State of the Union

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or 75 years there has been one place on the University of Texas campus where students can go to eat, meet, nap, dance, bowl, drink, skate, study, watch movies, see concerts, play pool, check email, make copies, hear speeches, and get coffee — the Texas Union. When it first opened its doors in 1933, the Union became the center of student life on campus, and it has remained so ever since.

No structure on campus has a richer or more remarkable story than the Union. As students’ HQ for seven and a half decades, it has planned and housed a fair portion of the events that have defined campus life over the years, everything from concerts to war rallies to the elaborate and stunning Madrigal Dinner. It has fed many a mouth, hosted many a dance, and housed more student organization meetings than any other building on campus. More than once it has been at the epicenter of controversy. And the Union also has changed enormously, expanding and morphing as the University and student body have as well.

Now the Texas Union stands poised for its next and perhaps most dramatic change yet, a long-awaited expansion into a second facility. On the eve of the Union’s 75th birthday (officially Nov. 23), the University will break ground on the Student Activities Center to be built next to Gregory Gymnasium, in the true geographic center of campus, and run by the Union Board of Directors.

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A Look Back and a Look Forward at the Hub of Student Life, now 75 years old b y T i m T al i af e r r o

42 The Alcalde November/December 2008

It’s hard to fathom that for the University’s first 50 years, there was no student center on campus. As originally conceived, the Texas Union was intended to encourage students to get involved with campus life and give them the guidance, money, and physical space to do so. Thus, throughout its history, the Union has been both an organization and a destination. It was and is one of the few buildings on campus where academics is not the priority and students have the most say about what goes on inside it.

For many years the Texas Union has been a dichotomous presence on campus, simultaneously ubiquitous and localized, high profile and underground, stately and common, a building and a community.

For many new students each fall, it appears to be just a building. Some know of its bowling alley, and others have heard of the famed Junior, a Wendy’s employee known for his fast and flashy cash-register prowess. But few know of its hand in student life, in and out of the building.

In 2001, the Texas Union Council became the Student Activities Center, made up of 10 committees that students comprise, some better known than others. Mostly unknown, the Events CoSponsorship Committee divvies up $35,000 a semester to student organizations wanting to put on events.

More in the spotlight, the Union-sponsored Distinguished Speaker Series has brought to campus Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Robert F. Kennedy, Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, Thurgood Marshall, Truman Capote, Walter Cronkite, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Dalai Lama.

Many know about the Cactus Cafe, where many musical greats

— including Lyle Lovett, Townes Van Zandt, Alison Krauss, Nanci Griffith, and Robert Earl Keen — have played, but few know that the Union bankrolls a host of musical and cultural events around campus. Some 17,000 students pass through the Union every day, but few have any inkling of its history.

The University Union Project The seed that ultimately sprouted into a student union was planted all the way back in 1907. A lawyer and former regent named Thomas Watt Gregory, LLB 1885, took up the cause of building a men’s gymnasium on the campus. Gregory chaired an Ex-Students’ Association committee formed to raise the necessary $70,000.

In 1912 Gregory left Texas to join newly elected president Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet, having raised nearly half the sum.

(As president of Princeton University, Wilson had been an early and vocal proponent of student unions, conceiving of them as places where students could become better citizens.) During Gregory’s absence the project sat. When he returned to Austin in 1924, he took up the gym effort once more. By then the fastexpanding campus needed more than just a men’s gym. A UT committee, made up in part of alumni, looked into the campus’ building needs and called for additional construction of a women’s gym, a big auditorium, and a student center.

With shrewd foresight Gregory and the University decided to pool all four buildings into one capital campaign, and the University Union Project was born. With Gregory as the point man, the Texas Exes took responsibility for making it happen.

Since oil had been discovered on lands owned by the University in 1924, it might have seemed like a fortuitous time for appealing to the board of regents for financial support. But while the Available University Fund was steadily growing, requests for money also were rising exponentially, and the board feared spending its new cash too fast. And it wasn’t as though the campus had no other building needs, especially after the Legislature approved the purchase of 135 acres of land adjacent to the original Forty Acres three years earlier. Classrooms and labs were in dire shortage, and suddenly there was much new space to build.

Gregory and his supporters knew that selling the regents on a building meant exclusively for recreational and social activities was going to be tough.

