by Jan Reid
She had a green rubber stamp that read “Bullshit.” She used it often in her correspondence with Zabel. One day, she banged the stamp on a copy of a letter from a small-town district attorney who had written to a representative in support of a House bill that increased the fines in Texas for prostitution convictions: “The fine is still a maximum of two hundred dollars. It’s a simple matter of arithmetic to see that a prostitute only has to have eight customers in order to pay a two hundred dollar fine. She can generally do this or more in one night.” Beside her “Bullshit” stamp Ann wrote: “The insidious effects of inflation are felt in all segments of society. Eight tricks a night is damned hard work.”
Another day, she read a copy of a profile of Marabel Morgan, the author of a best-selling book titled The Total Woman (1973). Ann underlined a passage in which Morgan announced, “God thought up sexual intercourse. In the marriage relationship, sex is as clean and pure as eating cottage cheese. Do it! Work at it! Your husband needs it every 48 hours!” Ann wrote in the margin, “Who needs an every other day kinda guy?”
Another time she wrote Doug a memo in response to a United Press International dispatch that Johnny Sartain, a city manager of the Dallas suburb of Lewisville, had been keeping a Thompson submachine gun in the city hall vault, sometimes under his desk, ever since dope-smoking hippies had danced naked and splashed in a crowd of 200,000 at an outdoor rock festival six years earlier, in 1969. Doug, one of the happy members of the throng at Lewisville, sent a courier to Ann with a copy of the machine-gun story. Sartain told the UPI he had several other Tommy guns in backup in case the hippies started a riot and stormed his office. In her memo to Zabel, Ann replied:
Dear Doctor,
My dedication to the council/manager form of government is renewed by the tenacity and good judgment of Johnny Sartain. “Preparedness” has always been my watchword and a riot without a machine gun would hardly make news much less put Lewisville on the map. . . . I once knew a fellow that carried a rubber in his billfold—hedging against emergencies and on the preparedness thesis, until one terribly hot summer day when the age and the heat of the appliance caused it to melt and adhere to his driver’s license. He was much more law-abiding when driving as a consequence for fear of having to produce the bonded member. I would suggest that the moral is much the same in Mr. Sartain’s case and that Lewisville is a morally tighter place, knowing that Sartain has his Tommy under his desk. All of this typing has exhausted me as [your] senator caused me to be over-served last evening. If I were not in such extremis, I would tell the story of the monkey and the chicken but that will have to wait until my next comment on the news of the day.
Oh yes. Please do not write suggestive things to me like “We do not have nuts like this in District 9.” I am not interested in your nuts or the nuts of any of your constituents.
Mz Ann
CHAPTER 7
Landslides
Ann gave up the job on Weddington’s staff after the 1975 legislative session, but the political pace only quickened in her life. In anticipation of the next year’s local elections, a group of Austin activists approached David about challenging a veteran county commissioner who had started to rub some constituents the wrong way. The most persistent rap on Johnny Voudouris was that he no longer felt obliged to return constituents’ telephone calls. Also, he just appeared vulnerable; the liberals thought they had a chance to insert another one of their own in Austin’s power structure. David weighed the matter for a while and decided that he was not well suited to be a candidate for anything. It was a wise decision, Ann remarked afterward. David, she felt, would have made a stellar commissioner but a lousy candidate—he was not very good at suffering fools.
With David out of the picture, talk swung to Ann as a candidate. For several weeks the matter got a thorough airing at the customary watering holes. “I was the one who talked her into it,” said Jap Cartwright. “We were at Scholz’s one night and she was carrying on about how ‘you guys’ ought to get out there and do something besides just talk, and I said, ‘Why don’t you run, Ann?’” A politico named Carlton Carl contended that, in fact, he was the one who talked her into it. The two friends agreed, at least, that a conversation in the storied Scholz Garten launched her political career.
