Up for auction"40th Texas Governor" Preston Smith Hand Signed First Day Cover.
ES-4344
Preston
Earnest Smith (March 7, 1912
– October 18, 2003) was an American entrepreneur and politician who
served as the 40th Governor of Texas from
1969 to 1973, who previously served as the lieutenant governor from
1963 to 1969. Smith was born into a tenant farming family of 13 children in
Corn Hill, a town in Williamson County, Texas,
that has since been absorbed into nearby Jarrell. The family later moved to Lamesa, Texas, where Smith graduated in 1928 from Lamesa High School. In
1934, he graduated from Texas Technological College (now Texas Tech University)
in Lubbock with a
bachelor's degree in business administration. Staying in Lubbock, he
founded a movie theater business
and invested in real estate. Smith was first elected to the Texas House of
Representatives in 1944 and then to the Texas State Senate in
1956. He won the Senate seat by defeating in the primary the incumbent Kilmer B. Corbin, the father of actor Barry Corbin. In 1962, Smith won the lieutenant governor's
race, securing majorities in all but 16 of the 254 counties to defeat the
Republican O.W. "Bill" Hayes. In
1968, Smith was elected governor, a position he held for two two-year terms. He
succeeded the popular Democratic Governor John B. Connally Jr., who later switched to the Republican Party in
1973. To win the governorship, Smith first defeated Don Yarborough in the 1968 Democratic runoff election.
Several other candidates, including Dolph Briscoe, a large landholder from Uvalde in the Texas Hill Country, and
former Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr, also of Lubbock, were eliminated in the
primary. Smith's inauguration on January 21, 1969, had what was called
"the flavor of the South Plains". The Texas Tech University marching
band led the parade just behind the marshal and the color guard. A mounted
masked Red Raider rode with
the band. Governor and Mrs. Smith, both Tech graduates, followed in an open convertible. Other Smith
family members rode in the parade, followed by the new lieutenant
governor, Ben Barnes. The band of
Lamesa High School, Smith's alma mater, was the first among the high school
groups. Before the oath taking, the first to be televised in Texas history,
Smith had been feted with a $25-per-place victory dinner in the Austin Municipal
Auditorium, now the Long Center
for the Performing Arts. Smith twice defeated Republican
nominee Paul W. Eggers, a tax
attorney from Wichita Falls and
later Dallas, and a close friend of U.S. Senator John G. Tower. In the high-turnout general election of 1968,
Smith received 1,662,019 ballots (57 percent) to Eggers' 1,254,333 (43
percent). In the general election of 1970, Smith, who had been unopposed in the
Democratic primaries, received 1,197,726 votes (53.6 percent) to Eggers'
1,037,723 (46.4 percent) - still the highest midterm year turnout in past 50
years. The state switched to four-year terms in 1974, two years after Smith
left office. In 1971 and 1972, Smith was embroiled in the Sharpstown scandal stock
fraud scheme, which eventually led to his downfall. Smith lost his third-term
bid for the governorship of Texas to Dolph Briscoe of Uvalde in the Democratic primary in 1972.
He ran a distant fourth in the primary, behind Briscoe, women's activist Frances "Sissy" Farenthold of Corpus Christi, and
Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes, formerly of Comanche County. Among his
appointments, Smith in 1970 named Paul Pressler of Houston, a former state representative, as judge of the Texas
133rd District Court in Harris County. Pressler,
who later switched to the Republican Party, subsequently became known as a
prime leader in the Southern Baptist Convention Conservative Resurgence which
began in Houston in 1979. He
appointed former State Senator Grady
Hazlewood of Amarillo and Austin as a regent of Hazlewood's alma mater, West Texas A&M
University in Canyon. In 1969, Smith named state Representative Randy
Pendleton of Andrews to head the Office of State and Federal Relations
in Washington, D.C.[10]