Nevertheless, they pitched to the regents an innovative financial arrangement whereby if the Texas Exes raised $400,000 the regents would match with $600,000, defraying part of the costs and placing the fundraising onus on alumni. “The Ex-Students’ Association,” wrote Gregory, “could render no greater service to the University than to assist in placing on the campus buildings around which the scattered threads of student life could be gathered.” The regents agreed to Gregory’s plan, and in early 1928 the Texas Exes initiated the fund drive with an extensive letterwriting campaign and an appeal to the “sons and daughters of Texas” to contribute.

Contribute they did. Families across the state pledged gifts to be made in installments over years. When the stock market crashed in 1929 and the country slid into the Great Depression, November/December 2008 The Alcalde 43

’30s >

’40s >

’60s >

making good on those commitments sometimes meant severe sacrifice. In late 1929 the University dispatched Arno Nowotny, then assistant dean of men, and other administrators involved in the fundraising effort on a month long paid leave to travel the state and personally call on donors to collect.

By 1931 contributions from alumni totaled more than $450,000. Additional pitching-in from students and revenue from the popular All-University dances brought the total to more than $500,000. With funding secured, building began.

Gregory Gymnasium was the first of the four buildings in the Union project. Construction began in 1929 and was completed in 1930. The Women’s Gymnasium, later called Anna Hiss Gym, was next, begun in 1930 and finished in 1931. Hogg Memorial Auditorium and the Texas Union were both started in 1932 and completed in the fall of 1933.

At construction’s end, John McCurdy, executive secretary of the Texas Exes, declared the campus “unshackled.” It seems worthwhile to note that the major impetus for creating a student center on campus came from former students, and except for the Etter-Harbin Alumni Center, no other structures on campus have since been funded by The Ex-Students’ Association. In its earliest days, the Union retained close ties to the Texas Exes. Indeed, from 1933-54 the Association had offices just outside the Ballroom, and the executive secretary of the Association sat on the Union Board of Directors.

’50s >

The First 50 Years: From Top Left ...

The ’30s: The Ballroom under construction; the Soda Shop; the view from Guadalupe; ladies who lunch The ’40s: A bullhorn calls a rally to order; dating bureau fulfills patriotic duty to date military men

’70s >

The ’50s: The Swap & Shop bulletin board; the Texannes Tap Ensemble The ’60s: Enter bowling; a fashion show; cue the folksinger; limbo madness The ’70s: Discoing down; informal classes teach knitting; and conversational Spanish; the Tavern

Dance Fever The Texas Union owes its existence in large measure to the fact that University of Texas students in the 1920s and ’30s were absolutely addicted to dancing. While administrators had many highfalutin notions of how a student union on a college campus contributes to students’ emotional and leadership development, in truth one of the main reasons the University needed a Union was to have a space for all the dances it held. Once the Union opened and the Saturday night All-University Dances, called “Germans,” moved from Gregory Gym to the Ballroom, the revenue from those dances alone sustained the Union for its first several years. Few other unions in the country even managed to cover the costs of dances, let alone turn a profit. In 1938, the Texas Union was the only student union in the country that sustained itself on dance revenue.

Dancing was so popular at Texas in the ’30s that the Union began hosting lunch dances. They became so well attended that the faculty began to object, seeing as class attendance dropped suspiciously low around midday. There did, however, exist one rampant problem in the Union’s early dance days. Men who managed to secure and bring partners to the dances found themselves having to share her with the many “stags” who showed up alone and were constantly cutting in. The dance organizers raised the fee for stags to attend without dates, but ultimately the problem became so bad that the organizers changed the dances to dates-only. Without the many stags paying entry fees, though, revenue fell off precipitously.

While dances represented a vast portion of the programming efforts during the early Union days, gradually the program office expanded and diversified. The Union Ballroom, at 9,200 square feet, counted among the largest and nicest music venues in Austin during the ’30s and ’40s, so it became a major stop on bands’ Southern tour schedules. Notable headliners included Frank Sinatra, Benny Goodman, Duke November/December 2008 The Alcalde 45

The Past 25 A Fridaygras flier, and the event; UT president Robert Berdahl shows Governor Bush his portrait above the fireplace; a visit from President Clinton; Distinguished Alumnus and former governor John Connally; Wendy’s appearance signaled the fast food takeover of the food court, but the world didn’t end; the art gallery; Lyle Lovett without his Very Large Band; and the Madrigal Dinner.

Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Tommie Dorsey, Glenn Miller, and Guy Lombardo.

