The county seat of Harris County TX is Houston. Enough explaining? City where I grew up. I first heard of Hartsell Gray in 1974 when I voted in the Democratic primary. He was a recent appointee, Harris County Treasurer; he had been appointed by the the Harris County Commissioners' Court to succeed Constance McDavid, who had died in office. My liberal friends recommended I vote for Hartsell and I did.
Then came 1975. I was giving up on getting a PhD in mathematics at the University of Houston. Better to be making money somewhere. I spent most of 1976 looking for a job, without much experience to show besides teaching.
At the same time, in 1975, the Houston Gay Political Caucus (now Houston GLBT Political Caucus) came into being. I had been active in the glbt movement since 1972. I had political ties to Houston's Montrose area, although I lived elsewhere until the fall of 1975. The news came in the summer that Hartsell Gray had fired Gary Van Ooteghem, who had wanted to address the Commissioners' Court in behalf of gay rights. Gary was Hartsell’s chief administrator, called the Controller of the County Treasury. Gary sued in Federal court with the support of the ACLU. This made quite a splash and was attended by the founding of the Caucus. Gary Van Ooteghem became its first president. At the time I had regrets about voting for Hartsell Gray. I attended my first Caucus meeting the evening after I had moved into Montrose. Precinct 34, in fact. Through the Caucus I soon got to know Lee Marsters, Democratic chair of Precinct 34. He would be a mentor to me in the following years.
I was 35 years old. In September 1976 I had been elected to a 3-year term on the board of the GPC. Lee Marsters knew I was looking for a job. One day in December he told me a computer programmer was needed by the County Treasurer. That was Hartsell Gray. I walked to the County Courthouse to meet my new boss. There was a bus strike at the time and I had to walk downtown. So I met Hartsell. I noticed he referred to himself as a liberal. Not a bad impression. For the first few months I would be learning about computers and about programming. He gave me plenty of time to learn. The Treasury was in 2 buildings. In the main Courthouse (and jail) at 301 San Jacinto there was the main office, where deposits were handled. It included Hartsell's office. There was an IBM 3741, model 3, a desk-sized keypunch machine supplemented with an 8K computer. It would become my bailiwick.
After about a week Hartsell called a staff meeting. Before it started he seemed lost in thought, staring into a corner of the room. I thought many executives would not be caught dead doing that. He was his own person and I liked that. Not afraid to be eccentric. When I was trying to change careers I had worried about having to work for super-conventional bosses. Pretty soon the staff meeting began and Hartsell ordered the staff to hold up on county checks, including paychecks. There followed a press conference. He thought there was a legal question about releasing checks that time. I do not know the legal aspects of this matter. My friend Lee Marsters thought this was a bad thing. It would come to bite my boss later.
One fellow employee was Mrs. Lorine Stanley. She helped me learn to be at ease with black people in an equal setting. She took me under her wing. One thing she told me was that Mr. Gray expected loyalty. Something I was ready to give. Later I noticed other women addressed her as Lorine and I did. She took me to a corner and asked me to use Mrs. I could understand there was a time when no one would call her Mrs.
This County Treasurer was passionate about hiring minorities and the handicapped. Eventually I would identify my minority to him. He was an Episcopal priest. In the 25 years I knew him I do not think we ever discussed religion. I am not a Christian.
I soon learned that Hartsell Gray was an angry person. Nevertheless he never once blew up at me. A woman I worked with thought it was because he respected me. I have my own things I am angry about and I could identify with his anger. A therapist told me I held my anger in and he let his out. I remember when he was interviewed by a Houston Post reporter and got absolutely livid with this man. He did not get along well with the press.
On many things he was self-taught. He read up on the computer scene, also on accounting. His critics sometimes complained that he was not a trained accountant, but he could educate himself.
