Old Tack

Far beyond the Texas panhandle, Gene Howe, publisher of the Amarillo Globe and News, was fondly known as "Old Tack." His folksy daily column, "The Tactless Texan," was the most popular newspaper column in the state, and across Texas he was known as "Mr. Panhandle, Amarillo's one-man Chamber of Commerce." Ranch hands named their pet horses Old Tack, and readers named their children after him. Texans seldom recalled that "Mr. Panhandle" had actually been born in Kansas.

Drunk & Fired. Gene Howe was the son of the moody, melancholy Ed Howe, the "Sage of Potato Hill," who made his Atchison (Kans.) Globe one of the most quoted papers in the nation and wrote Story of a Country Town, a bitter novel about small-town Babbittry. But young Gene Howe never had an easy time of it. He quit high school after two months, was often at odds with his stern father who once wrote in the Globe: "Three Atchison young men disgraced themselves . . . Saturday. The publisher's son was the drunkest of the bunch." Even when Gene Howe took a job on the family's paper, his father agreed he was an "impossible" newspaperman, summarily fired him. After four years working as a reporter on the Portland Oregorian, Gene went back to the Globe. Later he borrowed $25,000 from friends and took over the paper when his father retired in 1911.

But in Atchison, he could never escape the shadow of his father and he got tired of being known only as "Ed Howe's son." He went to Texas and started the afternoon Amarillo Globe. Two years later he bought the morning News. Gradually he spread his newspaper holdings all over the Southwest, although in recent years he trimmed his chain from eleven to five papers (in Amarillo, Lubbock and Atchison) and two radio stations.

Howe thought newspapers should not be profit grubbers but community institutions, worked hard to make them that with his own brand of salty, personal journalism. It was his explanation for his success. Said he: "I can drive across the United States and buy a newspaper in every town and there would be the same comics, the same text, features and a lot of times even the same editorials." But "we print news so that it can be understood in this part of Texas."

Free & Equal. Over the last year, Gene Howe showed signs of losing his zest for journalism. He sold his Atchison Globe to two old associates, told friends he was getting weary of fighting his competitor, the Amarillo Times, which had been backed by the oil-rich Whittenburg family. Last December the Whittenburgs bought 35% of Howe's enterprises, and the Times and Globe merged. Gene Howe talked of retiring, but went right on writing his column. He worried, however, about his health, although repeated checkups showed nothing was wrong with him.

One day last week, at the end of his column, he tacked on one of his familiar aphorisms: "An old Texas saying: Sam Houston made us free and Sam Colt made us equal." Next morning, Old Tack, 66, was found in the back seat of his car on a country road, a bullet in his head and a Colt revolver in his hand.

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