During World War II, the Union created the War Effort Council, which coordinated a host of wartime activities. At the Union male students registered for the draft, female students learned to roll bandages, and all contributed to rubber, aluminum, book, and silk drives. Many students also gathered there to hear President Roosevelt’s radio address to the nation after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

One particularly innovative Union-sponsored war effort was the organization of a University Date Bureau. The idea was to set up dates for troops stationed in Austin. Girls needed their parents’ permission to join the bureau, but when in time their profiles were matched to a registered soldier’s, they considered it their patriotic duty to go on a date with him. As a precaution against any “misconduct,” the couples could only go to places approved by the dean of women’s office, and the girls had to report back the next day if the soldier wanted to ever get another date through the bureau.

Through the years the number and nature of the Union’s student planning committees has evolved with students’ interests and the changing times. During the ’50s, the Union added the Charm, Talent, and Hospitality committees and hosted style shows and beauty pageants, including the “Ten Most Beautiful” and the “Best Dressed Coed” contests. As motion pictures rose in popularity, Union student planners added film screenings to the programming ledger, showing films in the Ballroom or the 46 The Alcalde November/December 2008

nearby Hogg Auditorium. The ’60s saw the establishment of the African-American Culture Committee, originally on a probationary basis and later made permanent with the dedication of a room specifically for the committee. Soon after came the AsianAmerican and Mexican-American Culture committees. Most recently, in 2007, the SEC added five more major programs, including the Orange and White Ball, Texas Revue, 40 Acres Fest, the Student Endowed Centennial Lectureship, and the Texas Cowboys Lectureship. At present the SEC has 14 committees and an annual budget north of $684,000, plus income from several endowments.

The Board of Directors What has always made the Texas Union unique among institutions at the University is the unusually high responsibility that students enjoy in the organization’s direction. By design, the Union Board of Directors has a student majority. Six of the nine voting spots on the board belong to students, including that of the president, who appoints three faculty members to the board.

A representative from the vice president for student affairs’ office and the Union director sit on the board but don’t vote. It was a farsighted notion when the board originally formed to allow students such remarkable say in a University entity. Consider, by contrast, that the UT System Board of Regents, after decades of resistance, only recently agreed to allow a lone student from the entire System on its board, and even then as a non-voting member.

The basis for allowing students such control is the belief that the best way to develop student leaders is to enable them.

And in 75 years, the results have been borne out. Some of the most recognizable names in University history held leadership positions in the Union (see sidebar p. 50). Like other boards of directors, the Union board recommends rules and procedures regarding the facilities, approves the budget, makes policy decisions, and looks toward future development. At present the Union board manages an $8.2 million annual budget, heady stuff for college kids.

“What has been the theme of the Union over 75 years is the concept of a partnership between students, faculty, and staff,” says former director and Distinguished Alumna Shirley Bird Perry, BS ’58, MA ’67. “The traditional divisions between faculty, students, and the administration don’t exist in the Union.”

That independence has on some occasions led to disagreements between the Union board and the University or the regents, but on the whole it has proven to be a harmonious and productive relationship.

“I have enormous respect for the role of the Union as a vehicle for student leadership training,” says Perry. “And I know when I’m working with the development office that students who were active with the Union become active alumni, too.”

A Greater Union When the Union opened in 1933, the student body numbered right at 6,400 students. After World War II that number explod-

ed, and the original structure soon had trouble accommodating the increased demand for space. After 15 years of operation, the size of the student body had almost tripled. The Union was due to grow, too. Money remained the issue.

Bankrolling the Texas Union has always been a contentious proposition. Even before construction started, questions arose as to how the Union would secure ongoing funding. Among the options considered was a compulsory student fee. Most unions around the country levied a student fee to fund both programming and building maintenance. Charles Zivley, the Texas Union’s first director, supported the fee proposal, but others at Texas worried it would rouse student indignation. A compulsory fee also would require modifying the Pollard Fee Bill, which prohibited mandatory student fees at state-supported schools in Texas.

Because Union planners knew they could count on revenue from the All-University dances, they tabled the compulsory-fee issue. When dance income fell to an all-time low in 1939, the proposal came back. With strong student support, a bill was first introduced into the Texas Legislature in May 1939. But it was not until 1945 — after a drawn-out process that saw numerous false starts, a lawsuit, and the passage of a volunteer fee over the course of three consecutive legislative sessions — that a compulsory fee of $1 per semester was approved by the Legislature.

