There must be something in the influence of environment. Maury Maverick's ancestry is almost pure English; but he looks enough like a Latin to be a full-blooded Mexican politico. He is rotund, small, and olive-skinned, with massive shoulders and a big head growing out of them. Maury looks rather like a bullfrog sitting on a damp rock. His big mouth and protruding eyes have the sullen, reptilian expression of a frog. His peculiar appearance is partly due to his construction, partly to physical infirmity.
He was a child prodigy of sorts. The youngest son of a youngest son in a big family, Maury was a studious boy subject to fits of exhibitionism. He took his schooling not at the University of Virginia, where most of the Mavericks went, but at the Virginia Military Institute, then at the University of Texas. He studied law at Texas, and was never graduated. But he passed the Texas bar examination when he was twenty, and started out to practise law.
Even as a law student, Maury was eccentric. He barely escaped a Federal indictment, while he was at Texas, for sending obscene writing through the mails. A lecturer had passed through Austin and given a talk which enraged Maury Maverick. Maury wrote him a letter, and on the outside of the envelope scribbled a bit of satirical verse. He was merely expressing himself with his habitual candor, but he had quite a time explaining it to the Federal authorities.
World War I began for the United States when Maury was twenty-four. He promptly enrolled in an officers' training camp, emerging twelve days later a second lieutenant. His war record was excellent. As commander of an infantry company in the Argonne, Maury was first gassed, then wounded by shrapnel. He was cited for gallantry, awarded the Purple Heart, the Silver Star, a service medal with three clasps. Back in San Antonio at the war's end, he was elected president of the city bar association and head of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Instead of carrying on with law, Maury went into the lumber business. He was a lumber man for nine years, but never was much good at it. Then in 1930 an ambitious county politician named Bill Brogan (you'll remember him as the Sheriff's chief vice investigator) plucked Maury out of the vulgar halls of commerce and got him elected tax collector of Bexar County on a tax-reform platform. Surprisingly—to people who knew him—Maury turned out to be a good tax collector.
About that time he became disturbed about the condition of the veterans. The depression had left a number of them indigent, without State or Federal relief. Some had become vagrants, tramping the highways of South Texas, living in hobo jungles. Maury decided to look into their troubles at first hand. Like an Oriental caliph, he put on humble raiment and went among the people. With him went another veteran, Harry Futrell, and State Representative Pat Jefferson of San Antonio. They started out in an ancient Ford, but soon abandoned it to travel on foot like other hoboes.
Maury alarmed his companions from time to time by flashing a large roll of bills, when the troubles of the jungle dwellers roused his ready sympathy, and impulsively inviting them all to go to town and "eat on me." But they got the information they wanted. Maury wrote a long report and sent it on to Washington. Then he organized a colony for destitute veterans, called Diga, short for the Democracy of Industry and Agriculture. (But don't ask me how you get Diga out of that.) It was a coöperative enterprise, working on the barter system. It flourished until Federal relief came along and took its place.
Then Maury began to think about going to Washington. The Congressional districts of Texas were redrawn in 1936, and San Antonio acquired a new district, the Twentieth. Maury Maverick stood for Congress in this virgin district, bidding for the support of labor, veterans, and the down-trodden Mexicans of Father Carmelo Tranchese's slums. Mayor Quin opposed him with the city machine; but Maury won hands down. In Washington he distinguished himself as a bumptious young political clown and a whipping boy for the New Deal. But he was also able to do a number of things he had set out to do—such as getting a Federal housing project for the slums.
Meanwhile, in San Antonio, a new figure had risen up to dominate the machine. He was Owen W. Kilday, Mayor Quin's busy-browed, hotheaded, Irish chief of police. Kilday was making a name for himself among conservative citizens by battling Emma Tenayuca's Communists. He supplied the structural steel bracing which the machine had lacked under the flabby, dignified hand of Mayor Quin. Kilday was a Catholic in a predominantly Catholic city. He was one of seven Kilday brothers, all energetic and colorful. Tom Kilday was an army captain and a graduate of West Point. Another Kilday brother was a priest.
Quin and Kilday put their heads together and figured out a plan to lick Maury Maverick when he came up for reelection in 1938. They picked Owen's younger brother, Paul Joseph Kilday, to oppose him. They got Vice-President John Nance Garner, who never had cared much for Maverick, to back Brother Paul. (The Kildays came originally from Uvalde, Jack Garner's home town.) They based their campaign on Maury's own eccentricities and on the growing distaste of Texans for the New Deal. Maury had the President's support, but this time it failed him. He was beaten as decisively as he had won two years earlier.
