Ferguson Out

The incoming Governor marched beside the outgoing Governess-- who did not take his arm. The husband of the outgoing Governess marched directly behind them-- with his youngest daughter, the wife of the incoming Governor hav-ing refused to march with him.

When the band played:

The Old Grey Mare

She AIN'T what she used to be

AIN'T what she used to be

AIN'T what she used to be**

some of the crowd tittered. Miriam Amanda Ferguson, outgoing Governess, had on an old grey coat./=

Clear-voiced,S: Mrs. Ferguson rose to speak. Her black eyes glittered like beads behind the octagonal lenses at either side of her hawk nose.

". . . My record speaks for itself. [Laughter]. It cannot be changed--either added to or taken from.

"If in the passion and prejudice of the hour my mistakes are magnified and my achievements are minimized, I shall find consolation in the fact that I am not the first Governor who has had to suffer the same penalty as the price of political honor.

"If I am condemned and criticized I shall not murmur, because I remember that Sam Houston, the father of Texas, paid the same penalty. If I am hated and abused, I shall forgive my enemies and find comfort in the recollection that Jim Hogg,* when he laid down the reins of power, was also hated and abused. . . .

"I present you your Governor, Daniel J. Moody. Hear ye him!"

"They [the people] wanted not only a man for Governor, but apparently they wanted a young one. Frankly, he was not my choice. [Laughter]. . . His election as a 33-year-old Governor was about as novel as my election as a woman Governor."

When Speaker of the House of Representatives Robert Lee Babbitt got up to speak, he roundly flayed the Fergusons. Then rose Mr. Moody. He spoke for less than five minutes. ". . . I ask, as did the Hebrew of old, that God give me now knowledge and wisdom to come in and go out before this people; for who can govern this people that is become so great? . . ."

Had Governor Moody and 29-year-old Mrs. Mildred Moody (who married on Apr. 20 last) gone from the Capitol to the executive mansion, there they would have found on the table a piping hot meal. (Texas tradition requires that the outgoers do the incomers this courtesy.) But the Moodys did not touch this food. They did not set foot in the executive mansion. Instead they went to rooms in the Stephen F. Austin Hotel. At the executive mansion a thoroughgoing inventory is being taken. "I was long enough in the Army," said Governor Moody, "to learn not to sign for anything I wasn't sure I had."

The chief points of difference between Moody and the Fergusons have been Ferguson highway administration and Ferguson wholesale pardoning of prisoners. During her two years incumbency, Ma granted clemency to 3,595 prisoners. But 3,053 convicts still remain in cells--or about 250 less than the total when she became Governess.

Last week she pardoned one Doy Arnold of Mineral Wells, described (without qualification) in the news columns of the New York Times as the perpetrator of "a crime against a woman as revolting as any ever perpetrated in the history of Texas." His sentence was originally set at 198 years, of which Mr. Arnold had served one and a half.

Governor Moody is five years younger than Governor of Virginia Harry Flood Byrd, brother of Richard E. ("Dicky") Byrd, famed Pole man. Governor Moody is, then, "youngest U. S. Governor." But he is no younger than Sam Houston* was in 1827 when he became Governor of Tennessee.

**Two years ago at "Ma's" inaugural the band played:

Put on your old grey bonnet

With the blue ribbons on it

And hitch old Dobbin to the shay.

For from Gulf to Coston

Folks are bound for Austin

For Ma's inaugural day.

/=Two years ago she had on a black satin gown with grey fur trimming, imported from Manhattan.

S:Two years ago her speech was barely audible.

*Popularly supposed to have named his two daughters Ima and Ura.

*Sam Houston was born in 1793, to Texas in 1832.