Legends & Lore of the Texas Capitol

by Mike Cox

  As Travis put it years later, “We restored the Light.” And without a shot being fired.

  19

  THE CRACK IN THE FLOOR

  For decades, most people who knew the fate of Ed Wheeler avoided stepping on or across the long crack in the terrazzo floor of the rotunda. Not that they did not stare at the thin fissure in morbid curiosity, grimly imagining what it must have been like when the young painter plunged to his death from high in the capitol dome and hit that very spot, but somehow it seemed disrespectful to stand on it.

  The December 13, 1922 accident made big news at the time, but while it gave life to one of the capitol’s better-known legends, the details of the incident itself had been largely forgotten by the late 1960s. However, in the early fall of 1968, a San Antonio painting company got the contract to repaint the robin egg–blue interior of the capitol dome. A few old-timers in the capitol press corps remembered the tragedy connected to a previous dome repainting, and a young reporter for the Austin American-Statesman got the assignment to resurrect the tale while a colleague focused on interviewing the latest workmen.

  Checking the newspaper’s “morgue,” a room crowded with battleship-gray file cabinets containing yellowed clippings of past news events, the reporter assigned to the back-when piece read up on the accident. One of the things he found folded up in the envelope of material on the incident was a two-page typewritten statement made in 1955 by Vernal Ray Ramsey, one of the painters who witnessed his co-worker’s fall more than three decades earlier.

  That noon hour, he remembered, they had eaten their lunch and told jokes. During that time, Ramsey noticed that Wheeler seemed unusually quiet. Finally, he admitted to a bothersome leg injury. Ramsey suggested that he loosen the bandage covering the wound (he didn’t say in his statement how Wheeler had been hurt), and Wheeler said that made it feel much better.

  A painter touching up the interior of the dome fell to his death in 1922. Author’s collection.

  Back on the job at one o’clock, they climbed back out on their painter’s platform—they called it a stage—that hung from ropes up in the dome. Having started at the top, they would paint a “stretch,” as Ramsey called it, and then lower their platform to start working on a new area.

  Ramsey continued, “We heard a most peculiar noise and I said, ‘Ed, what’s that?’ We looked at our falls and they were alright. We looked at our ties, and they were alright. So I said, ‘It must be the hook.’ He said, ‘It must be my hook. It seemed like it hung on something when I put it in.’”

  Since that hook is what held up half of the swaying platform, Ramsey told his colleague that he’d better move over and make sure it was secure.

  “He set his pot and brush down…and started back to see what was the matter,” Ramsey went on. “As he took his weight onto his hand, the hook straightened out.…Mr. Wheeler slipped off the stage onto the top ledge [of the fourth floor]. But he gradually went to sliding off. I hugged my rope and closed my eyes.”

  If Wheeler screamed on the way down, Ramsey had blocked it out of his memory, recalling only that he did not hear him or his paint pot when it crashed to the floor nearly three hundred feet below.

  “When I looked again,” he said, “I saw the hole where he went through.”

  At the time, the floor of the rotunda consisted of thick opaque glass bricks. Wheeler had smashed through the glass and landed on the concrete basement floor. The terrazzo floor, which eventually developed a crack to which was attached a gruesome and unfounded story, was not laid until the Texas centennial in 1936. The state repaired the infamous crack during the extensive renovation of the capitol in the late 1980s.

  Another of the five painters working that day was twenty-six-year-old O.L. Stiefer, president of the painter’s union, Local 221 in Austin. He and the other painters met after the accident and voted not to go back on the job until safety precautions were taken. Once waist-high fencing had been installed around the platforms—a measure that would have kept Wheeler from sliding off to his death—the union men went back to work and finished the job without further incident.

  When the dome needed repainting after more than forty years, a new generation of painters wore safety harnesses. And stretched beneath them at the fourth-floor level was a strong, well-secured nylon net, just in case.