Young Kilday's victory was a triumph for the city machine, but it didn't do Mayor Quin any good. He was still lurking under the cloud cast by those revelations in Collier's a year earlier. Quin just couldn't get away from the black shadow of Charlie Bellinger. If he turned against the Negroes, he lost the solid bloc of colored votes which had kept the machine in power since Bryan Callaghan's death. If he courted them as usual, San Antonio's white citizens would rise up and smack him.
Maury Maverick came back to San Antonio in 1939, after handing over his seat in the House to young Kilday, and swiftly sized up the situation. He announced that he would run against Quin for mayor. Now, the same citizens who had turned thumbs down on Maury as a Congressman thought he might do pretty well as mayor. As long as he was in City Hall and not in Washington they could keep an eye on him. He still had the backing of the veterans. The Mexican Quarter was solidly for him. On May 9, 1939, after the hottest municipal campaign San Antonio had seen in all its history, Maury was elected mayor over Quin by a plurality of three thousand votes. It looked as if Charles Kennon Quin was through.
The first thing Maury Maverick did as mayor was to toss out Police Chief Owen Kilday. An outsider, imported from Illinois, took his place. (But Kilday promptly got himself elected Sheriff of Bexar County and started organizing the county behind the old city machine.) That was all right, if Maury could get away with it, though the keen thing to have done would have been to make his peace with Kilday. But Maury had scarcely been in office two months when his assistant granted Emma Tenayuca that license to hold a Communist rally in the Auditorium. Maury loyally backed up his subordinate, and explained that he had no constitutional right to withdraw the permit. But he was already under suspicion as a New Dealer. When the Legionnaires began to sing, "Hang Maury Maverick to a sour apple tree!" outside the Auditorium, Maury knew that he was in the same kind of spot that Quin had occupied for two years.
Nevertheless, he was a good mayor. Always a showman, Maverick amused the citizens by issuing a series of fancy proclamations, all done up on scrolls in blue ribbon with the Great Seal of the City of San Antonio embossed beside his signature. In the space of three months in 1940 he proclaimed Lincoln's Birthday, Washington's Birthday, National Defense Week, Army Day, Livestock Week, Safety Month, and Good Friday. But he also gave the city an honest, efficient administration. Maury's weakness wasn't lack of brain or lack of character. It was his unpredictable enthusiasms, which usually got him in trouble.
With his New Deal connections, Maverick was able to get a generous lot of Federal aid to clean up and improve the city. He installed a new traffic control system—which included the network of lanes and signal lights in Romana Plaza, known as "Maverick's Island." The National Youth Administration helped him to restore a portion of the old Spanish town of Béjar and preserve it for the city as La Villita (The Little Town). The Works Progress Administration and the city together spent $430,000 to landscape and improve the San Antonio River. In addition to the two housing developments in the Mexican Quarter, WPA put up Wheatley Courts and Lincoln Heights Courts for Negroes, Victoria Courts for white slum dwellers.
When the time came to defend his administration before the people, in 1941, Maury found himself running once more against Quin. It was their third time together in the ring. Maury started off with a dignified campaign, standing on his obviously good record. But Quin and the Kildays from the first made it a slugging match. They harped on Maury's leftist sympathies, played up the Auditorium riot for all it was worth, shouting: "It can happen again!" Quin walked the streets of the Mexican Quarter, promising jobs to the Latinos. Even though liberal Archbishop Robert Lucey was for Maverick, the rank and file of San Antonio's Catholics were with Kilday.
When the ballots were counted after the first primary, plain citizens were stunned to find that Quin had rolled up a plurality of thirteen hundred over Maverick. He had won most of the Negro and Mexican vote; Maury had gathered most of his support from the few well-to-do people who bothered to vote at all. The result wasn't a clear majority for Quin, so a run-off was scheduled. And now Maury Maverick was really aroused. He lit into Quin with both fists swinging, jabbing away at the city machine's long history of graft, favoritism, and corruption.
He might have won this time, except for a typical Maverick blunder. Goaded to fury one night by the failure of the Negroes to support him in the first primary, Maury shouted at a white audience: "The Negroes will run the City Hall! Even your cook will be more important than you. We are not going to have the Negroes telling us what to do—this has always been a white man's country, and we've got to keep it that way. God have mercy on the poor white people of this town if Bellinger's man gets into office. I don't want their vote!"
