by Jan Reid
Tom Davis, a prominent Baylor supporter and the father of a Baylor coed, was so enraged that he and another man fired on Brann as he walked on a downtown street. Brann the Iconoclast, as he was known, also carried a gun. He drew his pistol and flung off several shots, mortally wounding Davis and putting him down in the doorway of a cigar store. But a bullet fired by one of the assailants tore through Brann’s lung. Waco police made him walk to the city jail, though friends were later allowed to carry him to his home. He died the next morning at the age of forty-three.
For many years, the town run by Baptists had a thriving red-light district. In 1916, a black teenager named Jesse Washington was convicted of murdering a white woman in Waco; a mob tortured, mutilated, and burned him to death as police withdrew and a crowd of 15,000 watched the lynching, which was condemned around the world as the Waco Horror. When Cecil Willis and Iona Warren found their first jobs there, members of the Ku Klux Klan dominated local politics and law enforcement. But the town’s reputation and legacy were not all hypocrisy and violence. In 1885, a pharmacist named Charles Alderton, who was employed by Morrison’s Old Corner Drug Store, had started fiddling with the recipe of a sweet syrup that the soda jerks mixed with carbonated water—the secret ingredient was rumored to be prune juice. The name “Dr Pepper” grew out of an ad pitch that the drink would pep you up during the day if you refreshed yourself with one at ten, two, and four o’clock. But when people were drinking their favorite beverage fresh made at Old Morrison’s Corner Drug Store, they simply said, “Let me have a Waco.”
Rich people lived on Waco’s west side. One of those families had arrived in Central Texas in uncommon fashion. In 1926, Dick “Cul” Richards was a World War I navy veteran whose roots were in Iowa, but he got an offer to become the freshman football coach at storied Clemson University. A fellow coach assured Richards that would be a very good offer to accept. Dick Richards’s wife, Eleanor, was tall, broad-shouldered, and assertive. She came from an Iowa family that owned a major seed company and, in the misfortune of those times, some banks that had failed. She had a degree from Grinnell College in Iowa and had started graduate work at Radcliffe before the collapse of her family’s finances. The couple moved to South Carolina, and in the spring of ’26, Cul coached the Tiger baseball team to a record of eight wins and eleven losses. When training for the football season began in August, he was the coach of the freshmen and an assistant with the varsity, but in October the head coach abruptly quit. Richards and another coach were charged with keeping the team together and salvaging the season. The regime lasted two weeks. According to his wife, Richards became so overwrought during his coaching finale that alarmed trainers and doctors packed him in ice, fearing he might die. Dick Richards recovered from the coaching experience and got a sensible degree at Clemson in construction engineering. He was helping build a highway in Texas when the large company that employed him went broke. He and Eleanor were literally stranded in Waco. Their only son, David, was born there in 1933.
Papa Dick, as he came to be known in the family, first found work with a small hardware store and then managed to buy it. Despite his age, he talked his way back into the army in World War II, and when he came back home, the fruits of victory and the clout of Texas’s congressional leaders had bestowed on the small city an army flying school and the Blackland Army Air Field, and nearby is the army’s vast Fort Hood. Using his knowledge and experience as an engineer, he made the hardware store into Richards Equipment Company, which supplied machinery and parts used in road building and other heavy construction. Papa Dick won bids for a sizeable number of military construction projects.
He built the family a large house near the golf course—golf became his athletic obsession after his ill-starred coaching career. The house had leaded glass windows, a brass fireplace, and antiques throughout. Eleanor Richards, nicknamed Mom El, did not adapt as well to life in Waco. Thinking she would finish her graduate degree, she applied at Baylor; the hierarchy of Baptist academics informed her that Baylor would not recognize the credits she had accumulated at Radcliffe. That institution, they ruled, was nothing more than an effete girls’ finishing school, even if it was an affiliate of Harvard University. Contemptuous of such provincialism, Eleanor founded the Waco League of Women Voters and was later a president of the state organization. She expected her son to carry on the family trait of self-reliance. David was terrified as a small boy when his mother put him on a train to go visit relatives in Iowa. It was up to him to negotiate the transfer in the sprawling train station in St. Louis.
