Dorothy Louise Browne

One of Austin’s most alluring lights has glimmered and gone out. Dorothy Browne died in her home at 6 p.m. this Christmas Eve with her husband and daughter at her side. Born Dorothy Louise Browne in Tyler on March 19, 1941, she began life in families that had prospered there for generations in banking and the florist business. When she was a small child, one of her grandmothers put a rebel flag in her hands and seated her on the ground in front of a gathering of the Daughters of the Confederacy. The beliefs and priorities of those women couldn’t have been farther from the ones Dorothy embodied as an adult, but she adored her grandmothers, and she yearned for the time she might be a grandmother. When Isabelle came along, she and Dorothy would swing in a hammock together and make up wild stories that had no ends. It came as natural to Dorothy as opening her glorious brown eyes.

In Tyler Dorothy was a cheerleader and was nicknamed “Sparky” by her high school friends. A protracted illness of a family member made her father take employment with a florist in Houston before Dorothy’s senior year. She punished her parents with blasts of Wagner symphonies at night and rode a train to be with her Tyler chums on weekends. But she came to realize her year at Lamar High taught her to make new friends and expanded her horizons.

At the University of Texas, she moved in the new Kinsolving dorm and made lifelong friends with other future prominent Austin women, Claudette Lowe and Sally Wittliff. When Dorothy’s sorority snubbed Claudette with explanations that her parents weren’t distinguished enough, Dorothy told those young women and their organization to kiss her behind and never looked back. No longer a rich girl in an insulated Texas town, she prided herself in studying liberal arts one semester and working full-time the next to achieve her bachelor’s degree. During the UT administration of president and chancellor Harry Ransom, Dorothy was enthralled and befriended by faculty members that included the classicist William Arrowsmith, the archaeologist Jim Wiseman, and the photographer Russell Lee.

One day someone came up the apartment stairs to introduce Dorothy to Bill Brammer. He helped her write a paper that night on Scott Fitzgerald, and their courtship began. Bill was in his early thirties, recently divorced, and the father of young children. He had written a novel titled The Gay Place, a classic portrayal of Texas politics and Austin social life in the 1950’s. Like most fictional characters, Bill’s overbearing and profane Texas governor Arthur Fenstemaker was a composite of persons real and imagined. But because Bill had written speeches for Lyndon Johnson when he was Senate Majority leader, after President Kennedy was killed in 1963 publishers in New York clamored for Bill to write a nonfiction book about the nation’s new president. “What do you do with me?” Dorothy asked Bill. His answer was a Houston wedding in which she wore a pillbox hat. One of Bill’s friends startled her parents by arriving with a date named Barbara Jordan.

They moved to Washington but Bill soon learned that LBJ and his wife Lady Bird felt betrayed by their alleged portraits. On LBJ’s orders, no one in the administration would talk to their friend from the Senate days. Bill and Dorothy moved to New York for a while. An emerging movie director took one look at Dorothy and arranged an interview by the head of a top modeling agency. The woman looked at her and said, “How tall are you?” Dorothy said, “Um, five-five?” Not tall enough. They returned to Austin, and then with their fabled standard poodle Rosebud they joined Hugh and Claudette Lowe on their honeymoon in Manzanillo, Mexico. Dorothy gained enduring friendships in Austin with emerging writers that included Edwin “Bud” Shrake and Gary Cartwright. Bill, whose critical success inspired them, started a sequel to his novel and covered the civil rights struggles for Time, but he could never bring another book to fruition. He liked the social and chemical adventures of the 1960’s more than the lonely routine and discipline of writing.

In the mid-sixties Hugh Lowe hired Bill to help publicize the upcoming Hemisfair in San Antonio. Bill’s daughter Sidney recalled one weekend morning when she and her sister Shelby were staying with them at the apartment in San Antonio. “Dorothy came out of their bedroom rubbing her sleepy eyes and wearing her baby doll pajamas. Bill said, ‘Look, kids, it’s the evil stepmother.’ We shrieked with laughter.” That was a good year for Dorothy. They both had jobs; life was stable. Claudette Lowe got Dorothy to fill an English teaching vacancy at the old Brackenridge High School. To balance the mandatory reading of Silas Marner, she bought her students novels more relevant to their lives, A Patch of Blue and Little Big Man. Their classrooms were on the third floor, and the men in administration did not like to climb the stairs. On Fridays Dorothy and Claudette let their students bring record players and dance.

