A LONE STAR

WITH AN APPEARANCE of utter calm, Ann Richards looks out over her half-glasses at the crowd facing her.

She isn’t there to do her infamous Harry Porko routine, with the big nose and glasses and cigar, in which she lampoons a sexist pig boss who says things such as “Just give your girls a hug and a pat on the fanny, and they’ll work like dogs.”

Nor is it to tell her feminist buddies, who provided the nucleus for her 1982 campaign for state treasurer, how important women are to the political process.

Instead, Richards is facing a joint session of the Texas Legislature to talk about money. It’s a week into a special session called by Gov. Mark White to allocate more funds for education and highways and to decide how to raise the money to pay for it.

“Bob Bullock was here last week to tell you that in the long range, you haven’t got any money,” Richards says. “And I’m here to tell you that in the short range you don’t have any.”

Richards, the first female state treasurer of Texas and the first woman elected to statewide office since Gov. Ma Ferguson half a century earlier, tells the legislators that they are going to have to do something different.

“This morning we want to discuss with you a problem that relates to the cash flow of the state of Texas,” Richards says as her staff members display charts to illustrate her point. “It’s the same kind of problem that most of us deal with in our own household budgets-and that is the timing of money and when you get it, and how you spend it, and the timing that accompanies that expenditure.”

Richards tells the legislators that unless they change the law, there are going to be times during the coming year when they will be out of money because the state’s tax revenues don’t always come in at the time the state needs to spend money.

Richards asks the legislators to consider speeding up the collection of state franchise taxes, making the due date March 15 instead of June 15. She asks them to redistribute some public school education money so that the payment schedules can be leveled out. And she wants motor fuel taxes to go into the state’s general revenue fund first, from whence they would be transferred every three months to the highway and school funds instead of going there immediately.

Unless some action is taken, Richards says, the state is going to wind up with some hot checks. Unlike previous state treasurers who had cozied up to the bankers, Richards says she doesn’t particularly want the state to have to place funds in banks interest-free to get the banks to honor those hot checks.

And sure enough, Gov. Mark White opened up the special session so legislators could consider Richards’ proposal; they overwhelmingly granted her requests.

In addition to revamping the managerial style at the Treasury, Richards also has a keen wit that she uses to have fun with fellow Democrats. In Houston, she was the master of ceremonies at a dinner honoring Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen. The guest of honor was the then-apparent Democratic presidential nominee, Walter Mondale. Richards, whose sense of humor is becoming legendary, lauded Mondale and then asked the audience, “Isn’t he cute?” The audience went crazy.

Less than halfway through her four-year term, Ann Richards has developed a warm but no-nonsense reputation in dealing with the taxpayers’ dollars. A familiar face to many in Austin from her days as a county commissioner, she has won over many members of the Legislature and the financial community with her creative methods of managing the state’s money to earn maximum interest-and thus stretch the state’s tax dollars.



AT HOME, CURLED up on her couch, Richards, now separated from husband David, explains how her experience as a woman, her management of a household and the rearing of her four children has prepared her for running a state agency that has an annual cash flow of $44 billion.

“We are trained in detail, and we are expected to juggle a lot of balls at once,” she says as she sips coffee and lights another menthol cigarette. “Even if the father is going to run the Little League car pool, it’s the mother who tells him, “Tonight you’re going to run the car pool.’ She’s the one who’s supposed to keep all those things in mind-in other words, manage the timing of all these things.

“I think most of us believed all the expectations of the supposedly great American woman: all that junk about being a nurse, a chauffeur, a chef, a lover and a perfect everything. We really tried to do all that. And most of us still do, even when we know that we’re just cheap help.”

With that attitude, Richards took over the Texas Treasury, which had changed hands only twice since 1941, and quickly brought it from a dusty, not-so-good-ol’-boy operation into a computerized model of efficiency.

“When we got there,” says Rich Paul, her former campaign press aide who now has his own public relations consulting firm, “telephones were not found on every desk. In the hallway, they had pictures of every State Treasurer-all of whom, except Warren Harding [Richard’s predecessor], were dead. That was the total of art in the office, with the exception of some calendar pictures that were framed and hung on the downstairs walls. The first thing she did was to get rid of the old photos of the grumpy-looking old men who had been state treasurers, and she got pictures from Laguna Gloria [art museum]. After the initial shock, I think a lot of the employees really liked the idea.”