But the decision could only be Ann’s, and she was inclined to turn down the opportunity—it frightened her, for deeply personal reasons. For someone who had taken up the intellectual cause of the burgeoning women’s movement, she clung to some rigid opinions about the adaptability of men. She wrote in her memoir: “In truth, I was afraid that if I ran for public office and was successful and served, it would be the end of my marriage. . . . I don’t care how much things change, or how much men say ‘I’m going to be a helpmate and I want somebody who is independent and responsible.’ The truth of the matter is, men expect somebody to put food on the table for them, to provide for all of those little things that keep life together. That’s all there is to it.”
Sarah Weddington, former Texas state representative and one of the Texas attorneys who successfully argued Roe v. Wade, presented this photograph with a note of congratulations to Ann, her former chief of staff, for her election as Travis County commissioner. From left are David Richards, University of Texas historian and friend Standish Meacham, Ann, and Weddington.
Their marriage had been adrift for some time. But David argued that it would be a mistake for her to pass up this chance. To her amazement, David wanted her to go for it. “He said, ‘Don’t do that. Don’t tell them no. You will wonder all your life whether you could have done it or not. And in the end, you’ll probably be good at it.’” Reassured, she was methodical and thorough in thinking the race through. She asked friends to help pull together totals of other races in which candidates had run against the Austin establishment. Then she and David and the kids drove to a condo on South Padre Island, where they often vacationed, and while the kids fished and beachcombed, Ann and David pored over the totals—not just races of comparable candidates, but also for elections involving low-turnout bond referendums and proposed amendments to the state constitution. They spent hours walking the long white beaches, comparing mental notes on the numbers they read. Ann came out of the exercise convinced she could win.
During the 1972 campaigns of Sarah Weddington and Sissy Farenthold, Ann had become the friend of Jane Hickie, a tall, abrupt, and intense young woman who would have a sterling career as a lawyer. She came from a Central Texas ranching family, but she was a graduate of Mount Holyoke and was the past president of the Texas Women’s Political Caucus. “I thought at the time,” Ann wrote in her memoir, “and I think today, that Jane was one of the brightest people I had ever met. She had tremendous organizational capabilities, unlimited energy, and real dedication. And she wanted to be a political player.”
In strategizing Ann’s county race, they bore down with yellow highlighters on a how-to campaign workbook published by the National Women’s Education Fund in 1974. It posed a series of qualifying questions for potential candidates:
Home Life: What is the attitude of the candidate’s family toward her candidacy? Are they willing to commit time to the campaign and sacrifice their time with her? Can they take criticism which is aimed at her? How can changes in lifestyle (housekeeping, cooking, driving the children) be accomplished most harmoniously to add campaigning to her schedule? Physical and Mental Endurance: Is her health good? Can she withstand a non-stop schedule day in and day out? What are her sleeping and eating requirements? If she smokes, can she abstain for long periods in “smoking prohibited” places? Can she withstand tension and frustration? Can she take public and/or personal criticism? Can she take defeat?
Ann and Hickie built their strategy on identifying three voting precincts that should be friendly, three where her prospects were probably so-so, and three where she expected a hostile response. Ann’s home turf in the county was not easy to figure. Many residents of West Lake Hills were affluent, had some connection to
the university, and brought with them academics’ customary aloofness regarding local politics. There was a varied assortment of hippies, musicians, recluses, oddballs, retirees, and drug dealers in the unincorporated developments strung along the shores of the Colorado River’s connected reservoirs, Lake Travis and Lake Austin. And there were the cedar choppers—people who had hung on to fragments of families’ failed ranches and farms and let old trucks and plows rust in the lower pastures and watched the water-sucking mountain cedars turn every acre of onetime prairie into impassable brakes and, during the frequent droughts, a terrible fire hazard. The only thing they could do with their land was to crank up chain saws and harvest some of the trees for sale as fence posts. Their hardscrabble way of life was threatened by the approach of Austin suburbs and a resulting spike in property taxes, and if they were even inclined to vote, they probably would not be thrilled to see a middle-class woman rolling up their unpaved roads at beer and suppertime.
