Showdown at Maverick Ranch
Henry Cisneros and the state’s highway boosters were determined to bull-doze a loop through the pristine Hill Country near san Antonio. Now, all that stands in the way is three sisters and five generations of Texas history.
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In September 1990, the Fenstermakers carried the fight to Austin. Bebe testified before the Sunset Advisory Commission, which was reviewing the highway department’s performance. She directed her thrust at tax dollars. “Some of the road is already built,” she said, “although the highway department to this day has not held a general public hearing on the whole road, nor engineered the road, nor acquired the right-of-way, nor even chosen a route! No business could hope to get a construction loan without demonstrating that all major contingencies had been resolved.” A commission staffer offered to arrange a third conference later that month between the sisters and their lawyer and San Antonio officials. At the conclusion of that meeting, the staffer asked what had been accomplished. “Nothing,” said Vassallo. The engineers stared back across the table and agreed.
Around this time, the sisters uncovered other possible paths through their property. On the tallest hill of the Maverick Ranch sits a bizarre concrete house with the interior design of a yacht. Relatives had built it in 1913; a third highway route would bulldoze it. Then there was the Nineteenth Amendment Oak, under which the Texas suffragettes, led by the Fenstermakers’ grandmother, plotted in 1919. Another route would uproot even that historic tree.
Fighting the highway department, the Fenstermakers found, is maddening—like throwing punches at wisps of smoke. Although the department maintains that it is cooperating with the sisters, its engineers, as Vassallo had told them, are not required to disclose construction plans until their crews are at the fence line. In the 1991 legislative session, Mary testified before a Senate committee: “We have seen perhaps ten routes, seven or eight of which would go through our home. …We have had tremendous difficulty obtaining even that information from them. At great expense we have had to retain an environmental consultant and an attorney to help us. Often the only information we got came from our state legislators, who asked the questions for us when we could not get the highway department to respond.”
So the battle lines were drawn. Three middle-aged sisters couldn’t begin to match the resources of the Texas highway department. Or at least that’s how it seemed.
MARTHA, BEBE, AND MARY FENSTERMAKER are heirs to a family tradition of sufficient independence that the binding surname, Maverick, has become an English noun with connotations of contrariness. The patriarch, Samuel Augustus Maverick, who arrived in San Antonio in 1835, guided Ben Milam’s insurgents through the town when the rebel Texans captured the Alamo. The day the Alamo fell to Santa Anna, Samuel was representing its men at the people’s convention in Washington-on-the-Brazos, where he signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. After the war, he married Mary Adams of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who composed a spare ink sketch and watercolor of the Alamo with its bombed walls still in ruin—the first icon of its enshrinement. In 1840, Mary ran through the streets crying, “Here are Indians! Here are Indians!” when a courtroom summit with Comanche chiefs turned into the raging Council House Fight. During one of the Mexican invasions in 1842, Samuel traded rooftop gunshots with Santa Anna’s soldiers. Consequently, he was imprisoned for a short time in Mexico, where he was forced to work on a road-building project.
But it was unbranded cattle that put the family name into the English language. Around 1845, Samuel failed to brand a herd of cattle he had received as payment for a debt. Since cattle roamed free on unfenced open range, nearby ranchers began identifying any unbranded cattle as Maverick’s. By the end of the Civil War, the term “maverick” meant any unbranded calf that had strayed from a herd, and the word eventually became synonymous with “rebel.”
In San Antonio society, the Mavericks carved their niche among clothiers and bankers, Joskes and Frosts. Charles Goodnights and Burk Burnetts these folks were not. Samuel’s son George—the Fenstermakers’ great-grandfather—was a lawyer and developer. In 1907, he bought a nine-hundred-acre ranch 25 miles up in the Balcones Canyonlands and made it the family’s summer residence. His daughter Rena Maverick Green—the Fenstermakers’ grandmother—led Texas’ suffragettes; she also helped found the San Antonio Conservation Society. In the twenties, Rena fought city plans to pave over the San Antonio River and make its bed a sewer. Her first cousin Maury Maverick, Sr., a San Antonio congressman and mayor in the thirties, was a populist radical who talked Franklin Roosevelt into approving a beautification grant for the San Antonio River. Maury Junior carried on his father’s civil libertarian tradition in the Legislature and in his legal practice. In a recent column in the San Antonio Express-News, Maury Junior quoted a fictitious bartender: “You Mavericks brought the first black slaves to San Antonio after the fall of the Alamo. Is that why you are such a guilt-ridden lefty?”