As Richards changes the art from time to time, even her employees get in the act and occasionally display their own paintings, afghans, sculpture, photographs and other personal art objects.

Paul says that with her friendly attitude-caring about employees, listening to their personal problems, asking that they call her ’Ann’-the agency has moved some distance from the time when an employee in the vault would break out in hives when Harding made one of his rare visits. Early in her term, Richards had her employees read The One-Minute Manager, a book that suggests giving specific praise or specific criticism to employees, accompanied by warmth. Some Texas bankers have been shocked to receive the rather non-bankerish token of a bouquet of flowers with a warm note from Richards when they did something for which she was particularly appreciative.

“When you do a good job, you get a good job award,” Paul says. “I don’t know where she gets these things – it’s either a pin, one of those plastic wind-up toys that does flip-flops or something else. If you do something exceptional, you’re liable to wind up with a good job award on your desk in the morning with a note from Ann. Or she’ll walk up to you without saying anything and put this little pin on you or a funny sticker on your shirt. Those really have become a kind of status symbol around the agency,” Paul says.

Once, when Richards had just returned from a midweek trip in which she and other state officials had camped overnight near Del Rio to commemorate the 100th anniversary of completing a historic rail line to the West Coast, she went straight to the Treasury in her blue jeans and big old baggy sweater, still carrying her backpack, Paul recalls. “She took care of whatever business needed to be done, then went downstairs and sat down on someone’s desk and started telling them stories about camping.

“Ann’s creating kind of a family over there,” he says. “At Christmastime, we had scheduled a Treasury wide Christmas party one afternoon. Leading up to that, every division was invited to decorate their door, and the best door would win a prize. That created a kind of camaraderie that I don’t think existed much before then.

“She also had a potluck lunch for everybody, with spouses invited, and there were kids all over the place. We had a piano player playing Christmas carols. And then Ann got up and handed out the prizes for the doors. They were all booby prizes of one kind or another. This was just at the time that she was moving into her new house, and she made a kind of emotional speech to her employees. She told them about how she had left home for the first time at age 50. She had lived with her parents, and then her husband, and she had finally moved out of the house and gotten her own place.”



RICHARDS HAS RAISED the minority hiring percentages in her office by astounding numbers. Currently, the ethnic breakdown is 60 percent white, 18 percent black and 22 percent Hispanic. The work force is 59 percent female.

In addition to putting art in the hallways and smiles on the faces of her employees, Richards has shipped 7,000 boxes containing 18 million state money warrants to the state library for microfilming. With the space created by that move, she installed four proof machines to process items that were previously hand-sorted. The machines also encode checks, a process that the state previously paid banks to do. These efforts save the state more than $3 million a year in added interest and reduced charges.

All checks are processed as quickly as possible to minimize the “float” time in which they are not gaining interest for the state. The time that a check remains in the Treasury before it’s deposited into an interest-bearing account has been cut from up to a day and a half under Richards’ predecessor (Warren Harding), to an hour and a half. Checks for large amounts are given priority so that the float time is kept to an absolute minimum. These processes, plus better cash management of the average $2 billion that the state has invested somewhere at all times, generated an additional $9 million for Texas just during the first six months of fiscal 1984.

Richards has ended Harding’s practice of leaving $5,000 in interest-free accounts in 1,405 Texas banks. The money had been generally considered to be a tool to curry favor with the bankers. That $7 million is now earning interest.

Richards also has begun to vigorously enforce the state’s escheat law, in which unclaimed safe deposit boxes or dormant accounts with banks and insurance companies as well as utility deposits and other such entities revert to the state. Richards upped the collection to $12 million for fiscal 1984. At the same time, she has instituted an ardent campaign to find the rightful owners of those accounts or items such as watches and gold coins. This fiscal year, $1 million was returned to people who had forgotten about their accounts, or to heirs who didn’t even know the accounts existed.

