When Cordye Hall walked into her boss’s office one day in 1932. he asked her who she was going to vote for. “Roosevelt,” she said with enthusiasm. As Hall turned to walk out of the office, the boss, half standing up from his chair, yelled. “You’ll regret it! And your petticoat is showing!”
“It was the nicest nasty thing he could think to say to me,” Hall says now, fifty-six years later. She says that in those days it was dangerous for workers to reveal their political views if they differed from the company line. But Hall was unintimidated when it came to voicing her opinion. Now approaching ninety, she still is.
Hall was born near Abilene in 1899. Her parents died when she was young, and her brother brought her to Dallas where she attended Ursuline Academy, graduating in 1918. She married, had two sons, and divorced- long before divorce was an accepted end to marriage. When World War II beckoned, her sons answered. “My oldest flew 182 missions,” she says. “That’s a lot. Of course I never knew when he was gone if I was going to get that letter or not [saying her son was missing or dead]. That will activate any mother.”
So Hall became an activist for peace. She was a charter member, along with federal judge Sarah T. Hughes, of the Dallas United Nations Association, which was formed to support world peace through the UN. She also became a tireless letter-writer, giving advice to world leaders and attacking every article or editorial that seemed to advocate bucking the UN or favor remilitarizing against the new “threat” from Russia. “My goodness,” says Hall, “they were our allies in the war. Had we already forgotten?”
“She’s always had the knack of looking pompous asses in the eye and telling them, in a nice, blunt way, that they were pompous asses,” says Ken Gjemre, a long-time friend of Hall’s and founder of the Half-Price Books chain. Hall battled with The Dallas Morning News and its arch-conservative columnist, Lynn Landrum, who often complained of the “salt and pepper” mixing of the races (“Prejudice is the root cause of all wars,” Hall says). Landrum once invited Hall to lunch in the News’s lunchroom to discuss their differing views. “Perhaps you would like to bring a friend with you,” Landrum wrote her. Naturally, Hall brought a black friend who, in that year of 1955, was barred from entering the lunchroom. Landrum, whom Hall refers to as “the rattlesnake,” was angry, but Hall had made her point.
Now winding down her activist career, Hall has donated all of her letters, news clippings, and mementos to Texas Woman’s University, where they are safely stored and catalogued in the library. And she has just written an introspective book about her life, What Can One Person Do?, published by the Heart of Texas Foundation. She says that in all her travels that is the question she is asked the most-as if, she says, one person alone is powerless. Cordye Hall has spent a lifetime proving that’s not true.
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