Now, it wasn't necessary to attack the Negroes to get the white voters—most of them were already with Maury. All this diatribe did was to enrage the Negroes and ruin any chance he might have had to woo them over on his side. Next day the San Antonio Register, Negro organ of Valmo C. Bellinger, gave it back to Maury hot and heavy. Valmo Bellinger was Charlie's son and an alumnus of Harvard University. Maury had called him a "big, black baboon." Wrote Valmo Bellinger on election eve:
"Mayor Maverick has said to the Negroes that he doesn't want their votes. And the Negroes, along with the rest of San Antonio, say to Mayor Maverick: WE DON'T WANT YOU!"
The result was a foregone conclusion. When the last of the forty-one thousand voters had pulled the automatic levers at the polls, Quin was mayor again by a twelve-hundred-vote majority. This time it looked as if Maverick was through. And so he was, as a candidate for public office. He turned up in Washington again before long, to work for the New Deal in various government agencies. From time to time he would deliver an oration to the press on some harmless subject, such as gobbledygook.
As for Mayor Quin, his own triumph was short-lived. The people who put him back in office hadn't voted so much for Quin as against Maverick. The Kilday machine—now firmly in control of both city and county—knew that Quin represented a perpetual source of danger as mayor of San Antonio. So in 1943 they made a deal with him. For mayor they picked a colorless but untarnished German lawyer, Gus B. Mauermann, who could be depended on to fill the office with dignity and make no trouble. Then Quin ran for a vacancy as District Judge, and won on a write-in campaign. San Antonio lawyers generally consider Quin the best and fairest Judge on the County bench, no matter what they may think of his record as mayor.
Incidentally, in that same election Alfred Callaghan—grandson of Bryan Callaghan—was chosen for the post of tax commissioner. So far young Callaghan has failed to show much of his forebear's talent. But there's plenty of time for that. San Antonio may yet have another Callaghan for mayor. Meanwhile, the machine is safely back in power, governing with caution at the moment, but governing all the same. Though his reign was brief, Maury Maverick is the only political reformer in a hundred years who has ever been able to break its grip on the city. But for Maury's own impulsive nature, he would probably still be running San Antonio.
It should have been possible for anyone who knew Maury to predict the outcome of his political career. It was a perfect reflection of his capricious, moody temperament. Even his enemies admit that Maury Maverick is wholly honest and sincere in his convictions—"when," they add, "he has any." He is also an egotist, an introvert, and more than a little erratic in his thinking. Maury has read everything from Plato to Rabelais, and he likes to put everything he reads into practice.
In his youth—he is fifty-two now—Maury made a deliberate cult of being boorish. It was a sensitive man's device to protect his own feelings. Today he is neither crude nor courtly, friendly nor unfriendly; he is merely indifferent. Though he has a tremendous intellectual sympathy for oppressed people, there is no personal warmth in Maury Maverick. He believes in democracy; he also believes in a controlled economy to keep democracy going. Most of all he believes in the Bill of Rights—in freedom of speech and peaceable assembly, which he defines in public as "the permission of supreme utterance," in private expresses with the words, "Let 'em blow it off."
Some of his mental quirks, as well as his physical traits, are explained by the wounds he suffered in the war. Maury underwent a series of painful operations to remove fragments of shrapnel from his back and shoulders. As a result, he has no vertebrae from his shoulder to the base of his skull. For a while, after these operations, Maury thought that he would not live. During his first campaign for Congress, his right arm was almost useless because of a partial paralysis from his spinal column. He still walks with a powerful, grotesque, swinging motion, literally heaving his two hundred pounds along.
At home, Maury rusticates on his three-acre plot of ground at the Sunshine Ranch. There he has a cottage, a bunk house, and a sort of hybrid playhouse rigged up from an old trolley car which he bought for twenty-five dollars. The front is walled with native rock and opens on a flagstone patio. Inside the car at one end is a kitchenette, at the other a lavatory dressing room. In between is a lounge littered with bits of Mexican pottery, Indian blankets, a typewriter, a dictaphone, and other odds and ends.
Here Maury waters a few sickly-looking pecan trees, of which he is inordinately proud, and broods over the misfortunes of the world. He collects rare crucifixes. He also has a collection of autographs of all the Presidents except William Henry Harrison. But his proudest possession is the United States flag that flew over captured Rome, Berlin, and Tokyo. It will hang hereafter in the rotunda of the Capitol at Washington.
