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Texans foresee that celebration of the Centennial is not the last boldness which Jim Allred contemplates. This year he again faces Tom Hunter. The odds are on Allred's keeping his job, and he is already pointing for the national arena. Three weeks hence, having opened the Centennial and welcomed Franklin Roosevelt to Texas, he is going to Philadelphia. The job of heading the Texas delegation to the convention is reserved for Senator Tom Connally, but for Allred is reserved the privilege of renominating his fellow Texan, John Nance Garner, for Vice President. This is a compromise achieved with some little coolness between Messrs. Connally and Allred, for Senator Connally comes up for re-election in 1940. More than one Texan makes a shrewd guess that by that time Jim Allred, who will then be 41, will be ready to warm the hearts of Texas Heroes once again, by running for the U. S. Senate.
Whereas at the Dallas Fair liquor will be sold in packages by a drug-store chain concession and it was still doubtful whether Dallas visitors could buy a drink on the Fair premises* Fort Worth, priding itself on its cow-town ancestry, plans to vend refreshments of all kinds. Thus, although $1 will get a visitor into both Casa Mañana and Jumbo, Billy Rose figures he can gross $35,000 a day to offset $11,000 a day running expenses. Having started later than Dallas, Fort Worth's Frontier Centennial is not scheduled to open until July 1, plans to keep going till Dec. 1, three days after the Dallas Fair closes.
Able Allred. No ghoulish stethoscope last week dangled into the graves of Texas' heroes to determine whether all this was bold enough to please them, but if boldness and youth were what the heroes were grateful for, James V. (for nothing) Allred was their man 13 years ago when Texas Centennial was a speech at an advertising convention and Jim Allred was a 24-year-old cub attorney at Wichita Falls. Third son of a rural mail carrier of Bowie, Tex., he had been through the War as a gob on a training vessel in the Pacific, had earned his way through law school. In 1924 when a district attorney of Wichita Falls resigned, he recommended young Allred as his successor and Governor Pat Neff made the appointment.
First thing Allred's fellow citizens knew, their stripling district attorney was prosecuting Mayor Collier of Wichita Falls and his wife for murdering their son-in-law, and convicting them. Next Jim Allred, at 27, was running for Attorney General of Texas. He lost to Claude Pollard, a seasoned attorney, by a total of only 3,500 votes out of 700,000 cast. When Pollard resigned in 1929, Allred went to Governor Dan Moody and said, "Appoint me." Instead Moody appointed another seasoned lawyer, Robert Lee Babbitt. In 1930 Allred went once more to the polls and took off with Babbitt's job. As Attorney General, he launched a series of suits demanding over $17,000,000 in fines from 17 major oil companies for violation of the State's anti-trust laws. The anti-trust suit ran aground three years ago on a court decision declaring that NRA superseded all anti-trust laws, but Allred succeeded in recovering Texas school lands on which oil had been discovered, lands which he claimed were worth $100,000,000.