by Jan Reid
We were perhaps ten minutes into our adventure when I said to David, “Which side of that rock do you want to go on?” David said, “What rock?” We hit it sideways. The rapid just dumped us right out, filled the canoe with water, and wrapped it clear around the rock. I was still fiddling with this damn thing on my wrist when David and some others drug me out of the river.
When you get into river canyons, the only way out is down. . . . David got in with Joe Christie, who had been canoeing by himself, and I got in the center of Tony and Claire’s. Our boat became known as Tony and his Oars. Much laughing and snickering about that.
Although the rude start to that trip proved they had much to learn as canoeists, it also demonstrated David’s pluck as a lawyer. He decided they ought to be able to collect for their lost possessions on their homeowner’s policy. The insurance company scoffed, retorting that their canoe was not a vehicle. David searched and found a precedent in which a judge had ruled that a vehicle is any form of conveyance, “including the patient mule or an ocean liner.”
The insurance carrier threw up its hands and paid up. Of course, it might have been argued that the jurist who wrote that opinion knew very little about the patience of mules.
The Richardses’ kids grew up steeped in politics, of course. “One time in Dallas,” Cecile recalled, “the parents of some kid had taken me out to Fair Park, and the people there were giving away all sorts of stuff—emery boards and things like that. I came home with a bag supplied by HLH Enterprises. My dad blew a gasket. There were so many bad guys, and H. L. Hunt was the worst. And in fact you’d go in a store and gape at all the HLH products on the shelves.
“In Dallas we were kind of against everything. It made us the way we are. My dad was really into progressive labor politics, and we took part in the melon boycott, the lettuce boycott. I remember Mom taking us to the local supermarket, and she got the store manager out there and started demanding to see the boxes that the lettuce came in, so she could see if they were union or non-union. And it worked. Mom and Virginia agitated well enough that many grocers decided it was just easier to buy the union-picked produce.”
David calculated that he and Ann and the three Dallas couples whom they saw the most had a total of sixteen children. That encouraged a family tradition of campouts where musicians played guitars and sang as sparks from the fires swirled toward the sky. Cecile said of the campouts, “They could put us in the station wagon and they could go out and put up the tents and drink a lot and stay up all night. Dallas didn’t really lend itself to that.” One of the campfire guitarists and raw-voiced singers was Stan Alexander, who had known and performed with Janis Joplin at Kenneth Threadgill’s storied beer joint when he was a graduate student in Austin. Now he taught English in Denton at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas), and at one of the parties, he brought along a student named Eddie Wilson, who became part of the gang. Though he was not a musician, Eddie belonged to a folk music club sponsored by Alexander; with members that included the future recording artists Michael Martin Murphey, Steven Fromholz, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and Spencer Perskin, the collegiate club played an essential role in the Texas music boom that soon exploded in Austin.
David met another new friend, Shel Hershorn, one night in 1964 while he was punching doorbells in their neighborhood and asking folks for support in his bid to be reelected the Democratic precinct chairman. Hershorn was a prominent photojournalist who worked on assignment for Time, Life, and Sports Illustrated, capturing images of Lee Harvey Oswald, catfish grabbers in Mississippi, the devastation of Hurricane Carla, and Red Adair putting out an oil-well fire. Hershorn at once dispatched David to post bail for a black man who had been arrested for demonstrating at a Piccadilly Cafeteria. The warm friendship with Shel and his family in turn brought into the Richardses’ circle two sportswriters and authors of growing renown, Edwin “Bud” Shrake and Gary “Jap” Cartwright.