The bottom line is that for 1984, the treasurer’s office will take in $190 million in interest and $12 million in unclaimed property (with $1 million of such property returned to the rightful owners) and will spend $6.6 million to run the agency-a net gain for Texas of $194.4 million. According to Richards, the state’s cash is now returning 8.91 percent interest during the first half of the year, 98.26 percent of the average yield of the nation’s 10 largest money market funds. Even the state’s bankers concede that the Treasury is run a lot more like they would run it than the fiscal backwater it had been – even if they don’t get the interest-free deposits that they once received.

And she has done it with the smiling political acumen that has made her a hit with legislators, Democratic Party politicos and Texas feminists, who are exultant about a woman making an impressive showing.

“She’s done a superb job,” says Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby, the presiding officer of the Senate, who is considered the most knowledgeable person in Texas fiscal affairs. “She’s brought the office out of the eyeshade-and-quill-pen era. She’s increased the return that the state gets on its money.”

Don Cavness, a banking lobbyist, says most of the bankers he talks to “feel like Ann’s doing a very good job. And I’m not just saying that because it would sound good to her.”



IN ADDITION to being one of the wittiest political speakers on the state or national circuit, Ann Richards is a woman who likes to float down rivers in a canoe; who can do wonders with little more than a plastic cutting board, a Swiss Army knife and a few spices beside a campfire on the bank of the Rio Grande; who can do all the things necessary to run a house, and who is lauded as a warm, caring manager who gets things done.

She grew up in Waco as the only child in a family without much money. Her parents doted on her; her father told her there wasn’t anything she couldn’t do. At Waco High School, she met David Richards, the son of a well-to-do Waco family. (After a separation of more than three years, their divorce became final on February 1.) They married while they both were attending Baylor University; she, on a debate scholarship. After graduation, the couple moved to Austin. Ann taught government at Fulmore Junior High School while David got his law degree at the University of Texas at Austin. From there they moved to Dallas, where David was a plaintiff’s attorney. Both were heavily involved in liberal Democratic politics.

Through her involvement with the DallasDemocratic Women, a tradition began between Ann and fellow political activist BettyMcKool (wife of Mike McKool, who is nowchairman of the Dallas County DemocraticParty). Each Christmas, Ann and Betty sendout a Christmas card featuring a picture ofthemselves so well-costumed that they arebarely recognizable. They poke fun at everyone from Pink Ladies to legislators to Ronald Reagan-even fellow feminists such asBella Abzug.



In 1969, the Richardses moved to Austin. They bought a house on 13 hilly acres overlooking the city. David practiced labor and civil rights law, and Ann dabbled in politics while raising their children. She helped Sarah Weddington become Austin’s first female legislator and helped Wilhel-mina Delco become the city’s first black legislator.

In 1976, she ran for office herself, ousting incumbent County Commissioner Johnny Voudouris. By most accounts, she was an effective commissioner who easily fit into the good-ol’-boy atmosphere of the courthouse while helping to push the hiring of minorities and women.

Unfortunately, as her political career brightened, her personal life diminished. She began to increasingly rely upon alcohol for emotional support. But in 1980, after friends and family confronted her, she checked into an alcoholism treatment center. She hasn’t had a drink since that time, and, like former first lady Betty Ford, she occasionally talks to groups about the problems of chemical dependency.

In 1982, when word leaked that Harding was being investigated for official misconduct just days before the February filing deadline for candidates, Richards resigned her county commissioner’s seat and jumped into the race for state treasurer. After an exhausting campaign, on which she was accompanied by her son, Dan, Richards led Harding in the first Democratic primary. He bowed out of the runoff. She easily outdistanced well-financed, banker-backed conservative Republican Allen Clark to win the treasurer’s post. Her salary is $69,000 this year.

For Richards, running the Treasury has been just an extension of the job she performed as a housewife and mother. As she describes it, women in those roles learn to keep 16 balls in the air at once and to have an ability to focus on one problem-such as a child who needs attention-while still remembering to turn on the oven for dinner and to run the car pool.

“There is so much to do as a housewife-assuming that you’re doing it well-that every minute in management really matters. And you know that wasted time is just terrible. Time is crucial to how well you do your job, so you do learn to deal with all of it in a big sense. But it’s the details that make all that happen, that make it function,” she says.

