Proof that ‘One Person Can Make a Difference’

TEXAS TORNADO

The Autobiography of a Crusader

for Women’s Rights and Family Justice

By Louise Ballerstedt Raggio

With Vivian Anderson Castleberry

Foreword by Ann Richards

292 pages, Citadel Press, $24.95

“Texas Tornado” is a rollicking page-turner of a book, an autobiography that reads like a novel.

On one level it is the story of a reluctant law student in the 1940s, a persona non grata by her professors, who graduated as the only female in her class and became the first criminal prosecutor in Dallas County, in the 1960s to spearhead a campaign that changed antiquated Texas laws giving married women equality and went on, in the 1970s, to create the first complete Family Code in the USA, which has served as a model for updating family law throughout the country.

On another level it is a Cinderella story, the tale of a poor unpopular farm girl growing up on a hardscrabble farm without electricity, paved roads or indoor toilets, to graduate summa cum laude from the University of Texas at age 19, to become one of the first Washington, D.C., interns in 1939-40, to meet Eleanor Roosevelt and be entertained in the White House, to accumulate suitors who have become legends, to be courted by a charismatic attorney, marry him after a three-month courtship and celebrate her 46^th wedding anniversary before his death in 1988.

On still another level, it is a cloak and dagger story – the tale of being haunted for many years by the FBI after her husband, in a series of false accusations, was charged with un-American activities during the Joseph McCarthy Communist witch hunts.

Through it all, it is the story of a survivor–of a woman who kept it together through years of night law school, who suffered and overcame bouts of clinical depression while forging her career, who supported a husband whose health was impaired on the battlefields of World War II, who raised three successful sons who today are her law partners, and who rose to be honored multiple times, cited as one of the best Family Lawyers in America, and in 2000 to be named by Fortune Small Business Magazine “one of the 15 Heroes, influential entrepreneurs of our time.”

TEXAS TORNADO is available through Citadel Press, Kensington Publishing Corp., 850 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022, 1-800-221-2647, www.kensingtonbooks.com; and at Amazon.com(DIRECT LINK to the BOOK) and www.Forbesbookclub.com, Borders, and Barnes & Noble. See also www.raggiolaw.com/texastornado.htm

 04/19/04