by Jan Reid
Fath’s discovery let her know there was no need to do anything more. She not only upset the incumbent, she trounced him, carrying 63 percent.
Eddie Wilson had left the Armadillo World Headquarters that year, exhausted by its success but exhilarated by the manic burst of creativity it help set off in his hometown. Always on the move and looking for something new, he found a cramped little building on the east end of downtown, half a block from the police station, that he envisioned as a steak and beer joint where important and entertaining people could just talk—there were by then plenty of places in Austin where you could hear live music. Eddie was right about the Raw Deal’s potential as a hip salon, but the economic beating he had taken at the Armadillo told him he had better have more going for his bank account than a downtown greasy spoon. So he won a job as head of the local musicians’ union. On January 1, 1977, a packed house of Austin liberals assembled for a party and swearing-in of three officials: Eddie as the union leader; Frank Ivy, a lawyer friend of David Richards, who had been elected a justice of the peace; and Ann Richards, the new county commissioner. Virginia Whitten was a very witty matron of ceremonies. A newspaper reporter asked Ann whether it was proper to get sworn into public office in a bar. Ann shrugged and said that it was her chosen hangout, the people crammed in the joint were her gang of friends, and people in Austin could probably live with that. She was right.
The race, victory, and the swearing-in had been rousing fun, but then Ann and Jane Hickie, who became her administrative assistant, went to examine the new digs in the courthouse. “We went in there the very first day,” Hickie later said. “We opened up the file drawers, and there wasn’t anything in them. All the road files were gone. Phones started ringing, and people would say, ‘Why didn’t I get my asphalt this morning?’ We’d say, ‘Where are you?’” Hickie went on, “It doesn’t leave you with any information base to know what was done before—we literally did not know where their road was.”
In quick response, Ann asked the foreman of Voudouris’s road crew whether she could take him to lunch. A friend of the defeated commissioner, he did not figure he would be staying on. But Ann coaxed him into seeing whether they could work together. He took her out to meet the road crew, who parked their trucks and heavy equipment at a precinct office and fenced yard in a part of the county called Oak Hill. It was cold and rainy, and in going upstairs to the meeting room, she encountered a soaking-wet coarse-haired dog lying in the doorway. Trying to make conversation, she said, “My, isn’t that the ugliest old dog you’ve ever seen in your life?”
Inside, about thirty men sat stone-faced as she made her pitch to pull together and work hard for the people who lived in Precinct 3. Finally, somewhat desperate, she asked them about their dog. “Texas men will always talk about their dogs,” she wrote, but no one said a word. Some shuffled their feet.
I thought, “There must be something unseemly about the dog’s name, it’s the only answer.” I looked around and they were ducking my gaze. “Let me tell you,” I said, “that I am the only child of a very rough-talking father. So don’t be embarrassed about your language. I’ve either heard it or I can top it. So, what’s the dog’s name?”
An old hand in the back row with a big wide belt and a big wide belt buckle sat up and said in a gravel bass, “Well, you’re gonna find out sooner or later.” He looked right at me. “Her name is Ann Richards.” I laughed. And when I laughed they roared. And a little guy on the front row who was a lot younger and a lot smarter than most, said in a wonderfully hopeful tenor, “But we call her Miss Ann!” From then on those guys and I were good friends.
Maybe she won over her road crew that easily. But the guys also found out things were going to be different when they invited her to the annual Christmas party. They paid for their beer and barbecue by cutting down enough trees in Pace Bend Park to sell a couple of cords of firewood. Located in the far west of the county, where the Pedernales River empties into Lake Travis, the park has a winding seven-mile road, nine miles of shoreline on the lake, many campsites, and, in its interior, a nature preserve accessible only by hiking and on horseback.
The men on the road crew were not thinning out the pestilent cedar. They were cutting down hardwood oaks and elms in the county’s largest and most treasured park. Ann served curt notice that there wasn’t going to be any more of that tree cutting in Pace Bend Park; and she canceled their Christmas party.