Bud spent the first part of his boyhood in the country town of Mansfield, but grew up on the outskirts of Fort Worth. Across the street from his home was a golf course where Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson had once caddied for his dad. When he was a student at Texas Christian University in the early fifties, Bud began to find his voice while writing about crime, sports, and racial strife for the often-sensationalist Fort Worth Press. Bud persuaded Gary Cartwright, another young reporter, to come over from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Gary’s dark, angular features were inherited from a grandmother who was a Comanche, but an old hand in the pressroom confused him with a past intern and complained about that useless Jap being back among them. Despite changing modes of political correctness, the nickname stuck; though he never used it in his byline, among his friends it was a term of endearment. Mentored by the editor Blackie Sherrod and running with other Press stalwarts, including the future best-selling novelist Dan Jenkins, Bud loped through his beats in stylish threads, sometimes sporting a Bogart-style fedora. He moved on to bigger papers and readerships, first at the Dallas Times-Herald and then the Morning News, where he was soon followed from Fort Worth by Jap.
“The halfback did what?” Fort Worth Press sportswriter Gary Cartwright interviews a chimpanzee in a spoof promotion for the newspaper, late 1950s.
In those newsrooms, the sportswriters were recognized and also resented as artists and stylists, the designated free spirits. Bud was the tall, handsome, twice-published novelist who would soon follow Jenkins to New York and Sports Illustrated. He was the Morning News’s star columnist, and for a while, he lent his local celebrity to an in-crowd bar called Bud Shrake West—until some bills didn’t get paid and managers provoked the ire of hoodlums who had a monopoly on the jukebox and pinball-machine trade. Jap was abrupt, unpredictable, and mercilessly funny. A photo of him as a brash young reporter shows him squatting on his haunches and scribbling on a notepad as he interviews a chimpanzee in shoulder pads that appears to be having a good time, too.
Jap said that the first time they arrived at one of those parties on Lovers Lane, Ann and their friends were engaged in a contest to see who could talk the dirtiest. The crowd would improvise games of dirty-talk charades, offering lines such as “With My Thighs Wide Open I’m Creaming.” On the scale of social wildness, the new arrivals must have found it pretty tame. Before the Kennedy assassination, Jap and Bud drank whiskeys on the house many nights at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club; Bud regularly shacked up with Ruby’s star stripper, Jada. Jap later wrote in a 1975 Texas Monthly article that her act “consisted mainly of hunching a tiger-skin rug and making wild orgasmic sounds with her throat,” adding that “as a grand climax Jada would spread her legs and pop her G-string.” She loved to drive around Dallas in a gold Cadillac with “her orange hair piled high on her head, wearing high heels and a mink coat and nothing else.”
Bud and Jap developed a mock-acrobatic act called the Flying Punzars. They pulled the stunt one night at a swank club as guests of Lamar Hunt, who owned the Dallas Texans, the American Football League team that was fighting a local tug-of-war with the Dallas Cowboys, the National Football League’s expansion franchise. (Hunt later moved his Texans to Kansas City, where they became the Chiefs.) Bud and Jap liked the son of H. L. Hunt, and that night the Punzars wore not their costume tights and capes but red team blazers provided by members of the Texans’ front office. Hunt’s publicist took the mike and told members of the audience that the football team’s distinguished guests were going to perform the death-defying triple. The drummer of the club’s jazz combo contributed a slow roll of his sticks as they began. Cartwright described the performance in his book HeartWiseGuy.
We had no idea what we were about to do, absolutely none. Shrake, who at six-feet-six is at least eight inches taller than me, crouched slightly to reduce the difference in our sizes, then clasped his fingers, making a foothold for me. I came running at him full-speed, leaping at the last second and attempting to engage my right foot in his clasped hands. Instead, my foot landed squarely against his chest, se
nding Shrake tumbling backward into the drummer. I fell across both of them, knocking over a set of cymbals, which crashed into more cymbals, creating a racket that sounded like the bombing of Dresden. As was our custom, we sprang to our feet and began to bow profusely and blow kisses to the audience, which sat stunned in an icy silence.