What Maury will be doing hereafter is his own secret. (He announced lately that he planned to practice law in California.) For all his whims and crotchets, Maury Maverick is too intelligent, too ostentatious, and too able an administrator to languish long in obscurity. In spite of himself, in spite of an unwilling electorate, Maury is still San Antonio's most distinguished citizen.
Green Peyton, San Antonio, City in the Sun
He was a child prodigy of sorts. The youngest son of a youngest son in a big family, Maury was a studious boy subject to fits of exhibitionism. He took his schooling not at the University of Virginia, where most of the Mavericks went, but at the Virginia Military Institute, then at the University of Texas. He studied law at Texas, and was never graduated. But he passed the Texas bar examination when he was twenty, and started out to practise law.
Even as a law student, Maury was eccentric. He barely escaped a Federal indictment, while he was at Texas, for sending obscene writing through the mails. A lecturer had passed through Austin and given a talk which enraged Maury Maverick. Maury wrote him a letter, and on the outside of the envelope scribbled a bit of satirical verse. He was merely expressing himself with his habitual candor, but he had quite a time explaining it to the Federal authorities.
World War I began for the United States when Maury was twenty-four. He promptly enrolled in an officers' training camp, emerging twelve days later a second lieutenant. His war record was excellent. As commander of an infantry company in the Argonne, Maury was first gassed, then wounded by shrapnel. He was cited for gallantry, awarded the Purple Heart, the Silver Star, a service medal with three clasps. Back in San Antonio at the war's end, he was elected president of the city bar association and head of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Instead of carrying on with law, Maury went into the lumber business. He was a lumber man for nine years, but never was much good at it. Then in 1930 an ambitious county politician named Bill Brogan (you'll remember him as the Sheriff's chief vice investigator) plucked Maury out of the vulgar halls of commerce and got him elected tax collector of Bexar County on a tax-reform platform. Surprisingly—to people who knew him—Maury turned out to be a good tax collector.
About that time he became disturbed about the condition of the veterans. The depression had left a number of them indigent, without State or Federal relief. Some had become vagrants, tramping the highways of South Texas, living in hobo jungles. Maury decided to look into their troubles at first hand. Like an Oriental caliph, he put on humble raiment and went among the people. With him went another veteran, Harry Futrell, and State Representative Pat Jefferson of San Antonio. They started out in an ancient Ford, but soon abandoned it to travel on foot like other hoboes.
Maury alarmed his companions from time to time by flashing a large roll of bills, when the troubles of the jungle dwellers roused his ready sympathy, and impulsively inviting them all to go to town and "eat on me." But they got the information they wanted. Maury wrote a long report and sent it on to Washington. Then he organized a colony for destitute veterans, called Diga, short for the Democracy of Industry and Agriculture. (But don't ask me how you get Diga out of that.) It was a coöperative enterprise, working on the barter system. It flourished until Federal relief came along and took its place.
Then Maury began to think about going to Washington. The Congressional districts of Texas were redrawn in 1936, and San Antonio acquired a new district, the Twentieth. Maury Maverick stood for Congress in this virgin district, bidding for the support of labor, veterans, and the down-trodden Mexicans of Father Carmelo Tranchese's slums. Mayor Quin opposed him with the city machine; but Maury won hands down. In Washington he distinguished himself as a bumptious young political clown and a whipping boy for the New Deal. But he was also able to do a number of things he had set out to do—such as getting a Federal housing project for the slums.
Meanwhile, in San Antonio, a new figure had risen up to dominate the machine. He was Owen W. Kilday, Mayor Quin's busy-browed, hotheaded, Irish chief of police. Kilday was making a name for himself among conservative citizens by battling Emma Tenayuca's Communists. He supplied the structural steel bracing which the machine had lacked under the flabby, dignified hand of Mayor Quin. Kilday was a Catholic in a predominantly Catholic city. He was one of seven Kilday brothers, all energetic and colorful. Tom Kilday was an army captain and a graduate of West Point. Another Kilday brother was a priest.
Quin and Kilday put their heads together and figured out a plan to lick Maury Maverick when he came up for reelection in 1938. They picked Owen's younger brother, Paul Joseph Kilday, to oppose him. They got Vice-President John Nance Garner, who never had cared much for Maverick, to back Brother Paul. (The Kildays came originally from Uvalde, Jack Garner's home town.) They based their campaign on Maury's own eccentricities and on the growing distaste of Texans for the New Deal. Maury had the President's support, but this time it failed him. He was beaten as decisively as he had won two years earlier.