Even then it was largely because the Veterans’ Administration would pay only compulsory fees as part of the federal G.I. Bill that the Texas bill passed. A full 12 years after it opened, the November/December 2008 The Alcalde 47

Details, Details

The Union’s Architectural Highlights

H

ad the Main Building and Tower never been built, the Texas Union might well have represented architect Paul Phillipe Cret’s magnum opus.

As it is, the elegant and subtle structure stands as an overshadowed masterpiece. With its humane southwest tower that alludes to and compliments its larger cousin, the Union serves as the western gateway to campus.

Inside, the Union building boasts some rare and quirky architectural treasures. All of its light fixtures were custom-designed for the building by the firm of Walter G. Warren and Company of Chicago. As was the norm, the company made detailed “shop drawings” of the designs to guide their construction. Forty-four of those original fixtures remain, and in the hallway outside the ballroom hang some of the original drawings with descriptions of where the lights may be found.

When Cret designed the Union, he fashioned two major entrances, both off the West Mall. The one to the far west near Guadalupe Street leads up to the second floor (third level) with an exterior staircase, while the lower entrance to the ground floor (second level) is marked with classical arches. The former leads to the grand Presidential Lobby, while the latter originally opened onto the cafeteria. Etched in stone above the lower entrance is the word “Commons,” which is

48 The Alcalde November/December 2008

what the cafeteria was originally called.

The two entrances open into vastly different spaces, the upper far fancier than the proletarian “Commons.” Inside the doors to the Presidential Lobby, a staircase leads visitors toward the ballroom. The steps themselves are covered in rare hand-painted mosaic tiles. The dark wood paneling of the Presidential Lobby is made from the heart of the gumwood tree, now an endangered resource. Written on the ceiling’s beams are the names of every past president of the Texas Exes.

Wooden medallions at the top of each column, carved by sculptors Peter Mansbendel and, later, former UT professor David Demming, commemorate every past president of the University. (President Harry Benedict is shown in photo above.)

To the right of the staircase, just inside the enormous exterior doors, lies Hobbit’s Hole, a nook installed in 1937 as a telegraph room. According to an old Union tour guide script, a parttime student employee named Jim Wells secretly sold candy out of Hobbit’s Hole in the 1950s. It has since been a place to sell tickets to events in the ballroom, cash checks and pay for meal plans, and to store things. Just outside the Ballroom, a room now called the Presidential Lounge used to house The Ex-Students’ Association.

Of the 411 pieces of original furniture that remain in the Texas Union, two have particularly

interesting backstories. The first is known as the body box. Originally the coffin-sized trunk was used to store blankets in the Ladies’ Lounge. At some point, street people discovered they could hide inside it to sleep through the night after the Union closed. On more than one occasion, Union staffers in search of blankets found vagabonds instead. Now security checks the box every night before the Union closes. The second and perhaps most spectacular piece in the whole building is an entertainment system with carvings of native Texas animals on its exterior. Originally on casters, this enormous piece held a Victrola and was rolled out almost every day for the noontime ballroom dances. It now rests along the eastern wall of the Presidential Lobby.

The Union is one of only a few buildings on campus, aside from residence halls, with a fireplace. In fact it has three: one in the third-floor Texas Governors’ Room, another in the adjacent Sinclair Suite, and the third in the Eastwoods Room on the ground level near the information desk. When the Union first opened, the Governors’ Room, then called the Men’s Lounge, was restricted to men, and it was the place where guys would go to read the paper and smoke a cigar. Like the Presidential Lobby, the Governors’ Room has heart of gumwood paneling, and all of the furniture is original. The floor is made of white oak and is an example of three-board installation, extremely rare outside the Northeast and expensive to replicate. It’s called the Texas Governors’ Room now because a portrait of every past Texas governor hangs on the wall, the current governor’s in the place of honor above the mantel.

The adjacent Sinclair Suite, named for “The Eyes of Texas” scribe John Sinclair, was originally the Women’s Lounge. It is the only meeting room in the building with its own restroom. Men were allowed in only as invited guests, and they had to leave with their hostesses. During midday, the Union brought out cots so women could recover from the exertions of morning classes. A fulllength mirror remains in the room, a relic of the day when a woman wouldn’t dare walk out without first checking her hemline. —T.T.

Union finally had predictable cash flow.

