James Harlan Granberry Sr. is an American politician who served as the mayor of Lubbock, Texas from 1970 to 1972. He guided the city through a series of tornadoes that shattered the region on May 11, 1970. He imposed a curfew to restore order. He had just become mayor when the tornadoes occurred. He served only one two-year term from 1970-1972. He was a member of the Lubbock City Council from 1966-1970. He did not seek a second two-year term in 1972 and was succeeded by city councilman Morris W. Turner. Mayors and council members in Texas are all officially nonpartisan, but Granberry was known to be a Republican. In 1974, Granberry was the Texas Republican gubernatorial nominee. He won only 7 of the 254 counties and hence lost the general election by a wide margin to incumbentDemocratic Governor Dolph Briscoe of Uvalde.
Gubernatorial race
Granberry was opposed for the Republican gubernatorial nomination by Odell McBrayer, the candidate of what later became known as the "Religious Right". Granberry handily defeated McBrayer, an attorney, 53,617 votes to 15,489 ballots in a low-turnout primary. Granberry was the choice of Republican U.S. Senator John G. Tower, the nominal head of the Texas GOP at the time. He would carry his party's tattered banner in the year in which the national party was dragged down by the Watergate scandal, which had forced the resignation of U.S. President Richard M. Nixon. Dolph Briscoe hence defeated Granberry in the strongly Democratic year nationwide. Briscoe polled 1,016,334 votes, compared to 514,725 for Granberry, and 93,295 for the HispanicRaza Unida Party nominee, Ramsey Muñiz, who had also been the La Raza candidate in 1972. Another approximately thirty thousand ballots were cast for other candidates. Briscoe, who had served the last two-year gubernatorial term in Texas, therefore became the first Texas governor to win a four-year term since the establishment of the Texas Constitution of 1876. Yet, Briscoe polled 617,159 fewer votes against Granberry than he had with his initial election in 1972 against the conservative Republican Henry Cushing Grover of Houston, because of a much lower turnout in 1974.
Bush "Beer Bash"
In 1978, Granberry advised congressional candidate George W. Bush, who was seeking to succeed the retiring veteran DemocratGeorge Mahon of Lubbock. Bush said that Granberry urged him to "expose Hance's ownership" of a Lubbock bar across the street from Texas Tech that sold beer to Tech students. But Bush declined to do so. An advertisement appeared in the Texas Tech University newspaper in Lubbock which invited students to a "beer bash" at Granberry's home to drum up support for Bush. Hance, the Democrat candidate who defeated Bush in that election, attributed his victory more to the endorsement by Mahon than from public outrage over the "beer bash."