Ann’s strategy was to leave those people alone, allowing direct mail and radio and television ads to make the introductions and change a few minds. Of great importance, David Butts, Carlton Carl, and other emerging young politicos mobilized college students. Conservative legislators had for years fought to ensure that if university students registered and voted at all, they would have to go back to their hometowns to do it. In 1971, Congress and the states, with the support of President Nixon, put into law the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the legal voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. The amendment was a concession to one of the bitter disputes over the Vietnam War, namely, that young adults could be drafted and put at risk of being maimed or killed, but in most states they were not able to vote for or against those who would send them into harm’s way. Anticipating that the amendment would be ratified, conservative legislators in Texas passed a bill requiring collegians to register and vote in the counties where their parents lived. It was a brazen attempt to suppress turnout; the powers in control of Texas figured that not many students would do that, and it would negate their promise as a voting bloc.
Bob Bullock was the secretary of state appointed by then-governor Preston Smith. The ex-legislator from Hillsboro was regularly impugned in Austin as a drunk, a thug, a bully, and a bagman for Smith. One of Bullock’s most fabled stunts came on the night he staggered from a house where he had been chased by a quarrel with his wife to a car that resembled one owned by Carlton Carl; he thought he had better snooze a little in the backseat before heading home. He sacked out in the wrong car, and when he woke up, a total stranger was speeding along. He sat up, thrust his hand over the man’s shoulder, and in his deep growl of a voice scared the poor driver out of his wits: “Hello there, I’m Bob Bullock. I’m your secretary of state!”
Galveston’s senator A. R. “Babe” Schwartz once said of Bullock, “He was the most atrocious human being who ever lived.” When Smith was leaving the governor’s office, senators rudely “busted” his nomination of Bullock as an insurance commissioner. Bullock said that rejection was one of the most painful things he ever endured, and for years he schemed ways to get even with those senators, who included Houston’s Barbara Jordan. Even when she won a seat in Congress from Houston and became the voice of moral and constitutional authority in the televised Watergate hearings, he grumbled that she was a fraud and phony. Yet Bullock had many liberal friends and admirers, among them Molly Ivins, and despite his erratic moods and tantrums, people who worked for him tended to be extremely loyal.
As secretary of state, he was Texas’s chief election officer. Around the same time, David Richards started expanding his practice to include cases involving voting rights and civil rights. In a case in behalf of students at Prairie View A&M, an all-black school in Waller County, he did not persuade a federal judge that their right to vote freely was being violated. Seeking a friendlier court, he got his friend John Duncan, the director of the Texas Civil Liberties Union, to round up some aggrieved students at North Texas State University in Denton. The case named Bullock as a defendant, along with the local tax assessor. David did not know Bullock enough to predict what he might say, but he was well acquainted with Bullock’s staff expert on elections, Buck Wood, who signaled that despite being a defendant in the suit, the boss was sympathetic to the students’ aims. The federal judge with jurisdiction over Denton County was William Wayne Justice, a hero to liberals and scourge of conservatives. Lyndon Johnson had appointed Justice to the federal bench, and he served notice of the power he would wield when he forced desegregation of the state’s public schools in 1970. In this voting-rights case, he was quite pleased with Bullock’s deposition. Bullock astonished lawyers from the attorney general’s office, who were defending him, and infuriated the political old guard by his assessment of the election law: “I think it was placed there, to be very honest about it, to discourage students from voting.”
Judge Justice thanked him for the input and declared the Texas law null and void. Justice’s ruling transformed races in Austin and Travis County. And it is worth emphasizing: by freeing thousands of University of Texas students to vote, David Richards’s courtroom activism and Bob Bullock’s act of principle jump-started Ann’s political career.
