EIGHT

A Ladylike Strategy

1969–74

After a busy campaign in 1969, orchestrated once more by the GGL, I was reelected to the city council for a fourth term. Not every candidate on our slate was elected, however, as the GGL lost a second seat in 1969. We all sensed a subtle change under way in city government. Walter McAllister was elected mayor for the fifth time, and I was elected mayor pro tem by vote of the city council. This was the first time a woman had held the position, and I was thrilled. With the election behind us, we settled down to work.

During my years on the council, I had discovered an effective way to be an agent for change in the city. I realized that council members had a lot of power in appointing the boards of municipal agencies, and I knew those appointments were important. In many ways, these boards controlled the development of the city. They included the City Public Service Board, the boards of the San Antonio Development Agency and Zoning Commission, the water board, the planning commission board, and the board of City Transit, which is now VIA Metropolitan Transit. Anglo men dominated the scene on all of the boards and their committees. From my first days at the city council table, I tried to get more women and minorities on the boards. I researched which positions were open and arrived with a list of qualified women to put forward. Sometimes my fellow council members, especially John Gatti, would say, “Oh, Lila, do we have to?” And I would say, “Yes, you have to. I don’t have anything against Anglo men—I am married to one. But we need opportunities for women and minorities.” John Gatti just chuckled. We would joke about it, but he knew I meant business.

I always studied upcoming vacancies and researched my candidates. I never brought forward a name just to have a woman or an African American or a Hispanic selected. My candidates always had every qualification. They were not always appointed, but I did open some initial doors, and I got the first woman appointed to the City Transit board. I tried to get Irene Wischer, president of Panhandle Producing Company, appointed to the City Public Service Board but was unsuccessful. Her background in the oil and gas business made her a perfect candidate for a utility board, but that was the top appointment in the city. It would be another six years before a woman held that position.

Change was slow in coming, but it was happening. It was exciting to see the Mayor’s Commission on the Status of Women established during Mayor Mac’s last term. I worked on the preliminary planning with a group of highly gifted women, including Lynette Glasscock and Irene Wischer, and we were confident that the commission would have a huge impact on the future of San Antonio.

I believe one reason I got things done is that I did not come to the table with a shrill voice. I never forgot that I was a southern lady, and I always tried to deal with people in a ladylike—but firm—way. Everyone knew I was serious, but I did not scream at them or berate them. I said, “This is something that is right, and we must do it.”

Mayor McAllister also had a special style for getting things done. He was forceful in getting his points across but was a charming gentleman in many ways. I remember disagreeing on an issue concerning public housing and being invited to his office for a little chat. His secretary made tea and served us cupcakes, and as we enjoyed our tea party, he said, “I wanted to explain to you my views on the issue.” Mayor Mac felt that we already had enough public housing and did not need to seek federal funding. But I felt that there were so many people living in substandard, unhealthy conditions that we should not pass up the opportunity for federal help to increase our supply of subsidized housing. We had a lovely visit, and he was gracious, courtly, and gentlemanly, but I was not persuaded to change my position. I think he was disappointed. He had made the effort to convince me with great style, and I appreciated that.

“Mayor Mac” (right) was the first person to encourage me to run for public office. I served with him in city government for eight years, and he was a dynamo—whether leading our city, meeting with celebrities like Lawrence Welk (left), or fishing on the Texas coast.

Mayor McAllister served ten years as mayor, and I served with him for eight of them. He is the person who encouraged me to become an elected official, and I learned a lot from him. I also enjoyed working with John Gatti and thought he was very smart, with a strong background in municipal finance. He was much more liberal in his viewpoints than Mayor Mac, but he was always respectful and was able to get a lot done because he got along so well with the mayor.

It was the GGL strategy for a retiring council member to step down before the end of the term, allowing his or her replacement to serve by appointment before becoming the candidate in the next election. As I prepared to leave office in 1970, Carol Haberman was chosen to take my place. She was an attorney and active in the Business and Professional Women’s group and other women’s organizations. She was very visible in the community. She was appointed to fill my unexpired term so that she could run in 1971 as an incumbent.

As my days on the city council were ending, Cathy’s days as a college student were coming to an end too. Before graduation, she had applied to be a flight attendant for American Airlines and had been hired, and she went almost directly to work. With her roommate, another flight attendant, she took advantage of the privileges of her job to travel to Europe and other places, and Sid and I benefited as well. We traveled to Hawaii as her guests; then Cathy flew on to Fiji. Standing in the Honolulu airport, watching my daughter fly away, I felt trepidation because her destination sounded so far away and I would not be there to look after her. I grappled with a mother’s protective feelings. She waved, and I realized that she was a grown woman, on her own.