At the same time I was on the board of the GPC. Sometimes Hartsell would have me work in the evenings, but never once did this conflict with a board meeting. To this day I do not know how this happened. I came to work closely with Lee Marsters, a fellow board member. He chaired the screening committee and I did interviewing of candidates, notably Kathy Whitmire in her first race (1977) for City Controller. Lee and I shared a common outlook: we were embedded in the local Democratic party and were strongly interested in local elections. Others, such as Gary Van Ooteghem and GPC board chair Mort Schwab took their direction from national glbt figures and organizations. It had largely been due to Lee that we had gotten into the 1975 election to re-elect Mayor Fred Hofheinz over Frank Briscoe; the latter had been anathema to minority communities. I had first met Lee's ex-wife Polly Marsters in a 1972 campaign. They were said to be alienated. Lee had been elected in 1970 to the Harris County Democratic Executive Committee to represent Precinct 34, which voted at Felix's Mexican Restaurant on Westheimer. It was customary for the county to appoint as election judge the party committee member from the majority party in a precinct. Hence Lee was commonly referred to as an election judge. Lee had a gardening column in the Houston Post. For a living he was a landscaper.
One friendship I made at the County Treasury was with Kate Kennedy Dever. She did volunteer work at the Treasury and would work in Hartsell's campaign. She had grown up with National Democratic Committeewoman Billie Carr and they were longtime friends. Kate was one to stand up for her friends and she was a forceful person. One of her interests was to elect Catholics to office. This did not mean she rejected separation of church and state. She had real discontents about criminal justice in general and this seemed to include criminalizing abortion. She would stand up for gay people. We discussed Gary Van Ooteghem at times. She respected his abilities but thought it unfair of him to accuse Hartsell Gray of discriminating against gay people.
A County Auditor is appointed and removable by the county's district judges, some 70 of them. At the time that was Grady Fullerton. He and the County Treasurer had diverse responsibilities for the County's finances. They were always at odds with each other. One of the Auditor's powers was to establish funds, bank accounts. It seemed he was creating bank accounts just to inundate my boss. It seemed like a business that had a separate bank account for each employee plus accounts for some former employees. My big creation was to write a program to handle deposits into the different funds; it ran on the 3741 with only 8K memory. An advisor at IBM had told me this machine was not made for complex programs. Hartsell had me use it anyway. I made use of overlays, code read into memory at needed times, replacing code not then in use. An operator punched in the relevant information and the 3741 printed out a deposit slip and wrote a record to diskette to be fed into the Treasury's database, which was maintained by the Data Processing Center on Caroline Street.
I got plenty of experience dealing with users, who were in the Treasury. I made friends with several women, such as Rosalie Burkhart and cashier Ann Andrews. I think they appreciated how I did not flirt. Rosalie was very accurate at keypunching, at using my program.
One afternoon I was at the 3741 and I heard Hartsell in his office 2 rooms away. He seemed to be reading a court order to reinstate Gary Van Ooteghem. He was speaking in a quiet voice and I must have thought it was my imagination. At home I would leave a classical station running overnight. The next morning I woke up to a newscast and sure enough I had heard right. Then Lee Marsters called. I got on the bus and went to the courthouse. Hartsell was talking to reporters and was very unglued, going off in many directions. He said he was sure he had had gay employees before and thought Gary was very unfair.
As I understand it Gary told Hartsell he wanted to address the Commissioners' Court on glbt rights. The boss said not as a representative of the County Treasury. He gave Gary a statement to sign defining his working hours, that he was not to do his own politics in working hours. Gary would not sign and was terminated. The judge in this case ruled that the sudden imposition of working hours infringed on the plaintiff's freedom of speech. I have mixed feelings about this. I can see a need for Hartsell to separate himself from an employee's controversial stand. On other the hand I like a broad construction of the First Amendment for public employees.
One day a fellow employee handed me a paper bag to take to the other building. I was told it contained a document critical to Van Ooteghem v Gray. It had been found among the belongings left by a former employee who seemingly hid it; without it our boss lost the case. I figured my loyalty was being tested. I took the bag to the proper place and did not look at the document.
Some people told me Gary could have taken vacation time, and made an opening line to the County Commissioners’ Court: “Today I speak to you as a private citizen.”
The County Treasurer was up for re-election in 1978. Hartsell won re-nomination in the Democratic primary without much difficulty. One day he wanted to discuss the primary with me, especially the Montrose vote: area where I lived. I thought it time to disclose my involvement in the Gay Political Caucus. It went fine. He commented that some gays were set on destroying the only liberal in Harris County government, him. He thought gays had worked for him before. I mentioned one fellow employee who was a bit fem. He had not thought about that. My impression was that he was so straight that he did not think about who was gay.
