Mike Cox - Legends Lore of the Texas Capitol

Published by The History Press

Charleston, SC

www.historypress.net

Copyright 2017 by Mike Cox

All rights reserved

First published 2017

e-book edition 2017

ISBN 978.1.43966.108.6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017931822

print edition ISBN 978.1.46713.758.4

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

DEDICATION

This isnt the only book Ive dedicated to my granddad L.A. Wilke (18971984), but this one especially is for him. The first time I ever saw the capitol was when he took me there when I was a little boy in the early 1950s. As I stood wide-eyed in the rotunda taking in the dome above, he told me that his fathermy great-grandfatherhad been one of the workers who helped build the capitol back in the 1880s. Granddad was proud of that, and so am I. While Granddad never got around to writing the book on the capitols history that he had hoped to, he did lay the metaphorical foundation for my writing career. So now its come full circle.

PREFACE

Like most Austinites, I was still asleep early that morning of February 6, 1983. But then my phone rang. The capitol was on fire.

At the time, I covered the police beat for the Austin American-Statesman. I had an arrangement with the Austin Fire Department (AFD) that a dispatcher would call me at home anytime a major fire broke out, but Larry BeSaw, a friend and former newspaper colleague who worked as assignment editor for one of the local television stations, called me first. AFD might have called later, but by that time, I was already on my way downtown.

Driving toward the capitol in my personal vehicle, I could see its familiar lighted dome as I headed north on MoPac Boulevard from far South Austin toward downtown. All looked perfectly normal, so I began to think Id be back in bed soon. Getting closer, however, I saw black smoke coming from the big, red granite statehouse. Having covered plenty of fires over the years, I knew the significance of that: black smoke meant live fire untouched by water.

When I got to the capitol, I found it ringed by flashing red lights coming from what seemed like every fire truck in Austin, with more equipment rolling up. The incident had already gone from two to four alarms and soon reached an unprecedented all-out level the department referred to as a general alarm. In other words, it was bad.

I spotted Assistant Fire Chief Brady Poole, ranking officer on the scene, and checked in with him for a quick rundown on the situation. He said a fire had started in the lieutenant governors apartment behind the Senate chamber on the second floor of the huge buildings east side. His firefighters were having a hard time getting water on it, and the fire had begun to spread through the crawl space created with the installation of modern offices in the then nearly century-old structure. I stayed close to Poole so I could keep up.

As word began to spread that the capitol was burning, more and more people began showing up. Soon, newly inaugurated governor Mark White, awakened by all the sirens and flashing red lights just across Eleventh Street from the governors mansion, joined the onlookers and got his own briefing from Poole. Austin mayor Carol Keeton McClellan, wearing a jogging suit, arrived next. Soon, Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby showed up. He had not been in his apartment, but his daughter and three friends had been. Eighteen-year-old Kate Hobby had gotten out okay along with two of her guests, but the third friend was dead of smoke inhalation.

I had been talking with the governor, who I had known since he was secretary of state, when Poole interrupted to tell him that he needed to mobilize as much state manpower as he could to begin emptying the capitol of anything that could be saved, from files to works of art. We might not be able to stop this, the assistant chief said in so many words. Hearing that, the mayor began crying. A longtime Austinite, I knew how she felt. While the capitol belongs to all Texans, those of us who grew up with the statehouse tend to be pretty proprietary about it.

In my case, I remember going to the capitol for the first time as a kindergartener. I still have a photograph that my late granddad L.A. Wilke took of me sitting on one of the Civil Warera cannons on the capitol grounds.

Granddads father, a second-generation German Texan named Adolph Wilke, had been one of many laborers involved in the construction of the capitol back in the 1880s. (I hasten to add that he was among the paid workers, not one of the convicts pressed into service by a cost-conscious state government.)

As I stood there that cool morning watching smoke continue to pour from the building, I couldnt help but flip through my many memories of the capitol. There was that Sunday in the early 1950s when I was barely five. Granddad worked for the Texas Good Roads Association, which had a post office box in the old Capitol Station, long since closed. But back then, years before its quasi-privatization, the U.S. Post Office Department delivered mail twice daily, Monday through Saturday. Even on Sundays, postal workers placed mail in post office boxes. The Good Roads Association subscribed to the Houston, Dallas and San Antonio newspapers, and Granddad had come to the capitol to pick up the Sunday editions. Somehow I got separated from him and, with growing alarm, began wandering the long, empty corridors yelling for him as loudly as I could. Had I known then that many believe the place is haunted I would have been even more terrified. I wandered around the capitol for a tearful ten or fifteen minutes before Granddad finally found me.

Ten years later, my first for-pay job was in the capitol. I worked in the Senate as an assistant sergeant-at-arms (a glorified page) during the 1965 regular legislative session and again in the 1967 session. Later that year, I began a newspaper career that often had me at the capitol covering stories, including the 1974 Constitutional Convention that came within three votes of passing a new state charter for the first time in nearly one hundred years. Of course, Texas voters still would have had to approve it, but back then, they probably would have.

Now, I was covering the fire that threatened to destroy the capitol. As night turned to cloudy morning, firefighters finally got the blaze under control. Problems with hot spots continued for a while, but they had saved the building. Later that day, in the American-Statesmans busy newsroom, I turned in my stories and headed home to get some sleep. For a while, Id thought Id be writing the buildings figurative last chapter. Instead, it proved to be just another of its many stories.

Over the years, from my granddad and others, Ive heard quite a few interesting tales about the capitol, and those became the genesis of this book. Granddad had always been intrigued by the capitol because of his fathers role in helping to build it, and he had his own memories as well. In fact, in the early 1950s, he decided to do a book on the capitol. He did a considerable amount of research but never got around to writing it. (Fortunately, I inherited his files.) He envisioned a definitive history, but this book is not intended as an overall history of the iconic buildingthat would take a much larger volume, maybe even two volumes to really do it right. Nor can this book relate every story connected to the capitol. All I can do is tell some of the more interesting tales. Even so, in reading this collection, I think youll wind up with an overall sense of how Texas ended up with such a magnificent capitol.