Reporters on the courthouse beat gravitated toward Ann, knowing she had a gift for colorful quotes, and she was usually glad to provide one. She was a heavy smoker in those days, and it made sense to her to use some leftover campaign money and have printed up a gross of books of matches with her smiling face on the cover. Jan Jarboe Russell later wrote about that stage of her political career in Texas Monthly:
Many of Ann’s friends confess to being surprised when the former housewife and volunteer agreed to a full-time, high-pressure job. They must have been doubly surprised when she took to her new work so avidly—and not just by expanding the human services programs that came under the county’s jurisdiction. Gone were the peasant blouses, blue jeans, and lectures on the rights of the oppressed; now Ann Richards could be found in a designer suit, out-bubbaing the bubbas by picking her teeth with an ivory toothpick and cleaning her fingernails with a Swiss army knife during commissioners’ meetings. (Read at least one story on the sports page a day, she’d advise her friends, so you’ll have something to talk to men about.)
Ann’s husband noted another big change—the hair. Gone was the look of the earth mother who had morphed into Mary Tyler Moore. The big hair of middle-aged Texas women would henceforth be part of her brand. “It was a straightforward tactical decision,” said David. “Now at night she wore all these curlers to bed.”
For the most part Ann received high marks in Austin for running an office that few people in the city really understood. A politician with an urban base, she was catching a ride on a whirlwind of change—post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, post–Roe v. Wade. But she often remarked that the commissioners’ courts are Texas’s original form of local government. The courts are not courtrooms, and the elected leader, the county judge, is not a judicial official. The judge and commissioners administer the courthouse and county jail, appoint minor officials, offer public welfare services, set tax rates for the county, and issue bonds. Commissioners’ courts maintain and build roads and bridges, yet they have no zoning authority over the hamlets and subdivisions that these roadways serve.
Jane Hickie had a grasp of large policy ideas, an occasionally abrasive manner, and the ability to drink most guys under the table—and she was proudly gay. Even in a city as bohemian and open-minded as Austin, out-of-the-closet lesbians were not common in highly visible government positions. Ann’s thirty-five-year friendship with Hickie was full of mutual respect, and it was complicated. In later years, allies and political enemies often claimed that the older woman kowtowed to the aggressive young lawyer.
Ann and Hickie found a crack appointments secretary in Nancy Cannon. Efficient and funny, she resembled the actress Julie Christie, and, like Hickie, she shared a sense of mission with their boss. Following up on the themes that had gotten Ann elected, they made sure that constituents’ letters were answered, that their telephone calls were returned. And along with that crew of guys with the ugly dog and equipment yard in Oak Hill, they tried to make sure that the narrow, twisting roads and bridges in her precinct were holding up to an ever-increasing load of traffic.
Ann didn’t know how difficult that would be. She found out that she was responsible for more than 500 miles of county roadways, while some of her fellow commissioners had less than 150 miles in their precincts, and budgets for maintenance were not divided up proportionally. She won the political support she needed to get her budget increased by $150,000. She said she would use it to hire more drivers and buy new dump trucks; the ones they had were spending too much time in the shop. Imagine that—Ann Richards, looking for t
he best buys in dump trucks.
Ann and her staff worked with the county judge, fellow commissioners, and their aides in budgeting expenditures for general sanitation inspections, food and milk inspections, vacant acreage cleared, air and water pollution samples collected, loose dogs picked up, dog-bite investigations, “loads of rodent harbor-age removed,” and city and county acres sprayed for insects. They provided burials for paupers, appointed members to the Child Welfare Board and oversaw its meetings, and, enabled by the legislature and Governor Dolph Briscoe, founded an Austin–Travis County Mental Health and Mental Retardation Center. Ann took great pride in helping develop Travis County Services for the Deaf, in fending off proposed budget cuts to Child Protective Services, and in improving the Infant-Parent Training Center, which provided particular help for children who were born with Down syndrome.
First-term Travis County Commissioner Ann Richards speaks to greater Austin’s needs from a vantage point south of downtown and the Capitol, about 1977.
Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby asked her to work with a committee—whose members included one of her drinking pals, the University of Texas regent Frank Erwin—set up to examine the state’s delivery of human services. In the division of responsibilities, Ann wound up assessing the state’s failure to steer juveniles in trouble with the law away from a future as inmates of state penitentiaries. At her direction, the committee devised legislation that would provide state money for a probation system dedicated to serving juveniles, but the money would be released only as matching funds to counties wishing to participate. “Seventy-two percent of the juveniles who are serving time in the state of Texas have abused alcohol or drugs,” she concluded. “Many of them have reading or learning disabilities. The answer society has devised is, ‘Let’s lock them up and our problems will be solved.’ But you can’t build enough buildings to lock them all up, you just can’t.” That committee and its charge fueled her with a sense of mission she would bring to a much higher office than county commissioner.
The old Travis County Jail downtown was a constant headache for the commissioners. The roof was always leaking, and it was buckled enough that a pool of standing water became home to goldfish. In 1974, a federal district judge had ruled that the jail was detrimental to the health and safety of the inmates; he ordered the county to bring the lockup into compliance with requirements of the state Jail Standards Commission. “I would like to see it closed,” Ann told reporters in 1978. “The number of violent deaths we’ve had indicates that rational behavior has no chance of survival in that type of situation.” The incident that prompted her remark was the stabbing death of an inmate over a pair of shoes. The county judge and commissioners phased out the old jail and committed taxpayer revenues to construction of an expensive new one in the suburb of Del Valle, which later proved to have certain design problems of its own: with the foil of chewing-gum wrappers, the inmates found they could easily pick the locks. Design flaws delayed the opening of the new jail until 1986.
But all those issues paled in comparison to the fierce battle between environmentalists and developers. About half of Austin and its suburbs rest on thin topsoil and a substructure of limestone that is between three hundred and seven hundred feet thick; within that cavernous rock is a large circulating body of water called the Edwards Aquifer. Limestone is porous, full of holes big and small. Under the pressures of periodic drought, agricultural irrigation, and expanding residential development, artesian wells and springs often dried up. The holes and fissures in the limestone also let water trickle through a natural filtering system. Unlike San Antonio and several smaller towns and cities, Austin does not rely on the aquifer for drinking water; that comes from water rights to reservoirs on the Colorado River. But the aquifer lets out the clear-running Barton Creek and a jewel of a swimming hole called Barton Springs Pool. Shaded by a lush stand of oaks, pecans, and cottonwoods, the channel filled by the springs was treasured by Indian tribes centuries before any settlers of European heritage camped beside it. Barton Springs Pool and the swimmers who cherish its sixty-eight-degree water became the foremost symbols of Austin’s uniqueness and self-possession.
By the time Ann was elected commissioner, the battle for the soul of the city was already joined. In 1974, John Connally and Ben Barnes had bought 2,200 acres on the aquifer’s watershed and launched a lavish country-club development called the Estates of Barton Creek. That same year, the Texas Highway Department, later renamed the Texas Department of Transportation, built a bridge over Town Lake and extended past Barton Springs and over the aquifer’s recharge zone a freeway called Mopac (because much of it ran beside a busy railroad track originally laid by the Missouri Pacific). In the 1920s, this road had been proposed as a short, nicely landscaped boulevard with a forty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit (some signs along the expressway still identify it as “Mopac Boulevard”). In opposition to the developers and the choked commuter artery that Mopac became, a nonprofit organization called SOS—Save Our Springs—grew into a major power in Austin and Travis County politics. Barnes and Connally went broke with their real estate development, but others took advantage of Mopac and other roadways, laying out grand schemes for subdivisions to be built over the aquifer’s recharge zone and along Barton Creek. Two of those developers were Gary Bradley and John Wooley.
