Ken Towery: A lifelong patriot
Tuesday: The “Chow Dipper” survives.
Wednesday: Towery returns to Texas, starts a family, wins the Pulitzer Prize.
Thursday: Mr. Towery goes to Washington.
Friday: Back in Texas.
After World War II ended, Ken Towery returned to Texas, but was hospitalized for months as Army doctors determined he had tuberculosis, which plagued him for years.
He was discharged in 1946.
Towery attended a junior college in Uvalde until illness forced him back into the hospital. During his time at college he met and married Louise Cook in May 1947. After graduating from junior college, he transferred to Texas A&M. But his studies did not last long. The tuberculosis rebounded and he spent the next two years in the hospital.
After returning to his wife and baby boy, Roland, they settled in Cuero, 88 miles southeast of San Antonio.
Becoming a reporter
Towery, who’d always believed in the power of the written word, got a job as a reporter at the Cuero Daily Record, daily circulation of 3,600. His wife taught him to type. They bought a two-bedroom house at the edge of town. He didn’t have experience, but he had great enthusiasm to learn, he wrote in his memoir.
When Towery began to feel competent in his reporting role, his publisher made him managing editor in 1954.
“Far from being glamorous, the role of a small-town editor was mostly plain hard work,” he wrote.
But he finally understood what his community needed from his newspaper. “In time it would produce the feeling that you were the paper and the paper was you.”
Finding the story
During rounds at the county courthouse he came upon the story that would earn him one of the first Pulitzer Prizes for local reporting in Texas.
A secretary told him about a gathering of people at the local country club. It captured her attention, because several people who attended were not members.
Snippets of information kept coming in, Towery wrote, but not enough for a story.
One day, one of the paper’s pressmen received an unexplained document in the mail from the Veterans Land Board. It said the pressman bought some land through the Texas Veterans Land Program, but he was unaware of the transaction. It showed he made a down payment and when the next mortgage payment was due.
“I bought no land,” he told Towery.
The story began to unfurl when people in the small town saw unfamiliar men coming in and out of the county attorney’s office.
The county attorney admitted his office was investigating the sale of land to local vets. Towery wrote the story of suspected irregularities at the Land Board and included the land sale notice his pressman received.
But it wasn’t time for the story yet.
On hold
Two officers involved with the investigation asked Towery’s publisher to hold the story, saying it would interfere with their investigation. Towery and his publisher agreed if they got a heads up when it was ready to print.
Not too much later, the county attorney said their investigation wasn’t getting support at the state level and to publish the story. The county attorney feared the problems went all the way to the top, Towery wrote in his memoir, “The Chow Dipper.”
Despite having no idea how to follow the story, Towery began making rounds in Austin. He met with a colonel he knew from prison camp and on his recommendation talked to the state auditor, known to be fair and honest.
He met dead ends in the attorney general and the governor’s office, although both officials were on the Land Board. At his last stop, he persuaded the land commissioner Bascom Giles to speak with him.
“The interview took a turn I didn’t expect. It was as if he had been waiting, expecting a session like this to develop,” Towery wrote.
Towery’s daughter Alice Towery Gilroy said Giles had answers for questions Towery didn’t know to ask.
‘He rambled’
“My dad didn’t think Giles was involved at all; he just wanted some answers. It was very obvious (Giles) knew more than he should have. My daddy just sat there while he rambled. He started denying things (Towery) hadn’t even thought or brought up,” she said.
He started denying things (Towery) hadn’t even brought up.
alice towery gilroy
Towery wrote he felt heartbroken when he returned to the newspaper because he had looked up to Giles, the man who created the Veterans Land Program. The program was intended to provide a way for returning vets to own a piece of Texas. It offered a low-down payment and a low interest rate for a 40-year mortgage.
Although Towery suspected the fraud later proven true, he had no proof. He wrote the story with Giles’ explanations along with his questions about the irregularities.
Apparently, corporations bought large tracts of land and attached ownership of smaller pieces within the tract to returning veterans without their knowledge, gaining access to state funds through those mortgages. The tracts were valued at an inflated price. When the unsuspecting owners defaulted on the loans they didn’t know they owed, the corporations could pick up the land cheaply and benefit or let the state suffer the loss. Either way, state officials received kickbacks for smoothing the process and looking the other way.
Although Towery worried, his publisher appreciated the story and encouraged Towery to keep after it – just don’t get the paper sued.
Towery wrote follow-up stories.
Story catches fire
Finally the story caught fire and reporters around Texas wrote about it as district attorneys in other counties started investigations.
Ultimately the state auditor found more than $3.5 million was involved in the fraudulent land sales, about $31.9 million in 2025 dollars. The state recouped about $1.2 million. While several people were prosecuted, Giles pled guilty and served three years in prison. One congressman who was indicted, but not tried, lost his election.
Along the way, Towery said he lost some objectivity and began to feel he was on a crusade. He felt empathy for the veterans who’d fought for the system corrupted by politicians who hadn’t shared battlefield dangers or the excruciation of a prison camp.
The fraudulent land dealings were “an injustice to the veterans. He thought he could stop the injustice,” Gilroy said her father told her.
Some of the veterans didn’t understand or weren’t educated about how land sales worked, Gilroy said. Officials, who the veterans trusted, took advantage of that lack of knowledge.
Towery’s publisher submitted his stories to the Pulitzer committee, but Towery did not expect it to win.
A reporter from the Houston Post called to say he had won the prize, he wrote.
The Pulitzer $1,000 check, worth about three months of Towery’s salary, arrived by regular post.
Eventually, 20 people were indicted in nine different counties. The May 3, 1955, episode of Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now” on CBS told the story of the investigation.
“His 1955 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting and his many years of outstanding work at the Cuero Daily Record and several other Texas community newspapers is an inspiration for all journalists to continue shining a light on government and those in authority,” said Micheal (CQ) Hodges, executive director of the Texas Press Association. Towery was inducted into the Texas Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2015.
Towery was also honored with a recent proclamation from the City of Cuero and a current exhibit at the Cuero Heritage Museum.
See the other stories in our series on Ken Towery
More TB treatments
Then Towery was back to the hospital for another year of tuberculosis treatment.
New drugs helped him recover faster.
“A year to rest, eat well and curse Tojo and the Emperor for taking yet another year out of my life,” he wrote, of Hideki Tojo, the prime minister of Japan during the war and Hirohito, Japan’s emperor.
The Pulitzer sparked offers to work for other newspapers. He and his wife, Louise, accepted an offer in 1956 from a chain of newspapers to be part of its capitol bureau and provide stories for papers in Austin, Waco and Port Arthur.
Towery’s star kept rising, although he became disenchanted with the influence politics had on journalism, he wrote.