Young Kilday's victory was a triumph for the city machine, but it didn't do Mayor Quin any good. He was still lurking under the cloud cast by those revelations in Collier's a year earlier. Quin just couldn't get away from the black shadow of Charlie Bellinger. If he turned against the Negroes, he lost the solid bloc of colored votes which had kept the machine in power since Bryan Callaghan's death. If he courted them as usual, San Antonio's white citizens would rise up and smack him.
Maury Maverick came back to San Antonio in 1939, after handing over his seat in the House to young Kilday, and swiftly sized up the situation. He announced that he would run against Quin for mayor. Now, the same citizens who had turned thumbs down on Maury as a Congressman thought he might do pretty well as mayor. As long as he was in City Hall and not in Washington they could keep an eye on him. He still had the backing of the veterans. The Mexican Quarter was solidly for him. On May 9, 1939, after the hottest municipal campaign San Antonio had seen in all its history, Maury was elected mayor over Quin by a plurality of three thousand votes. It looked as if Charles Kennon Quin was through.
The first thing Maury Maverick did as mayor was to toss out Police Chief Owen Kilday. An outsider, imported from Illinois, took his place. (But Kilday promptly got himself elected Sheriff of Bexar County and started organizing the county behind the old city machine.) That was all right, if Maury could get away with it, though the keen thing to have done would have been to make his peace with Kilday. But Maury had scarcely been in office two months when his assistant granted Emma Tenayuca that license to hold a Communist rally in the Auditorium. Maury loyally backed up his subordinate, and explained that he had no constitutional right to withdraw the permit. But he was already under suspicion as a New Dealer. When the Legionnaires began to sing, "Hang Maury Maverick to a sour apple tree!" outside the Auditorium, Maury knew that he was in the same kind of spot that Quin had occupied for two years.
Nevertheless, he was a good mayor. Always a showman, Maverick amused the citizens by issuing a series of fancy proclamations, all done up on scrolls in blue ribbon with the Great Seal of the City of San Antonio embossed beside his signature. In the space of three months in 1940 he proclaimed Lincoln's Birthday, Washington's Birthday, National Defense Week, Army Day, Livestock Week, Safety Month, and Good Friday. But he also gave the city an honest, efficient administration. Maury's weakness wasn't lack of brain or lack of character. It was his unpredictable enthusiasms, which usually got him in trouble.
With his New Deal connections, Maverick was able to get a generous lot of Federal aid to clean up and improve the city. He installed a new traffic control system—which included the network of lanes and signal lights in Romana Plaza, known as "Maverick's Island." The National Youth Administration helped him to restore a portion of the old Spanish town of Béjar and preserve it for the city as La Villita (The Little Town). The Works Progress Administration and the city together spent $430,000 to landscape and improve the San Antonio River. In addition to the two housing developments in the Mexican Quarter, WPA put up Wheatley Courts and Lincoln Heights Courts for Negroes, Victoria Courts for white slum dwellers.
When the time came to defend his administration before the people, in 1941, Maury found himself running once more against Quin. It was their third time together in the ring. Maury started off with a dignified campaign, standing on his obviously good record. But Quin and the Kildays from the first made it a slugging match. They harped on Maury's leftist sympathies, played up the Auditorium riot for all it was worth, shouting: "It can happen again!" Quin walked the streets of the Mexican Quarter, promising jobs to the Latinos. Even though liberal Archbishop Robert Lucey was for Maverick, the rank and file of San Antonio's Catholics were with Kilday.
When the ballots were counted after the first primary, plain citizens were stunned to find that Quin had rolled up a plurality of thirteen hundred over Maverick. He had won most of the Negro and Mexican vote; Maury had gathered most of his support from the few well-to-do people who bothered to vote at all. The result wasn't a clear majority for Quin, so a run-off was scheduled. And now Maury Maverick was really aroused. He lit into Quin with both fists swinging, jabbing away at the city machine's long history of graft, favoritism, and corruption.
He might have won this time, except for a typical Maverick blunder. Goaded to fury one night by the failure of the Negroes to support him in the first primary, Maury shouted at a white audience: "The Negroes will run the City Hall! Even your cook will be more important than you. We are not going to have the Negroes telling us what to do—this has always been a white man's country, and we've got to keep it that way. God have mercy on the poor white people of this town if Bellinger's man gets into office. I don't want their vote!"