Bradley was smooth, handsome, and flamboyant, often a smart aleck. He said he grew up in hardscrabble rural Texas before he moved to Austin and began to chart his future, eyeing a 4,000-acre ranch south of town. Wooley was Bradley’s opposite in many ways—soft-spoken, balding, and given to wearing glasses with translucent frames. Bradley eventually succeeded in turning that run-down ranch house and its pastures into a development of 3,700 homes called Circle C Ranch. Wooley was his main partner on the Rob Roy development.
Bradley and Wooley promised a development with first-rate schools, a paved course for bicyclists, and land set aside for what became the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. They later parted company in one of the most remarked-upon fistfights in Austin lore. But before that occurred, they had been friends of Ann Richards and major contributors to her early campaigns. Ann was praised by many environmentalists in the community as a leader with a “neighborhood outlook,” even as she demonstrated skill at knowing how to get state and federal funds channeled into road building. But like most politicians, Ann was loyal to old friends, even after Bradley went on to become an iconic villain in the view of environmentalists. One time, while being interviewed for Texas Monthly by Gary Cartwright, Bradley mocked and infuriated the SOS crowd: “Barton Springs? We’ll fill it with Perrier!” Ann’s friendship with Bradley would dog her the rest of her political career.
Ironically, given the distrust Ann aroused among some environmentalists, one of her greatest sources of pride as a county commissioner had everything to do with protecting water quality and the beauty of Austin and the Hill Country. A new multilane highway called Loop 360 was being built around the western edge of the city and through West Lake Hills, and it would cross a picturesque bend of Lake Austin, a winding reservoir on the Colorado River. Though the construction contracts were put out for bid, the real designers were engineers at the Texas Highway Department. They aimed to build the bridge the way they always had—straight ahead, lots of reinforced concrete, ample supports sunk in the lakebed. It didn’t concern them that water skiers were in an uproar over landslides into the lake from the preparatory excavations, and they didn’t appreciate being lectured by some pushy female county commissioner.
But in the end, Ann helped achieve what most people in Travis County would not have envisioned—a bridge that has the look of architecture and sculpture, a thing of beauty. It was a major part of Ann’s legacy as a local official. Working with Evelyn Wanda Johnson, a local activist she had gotten to know while working on Ralph Yarborough’s senatorial campaigns, Ann helped develop plans for a $10 million bridge, completed in 1982, that features a central arched span constructed from burnished, copper-colo
red steel imported in part from Japan and South Korea. Officially named for Percy Pennybacker, a longtime engineer for the highway department, the bridge has become one of the most stylish and frequently photographed landmarks of Austin. It reportedly cost less than the state design would have, and it is safer as well, since there are no piers for boaters to dodge. In 1984, after Ann had left county government, it won first place in the initial Excellence in Highway Design competition of the Federal Highway Administration.
CHAPTER 8
Raw Deals
Bella Abzug, the outspoken feminist and Democratic member of Congress from New York, developed a particular affection for Ann, nicknaming her “Texas” and saying, “Texas, you’ve got spunk.” Ann’s emergence as a national figure in feminist politics began when she worked for Sarah Weddington. The United Nations declared 1975 International Women’s Year, and Abzug introduced and steered to passage a bill that proposed a National Women’s Conference as part of the nation’s bicentennial celebration. Houston won the bid for the conference—which missed the bicentennial deadline and did not take place until 1977—and twenty thousand women attended. Moving through the crowd with retinues of photographers were Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Coretta Scott King, Lady Bird Johnson, and her daughter Lynda Johnson Robb. “Total chaos,” laughed Mary Beth Rogers, “the whole time.”
Abzug chose Ann to make the initial speech at the conference and turn up the volume of organizational support for the pending Equal Rights Amendment. It was Ann’s first major political address. She spoke, she said, for “those few of us who are fortunate enough to be in the positions we are in, but also for those who are voiceless, the divorced woman who may not get credit, the widows who are not capable of making a living, my own daughter who cannot find women in the elementary school history texts of this country, and the men who encourage us and support equal rights.” She closed the speech: “Our problems are the problems of tomorrow. We don’t just need to be right. We need to be in office.”