Ann had developed a strong belief that candidates who espoused the old saw of walking every block and shaking every hand were liars or losers or both. She relied on volunteers to roam through the city, putting up yard signs and handing out flyers. In neighborhoods that her numbers indicated should be friendly, she sent potential supporters two mailings of campaign postcards—ideally with some personalized handwritten note—and tried to visit every house once. When interrupting people’s evenings, she knew to be friendly, brief, direct, and flexible. One time she came upon a house where a large flock of pigeons was cooing and rustling on the roof. She remarked to the woman who came to the door that she had some mighty fine pigeons. The woman snapped that she’d like to kill them all. Ann quickly changed her tune—oh, what a sorry mess they made! The woman went on that Austin’s unpopular resident atheist, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, had lived a block away and put out food for the pigeons. Then she moved away, and the pigeons shifted en masse to the neighbor’s roof, fouling the place and cooing their demands for birdseed.
Ann stated her positions and proposed solutions to pressing county issues to the editorial board of the Austin American-Statesman and won its endorsement; she believed that happened, in truth, because she charmed the editor, who had worked for a Waco paper in prior years and was fond of her Uncle Jimmie, the motorcycling photographer.
Ann had learned she had the gift for being a ham in the “Political Paranoia” skits in Dallas. In Austin, an all-male club of well-heeled professionals and business leaders called the Headliners Club entertained themselves once a year with a program of freewheeling humor. In 1976, the club invited Johnny Voudouris and Ann to the party. Voudouris ignored his invitation, but Ann conspired with a friend named Cactus Pryor, who had been LBJ’s favorite comic, on an attention-getting stunt. In the county’s parks, Voudouris had stenciled his name on all the heavy-duty trash cans. Pryor helped Ann get one of them onstage, and after he warmed up the crowd, she popped out of the barrel, swung her legs to the floor, whirled it around, and, with a grin, displayed one of her bumper stickers, which covered up the incumbent’s name. Some of the most powerful men in the city guffawed in appreciation, and they later wrote checks to her campaign.
Ann also sought the advice and support of Commissioner Richard Moya. He shrugged and grinned in telling me how he played both sides of the fence. “I knew and liked Ann from the time she helped me in my second race. But I had my own seat to look out for, and the people who voted me in. Johnny Voudouris had been on that court a long time, and if he won again, I didn’t need for him to be antagonized. Johnny thought the student vote wouldn’t amount to anything, and he told me, ‘A woman’s never going to get elected county commissioner. People know that job’s about roads and bridges.’”
Ann did not he
sitate to call on her old friends for help. In October, on a fund-raising letter thanking contributors, Ann added a handwritten postscript to Bud Shrake: “Since you have regularly financed my campaign, I want you to know that we can do some pretty progressive things at the courthouse. When you get a marriage license now, the woman is given a gift bag containing samples of (1) remover for neck rings on collar, (2) Rolaids, (3) Bufferin, (4) Massengill’s douche powder. When I am elected, we are going to give the men something.”
Years later, Clark Richards wound up living near Zilker Elementary School and served there as its precinct chair in elections. He told me that in that initial race, his mother and her team considered that precinct in the Barton Hills area the bellwether. Conrad Fath, whom Clark’s father described as “one of the world’s great fishermen, storytellers, and Democrats,” was then the precinct chairman. As Clark tells the story: “She knew she was going to do well in the student areas, but she had to carry Barton Hills. That was the year punch-card ballots were being substituted for handwritten ballots. And the purpose of that was, the election judges had been able to unpack the boxes and look at the handwritten ballots and figure out who was ahead. And if a judge’s candidate was behind, he could call up his crowd and say, ‘Hey, we need to get some more voters over here.’ The idea was that only computers could count the punch cards—so that until the final tally, nobody could tell who was ahead. That was supposed to take the election judge out of the picture.
“Well, Mom and her team were biting their nails about the race, and about two o’clock Conrad Fath called and said, ‘You know, you can hold these cards up to the light, and they’ve got these holes in them, and you can tell how people voted.’”