Now, it wasn't necessary to attack the Negroes to get the white voters—most of them were already with Maury. All this diatribe did was to enrage the Negroes and ruin any chance he might have had to woo them over on his side. Next day the San Antonio Register, Negro organ of Valmo C. Bellinger, gave it back to Maury hot and heavy. Valmo Bellinger was Charlie's son and an alumnus of Harvard University. Maury had called him a "big, black baboon." Wrote Valmo Bellinger on election eve:
"Mayor Maverick has said to the Negroes that he doesn't want their votes. And the Negroes, along with the rest of San Antonio, say to Mayor Maverick: WE DON'T WANT YOU!"
The result was a foregone conclusion. When the last of the forty-one thousand voters had pulled the automatic levers at the polls, Quin was mayor again by a twelve-hundred-vote majority. This time it looked as if Maverick was through. And so he was, as a candidate for public office. He turned up in Washington again before long, to work for the New Deal in various government agencies. From time to time he would deliver an oration to the press on some harmless subject, such as gobbledygook.
As for Mayor Quin, his own triumph was short-lived. The people who put him back in office hadn't voted so much for Quin as against Maverick. The Kilday machine—now firmly in control of both city and county—knew that Quin represented a perpetual source of danger as mayor of San Antonio. So in 1943 they made a deal with him. For mayor they picked a colorless but untarnished German lawyer, Gus B. Mauermann, who could be depended on to fill the office with dignity and make no trouble. Then Quin ran for a vacancy as District Judge, and won on a write-in campaign. San Antonio lawyers generally consider Quin the best and fairest Judge on the County bench, no matter what they may think of his record as mayor.
Incidentally, in that same election Alfred Callaghan—grandson of Bryan Callaghan—was chosen for the post of tax commissioner. So far young Callaghan has failed to show much of his forebear's talent. But there's plenty of time for that. San Antonio may yet have another Callaghan for mayor. Meanwhile, the machine is safely back in power, governing with caution at the moment, but governing all the same. Though his reign was brief, Maury Maverick is the only political reformer in a hundred years who has ever been able to break its grip on the city. But for Maury's own impulsive nature, he would probably still be running San Antonio.
It should have been possible for anyone who knew Maury to predict the outcome of his political career. It was a perfect reflection of his capricious, moody temperament. Even his enemies admit that Maury Maverick is wholly honest and sincere in his convictions—"when," they add, "he has any." He is also an egotist, an introvert, and more than a little erratic in his thinking. Maury has read everything from Plato to Rabelais, and he likes to put everything he reads into practice.
In his youth—he is fifty-two now—Maury made a deliberate cult of being boorish. It was a sensitive man's device to protect his own feelings. Today he is neither crude nor courtly, friendly nor unfriendly; he is merely indifferent. Though he has a tremendous intellectual sympathy for oppressed people, there is no personal warmth in Maury Maverick. He believes in democracy; he also believes in a controlled economy to keep democracy going. Most of all he believes in the Bill of Rights—in freedom of speech and peaceable assembly, which he defines in public as "the permission of supreme utterance," in private expresses with the words, "Let 'em blow it off."
Some of his mental quirks, as well as his physical traits, are explained by the wounds he suffered in the war. Maury underwent a series of painful operations to remove fragments of shrapnel from his back and shoulders. As a result, he has no vertebrae from his shoulder to the base of his skull. For a while, after these operations, Maury thought that he would not live. During his first campaign for Congress, his right arm was almost useless because of a partial paralysis from his spinal column. He still walks with a powerful, grotesque, swinging motion, literally heaving his two hundred pounds along.
At home, Maury rusticates on his three-acre plot of ground at the Sunshine Ranch. There he has a cottage, a bunk house, and a sort of hybrid playhouse rigged up from an old trolley car which he bought for twenty-five dollars. The front is walled with native rock and opens on a flagstone patio. Inside the car at one end is a kitchenette, at the other a lavatory dressing room. In between is a lounge littered with bits of Mexican pottery, Indian blankets, a typewriter, a dictaphone, and other odds and ends.
Here Maury waters a few sickly-looking pecan trees, of which he is inordinately proud, and broods over the misfortunes of the world. He collects rare crucifixes. He also has a collection of autographs of all the Presidents except William Henry Harrison. But his proudest possession is the United States flag that flew over captured Rome, Berlin, and Tokyo. It will hang hereafter in the rotunda of the Capitol at Washington.
What Maury will be doing hereafter is his own secret. (He announced lately that he planned to practice law in California.) For all his whims and crotchets, Maury Maverick is too intelligent, too ostentatious, and too able an administrator to languish long in obscurity. In spite of himself, in spite of an unwilling electorate, Maury is still San Antonio's most distinguished citizen.
Green Peyton, San Antonio, City in the Sun
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