Dissatisfied with the quality of public education in Waco, or at least with the way her son took to it, Mom El dispatched him for his junior year to Andover, the famous prep school in a 300-year-old community in the Boston area. One time when David was home, his mother was reading the newspaper and saw a story and photograph about Ann Willis’s trip to Washington as a Texas delegate to Girls Nation. The photo of the delegates showed Ann sitting next to a black girl. In Waco, that probably aroused more comment than her shaking the hand of Harry Truman. On that trip, Ann gained an enduring friend in the granddaughter of Coke Stevenson, the Texas governor who lost the notorious 1948 Democratic runoff for the U.S. Senate to Lyndon Johnson by a fortuitously discovered, and probably fraudulent, eighty-seven votes. Eleanor wondered aloud why her son could not get interested in a smart girl like that? David doubtless gave his mother the silence or harrumph the remark deserved.
Ann said the best part of her high school experiences began the day in 1949 when she met the tall, handsome, and jocular young man who had spent a year at Andover and had then come back for his senior year at Waco High. In her memoir, Straight from the Heart: My Life in Politics and Other Places, written with the help of Peter Knobler, she reminisced, “The A&W Root Beer stand was the local summer hot spot. You’d pull up in your car and they would come out and put a tray on your window, and you’d sit and talk and kids would come over. David was sitting at the A&W when I met him. . . . I thought he was just the nuts.”
He took her out to dinner on their first date following her performance in a school production of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. She had never been around people who ate shrimp; she doubted that she had been in a real restaurant more than half a dozen times in her life. She carefully ordered what he did. As their senior year wore on, they became inseparable. Ann loved the way conversation just took off when she was with him. He had strongly held positions on social matters that most young people their age had not even considered. An English teacher at the high school remarked one day that he had the biggest vocabulary in her class. The praise won him endless razzing from their crowd of friends. “There he goes,” they hooted when he embarked on some lofty statement of principle. Though he had little notion of where his beliefs might lead, David was an idealist. Inspired by his parents’ reading of a story that never got old, he chose for his moral compass a rogue with a conscience and a sense of justice. Ann recalled, “Robin Hood, Little John, Friar Tuck, Maid Marian, Alan-a-Dale—the characters became personal friends of David’s. Intimates. He lived in that world. . . . We would talk about it all the time; it was a recurring theme: ‘What would Robin Hood have done?’”
Going steady with David ushered Ann into a milieu she had never known before. His family traveled, subscribed to magazines like the New Yorker and the New Republic, and talked about political events in the state and country. In her book, she conveyed how inspiring yet intimidating that was for her as an eighteen-year-old:
I felt that I was not equipped, that I could not begin to keep up in this intellectual atmosphere. I’m sure I talked, and I’m sure I talked about things I knew nothing about. But if I did, the family was tolerant of me. A lot of the time, partly out of anxiety, I would retreat and do the dishes. Doing the dishes is a refuge, it’s a place to go when you want to check out; you have an excuse for not being called upon to participate. So I listened and I absorbed everything I could of this very new, very different kind of conve
rsation.
But most exciting were the times when David and Ann crossed a frontier into an entirely different culture. Waco was rigorously segregated then, but the teenagers became regulars at Scenic Wonderland, a dance hall that had been converted from an equipment warehouse on a murky road near the tire plant. Black promoters rented the dance hall on off nights and booked touring jazz and rhythm-and-blues bands. Ann and David and a few other kids who went over there were three years away from being of legal drinking age, but the owner sold them beer. They saw, heard, and danced to Fats Domino, Billy Eckstine, Ruth Brown, and their favorites, the Clovers, a rhythm-and-blues vocal group from Washington, D.C.
Snapshot of Ann, Waco, early 1950s.
Ann said she liked the taste and buzz of beer, but the first time she got really drunk was at the all-night party for seniors just before their graduation. She won scholarship offers for debate from Baylor and Lindenwood, a liberal arts college in St. Charles, Missouri. “Ann really wanted to go to Lindenwood,” David told me. “She had her heart set on it. But her mother just flat refused to let her go.” The Baylor scholarship, her mother said, would cover tuition and allow her to continue living at home.
