3 Bad Things and 1 Good from my Spring Working at the Texas State Senate 50 Years Ago

I was twenty years old and still an idiot with a half-formed brain. Please remember, I grew up behind the Pine Curtain in East Texas, a second son of parents who hosted John Birch Society meetings in our home. I had only been in Austin for four months, so I was just beginning to shake the forces of the dark side in which I had been marinating since birth.

Having run through my meager savings during my first semester at UT, I needed a job. My roommate from home told me he had a job at the state capitol lined for the upcoming legislative session. I thought that sounded  good for me too, so during the Christmas holidays I called a man named Jack Strong, our state senator, and asked about a job during the upcoming session. I got a polite forget about it, that dozens of young people wanted the few jobs he had to offer.  After meeting that fast dead-end, I called a neighbor who was the County Democratic Chairman and asked if he might put in a good word for me with the senator.

When I got back to Austin for the new semester, a job as an assistant sergeant-at-arms in the state senate awaited me. Hmm, so that’s how things work.  Trouble was, it turned out that I had most likely inadvertently snatched that job from my best friend. So, did I back out and search for another job? No. The guilt that hung over me for doing an accidental end-run around my best friend was Bad Thing #1 about my spring in Texas State Senate.

The 1969 Texas Senate was ruled by the youngest Lt. Governor in Texas history, Ben Barnes, a red-headed man in his early thirty’s who was known around Austin as a skirt-chaser. An Austin TV channel at the time opened its 10 PM news show every night with a family-focused quip, “It’s 10 pm, do you know where your children are?”  Soon bumper stickers appeared on cars around the capitol: “It’s 10 pm, do you know where Ben Barnes is?”

Even if you are not an old geezer Texan, you might recognize two of the state senators in that 1969 session who went on to Congress in Washington DC and gained made nationwide fame for themselves: Barbara Jordan and Charlie Wilson.

First, Barbara Jordan. Here’s her photo with Lt. Gov. Barnes in 1969. She was an African-American, now deceased, the lone ethnic minority senator among 32 Senators.

Thirty-one Senators who were white men with big egos, and one heavy black lady who probably reminded most of them of their maid. It was a time when neither Blacks nor women were welcomed on the hallowed floors of the state capitol. For all that, when Senator Jordan spoke, everyone stopped what they were doing and listened. They did so in Austin in 1969 and they did so in Washington DC and around the country in 1974 during the Watergate Hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Her voice was special. It resonated, and she had a big brain behind that voice that cut to the chase of complex issues. She was terrific, and I’m glad I was close to her a few times.

Sadly, my only personal anecdote of being near Senator Jordan is Bad Thing #2 of my five months working at the State Senate. One of my menial jobs was operating the elevator behind the Senate Chamber. It opened into the grand hallway where the senators’ offices were jammed together.  One day Senator Jordan and another African-American woman got on the elevator on the second floor and rode down to the first floor, where a pair of white middle-age women brushed past them as two exited and two entered my elevator. As the door was closing with just the two white women and me on the elevator, one said, “They do have a distinctive smell, don’t they?” looking at her friend and me. I said nothing and probably even smiled politely. Wimp! For fifty years I’ve kicked my own butt for not having some snappy retort to let her know we were no longer in the era of Jim Crow and blatant racism. But I was silent. No excuse.

Thus, when the insightful comments of US Congresswoman Jordan during the Watergate Hearings were replayed on the evening TV news, I could only silently applaud, because to say more was to bring back my own “‘fraidy-cat white-boy” moment a few years earlier.

Then there was Charlie Wilson, another East Texan like me. Senator Wilson was flash personified. He had been a Navy officer and remained a very sharp dresser. He was also a womanizer and an alcoholic. He was a liberal democrat in a conservative district. His best quotes are too profane for me to write. He inspired a best-selling book and a movie, “Charlie Wilson’s War,” with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts as the lead characters. All because in the 1980’s U.S. Congressman Wilson persuaded his fellow Congressmen to secretly fund the delivery of modern anti-tank/anti-helicopter hand-held missiles (Think a rocket-bazooka) by mule train to the Afghan Muhjadeen who were fighting the Soviet army. And those Stinger missiles were incredibly effective against previously invulnerable Soviet helicopters that were dominating the war. The nasty little hand-held missile knocked hundreds of expensive Russian helicopters out of the sky. Here’s a photo of Congressman Wilson in Afghanistan.

Yes, those Afghan Muhjadeen were the precursors to the same Afghans we’ve been fighting for the past 15 years. But who knew we’d wind up following the Soviets in that crazy place long after the Russian bear boogied back to its own heartland with its stubby tail tucked between its legs. We can pretty much thanks the womanizing Congressman from Lufkin, Texas for that. The guy who wore pink shirts and loud ties on the otherwise dowdy floor of the Texas Senate in 1969. 

And my biggest Bad Thing #3 from those five months: I diddled them away. I wasted them by not rubbing elbows with people who might open doors for me, or making friends and networking, as we call it now, with other young men who were ‘connected.’

Instead, I was a contented idiot punching elevator buttons and running the big Xerox machine in the Secretary of the Senate’s office, instead of realizing I’d been gifted with an ‘in,’ at the tender age of twenty. I was more interested in drinking beer, riding my motorcycle, and reading escape fiction than milking the udder of the politically-privileged that had been pressed into my palm.

In some reflective moments, I applaud my ‘independence’ of half a century ago. But then I circle back around to, “Damn, wouldn’t it have been fun to be a key staff member of a Congressman or Senator in Austin or Washington?” Oh well, life’s little regrets, fifty years later.

The big Good Thing from my five months at the capitol was that it greatly impressed my grandfather, who I loved deeply. He’s the guy who took me as a little kid to the cattle auction barn and taught me to pee between the fence rails instead of finding the Men’s Room. As teenager, he took me deer hunting and after I worked in the capitol he called me ‘the Senator’ for a long time. Daddy Todd (our name for James Orland Todd) was already coping with Parkinson’s Disease by then and has long since passed away from that horrible affliction.  But I will always remember how secretly proud I was when he called me ‘the Senator.”