It wasn’t long after the Union fee passed that the discussion turned to upping it. The Union’s long-starved programming budget had been the primary beneficiary of the new cash flow, and in 1951 the Union Activities Council was created to coordinate the various student programming groups. In 1953 the student body overwhelmingly defeated a proposal to raise the fee from $1 to $2 a semester. Much of the opposition came from law and engineering students, who cared less about programming in the existing Union than the construction of an additional structure closer to their turf.

The Union Board of Directors would try again in 1956 to raise the fee, this time to expand the original building. They proposed increasing the fee per semester from $1 to $5. The University administration placed extra burdens on the Union with this election, stipulating that for the fee to take effect, not only did the students have to approve it, they had to approve it by a twothirds majority and with more than 30 percent of the student body participating -- substantially more than ever had before.

But the Union had learned lessons from its failed 1953 campaign. It enlisted more than 200 students to campaign in favor of the fee raise. Its leadership negotiated a gentlemen’s agreement among the three candidates for student body president not to seize the fee issue for demagogy. A resourceful student representative arranged for the pickup of new voting machines that Harris County officials had offered to lend. And, perhaps most importantly, it sent members of its board over to the law and engineering schools to assure them that a second Union was coming. It worked. Students approved the fee increase, and construction of the expansion began in January 1959.

In September 1960 the Union expansion opened, nearly doubling the building’s size. Numerous meeting rooms were added, as well as a theater, an underground recreation area, and a center for the students’ programming committees. Flush for the first time with space and cash, the Union hit its programming stride.

It brought in a host of big-name political personalities as part of its speaker series. At the same time, the ’60s brought an era of political activism never before seen on campus, and the Union became the hub for political protest.

There were protests against the Vietnam War, against the board of regents, against segregation, and against the Union itself. Students organized a lettuce boycott to highlight the plight of California migrant workers in 1971, which reduced food traffic in the Union by 50 percent and cost the Union more than $12,000 over 12 days. A similar grape boycott was organized as well. Many students chose simply to abstain from those products, but some urged the Union to show solidarity and stop selling them. Another student-led effort sought to stop the sale of Time at the Union gift shop on the accusation that Temple Inland, a part owner, used inappropriate forestry practices.

The protests reached an inglorious zenith on Nov. 10, 1969, with what has come to be known as the “Chuck Wagon Incident.” The Chuck Wagon was a restaurant in the Union that had become a gathering place for pot smokers, many of whom were not UT students, and in fact a great number of whom were local high school kids. An editorial in the Austin American-Statesman called on the University to clean up the Chuck Wagon and rid it of “non-student scum.” After the Union Board of Directors barred non-students from the Chuck Wagon, a group of former regulars forced their way into the Chuck Wagon and staged a protest. Eight people were arrested, and the Chuck Wagon tem-

porarily closed.

The highly politicized atmosphere of the Union in the ’60s and ’70s, though hardly unusual among the nation’s college campuses at the time, was nonetheless a far cry from the Union’s early days. When it first opened, the Union banned political announcements, speeches, or propaganda of any kind in the building. Nor, for that matter, did it allow any religious activities. Over three decades, the policy shifted from total prohibition to total acceptance. Any and all political speech was tolerated, and any religious group could use the facilities, provided they adhered to the scheduling rules. The same policy remains in effect today, and in 2007 the Union opened a reflection space, a place for students of any religious stripe, including atheists, to spend some quiet time.

One of the only subsequent flare-ups from protestors since the heady days of the lettuce boycott accompanied the opening of Wendy’s inside the Union in 1993. Some students argued the University was selling out to corporate interests and took to calling UT “McUniversity.” On the Monday that the Wendy’s opened, protestors found themselves greatly outnumbered by the line for hamburgers and Frosties stretching out the doors to the West Mall. The Texas Union Wendy’s went on to become the highest-grossing Wendy’s on any college campus, and it set a franchise record for the most people served in a “split” — 221 in 30 minutes, or one customer every eight seconds.

And who was behind the cash register? None other than Junior, who not only was the first manager of the Union Wendy’s to last more than 11 months but works there to this day.

East to the Center Not long after the Chuck Wagon Incident, the Union board commissioned a survey to discern the campus’ impression of the Union. The survey, done by then-upstart Austin advertising firm GSD&M, found that the Union was seen as dirty, drab, and unkempt. In particular, respondents described the dining areas as especially unpleasant. A subsequent commission that looked into the matter recommended an extensive remodeling effort to spruce things up.

