Word: southwesterner
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...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...
...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...
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...
...Southwestern Bell last week presented an entirely different scenario. Harvard psychiatrist Shervert Frazier, testifying for the company, told the court that the "bad part" of Gravitt's life was about to be exposed and "he didn't want to face the music." Bell lawyers charged that Gravitt had spent $200,000 in company money remodeling his private office, $4,831 of company funds on repairs to his home and thousands more on padded expense reports. The company maintained ftat Gravitt was being investigated at the time of his suicide for philandering with employees on company time...
...weeks, Rhodesia's Supreme Military Commander, Lieut. General Peter Walls, had been receiving intelligence reports of a guerrilla force building up in southwestern Mozambique. Faced with a security problem that would further extend his hard-pressed troops, Walls asked Smith for permission to make a punitive raid on Mozambique's Gaza province, a key infiltration and supply route. Smith readily gave him the go-ahead. Last week the first columns of Rhodesian army trucks, carrying some 500 troops, rolled across the Mozambican border shortly after daybreak and headed toward the village of Mapai, 60 miles away. Overhead, Rhodesian...