David Richards’s days as an elected political official did not last long. Voters in their neighborhood turned him out as their precinct chairman in 1964 in favor of a dentist. At the polling station, he was puzzled by the hostility directed at him by neighbors and Democrats who had supported him before. He then found out that “all the voters in the precinct had received a mailing, over Governor Connally’s signature, warning them that their precinct chairman—David Richards—was a lawyer for Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters Union.” That had not been anything close to the truth for several years. David was stung by his defeat but rather proud that Connally and his team knew who he was, and apparently thought he was important enough to carry their animus all the way down to the precinct level.
When David and Ann and the children had left Washington in 1962, he thought that someday he might like to try working there again. Ann was fed up with Dallas and no less eager to give D.C. another try. The opportunity came in 1967 when David and Ann’s liberal hero, Ralph Yarborough, became chairman of the Senate Labor Committee. With some lobbying, David got himself hired chief counsel to the committee. In a festive mood, he and Ann flew up to the capital to house-hunt. They had a fine reunion and dinner with their friends Harry and Clay McPherson—he was by then counsel to President Johnson. The next morning, David went to be sworn in and have his welcome-aboard meeting with Senator Yarborough. Everything went well until David mentioned that he and Ann had dined with Harry and his wife, Clay, the previous evening.
Yarborough threw a fit. He launched into a rage about the horrid people in the White House, claiming that Johnson was determined to destroy him. As David later put it, “He made it clear that no one on his staff could consort with any Johnson people.” David knew that LBJ had talked some conservative Democrats out of running against Yarborough in the 1964 congressional elections. Johnson had not changed his mind about Yarborough, but he did not want any complications sprouting on his home turf as he geared up for his onslaught against Barry Goldwater. And on the subject of Johnson, Yarborough’s paranoia and jealousy overmatched all logic. David knew himself well enough to know he would not put up with such tantrums. That night, he and Ann agreed that bad as Dallas was, they did not need to tackle Washington with David employed as an unhappy Senate staffer. The new job lasted twenty-four hours.
Original Flying Punzars, Dallas, mid-1960s. Bud Shrake, seated at left, compares notes with Gary Cartwright, at right, as they prepare for a performance of their mock acrobatic group. Standing is the duo’s “catcher,” famed Fort Worth and Dallas sports columnist and editor Blackie Sherrod. In the group’s Austin revival Sherrod’s role was assumed by the singer Jerry Jeff Walker.
In a funk, they returned to Dallas, their house and children, and the law practice downtown. David salvaged morale with cases he took pro bono for the Texas chapter of the ACLU. One of those was a civil rights case that unfolded in federal courts for several months. David’s client was Brent Stein, who wrote under the pen name Stoney Burns. He was a hippie journalist who had been kicked out of SMU and had started publishing an underground paper called Dallas Notes. One night the police raided his house with a search warrant for obscene material. Burns responded with an editorial in which he doubted that the forbidden words in his paper were making the Dallas police horny. “It may be possible, however, to visit the men’s room of City Hall and find a pig holding a copy of Notes in his left hand and jacking off with his right.” This time they really came down on him.
With a measure of delight, David took the case and honed an argument that writing about pornography was not pornography—it was an issue of free speech. A three-judge federal panel responded to the lawsuit by declaring the Texas obscenity statute unconstitutional. The state’s attorneys appealed the ruling, and David argued the case before the Supreme Court in 1970. Though William O. Douglas dissented, with harsh words for the behavior of the Dallas police, the majority ruled it was not an issue in which federal courts should countermand the authority of the states. In a way, it was a victory for David because the case helped persuade the legislature to repeal the obscenity statute, and the charges against Burns were dropped.
Also, members of the Richards family came up to Washington for David’s appearance in the big show. Ann described her experience in the hallowed gallery. “You cannot sleep in the Supreme Court. I know, because I had Dan and Cecile with me, and one particularly vigilant usher kept signaling me every time Dan’s head hit my shoulder. Dan was all of ten years old at the time, but in the Supreme Court they are sticklers for the rules.”
