“We did not think Hightower was gonna win until Reagan (Brown) stuck his hand in the fire ant mound and we just said, “Oh my God, this guy is going to come up and beat him…The Hightower years were the early part of my tenure at the Texas Chemical Council. Even though there were a lot of adversaries, I made […]
Paula de la Fuente
“I feel like the work we did at TDA (Texas Department of Agriculture) during the Hightower years was very heart-based. Really, truly, you have to have a heart, you have to have a conscience, in order to care about Mother Earth, sustainable living and care about the children that are exposed to pesticides, proper nutrition and all those things. We […]
Leroy Biggers
“I told John (Vlcek), ‘I’d like to put up a market here in Tyler’… So we had a meeting and we had about 15 to 16 producers in East Texas to show up for the meeting and explain to them what we was trying to do. But then I went on the Horace McQueen Show and advertised it and promoted […]
Mike Nassour
“I want to credit Jim Hightower’s cantankerousness, and just by God bullheadedness with raising awareness in this state that people are hurt by pesticides. They are. Just because you can buy something at Lowe’s or Home Depot doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to spray it on your face. I think people get that now because of the work he […]
Angela Lamb
“I’d like to offer you a piece of information that we’ve gathered in a survey. It’s how the citizens of this area feel about waste being brought into the area. And I would like to congratulate you because in the last two years you have discovered that this is the number one agricultural county in the state of Texas, which […]
Delbert Devin
“They (American flight crew I had been scheduled to be on) were (imprisoned) within six hundred feet from the point of impact of the bombing of Hiroshima…Six hundred feet from impact, you know what that means,” recalled Delbert Devin, founder of Serious Texans Against Nuclear Dumping. “When we were on that nuclear waste stuff, I was obsessed with it. I […]
Cather Woods
“Jim Hightower was one of the best things for Texas in my experience, in my lifetime, and I’m 78 years old. So, I started working with farmers during that era. He was really nice. He worked hard to make sure that he made it better for blacks. By making sure that you knew what was there, by reaching out to […]
Ellen Widess
“One of the provisions they (the Trump-era EPA) wanted to get rid of was the farmworkers’ right to have their doctors, or any other advocate, a lawyer, priest, worker center, anybody, union, get access to their pesticide safety sheets to know what they were exposed to, what the risks were and to be able to go after the company and […]
Andy Welch
“I think you could take that eight years, and set it over here and say, This is unlike anything else. I don’t know of anybody that talked about farm worker safety before that. I don’t know of anybody that talked about organizing farmer cooperatives like that. Yes, there were cooperatives, but they were for farmers to gin their cotton or […]
Sarah Vogel
“It made such a difference to me to have Jim Hightower and Jim Nichols (Minnesota Secretary of Agriculture) out front, articulating these issues so beautifully and showing their vision was possible and starting these different programs. In North Dakota, my campaign, I had a long list of campaign commitments, things that I was going to do if elected. I nicked […]