That summer, after I left the council, my mother invited me to accompany her on a six-week trip to Europe, sponsored by the Christian Herald. I had never been to Europe, and our adventure included stops in England, Ireland, Holland, and Germany, where we saw a passion play that is only presented every ten years, in Oberammergau.

When I returned to Texas, I went to work and found it was not nearly as stressful as serving on the council. I worked briefly as the part-time community relations director for the Ecumenical Center for Religion and Health. After a few months I saw an ad for a fulltime community relations position at what was then the San Antonio Tuberculosis Hospital. Not much progress had been made in the treatment of the disease, and patients still faced long hospital stays with lots of bed rest and medication. Even when no longer infectious, patients endured a lengthy recuperation and often grew bored and depressed. I developed programs for the patients, partnering with community groups like the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis Club, and the Lions Club to bring speakers, entertainment, and other events to the hospital. Many of the service groups were located on the South Side, and I met many leaders from that part of San Antonio and learned more about our city from the experience.

I was enjoying my work, until the GGL contacted me in 1973. Once again I heard the irresistible siren call of the city council. As expected, Carol Haberman had been elected for the 1971–73 term, but instead of running for reelection, she decided to run for a county court at law judgeship. At that time women judges were scarce, and I admit I was nervous because three women were running for judgeships in county courts at law that year. I was worried that too many women were trying to land positions at the same time. To everyone’s surprise, and my delight, all three women, including Carol Haberman, were elected.

When the GGL learned that Carol Haberman would not be running for reelection to the council, they asked me to return as a candidate. Adding me to the ticket would be quick and easy, and I agreed. An internal split was occurring within the GGL, however, over the mayoral position. The GGL placed Roy Barrera, a well-known Hispanic civic leader and criminal lawyer, on the ticket. When Charles Becker was not chosen as the candidate, he broke with the GGL and filed as an opposition candidate, launching a strong negative attack on Roy Barrera. At that time the city council—not the citizens of San Antonio—selected the mayor, and Charles Becker was able to get enough votes from the independents on the council to win the election. He served from 1973 until 1975, and I joined Dr. José San Martín, the Rev. Claude Black, Glenn Lacy, Clifford Morton, Alfred G. Beckmann, Dr. D. Ford Nielsen, Alvin G. Padilla Jr., and Leo Mendoza Jr. on the council.

In 1973 I returned to the city council, still the only woman, and served with (left to right) Alfred Beckmann, Cliff Morton, Glenn Lacy, Claude Black, Mayor Charles Becker, Dr. José San Martín, Leo Mendoza, and Alvin Padilla Jr.

Mayor Becker was an interesting personality. He was from a prominent family that owned Handy Andy, a large grocery corporation at the time. He had grown up as part of the social establishment in San Antonio, and yet he was antiestablishment and did not care for anyone who followed traditional social patterns. I would call him a maverick.

I remember one council meeting when he called us to order and talked for an hour about the movie The Towering Inferno, which he had seen the night before. He went on and on about it. Suddenly I got it. That night the annual meeting of the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce had taken place. He wanted everyone to know he had gone to the movies and not to the dinner.

Mayor Becker was fond of a little Italian restaurant on the West Side near the Mercado area. It was a casual place with very good Italian food. He would insist that the whole council go there for lunch. In the past we had eaten a light catered meal at city hall, which did not take much time. Now we went to the Italian restaurant. The waiters would offer wine with the meal, and we were always late getting back. The council meeting was supposed to begin at 1 p.m. but never got going before 1:30. Those who had enjoyed perhaps two glasses of wine were quite relaxed, and our afternoon session had a different tone than the morning meeting. Perhaps it was a result of my prohibitionist grandfather or my love of punctuality, but I found these lunches slightly worrisome.

I was far more worried, however, about energy problems that I feared were looming for the city and urged the council to be watchful. San Antonio had a twenty-year contract with Coastal States Gas and its subsidiary, the LoVaca Gathering Company, to provide our natural gas at the set price of about twenty-five cents per 1,000 cubic feet. But LoVaca did not have the reserves it had claimed; they had to purchase their gas at a higher price, and the increased cost was passed through to its buyers, including San Antonio. Consumers’ energy bills increased tenfold, and I felt we should sue Coastal States for breach of contract. Mayor Becker did not agree; he felt the company was run by great people and that its owner, Oscar Wyatt, was a smart man.

I kept saying that, as representatives of our taxpayers, who are also our ratepayers, we needed to sue Coastal States. The situation started to escalate, and I began to emerge as a spokesperson within the GGL on the issue.