Ann continued to entertain herself with the Christmas cards she made with Betty McKool and with the annual Political Paranoia shows of the North Dallas Democratic Women. In a 1968 takeoff on The Wizard of Oz, they cast George Romney (Mitt’s father) as the Scarecrow, Nelson Rockefeller as the Cowardly Lion, and Richard Nixon as the Tin Man. Ronald Reagan had gotten elected governor of California in 1966 largely on the strength of an impassioned speech he had made in favor of the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater. The Dallas women wrote Reagan into the skit, singing:
Oh I know that I’m a cutie
Just a little Tootie-Fruitie
But I want to have my day
I can sing and dance and yo-yo
I’m a Hollywood-a-go-go
And I want to run and play
Of that time in their lives, Ann reminisced in her book about going to Mission, Texas, with their children to attend the kickoff of a César Chávez–inspired farmworkers’ march on Austin. “The night before,” she wrote, “the farm workers held a dance in a VFW hall or perhaps it was just some storage building for a Catholic church. It was hot and dusty, but when we walked in the music was wonderful and lively, and people were dancing, ranging around the whole floor to blaring mariachi trumpets. Cecile was [nine] years old and she looked over with a big smile on her face and said, ‘You know, Mama, this is my first dance!’”
Near the end of the three-hundred-mile march, Governor Connally, other elected officials, and a hefty contingent of Texas Rangers confronted the farmworkers and tried to intimidate them into turning back when they were just thirty miles from the capital. David walked with the strikers the last ten miles of the march.
But of that period Ann also wrote, “What was really going on from day to day in my life, was birthday parties for little kids, Easter egg hunts, Indian Guide meetings, Campfire Girl meetings, Girl Scouts, ironing shirts, cooking large quantities of food not only for a good-sized family but also for parties and meetings. This is what went on at our house all the time. All the time.”
As an adult, Cecile Richards told me her impression of her mother’s state of mind in those days: “We used to have the most elaborate Easter egg hunts at our house. Hundreds of people with kids would come. We always had an enormous Christmas, over the top. Mom was a woman with all this energy and talent, but there wasn’t a way she could really express herself. Four kids, you don’t have a lot of options. Twenty years of your life just raising kids must have been hard. I think there was a lot of intensity in how she lived, and a lot of resentment.” One could not find any evidence that Ann had a notion she might one day run for public office—or find much fulfillment in who and where she was at that time. “I can’t tell you how important it was that we finally got out of Dallas,” David told me. “For Ann especially. I was so overwhelmed and isolated in my work, and she was at home coping with all those children. We were just so forlorn.”
CHAPTER 4
Mad Dogs and First Fridays
By 1969, Ann and David felt they could no longer stand living in Dallas. They looked at San Antonio and Corpus Christi as towns with more tolerable politic
al and lifestyle climates and some possibilities for a new law practice, but from the beginning, Austin was the destination they longed for. Two years earlier, Sam Whitten had gotten a job teaching in the library school at the University of Texas, and the Whittens bought a two-story rock house near the campus that would soon become famous for its parties of hard-drinking liberals. During the time that the Whittens were away, David and Ann loaded up their children on weekends about once a month and drove down to visit their closest friends. The Richardses’ chance to act on their wishes emerged at a political party in Austin one night—Sam Houston Clinton asked David (who by now was being called Dave by most of his friends and colleagues) whether he would care to join him in his practice. Though David had known the older man in Waco, their friendship had put down deep roots at gatherings of the Young Democrats and labor unions and during many nights at the Scholz Garten.
The Richardses were given pause by their forays to Washington, which had not gone well. They thought their children were old enough to have a voice in such an important matter. The parents called the family together one evening, took votes by shows of hands, and frankly told the kids that they had a plan to move to Austin, but that they really didn’t know how it would work out. Cecile was eleven, Dan was nine, Clark was six, and Ellen was four. On hearing the prospect of moving to Austin, the kids raised a clamor as if they were about to go off on one of their camping expeditions. Dan had one caveat and specific request—could they please find a house on a street where, if he had a dog, it would not always get run over?