texas Almanac, and I read the ad of the Railroad Commission in the Texas Almanac, and the ad said—listen to this close, listen to it close. The ad says, “The Texas Railroad Commission, serving the oil and gas industry of Texas well.” And I said, “Think about that a minute.” I said, “These people have taken out an ad in the Texas Almanac, bragging about being the handmaidens of the oil and gas industry. I want to add something to this ad next time they run it. ‘Well and favorably and cheaply.’” [Laughs.]
DT: [Laughs.]
BS: Anyhow, that’s…
DT: Well, enough said. One last thing I should probably ask you. I ask other people this. This tape is gonna end up at an archive, and…
BS: Um-hmm.
DT: …you never know what people will make of that,…
BS: Um-hmm.
DT: …how they’ll use it. But I think in some sense it’s a message in a bottle and, you know, there’s some continuity there. I’m curious what you would…
BS: Oh, yeah. Researchers.
DT: …what you would want to tell whoever might pick this up one day. What do you think’s important, in a nutshell, about conservation in Texas and some of your contributions?
BS: I think what’s important in the scheme of things is not so much—the history of the fight, or the anger and the sentiment that’s been built over all those years, but the recognition that, you know, through that history, maybe we won’t make those same mistakes again, which is trite to say. But we do tend to forget that all these gains were made at some great cost to some people, and there’s always somebody out there trying to recapture that ground. I mean, it’s like a war in which the battle is always for the top of the hill. And we’re in an era where we think that we’ve gained such great ground that we’re reaching the top of the hill. The truth is that there’s a lot of SOBs hanging on our coattails and trying to reverse those—that cycle all the time.
And I mean, the EPA issued an edict last year which would ban the salt-water discharges of oil companies into bays and estuaries. A ban by the EPA! Unheard of in my time, when we couldn’t get Parks and Wildlife–hundred objections honored in one case by the Railroad Commission in the state of Texas, elected to protect the people, you know, being whores to the oil and gas industry, and the trucking industry. And I mean, body and soul, cheaply. So, there we are, and here we are, and the first outcry was from the oil and gas people about how horrible that was. And everybody in Texas—the first people to rush to the aid of the oil and gas people in Texas was our present Railroad Commission, and they are trying desperately to reverse the progress we’ve made, you see, in the last ten years and go back to where they were 30 years ago. And they’re almost getting there, under what I unhappily believe is the mistaken Republican approach to the environment, and that is that somebody else is gonna protect the environment, that this free-enterprise independent initiative which the oil companies like to talk about—which is a laugh because they don’t want to be free, or they don’t want to be anything but enterprising. They want the government to protect ‘em, they want the government to guarantee ‘em, they want the government to control their prices, by controlling their—giving them a chance to control prices. The government doesn’t control it: it gives them a chance to control it. They want all these perks from the government, but they don’t want the government to do anything to protect the environment, and they still will not permit that, readily. And the Republican attitude about all this is that–well, if we just trust ‘em they will take care of it, and going back to the quote you quoted to me, don’t trust ‘em just because they’re on the front row of the church, ‘cause what they’re doing is sitting there praying that they don’t get caught.
DT: Thanks a lot.
BS: O.K.
DT: I hope to return to this later, but you’ve been very generous today.
BS: Well, as you can tell, I’m still mad. [Laughs.]
DT: Keep at it.
BS: … [sic] advice I ever received in the Senate from a Press Corps member was probably the best advice I ever had. He said—”Remember, son,” he said—in those days he was a lot older then, [laughs], I was a lot younger then. “He whom the gods seek to destroy, they must first anger.”
DT: Well put.
BS: It’s a good piece of advice.
[End of reel]
[End of Interview with A.S. “Babe” Schwartz]