But the GGL no longer automatically ruled the city council, because it no longer had all the elected positions of the council, as it had in the past. There was a five-to-four split at the time, with the independents in the majority. Right after Charles Becker was elected mayor, I proposed we elect Dr. José San Martín as the mayor pro tem, thinking that as part of the GGL he would be a helpful balance since the mayor was an independent. Instead Mayor Becker suggested we adopt a new rotating system for mayor pro tem, where each council member served for a short term, six weeks or so. When it was time to vote, the Rev. Claude Black did not vote with the rest of the GGL group. He felt that the rotating system would provide the opportunity for an African American to be in the position of mayor pro tem for the first time. That was very important to him, so he supported Mayor Becker’s idea.

Reverend Black was a very active East Side community leader who had appeared before the council often in the past. He was intelligent and affable, but he never lost sight of his mission to ensure opportunities for African Americans to be recognized and included in decision making. I think it is important to remember that, unlike many other cities, San Antonio’s African American population is relatively small, running at about 6.5 to 7 percent of the total population. This has always been a factor in that community’s participation level in city government. But Reverend Black and his mentor, G. J. Sutton, were powerful advocates for change and always presented the issues of their community effectively. When Reverend Black left the GGL group to vote with the independents, I realized that the GGL was over.

It was during this time that we first began hearing from Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS). Ernie Cortés, who had trained under Saul Alinsky, the Chicago-based author of Rules for Radicals and the founder of modern community organizing, established COPS to drive an agenda of issues of importance to the San Antonio neighborhoods, especially those of the West Side, which were predominantly Hispanic. To get their agenda items through, the group embraced what they called pressure methods, believing those tactics were necessary for their success. I did not like those methods, because they did not encourage coming in, sitting down, and trying to negotiate. COPS became a large group trying to intimidate leadership into taking a particular course of action. They held “COPS accountability meetings,” which council members and candidates were invited to. We were given lectures, followed by presentation of COPS plans and lists of what they wanted funded. While this political strategy differed from mine, I realized that the COPS constituency was making its needs and aspirations known, something that had not really happened before.

I remember a big public meeting COPS staged in a West Side church, with all the city council candidates in attendance. COPS had developed an agenda of $100 million in projects they wanted. Many were very good projects, but they were only in certain areas of the city where COPS wielded influence. That night COPS leaders called on each candidate and asked, “Will you support our list of $100 million of improvements?” Every person said yes, and then it was my turn. “Let me just say that the list you have would require different ways of funding,” I said. At this point I was interrupted, before I could explain that some would need to be funded under community development grants and other ways.

When the city council prepares a bond election, it usually includes projects all over the city, East and West Sides, Center City, South Side, and North Side. Before I could explain that, the COPS leaders said, “No, we did not ask you that. Yes or no, will you support these projects on the bond issue?” I responded, “If either yes or no is the only way I can answer, then the answer is no.” I am the only one who said that.

COPS used a group-style leadership model instead of identifying one spokesperson. But Catholic priests were perhaps the closest to being in charge, and Father Albert Benavides often presented the group’s views at city council, berating us for many things. I had received some literature that COPS was distributing in Houston, where they were in the early stages of organizing. The Houston pamphlet described the marvelous successes they had brought about in San Antonio. At one of the many protests Father Benavides organized at city hall, I quoted his words from the pamphlet, where he praised the city council for its assistance. He was amused but did not want to show it. Trying hard not to laugh, all of us continued the meeting on a less contentious note. There was a mellowing, and over the years I supported many of the initiatives that COPS introduced. My loyalty has always been to our city as a whole.

In fall 1974, Mexico’s president, Luis Echeverría, initiated an international trade fair to be held in San Antonio for three years. Knowing that the event would take place again the following year, I took a delegation of about twenty-five San Antonio business leaders to Mexico to present a formal invitation to President Echeverría to personally open the fair. Before I went, I received a briefing and was told that the president was not always cordial to norteamericanos and that I probably would not get an answer, just a promise to take the invitation under advisement. Our delegation, which included banker Tom Frost, civic leaders Bill and Faye Sinkin, and others, went to Los Pinos to see the president. I took a painting of the San Antonio River as a gift and told him we would be thrilled if he would come to our city. When I presented him with the painting, he had a painting taken down from his office wall and gave it to me. After our exchange of gifts, he agreed to come to San Antonio for the 1975 fair.

When I visited President Luis Echeverría in Mexico, I gave him a painting of the San Antonio River to encourage him to attend the opening of an international trade fair in San Antonio.

