Ma Bell's slip shows in a San Antonio courtroom
On Oct. 17, 1974, T.O. Gravitt, the 51-year-old chief executive in Texas for Southwestern Bell, of which he was a vice president walked into the garage of his $120,000 north Dallas home, turned on the ignition of his Oldsmobile and settled back to die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Later that day, Gravitt's family and Bell colleagues found in his briefcase a nine-page memo accusing his company of political payoffs, illegal wiretapping and using questionable bookkeeping to secure telephone rate increases. A hand-scribbled message added, "There is bound to be much more. Watergate is a gnat compared to the Bell system."
An emotional overstatement, certainly—but Gravitt's suicide touched off a scandal that three years later is badly damaging Ma Bell's image as the staid gray lady of American corporations. In a San Antonio courtroom last week, past and present Southwestern Bell executives accused each other of everything from bribing Texas newspapers and politicians to playing host to parties for local politicians and visiting executives from other Bell system companies. They were testifying in a $29 million libel and slander suit brought against Southwestern Bell by Gravitt's widow, Oleta Gravitt Dixon,* and James Ashley, who was fired as general commercial manager for the San Antonio office of Southwestern Bell a few days after Gravitt's death. The widow claims that the company hounded her husband to suicide; Ashley maintains that he was fired because he and Gravitt were about to expose the "incorrect, duplicitous, deceitful" methods that Bell had used to get rate increases in Texas.
Until last year, Texas was the only state where such increases had to be approved by city officials, and they were frequent and large enough to make it traditionally one of the most profitable states in the entire Bell system. Ashley claims that Southwestern Bell officials were constantly wooing and bribing politicians in such cities as Austin and Dennison.
Among other things, he says, the executives entertained politicians on hunting expeditions at Bell resorts in rural Texas gave them credit cards to make free long-listance calls—and, in one case, staged a three-day orgy at the TraveLodge in downtown San Antonio, where some Bell women employees became party girls Ashley also accused the company of giving top executives a $1,000 raise on the understanding that it was to be donated in $50 installments to a political slush fund. The pot was used for contributions to local and state officials friendly to Bell rate increases. Ward K. Wilkinson, the company's Austin lobbyist, admitted that he collected $1,200 a month from Bell executives for a political fund that was kept in cash in his office safe.