The renovation required the Union to close its doors for the first time in its 41 years, and it would remain closed from 197477. During that time, the Union moved to an interim site constructed of four double-wide trailers connected to Moore-Hill Hall. “My office was where Bobby Lane’s potatoes used to be stored,” jokes Perry, the Union’s director at the time.

While there, the Union became the first state agency to apply for and be granted a license to sell alcohol, which it did in the Texas Tavern, the Union’s saloon. The push to sell alcohol also came out of the GSD&M survey’s findings. Thinking it could both respond to student demands and make money, the Union board petitioned the regents for permission to sell alcohol and were approved, becoming the first place on campus to sell alcohol. The effort earned Perry the nickname “Miss Kitty,” after the saloon keeper of TV’s Gunsmoke.

Throughout the ’70s the Union board and the board of regents went back and forth on proposals for a second Union building on the east side of campus. They managed to settle on a site right next to the Mustang statues at San Jacinto and 24th Street.

Finally, a full 30 years after the fee to expand the original Union passed, students got a chance to vote on funding a second Union, this time via a $17 fee increase. It was crushed. According to many observers, recent tuition hikes doomed the proposal, so November/December 2008 The Alcalde 49

the decades-long fight to build a second Union continued.

The latest chapter of the Texas Union East saga began in 2006, when students overwhelmingly passed a referendum to support, at long last, a second Union facility, the Student Activities Center. Planned to open in February 2011, the SAC will greatly expand student meeting space and provide students with another campus home base. Situated between Gregory Gym and the East Mall, the SAC will represent the new center of campus.

Unlike the first Union, the SAC has been designed with enormous input from students, who stipulated that the structure have flexible spaces, furniture that can be easily rearranged, and a bevy of electrical outlets. Like the original Union, the SAC will open early and stay open late, and its purpose remains to offer students the space, the funds, and the guidance to develop as students, as people, and as citizens.

Current Union director Andy Smith, who will oversee both structures when the SAC opens, says, “The new facility will add greatly to the things we do.” It will feature two theaters and two ballrooms — one that seats 1,000 people, the other 600. There will be dining facilities, as well, but the majority of the SAC will be lounge areas and spaces for student activities. “We’re also planning on having lots of outdoor events,” says Smith, whose office desk and meeting table are covered in stacks of blueprints.

As for the original building, Smith expects it will see some slight decrease in traffic, but only temporarily. “When the SAC opens, people on the other side of campus won’t have to walk over to this Union any more,” he says. “But as long as West Campus is West Campus, we’ll have traffic.” A recent study by the City of Austin expects that by the time the SAC is completed, more than 10,000 beds will have been added in West Campus.

With its increased size and expanded presence, expect the Texas Union’s next 75 years to be even more memorable than the last.

———— Tim Taliaferro, BA ’05, former associate editor of The Alcalde, is a graduate student in journalism at Northwestern University.

The bodhi tree, planted in honor of the Dalai Lama during his visit in 2005, graces the Presidential Lobby.

Union Veterans

Congressman Lloyd Doggett rocks some striped slacks during a 1970s Union board meeting.

The Texas Union has always had as one if its central goals the identification and development of student leaders. During its 75 years, the Union has seen many future local, state, and national leaders participate as student programmers or members of its Board of Directors. Here are a few notable Union alumni: Bob Landis Armstrong James A. Baker III Paul E. Begala Dolph Briscoe Jr. Harley R. Clark Jr. John B. Connally Nellie Connally* Frank C. Cooksey Lloyd A. Doggett Ronnie Dugger Ray Farabee Beverly Griffith William G. Gurasich Lloyd N. Hand John L. Hill, Jr.* Kay Bailey Hutchison Lowell H. Lebermann Jr. Wales H. Madden Jr. Mark B. McClellan, M.D.

Matthew McConaughey Cappy R. McGarr Stan L. McLelland Michael L. Meadows Elliott Naishtat Dean M. Ornish J. J. “Jake” Pickle* Lynda J. Robb H. Barefoot Sanders* Arthur L. Schechter Allan J. Shivers Sam Sparks Franklin S. Spears Sr.* Annette G. Strauss* Robert S. Strauss Carole Keeton Strayhorn Eli Wallach Sarah R. Weddington *Deceased