  For years, capitol visitors stared at this crack in the rotunda floor, thinking a hapless painter’s fall in the early 1920s caused it. But this floor was not put in place until the mid-1930s. Author’s collection.

  20

  LOVE ON KISSING HILL

  The capitol stands on high ground known to early day Austin residents as Kissing Hill.

  The modest eminence at the head of Congress Avenue had its romantic name even before the state’s first stone capitol went up on the site in 1853 and kept it for some time afterward. First earmarked for governmental use when the Austin town site was laid out in 1839, the hill afforded an aweinspiring vista. Here’s how one nineteenth-century writer described it:

  It commands a magnificent view of the scenery up and down the Colorado River for fifteen miles. Patches of prairie appear to the southwest, low mountains and cedar-crowned hills rise in the blue distance in the west. In the foreground the…Colorado runs like a thread of silver. At the feet of the observer lies the city, with its palatial residences and numerous public buildings.

  Couples seeking a private place where they could enjoy both the scenery and some together time came to the hill hand-in-hand on foot or snuggled up in a buggy. In daytime, the undeveloped hilltop made a nice place for a picnic. At night, gentlemen might casually suggest the hill as a good vantage point from which to enjoy the stars or a full moon, hoping to work in a little smooching while they were at it.

  Austin and Texas having a much smaller population back then, even after the first capitol rose on the hill, it was still pretty quiet up there in the evening, especially if the legislature happened not to be in session. Nor did the hill’s appeal to lovers end when the present capitol opened in 1888. The grounds around the new statehouse remained a popular trysting place, while the building became the city’s social center. Beginning with the grand ball in the capitol the night of its dedication and continuing into modern times, couples have danced there, met and fallen in love there, became engaged there and exchanged vows there. Doubtless, over the decades many couples, from high schoolers and University of Texas students to elected state officials and staffers, bypassed those steps while still relishing each other’s company, if only for a few ecstatic moments or perhaps as their schedules allowed until it was time to go home to their families after the session ended.

  One of the most notable weddings took place there a few months after the end of World War II. With Governor Coke R. Stevenson sitting on the front row before the makeshift altar, on December 20, 1945, Waylon H. Galloway and Rose Mary Copeland became united in marriage on the rostrum of the Senate.

  The high ground where the capitol stands had been a sparking place long before the present statehouse went up. Author’s collection.

  Theirs was not the first wedding in the capitol or on its grounds and definitely not the last, but the ceremony made news. For one thing, so far as is known, it was the only time a couple has been bound in holy matrimony in the Senate chamber. But something else made the event unique. As the Associated Press reported, at only forty-five inches, the twenty-year-old groom was “the state’s tiniest employee.” His twenty-one-year-old bride, who played one of the Munchkins in the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie, stood a diminutive forty-four inches. Though their heights were not reported, the attendants also were little people. Six-foot Dr. W.R. White, pastor of Austin’s First Baptist Church, performed the ceremony.

  Galloway, originally from near Wills Point in East Texas, worked at the time for Secretary of State Claude Isbell. He had started as a Senate messenger in the spring of 1943. The couple had met three years before at Vinita, Oklahoma, and after Galloway moved to Austin to take the state jo
b, they carried on a courtship by correspondence. Long-distance telephone calls being fairly expensive back then, Galloway proposed by mail. And Copeland said yes by return post. However, they did use the telephone to wrap up details of their wedding.

  The governor presented the couple a set of dishes, and Galloway’s boss covered the cost of their honeymoon in East Texas. They got so many other gifts from state officials that they had not even had time to open all the boxes before they left on their wedding trip, the AP reported.

  Later a state board of control printing, mail and supply department supervisor, Galloway remained with the state until his retirement on November 13, 1971, with twenty-nine years’ service. The couple moved from Austin to Canton, where they raised dogs, gardened and worked with ceramics.

