Texas politics

Ann Richards a force of nature



 

 

I first met Ann Richards in the late 1960s or early 1970s, well before she first ran for county commissioner in 1976. Ann and hubby David were friends with a bunch of writers, including my friend Molly Ivins -an interesting group to hang out with.

Well before she became state treasurer and later governor, our families were into canoeing Texas Rivers. The first two times I floated the Lower Canyons of the Rio Grande – the 94-mile stretch that begins at the downstream end of the Big Bend National Park – Ann and David were along.

In 1977, toward the end of Ann’s first year as Travis County’s first woman county commissioner, she was still drinking. There were 17 canoes on that trip, which means at least 34 people, including then-Land Commissioner Bob Armstrong. Midway through the trip, we relaxed in the riverside hot springs, passing jugs of this and that.

Three years later, we floated it again, with just seven canoes. Ann had just been to what Bob Bullock called “drunk school.” Cutting her hooch intake had caused her to lose 20 to 30 pounds. She was thin.

The third day, a cold Texas norther hit us head on, with a chilling rain. Ann, who was underdressed, got soaked, and literally turned blue. We had to stop and crawl up into a cave and build a fire to get her warmed up.

But that didn’t dent her spirit. I remember Ann on her family’s night to fix dinner, sitting by the campfire, chopping up onions with her Swiss Army knife on a plastic cutting board, telling outrageously funny stories. She was as comfortable on the river bank as dissecting a county budget.

Ann was elected treasurer in 1982. The problems of the drinking years, plus the new duties of holding public office, had brought an estrangement with David. They divorced in February of 1984.

Later that year, I wrote about the first woman elected to a Texas statewide office whose husband hadn’t held it first. Her daddy had told her she could do anything. She believed him, and passed that advice along to others – particularly women. She said being a housewife and mother had prepared her for running an agency with an annual cash flow of $44 billion. There were just more zeroes.

“We are trained in detail, and we are expected to juggle a lot of balls at once,” she said. “Even if the father is going to run the Little League car pool, it’s the mother who tells him, .Tonight you’re going to run the car pool.’ She’s the one who’s supposed to keep all those things in mind.”

Richards took a rusty agency that took a day and a half to process checks and cut the time to an hour and a half. Her cash management techniques earned an additional $9 million in interest annually for the state.

“There is so much to do as a housewife – assuming that you’re doing it well – that every minute in management really matters. And you know that wasted time is just terrible . . . But it’s the details that make all that happen.”

She believed in clear assignments, praise for good work, and immediate, direct criticism of work less than good.

“I think that men are big-picture trained,” Richards said. “I kept thinking that the higher up I went, some big mystery was going to be revealed. How shocking it is to find that there isn’t any. It’s just applying what you already know, with an eye to detail, while keeping the big picture functioning with all the balls in the air so that none of them drop.”

The treasurer’s office soon reflected the state’s population. A year into her tenure, the workforce was 60 percent white, 18 percent black and 22 percent Hispanic – and 59 percent female. State Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, was elected to the House in 1990, when Richards was elected governor.

“I felt lucky to serve when Ann was governor, and Pete Laney was House Speaker, and Bob Bullock was lieutenant governor,” sighed Coleman, a constant agitator for spending more on education and health care for Texas children. “If we were fighting, it was about how far to go with something good.”

Contact McNeely at dmcneely@austin.rr.com or (512) 458-2963.

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