The president asked when our delegation was returning to Texas, and I told him we would depart the next day. He asked if those plans were firm; I was not sure what to say. He extended an invitation to our group to fly to Cancún to see the newest resort, El Presidente Hotel, which was about to have its grand opening. He wanted us to see how wonderful it was and to tell everyone at home about it. I huddled with the delegation, and everyone except Tom Frost, who had a bank board meeting in San Antonio, was able to stay a little longer.

The next day we were transported from our hotel to the president’s personal airplane. We flew to Cancún, where we were welcomed by a hostess from the new hotel. As we were driving to our destination, she told me she had received a telephone call from the president at midnight to say that he was sending twenty-five dear friends to the hotel the next day. She said the hotel was fully booked for the night, but the staff had performed a miracle. I don’t know who got kicked out for the president’s dear friends, but we had a wonderful time and flew from Cancún to San Antonio the next day on the president’s plane. When we arrived at customs, officials asked with astonishment, “Is that the president of Mexico’s plane?” The next year, after I became mayor, President Echeverría did come to San Antonio, staying for three days at the Hilton.

In fall 1974, people began to approach me about running for mayor the following year. I was hesitant—could a woman really be elected? But I was encouraged by the recent election of Carol Haberman and two other women to judge positions, and I began to consider it. By now the GGL had splintered into three factions and was considering three possible mayoral candidates: Dr. José San Martín, John Steen, and myself.

Dr. San Martín was a strong leader of a Mexican American group—a separate coalition called the Westside Preservation Alliance—that had long been affiliated with the GGL. He had been very active and had the support of many Hispanic leaders who felt it was time for a Hispanic to run for mayor. We were friends and had worked well together on the council when Charles Becker was mayor. He had been hopeful of being mayor pro tem then, but it did not happen. Now he wanted to run for mayor and had a strong group of supporters. He said that if I became a candidate, however, he would not run against me, because we had worked so well together.

John Steen also had a group of GGL backers, and he was more typical of the organization’s traditional values. He was an affluent business leader, like many of the other mayoral candidates GGL chose, and he had the added advantage of having once chaired the organization.

For the first time in San Antonio’s history, the mayor would be elected by the voters at large. I became the first woman to run for that office.

I knew that discussions were going on within the GGL about favorite candidates. I never campaigned to be selected, never asked anyone to fight for my candidacy. Eventually the GGL approached me and said that, after much thought, they had decided to invite me to be their mayoral candidate in the 1975 election. I was the first woman they had sponsored for mayor.

I would run under a new set of rules. In the past the mayor had been selected by a majority vote of the city council. But in November 1974 San Antonio voters passed a charter amendment to hold a direct election of the mayor by all voters.

I never was active in a political party; I always have voted for the person or the issue. I usually voted in Republican primaries, but I had never taken any political office within that party and had always voted for candidates from both parties in the general election. I never made my thinking public about national issues, but I did take public stands on city and local issues. My early experience with the nonpartisan League of Women Voters had prepared me well. I had no trouble being good friends with Sen. John Tower, a Republican, and with Rep. Henry B. González, a Democrat. My loyalties have always been to all the citizens of San Antonio, and that was the bedrock of my mayoral campaign.

I ran against a formidable slate, and it was a challenging race. Eloy Centeno, owner of a well-known grocery chain, with many stores on the West Side, was a strong candidate. John Monfrey was another prominent opponent. He was the distributor of Falstaff beer, and his signs were in bars all over town. He presented himself as a “man’s man” and had an active group of supporters. There was a sea of yard signs around town displaying his name and picture. He and I ended up in a runoff, which was hard fought—nothing like those early days when the GGL had been able to deliver an election easily.

The 1975 election was the GGL’s last gasp. In addition to my election as mayor, it won only two council seats, with the election of the Rev. Claude Black and a young twenty-seven-year-old named Henry G. Cisneros. The Independent Team—which was a strange name since independents don’t usually run as a team—won six seats: Phil Pyndus, Robert P. “Bob” Billa, Glen Hartman, Al Rohde, Richard Teniente, and Dr. D. Ford Nielsen.

I remember some people saying that I would be mayor in name only because I did not have a GGL majority on the council. I did not pay any attention to that. I would follow the strategy I had always used. I would work with the council to build a good working coalition of people who wanted to see San Antonio move ahead. I knew we would face challenges together, but I was the one sitting in the mayor’s seat. I had also been elected president of the Texas Municipal League, the first woman to serve in that capacity. I smiled at my new council members, exuding friendliness, happiness, and good thoughts about what lay ahead.