  Unlike some deals struck in the Senate, the Galloways’ marriage lasted. By the time Mary died on May 6, 2000, they had been man and wife for fifty-five years. Her widower, who had become an ordained Baptist minister in 1965, lived until March 6, 2009, dying in a Terrell hospital at eighty-four.

  While they did not get married there, another Texas couple had a story to tell about the capitol. It started in Washington, when a girlfriend of a University of Texas student named Claudia Alta Taylor from a little town in East Texas called Karnack gave her a piece of paper with the name, address and telephone number of a friend she thought Taylor ought to meet while she was in town. “You’ll just love him,” the friend said. “He’ll show you around.” Taylor politely took the information but had no intention of following up on it.

  That fall, back in Austin, Taylor went from campus to the capitol one day to visit Eugenia “Gene” Boehringer, a friend who worked at the Texas Railroad Commission. When she walked in the first-floor office, she saw a tall, thin young man with wavy black hair. After her friend introduced them, she recognized his name. He was the fellow from Washington she’d been told about. Gene had arranged a blind date for him with one of her co-workers, and he had come to the capitol to meet her. Before leaving on the date, the fellow asked Claudia in a low whisper if she’d like to meet for breakfast the following morning at the Driskill Hotel.

  Taylor demurred, but the next morning she had an appointment with an architect whose office was next to the Driskill. As she walked past the hotel, she saw the guy who had proposed breakfast. Spotting her, he began waving frantically until she stopped. Reluctantly, she took him up on the meal, and afterward, somewhat charmed, she accepted his offer to go for a ride. That constituted their first date. And by mid-November, they were married. From then on, except when people used her longtime nickname and called her Lady Bird, she was Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson, wife of the future thirty-sixth president of the United States.

  The Johnsons were not the only couple who met in the capitol and went on to get hitched. In 1905, Emily May Carter, a schoolteacher from Uvalde, happened to be in the north corridor of the capitol when she ran into handsome Wallace Ellis, a young railroad commission employee.

  They soon fell in love, married and went on to have four children: a son and three daughters. In 1923, while they were out for a Sunday drive, a drunk driver crashed into their car and killed Wallace. May survived but never remarried. Often, as the years passed, May returned to the capitol just to stand on the spot where she and Wallace had first seen each other so many years before. With pleasure, not bitterness at her loss, she remembered what had been. “She was so sentimental about that spot,” her daughter Virginia Ellis Adcock later recalled. “She just loved the capitol.”

  May Ellis died in 1967. Twenty years later, private funds to aid in the capitol restoration were being raised through the sale of commemorative granite pavers to go on the esplanade extending from the north entrance of the capitol over the planned underground extension. In 1993, Virginia and her husband, Howard, bought one of the pavers to honor her parents. All the twelve- by twelve-inch stone says is “In Memory of Wallace & May Ellis,” but for their grandchildren and other surviving family members, those six words tell a touching love story.

  Lady Bird and future president Lyndon B. Johnson in Washington shortly after their wedding in 1934. They met at the Texas Capitol. Courtesy of Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library.

  Not only have romances started in the capitol, but it has also been the scene of more than a few marriage proposals. When then representative Kyle Janek (later a senator and later still executive director of the state health and human services commission) decided to pop the question, he got help from Speaker Pete Laney in arranging a romantic event in a place only members of the legislature and maintenance workers are allowed to go: the top of the dome. The Speaker’s wife, Nelda Laney, had a small table, flowers and a bottle of bubbly placed on the outside walkway, the highest anyone can go in the capitol without rappelling gear. When Janek took his intended up there, she saw the setup as they approached and whispered with alarm that they had to get out of there. “Somebody is having a party,” she said. That’s about the time she noticed Janek holding an engagement ring.

  The couple went back to the dome on their second anniversary. This time, Shannon Janek carried their new baby, who one day will have his own story to tell about the capitol.