Bill drove out to California to visit Larry McMurtry, who was on a Wallace Stegner writing fellowship at Stanford. He found he had much in common with McMurtry’s friend Ken Kesey. One day Dorothy was grading papers when Kesey and the Merry Pranksters rolled up in their outlandish, wildly painted bus. Dorothy gazed out later and recalled, “It looked like every cop car in San Antonio was parked close around us.”

Bill was next hired to write a screenplay for a director in Bolinas, California. Dorothy got a job as the school librarian in the Marin County town famous or notorious for taking down every highway sign pointing to it. “We didn’t really fit in,” Dorothy said. “We didn’t bake our own bread. We had a television.” But they often drove the twisting roads to San Francisco and took in a full dose of its 1967 Summer of Love. They saw Jimi Hendrix, the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Dorothy knew she was a counterfeit hippie, but she acquired an adjective that for her never became dated or passé — “groovy.”

They were together seven years before their marriage collapsed. A romance commenced between Dorothy and Arthur Vance, a handsome liberal politician from Pasadena who worked in one of the plants along the Houston Ship Channel. When another Texas icon, Bob Eckhardt, left the legislature for a seat in Congress, Arthur won the vacated legislative seat and served two terms in the House of Representatives. On the class photos on the walls of the Capitol, one could tell from the difference in hair length that the social sea changes affected Arthur, too. He chose not to run again, but his intention was not to tune in and drop out — he said he hoped there were not so demoralizing ways for him to contribute than as a liberal Democrat in the Texas legislature. They moved to country places near the hamlet of Thrall. Dorothy taught English, world history, and government at Taylor High. She organized and coached a team for the community’s first Special Olympics. The rest of her life, people in Austin would come up to her and tell her what an inspiring teacher she had been at Taylor.

One summer they took off on a backpacking trek to Europe, settling for many weeks on the storied Greek island of Corfu. Dorothy said one night they crossed hills toward a beach with no roads of access. They saw a shepherd who had dressed his flock with ribbons and called and sang to the sheep by name, and the sheep seemed to respond. Dorothy’s and Arthur’s daughter Lila was born the next year, 1973. On weekends and in the summers Arthur’s daughter Kim from a prior marriage came up from Houston and became a permanent member of Dorothy’s extended family. Her marriage to Arthur also lasted seven years.

Dorothy rented a house for Lila and for Kim, through her later teens, on an Austin street called Possum Trot, and she got a job as the assistant director of the Texas branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. The staff was confined to director John Duncan, attorney Mary Keller, and Dorothy. They shared cramped space in a two-story yellow brick house on Seventh Street with the law firm of David Richards and the future appellate judge Sam Houston Clinton, and the Texas Observer edited by Molly Ivins and Kaye Northcott and then Jim Hightower. The building was ground zero of the 1970’s feisty and embattled Texas liberals. Those years stirred in Dorothy her passions for civil rights, voting rights, and women’s rights. As a single mom her weekend social life revolved around a bar and restaurant on West Sixth Street called Another Raw Deal, where there was much good talk and the kids liked their playmates and the food.

It would be disingenuous for the author of this to refer to Dorothy’s third husband, Jan Reid, in the third person. In 1979 at a party in the King William District in San Antonio, Pete Gent, a former Dallas Cowboy receiver and author of the novel North Dallas Forty, introduced her to me as Dorothy Brammer. She corrected our friend and said she was through changing her name to those of men — from now on she was going by her family name, Browne.

I had then written one book, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, and though I meant to be a novelist, I found myself an accidental journalist, freelancing for Texas Monthly. Though my prospects were most uncertain, we married the Fourth of July 1982. Until I met Dorothy I had never really been out of the country. When I won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, she led me, Lila, and Lila’s best friend Katy Milloy to London and Penzance in Great Britain; Paris, the Rhone valley, and Maritime Alps of France; and a rental place draped with bougainvillea overlooking the Italian Riviera beach town of Finale Ligure.

Back in Texas, Dorothy departed the Texas Civil Liberties Union and wrote a shy letter to Ann Richards, whom she had known at campouts on the San Gabriel River and parties in the home of David and Ann, who had recently been elected Texas State Treasurer. Dorothy added in her letter that she had no idea what the Treasury actually did. “Darthy,” Ann called back, “come on down here. You can do anything you care to do. We’re gonna teach you all about money!” At the Treasury Dorothy first managed Ann’s correspondence and then researched policy and gained another great friend, Joy Anderson, who lobbied the legislature for the agency. They often worked late while Lila did her school homework. Lila and Dorothy would look at each other and smile on hearing Ann padding down the halls to get a question answered, in her stocking feet.