“I can tell you that it’s so much better if you’ve got the chopping block right there next to the sink; that way you can always scrape the refuse into the disposal. And if you put the coffee within reach, you don’t have to run all over the kitchen doing it. You can take that same technique of item management and apply it anywhere. So when you see an employee in the item-processing division or the management division, and they’ve got the TV screen over there and their desk’s over here, and they’re going back and forth carrying that paper, you say, ’Why don’t you have that over here?’ And I don’t think most male managers would do that.”

Richards also attributes her attitude toward employees to her training as a wife and mother. She says that aside from details of the office, she hasn’t had any big secrets revealed to her about how to manage.

“When I was a county commissioner, we learned early on that you make assignments and that there is a time period in which that assignment will be performed, and that’s part of the whole housewifely thing. You’re not learning anything new, really, when it comes to management. I think that one of the greatest things missing in management is that employees, generally speaking, are not real sure of what the assignment is: It hasn’t been clearly defined. And they haven’t been told exactly when they are expected to produce it or report back. Then they’re not rewarded when they do the job well, or they’re not immediately reprimanded if they don’t do the job well. As a housewife, you know when that plumber is supposed to be there, you tell him exactly what he’s supposed to do, and you reward him-either with nice words or a paycheck or both-for having performed the duty. It’s the same thing with raising kids.

“I think that men,” Richards says, “are big-picture trained. They haven’t been trained to reward. It’s real hard for men to say, ’You did a really good job, and that was important to me’ because of how weak that sounds. Yet women do that all the time. They speak from a personal mode.

“I kept thinking that the higher up I went, some big mystery was going to be revealed. How shocking it is to find that there isn’t any. It’s just supplying what you already know, with an eye to detail, while keeping the big picture functioning with all the balls in the air so that none of them drop,” Richards says.

“I don’t know whether we’re better at knowing that if a ball drops, it’s not the end of the world. I guess we don’t have as much ego invested in performance or mistakes. We expect mistakes to take place because we’ve dealt with them with kids.”

“You don’t get quality performance out of fear, either,” Richards says. “I’ve done a lot of things because I was afraid, but I didn’t do them over and over again; I tried to avoid them. So I think bosses and managers who instill that fear are not very good in the long run.”

There are, however, potential drawbacks to a feminine approach to management that require some compensation, says Richards. One is “learning to let go when detail doesn’t matter. There are times when we will hang in there for that detail when we should just let it go-let it go to the big picture. And I didn’t learn to do that until I was a county commissioner-to say, ’That one really matters, but this one doesn’t.’ “

The other part of her homemaking background that Richards has had to adjust was learning that her sole role isn’t to be loved. “If it’s true that women with housewife training want to be loved more than males, you can quickly overcome that as an administrator and learn that there’s a difference between compassion and respect.”

Marion “Sandy” Sanford, a Houston lawyer who lobbies for bank holding companies, says the people he serves “think extremely well of her. She’s handled herself really well. In the first place, she’s real smart. She is creatively intelligent, and she wants things to work-sort of like Bob Bullock over in the comptroller’s office, who dragged the office kicking and screaming into the 20th century. She’s doing very much the same thing with the treasurer’s office.

“I suspect that there’s a bunch of folks who looked askance at her basically liberal credentials,” Sanford observes. “But she’s made believers out of almost everybody I know. Just sheer effort, and she’s terribly well-staffed. By and large, I would say the bankers are really pleased.”

Several of Richards’ Democratic colleagues think that she would have had a good shot at being the first woman vice presidential nominee if she had been in Congress or some other national showcase office where her talents, wit and speaking ability were more widely known. Sarah Weddington, who now heads the Office of State-Federal Relations for Gov. Mark White in Washington, says that Richards is a top prospect for a Cabinet post if the Democrats win the White House.

“I think that’s because she is one of the few statewide-elected women in the nation,” Weddington says. “Once people notice her, they’re so impressed because of her ability.”

The editors at Texas Business magazine must have felt the same way; they gave her an A rating among statewide officials for her performance in office.

If the Democrats don’t win the presidency, Richards is considered a hot prospect for higher statewide office when something opens up. In the meantime, she’s minding the checkbook for Texas taxpayers.