As I said, Hartsell easily won the Democratic primary. The November election turned out to be a different matter. I felt confident of winning, however. The Republican was Houston city treasurer Henry Kriegel. He was often compared to Colonel Sanders. Kriegel ran radio ads about “one more event in the life of eccentric Hartsell Gray.” I wanted to say, “you can call him eccentric but don’t call him crazy.” Some ads were about county employees who did not get their paychecks on time. As for the Caucus, it made no endorsement in this race. I heard that Kriegel said his party would not let him accept it. GOP activists such as Dr. Steven Hotze have done their utmost to put glbt organizations off limits to Houston Republicans. I was at the courthouse election night and it came as a shock to me that Hartsell lost. Kriegel lived in the Montrose area and won it.
I was working de facto for Hartsell Gray, but officially I worked for the Harris County Data Processing Center. I went to see its director, Frank Curcio. He said my job was safe but I would be working directly for the Data Processing Center. I mentioned that Kriegel was visiting the Treasury that week. Frank said I must not be at the Treasury that day and must not give the impression I was on Hartsell’s staff.
It is my understanding that, in compliance with a Federal court order, Hartsell Gray re-instated Gary Van Ooteghem for one day: Dec. 31, 1978. I was at the Treasury that day and do not believe he actually showed up: a mere formality. A few days later I read in the Houston Post that Hartsell had fired Chad Brown. That was Gary’s successor. The story offered no explanation but said Chad Brown got severance pay. I thought the story made Hartsell look bizarre and I was of course offended. Yes, Hartsell had had many run-ins with journalists and they must have wanted to get even.
I did want to meet Henry Kriegel and found time to do so in January, although I was not directly working for him. He had quite a reputation as a man of few words. Calvin Coolidge. My first impression was that he dressed too well for me. That could conceal some mediocrity, likewise his taciturn nature. He told me he thought Hartsell had tried to do too much and he would be doing less.
When I worked directly for the Data Processing Center I would still do some Treasury work. I saw the Auditor consolidate many county bank accounts. Yes, politics! One day in 1980 I heard news that the district judges had fired Grady Fullerton as County Auditor. The new Auditor would be Joe Flack.
In the fall of 1980 I got a call from a head-hunter. He got me a job with Getty Oil Company. At the end of the interview I was asked whether I had any questions. So I asked whether it would be much of a change from the public sector to a private business. The answer I got was no. I soon found that this private corporation had its politics but of a different kind. Harris County has many independently elected officials and their fighting is pretty public. Things at Getty, however, were quite opaque. I was told J Paul Getty had been quite a secretive person. The job paid quite a bit better but I found it harder to identify with.
From 1980 on I continued to have contact with Hartsell Gray and Kate Dever. In the spring of 1982 she asked me to ask Gary Van Ooteghem to run for County Treasurer. I did and he said "don't tell anyone" but he was planning to run. A week or so later I looked at the primary filings and there he was. Not much later I saw him in person. He said, "I bet you didn't know I would run as a Republican." A little one-upmanship I thought, but I worked in his campaign. He did not, however, fare well against Henry Kriegel.
Kriegel went on to another 4-year term but was defeated by a Democrat, Nikki Van Hightower, in 1986. In 1996 he died when he went off the road while driving. He had been born in 1908.
It is sad to say that in the 1990's Lee Marsters became testy, difficult to get along with. He once kicked me out of his birthday party because he thought I was not socializing enough. He died in Houston July 2, 1998. He had been born in Houston Sept. 9, 1921.
Kate Dever died November, 1999.
In 2000 an old friend of my parents invited me to lunch with Hartsell and others. This was a party mainly of Episcopalians. A few months later Hartsell and I watched the 2000 GOP convention together. He kidded me about Log Cabin Republicans. I said I would leave that to Dale Carpenter. I told Hartsell that Gary Van Ooteghem had died in June. He said "I am sorry to hear to hear that." Then he said, "I really am."
Hartsell Gray died May 12, 2008, in a nursing home in Luling. He had been born August 2, 1928, in Houston.