Kimberlee Ralph gets a lot of phone calls at her job, working for a lawmaker at the Texas Capitol. People call to get help with problems they’re experiencing. Or sometimes they call to tell their representatives how they want them to vote on such and such issue. Usually, it’s all pretty routine. But sometimes a caller really sticks out.
That’s where Reta Ward comes in.
“She is 94 and going blind and can hardly hear,” Ralph said. “But it is important to her to call all the elected representatives in the Texas legislature and to share her perspective on things.”
Ralph has talked to Ward multiple times over the past couple legislative sessions while working for a Democratic state representative from Laredo. Ralph said Ward stood out among other callers because knew a lot about the issues and how the Legislature works. She was funny. She was kind. She defied some preconceptions that Ralph, 35, had about older, rural Texans. She reminded Ralph of her grandmother — and of why Ralph got into politics.
“In a context where there’s a lot of people with power and money moving through this place, she stands out as like a touchstone of home and reality,” Ralph said.
Ralph wanted to know more about Ward: What she’s seen over the decades, why she keeps calling all the lawmakers and just hear her tell some stories.
So she asked KUT's ATXplained project to help.
A few days later, I called Ward. She lives in Bastrop. She is 94 and going blind. She had her shoulder replaced not too long ago.
And yes, she calls all 181 state lawmakers every legislative session.
“I’ve called everybody twice so far this year,” Ward said.
It's not just state lawmakers she calls. Ward regularly rings congresspeople and city council members, too.
I wondered how she got so interested in public policy and politics.
It all started when she was a little girl.
She recalled when W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel came to visit the small town she lived in on the western edge of the Hill Country. O’Daniel was president of the Burrus Mill and Elevator Company in Fort Worth. In 1938, he was running for governor.
He brought his company band — The Light Crust Doughboys — to the campaign stop.
Ward, then just about 8 years old, said she was captured by the spectacle of it.
“That tweaked my child’s mind,” she said.
It was around that same time when she would learn about a different kind of political spectacle.
Her mother was working at what is now Austin State Hospital, rooming there with three other women.
One day, state lawmakers told her to come and testify.
Ward’s mother didn’t know what it was about, but she reluctantly went.
“When she comes home she’s madder than the July heat,” Ward said. “My grandmother said ‘Well what did they say?’ And my mother said, ‘All those dirty old men wanted to know was how lesbians had sex.’”
As Ward tells it, the lawmakers were looking to purge gay people from the state’s workforce. She said they hauled her mom in because the women she roomed with at the hospital were lesbians.
“That really made an impression on me,” Ward said. "This was my first go-around with prejudice."
Ward has lived all over the state. In Lubbock, she developed a particular interest in water policy. She said she saw the ways water was being wasted.
She made her opinions known, but it wasn't until she moved back to Central Texas in the early 1990s that she started calling all the lawmakers.
Why?
“Somebody has to stand up and say what needs to be done,” she said. “Somebody has to do it. And it falls on me. Or at least that's what I feel like I have to do.”
About a week after we talked on the phone, Ward and I met at the Texas Capitol to knock on Ralph’s office door. She greeted Ward warmly.
We shuffled into a back room in the office and sat around a big table.
Ralph asked some questions. Ward spun some yarns about the Texas political characters she’s encountered over the years. And then we talked about the phone calls.
“Do you think it makes a difference when you call all the legislators?” I asked.
“I am hoping. I am hoping,” Ward said.
We turned to Ralph, as someone who answers those calls. Does it make a difference?
“It absolutely makes a difference for staff to hear people like you,” Ralph said. “I have seen that change a vote.”
“Wonderful, wonderful,” Ward said. “I had no idea.”
I think we all know that calling your lawmaker can’t make a difference every time. But maybe it can make a difference some of the time. And for Ward, that’s enough.