When Ann made her longshot run for governor in 1990, Dorothy and I worked as volunteers in her campaign. Ann defeated her Democratic rivals and the Republican Clayton Williams. I often thought that Ann and her chief of staff, Mary Beth Rogers, appointed Dorothy associate director of the criminal justice division to rattle the cages of former cops who imperiously dealt out federal pass-through grants but now were supervised by an attractive woman who had worked for a regional branch of the ACLU.

Litigation and the federal judge William Wayne Justice forced the Texas legislature to address the state’s chronic prison overcrowding with a surge in penitentiary construction. Governor Richards, a recovering alcoholic, wanted a hefty percentage of those new cells and beds directed at drug and alcohol treatment for inmates prior to their release. She told Dorothy to accomplish that. With a colleague or two, Dorothy traveled the country, studying programs in other states. In a matter of months Texas shot from fiftieth to first in its percentage of penal funding directed to that cost-efficient and sensible aim.

Dorothy adhered to a strict personal code of ethics. She was loyal to the elected officials who employed her, but when she worked on their campaigns it was on her own time, not the state of Texas’. She didn’t leave her convictions at the door. When Ann faced an uphill battle in her 1994 race against George W. Bush, at the campaign headquarters one night a political consultant barked, “Dorothy, I don’t want to hear one more word about the death penalty!” Ann lost, and after a few months Land Commissioner Garry Mauro hired Dorothy to direct the land office’s coastal programs. She came back after her first trip to the coast and happily told me, “They’re going to pay me to do this!” Then came another election, and a subordinate for a new land commissioner denied her a last couple of weeks on state payroll that would lock the two of us in to our medical insurance.

That was an urgent matter, for months earlier I had been shot and badly wounded in an armed robbery in Mexico City. Dorothy and Lila arrived the same night, followed by supportive friends, and my wife made some of the hardest calls on behalf of me and my medical treatment one could ever be asked to make. It would be months before I could walk and really work again. On a night when I was away in San Antonio researching a magazine piece and trying by phone to pass muster with an editor in New York for a book about the calamity I didn’t yet know how to write, at one of her Austin parties Molly Ivins heard of our predicament and told Rep. Elliott Naishtat he needed to hire Dorothy long enough to guarantee us the medical coverage. At first, she was only going to write a newsletter, but she became his chief of staff and helped Elliott get passed into law bill and after bill that benefitted the disadvantaged and disabled. She became an authority on mold contamination and medical marijuana. She labored in the legislature until her retirement in 2018 — long enough that young Isabelle called her workplace “Granny Lady’s Capitol.” Dorothy worked in state government for 32 years. She personified the ideals and calling of public servants, who are too often maligned these days. A novelist friend wrote that she always thought of Dorothy “as one of those rare ones who not only lived the sixties to their fullest, but carried the true and bright spirit of that time forward, lighting some darker times.”

Dorothy was a beautiful woman, inside and out. She carried on her career and cleared the way, really, for mine. My most recent books Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards — her favorite, of course — and my novels Comanche Sundown and Sins of the Younger Sons won awards but she said I took too long to write them. Dorothy and I battled many times but more often, I like to think, we laughed with and at each other. After she fell ill this year, out of the blue one day she asked, "How long did you think we'd stay married?" The once-jaded bachelor in me said, “Oh, five years. How about you?” Dorothy of the razor-sharp wit and tongue: “As long as it took to get to the courthouse and have it legally canceled.”

With the laughter, how we loved to travel. Our voyages took us on to rain forest Ecuador, Rome and Tuscany, her beloved Greece, my beloved Basque Country and the Pyrenees. We were among the three million near the Eiffel Tower when it lit up with revolving coils of fireworks to celebrate the Millennium. We had planned this past fall to visit friends in Portugal and roam on through southern Spain to Morocco. Dorothy needed to renew her passport. Who's ever had a passport or driver's license picture taken and not looked like a fugitive or a deer in headlights? Not Dorothy. At 76 or so, she was smiling slightly and looked like a million dollars. We were married 37 years. She was the love of my life.

Dorothy’s survivors include her daughter Lila Vance-Wilson and her granddaughter Isabelle Wilson of Austin, and her Indiana stepdaughter Kim Vance and Kim’s daughters Sierra Gearhart and Erin Browne, who called Dorothy “Grandma Texas.”

A celebration of Dorothy’s life will be held at Saengerrunde Hall in Austin on Sunday Jan. 19 from 2 to 5 p.m. Located at 1607 San Jacinto Blvd., the ample space adjoins historic Scholz Garten.

Those who want to make contributions in Dorothy’s honor are urged to consider Planned Parenthood and Houston’s TIRR Foundation for research, treatment, and care of patients with brain trauma and spine injuries.