Jim Wright died yesterday in Fort Worth. His passing led an alert FrontBurnervian to read our 1980 profile of Wright, written by Roland Stiteler, titled “The Most Powerful Texan in Washington.” The FrontBurnervian thought that you, too, might enjoy reading the story. A small taste:
By the time Wright was 14, he had mastered the politician’s art of indirection. He decided soon after enrolling in Adamson High School in Oak Cliff (his father’s job had taken the Wrights to Dallas) that he wanted to be captain of the football team. He thought the best way to accomplish that would be to make an impression on the coach, B.R. Harris, who was also the history teacher. But something happened in the history classes that Wright hadn’t planned on. He got carried away with history. The year was 1937 and the attention of the students was focused on Europe. What better way to guard the world from people like Hitler, to change the course of history, Wright thought, than to become a United States Congressman? From that point on, Wright knew that he was going to be a Congressman. He would study more history, journalism, and most of all, speech and debate. All the great politicians were masterly speakers, persuasive men whose vocabularies were arsenals. He would become one of those men.