Rena’s daughter Rowena helped save old Fort Davis. In 1941 Rowena married Leslie Fenstermaker, who would become one of the clan’s few genuine ranchers. They and their daughters—Martha, Bebe, and Mary—lived in far west Texas until 1958, when they returned to bustling San Antonio. There, the family’s connections swung up like loose boards. In 1961, Billie Lee Brammer published The Gay Place, which featured an LBJ-like governor called Arthur “Goddam” Fenstemaker. The sisters had an uncle named Arthur Fenstermaker. Brammer may have dropped a consonant, but sheer coincidence seemed unlikely.
As young women, Martha, Bebe, and Mary cut their political teeth on the long, bitter, fruitless attempt to stop construction of the McAllister Freeway through Olmos Park. Because the Maverick heritage had not bestowed on them a great deal of money, they needed to work. But the legacy had left them control of that lovely nine-hundred-acre place up in the hills. They stocked it with Longhorns and sought help from Texas Parks and Wildlife Department officials in stabilizing the deer population. In 1979 they won a listing for the place, as an intact frontier community, on the National Register of Historic Places.
Samuel Maverick had been an attorney, merchant, legislator, and mayor—and, with land going for a nickel or a dime an acre, an avid speculator in real estate. What goes around comes around. One hundred and twenty years after his death, the early eighties craze in Texas land speculation would aim the bulldozers of the highway department straight at his descendants’ door.
BY 1980, THE MAVERICKS WERE SYMBOLS of a languid old San Antonio that believers in a new era of progress meant to leave in history’s dust. No more should the families of a few old patróns approve the loans, dole out the opportunity, chart the city’s course. The lead disciple of this new faith was General Robert McDermott, the retired founding academic dean of the United States Air Force Academy who had built his insurance company, USAA, into a powerhouse. The political champion was Henry Cisneros, the charismatic Harvard graduate who would soon be mayor.
Through their initiative, San Antonio reached the final five in the 1982 wooing of MCC, a computer technology consortium headed by Bobby Ray Inman, a retired admiral and former Central Intelligence Agency director. Inman later told McDermott that San Antonio really hadn’t come close. Unlike Austin, the winning suitor, the city didn’t have a big university with the engineers and Ph.D.’s to feed the new payrolls. Look to your natural assets, Inman said; then proceed.
San Antonio’s assets were distinctly medical. There was the University of Texas Health Science Center, the Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, the Air Force’s largest hospital at Lackland, a medical research facility at Brooks Air Force Base, and the respected Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research, known by most San Antonians for its controversial medical experiments involving a large colony of captive primates.
Cisneros was an ideal pitchman. While his speeches could resonate with feeling for apachería and comanchería, eras in Texas when the most common surgery involved scalps, he cared about modern medicine too. In a publication known as his Orange Book, Cisneros effused about gene splicing, pancreas-substituting pumps, and a computer-controlled prosthesis called the MIT Knee. A “Tiger Team” was sent to study biomedical research parks in Pennsylvania, California, and North Carolina. The idea for the Texas Research Park was the result, and it was a captivating dream: In the course of finding new ways to treat and cure disease, physicians and scientists would spin off companies that would employ tens of thousands of people.
Land was no problem. In 1983, during the height of the real estate boom, Concord Oil CEO Tom Pawel donated 1,500 of the company’s 8,000 acres to the research park project, anticipating 6,500 acres of related development that would profit Concord greatly. Money wasn’t a problem either. In response to a delegation led by Cisneros and McDermott, Ross Perot had ponied up $15 million—three times the delegation’s request.
Transportation, however, was a problem. The only access to Concord’s acreage was a narrow county road; even an infant research park would require a full-blown highway. How could the park’s boosters convince the state to build them one?
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