It was pretty clear to friends and parents where David and Ann were headed, and they were going there fast. Though Eleanor Richards later became a mentor and close friend of Ann, she took steps that slowed them down. “David and I graduated from high school in 1950,” Ann reminisced. “His mother didn’t feel he had received a sufficiently good education at Waco High and was sending him back to Andover for a post-graduate year, which didn’t sit well with David or me. I also believe there must have been an ingredient in his mother’s plans which served to separate us; we were very much in love and we were just children.”
That first semester at Baylor, Ann lived at home. David came back for the Christmas holidays and flatly refused to go back to Andover. He enrolled at the University of Texas in Austin and pledged a fraternity with a big house at the end of the campus’s South Mall. If separating David and Ann was Eleanor Richards’s intent, for a few months it worked. At Baylor, Ann pledged a sorority. She liked the girls, but soon saw the ugly side of sorority rush: one girl was ridiculed and rejected because her father was a mere policeman, another slandered for allegedly whoring around in high school. Ann’s parents let her move into a dorm the second half of her freshman year, and she was doing well on the debate team.
Another boy she dated was on the Baylor debate team and aspired to be a Baptist preacher. Though her parents had taken her to church at Lakeview’s little Methodist church, where her dad was on the board of stewards, Ann did not really embrace religion until the night Billy Graham brought a crusade to the Baylor campus. Graham was as handsome and glamorous as a movie star, and when he finished his sermon and the invitation hymn began, Ann joined the throng streaming down the aisles to commit their souls to Christ. But when the passion of that moment waned, her doubts grew about angels and other tenets of the faith. Also, Iona Willis did not like the notion of this aspiring young minister who had turned her daughter’s head. The life of a preacher’s wife was hard and usually penurious. She knew that Ann would get her hackles up in defiance if told that she couldn’t go out with him anymore, but she regained some control by making Ann move back home.
David had meanwhile identified the bars on the periphery of the University of Texas campus where a minor could buy a beer. He liked the university well enough, but at his fraternity house, he heard remarks that made him gnaw on his tongue. One time Ann got away from her mother for a weekend in Austin—David’s fraternity was having a party—with the explanation that she would be staying with her friend, Coke Stevenson’s granddaughter. “It was the only way we could have gotten Ann down there,” David told me. The night of the party, an Austin outfit called Jack’s Party Pictures took one of the best photos of Ann and David. Holding a beverage aloft, David is wearing a mock turtleneck sweater, the kind of jaunty short-billed cap that Hemingway often wore, and a confident, thoughtful expression. Playing the vamp, Ann is wearing a glossy scarlet cocktail dress with a mildly plunging neckline, lipstick of matching hue, and orchids in her hair. She was a knockout.
Soon David was driving to Waco all the time to go out with her, and she gave up her scholarship because the debate competitions were time consuming and scheduled on weekends. She wanted to spend that time with him. “Ann’s dad was a big friendly guy, a lovely man,” David said. “Ann loved her mother, but she fought to please and satisfy that woman as long as she lived. She’d been opening and reading my letters to Ann since my parents sent me back to Andover. A letter was what compelled us to go ahead and get married. I mean, we were going to do that eventually. But Ann pretty much laid it out—she wrote that we had to get her away from her mother and out of that house.”
David had transferred to Baylor their junior year so they could see more of each other, and with much of their hometown in rubble from a horrific tornado, they got married in May 1953. Ann recalled: “Women were allowed to get married at eighteen, but in order to get the license David needed his daddy’s signed permission and I teased him about that a whole lot.” She also teased him about the matrimony: “The service was broadcast over the PA ‘so the congregation could hear the vows.’ Most of what they heard was David whispering, ‘Which way do I go? Which way do I go?’” They honeymooned in New Orleans and on the beach in Biloxi, Mississippi. Back in Waco, they lived in a small apartment complex; that summer, he worked for his dad’s equipment company and she worked in a dress shop. The next year they graduated from Baylor.