  21

  CAPITOL PROTEST HAD O. HENRY TWIST

  William Sydney Porter did not start out his life in Texas, but the famous short-story writer—far better known as O. Henry—spent enough time in the Lone Star State to pick up some good material.

  Sixty years after his death, in a way, O. Henry had a hand in one more yarn, this one involving the late governor Preston Smith. Call it “The Ransom of the Red-Faced Chief.”21

  To set the scene, in the spring of 1970, President Richard M. Nixon ordered U.S. troops into Cambodia during the Vietnam War. This apparent escalation of an already unpopular conflict triggered an immediate uproar among those opposed to America’s continuing presence in Southeast Asia.

  On Monday, May 4, an antiwar protest at Kent State University in Ohio turned violent when National Guardsmen opened fire on unarmed students, killing four. Outrage quickly swept through the nation’s college campuses. In Austin, protestors began gathering at the University of Texas the following morning. That afternoon, thousands of angry students and others against the war spilled off campus and marched toward the capitol.

  The Department of Public Safety quickly called in Highway Patrol troopers and Texas Rangers to protect the statehouse. “If any of those longhaired hippies get inside the capitol,” senior Texas Ranger captain Clint Peoples told his men, “it better be over dead men.” Despite the Ranger chief’s unrealistic admonition and the best efforts of rangers, troopers and Austin police, the protestors poured into the building, breaking some of the original ornate glass in the doors and generally wreaking havoc.

  Governor Preston Smith went to East Fifth Street for barbecue and ended up getting his state vehicle briefly impounded. Author’s collection.

  Only twice before had UT students descended en masse on the capitol. The first time came in 1917 during World War I, when Governor James Ferguson vetoed the university’s appropriation. Led by a band, some two thousand students marched from the campus to the capitol. Entering the building on the south, they paraded through the main corridor waving banners reading, “We are fighting autocracy abroad, we cannot tolerate it here,” as the band played “The Eyes of Texas.” Ferguson ended up getting impeached. The second UT onslaught came in 1947 when popular UT president Homer Raney got fired.

  However, neither of those incidents had been violent. In the 1970 protest, tear gas finally repulsed the students, though they soon began planning an even larger march for Friday, May 8. The Austin City Council denied the organizers a parade permit, saying they would have to walk on the sidewalks. But at the last minute, U.S. district judge Jack Roberts granted a temporary restraining order allowing the students to walk in the street. Many Austinites bordered on hysteria at the prospect of a second unruly protest and perhaps another assault on the capitol.

&n
bsp; Short story writer O. Henry’s restored house in Austin. In 1970, during heated antiwar protests in Austin, then governor Preston Smith got in a bit of trouble there. Courtesy of City of Austin Parks and Recreation Department.

  Even so, the potentially volatile situation that day did not spoil the appetite of Governor Smith when the noon hour rolled around. With more than twenty thousand chanting antiwar protestors headed downtown from UT, the governor decided he could sure use some barbecue. Smith and his DPS security detail left his capitol office and drove in a state vehicle to a popular BBQ place on East Fifth Street. That eatery—long since torn down to make room for a high-rise hotel—sat across the street from the O. Henry Museum at 409 East Fifth Street, which is how Texas’s favorite North Carolinian gets into this story.22

  The governor’s driver could not find a parking place, so he whipped the unmarked DPS car into the O. Henry Museum’s small parking lot. Neither Governor Smith nor his plainclothes bodyguards paid attention to a sign clearly reserving parking for museum patrons only.

  When Smith and the DPS officers returned to their car after their lunch, they found a locked chain stretched across the entrance to the lot. As the governor and his party pondered why someone would in effect impound the vehicle used by the chief executive of Texas, Maree Larson appeared. The museum curator asked the governor if he had seen the sign, and he said he had. Her point made, Larson unlocked the chain so Smith could return to the duties of high office. Before he left, however, the embarrassed but good-humored governor promised Larson he wouldn’t park in the O. Henry Museum lot again.23