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 hesitate 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.’”

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 the 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-colored 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.