Later in life, David also wrote a memoir, Once Upon a Time in Texas: A Liberal in the Lone Star State, which is a revealing counterpoint to Ann’s description of experiences and events they shared. David described a personal turning point that occurred one day when he was hanging out with cronies at Waco’s country club. Suddenly, he blurted that he was going to vote for the liberal and populist lawyer Ralph Yarborough in his 1954 attempt to unseat the Texas governor, Allan Shivers. Political races in Texas were then decided by factions of conservative and liberal Democrats, with Republicans effectively a small third party. But Shivers, the conservative Democratic governor, had organized his forces to help the GOP war hero Dwight Eisenhower carry Texas in the 1952 presidential election against the urbane Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson. David thought Shivers was a bigoted scoundrel. But his friends at the country club reacted to his outburst in support of Yarborough by staring at him as if he had lost his mind.
David Richards and Ann Willis dressed up for a college party in Austin, about 1952.
Newlyweds David and Ann Richards, Waco, 1953.
My childhood as part of what passed for Waco society had certainly been privileged. I had been exposed to the dubious benefits of an eastern prep school and University of Texas fraternity life, both of which soured me on the values of the moneyed social order. More importantly, I suspect, I had been nourished on Robin Hood as a child and had discovered John Dos Passos’ trilogy U.S.A. in my youth, which I may have read more for sexual titillation than for political content. In all events, somewhere along the line my disgust quota had overflowed, probably caused by a combination of racism, McCarthyism, and the smugness of the pooh-bahs who ran things, and I slipped my moorings.
David and Ann graduated from Baylor in 1954. The Soviet Union had the atomic bomb, the Korean War had ended in stalemate after intervention by the Communist Chinese, and David was going to be a conscript in the menacing Cold War if he didn’t come up with a plan fast. He had majored in history, not the most financially useful degree. His parents urged him to consider going back east to pursue an MBA at Wharton, the business school at the University of Pennsylvania. But he won admittance to the University of Texas law school, which extended his student deferment, and Ann took graduate speech and education classes at the university that certified her as a public school teacher.
David thought law school was boring but politics was fun. In 1956,
he was recruited to attempt a palace coup within the University of Texas Young Democrats, and he won the election. “The problem was,” Ann wrote, “David had never run a meeting before. Here he was president with a full agenda and work to get done. I had taken a course in parliamentary procedure at Baylor, so I became the parliamentarian.” These were not college students just playing at politics. Men who were well into their thirties jousted for power in the Young Democrats, for it was a major faction of the liberal wing of the party. Ann and David’s first Democratic precinct convention, held at an Austin grade school, was attended by hundreds of contentious people. Hoping to quiet the insurgents down, the precinct party chief made David an alternate delegate to the Travis County convention in 1956. That was little more than a pat on the head, so he went to the state fairgrounds in Dallas, where he climbed through an open window in a restroom and crashed the party’s state convention with a counterfeit ticket printed by Henry Holman, the president of the Austin carpenters union, and Jean Lee, a longtime conspirator among Austin liberals and the wife of the famous photographer Russell Lee.
The insurgents were thrilled and Lyndon Johnson was incensed when the liberals ousted the Shivers faction and sent to the national convention as Texas’s party chief Frankie Randolph, a Houston woman who inspired and helped fund many liberal causes and organizations, among them the muckraking Texas Observer. All this brought David and Ann into a hotbed of political dissent in Texas. Their faction of the liberal revolt met at the venerable Scholz Garten in Austin, where raconteurs on the shaded outdoor patio ignored the muffled clatter coming from the German Texan owners’ adjoining private ninepin bowling alley. The Richardses’ embrace of Democratic politics brought them into the lively circle of Henry Holman and his wife, Mary, a nurse who loved to dance drunk around campfires and roam off on spur-of-the-moment adventures in Mexico; Sam Houston Clinton, a cigar-smoking attorney who had once been David’s Sunday-school teacher and basketball coach in Waco; Fletcher Boone, a talented but un-prolific artist and an instinctive comic; and Wayne Oakes, a liberal scuffler and former junior college history teacher who loved to whack chords on his guitar and in a painful tenor sing cowboy laments like “Goodbye, Old Paint, I’m Leaving Cheyenne” and the Democrats’ 1936 song of triumph, “We’ve Got Franklin Delano Roosevelt Back Again.” Ann recalled that a lot of their politicking at Scholz’s centered not on issues or strategy but on who was qualified to sit at the table reserved for the Horses Association, alias the Horses Asses, with Henry Holman its long-serving vice horse.