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Notes from a rebel
Lawyer left
her mark on Texas
02:09 PM CDT
on Thursday, September 11, 2003
By JANE
SUMNER / The Dallas Morning News
Louise Raggio, still full of moxie at 84, looks over an
expectant audience at the Women's Museum like the assistant DA
she once was.
Then she holds up a copy of her memoir, Texas Tornado,
and points to it like a prosecutor points to a smoking gun.
"This is the book," she says. "But I didn't write it."
Whenever friends implored the pioneering Dallas lawyer to set
down her life story, she told them in her emphatic,
no-nonsense way: "I don't have time to write a book. I'm too
busy practicing law."
But her friend, historian James MacGregor Burns, persuaded
her to change her mind: "Somebody is going to write about
you," he said, "and it's going to be all wrong. But you won't
be able to do anything about it because you'll be dead."
So the tiny trailblazer, whose dedication to passage of the
Marital Property Act of 1967 gave Texas women the right to own
property, borrow money and conduct business sans hubby,
dictated 300 pages for her great grandkids to read.
"It has to be honest," Mr. Burns warned. "You have to tell
warts and all." And so she did, describing on tape her
charismatic but often difficult spouse and the bouts of
depression that sapped her energy.
The obvious person to write the memoir was author Vivian
Castleberry, a former journalist who covered Ms. Raggio for
the Dallas Times Herald . But fearing the acrimony that
can erupt between writer and subject, she didn't volunteer.
"Then one night at a Christmas party," Ms. Castleberry, 81,
says, "she sneaked up behind me and said, 'Listen, you've been
putting words in my mouth for 50 years. Why stop now?' "
The result is a candid, conversational chronicle about the
making of a rebel. As former Texas Gov. Ann Richards says in
her punchy foreword, "Louise has played a role in everything
good that has happened to Texas women for the last 50 years."
Using the tapes plus letters, interviews and 300 pages of
FBI and U.S. Army reports, Ms. Castleberry has written an
inspiring account of a driven, driving spirit.
"Vivian was the very person to do this book," Ms. Raggio
says, "She came from a poor family in East Texas. I came from
a very poor family in Central Texas. We both worked our way
through college. We both married and had children and chose to
be professionals. So she knew what I'd gone through."
Young people who want to get ahead in the world, she hopes,
will read the book. "But it also will take older people down
memory lane because Vivian did a wonderful job on what farm
life was like before we had electricity."
At 21, Ms. Raggio admits, she was afraid she wouldn't
marry. Especially when her then-boss at the National Youth
Administration, 26-year-old Jake Pickle, used to call out,
"Where's the old maid?"
"That was one of the reasons I married Grier," she says.
"Because he wanted to marry me. He really was a good guy.
Unfortunately, he went overseas in World War II and came back
a shell."
In those days, she says, a woman could be a nurse, a
secretary or a schoolteacher. And she wouldn't have become a
lawyer if her husband had not been unjustly fired in a
McCarthy era witch-hunt.
Against strong opposition, she led a task force that
created the world's first completed Family Code. Many opposed
the revision every step of the way.
"Most amazing of all to me," she writes in her prologue,
"is that people now seem to want to hear about my journey
when, for most of my life, many have wanted nothing so much as
to shut me up."
E-mail:
jsumner@dallasnews.com
Texas Tornado
The Autobiography of a Crusader for Women's Rights and
Family Justice
Louise Ballerstedt Raggio, with Vivian Anderson Castleberry
(Citadel Press, $24.95)
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