"40th Texas Governor" Preston Smith Hand Signed FDC for Sale

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"40th Texas Governor" Preston Smith Hand Signed FDC For Sale

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"40th Texas Governor" Preston Smith Hand Signed FDC:
$69.99

Up for sale"40th Texas Governor" Preston Smith Hand Signed First Day Cover.

– 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

offer 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 Austin as a regent of Hazlewood's alma mater, West Texas 1969, Smith named state head the Office of State and Federal Relations

in Washington, D.C.[10]