When Mary Lou Grier got involved with the Texas Republican Party in the late 1950s, it was so obscure that it had trouble fielding candidates. ?We just begged people to run,? friend Glenda R. Reeder said.
Grier ?was willing to run for office knowing she had no prayer of winning,? daughter-in-law Margaret Grier said. ?She ran for (Bexar County) district clerk in the early 1960s. Then in 1974, she was the first woman nominated to run for a statewide office,? though she lost her land commissioner bid.
She persisted. ?We had three objectives when we started,? friend Polly Sowell said. ?We wanted Texas to be a two-party state, we wanted to defeat communism, and we wanted to bring some fiscal sanity? to the state.
Mary Lou Grier died Feb. 15 at 87.
She knew the importance of being politically active, having been raised in the Panama Canal Zone, where her family was unable to vote. She made up for it after moving to Texas, where she was inspired to get involved by her boss at USAA.
She met her husband, a Texas native who had also spent time in Panama, and by the time they got married, he was in Honolulu working with the Army Air Corps during World War II. Grier, who had gone to the University of Missouri journalism school, got a job with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
After the war, the couple settled in San Antonio to raise their children. Grier continued her tireless political efforts, becoming vice chairwoman of the county GOP.
?She helped to elect John Tower as the first (Republican) Texas senator since Reconstruction,? said Cyndi Taylor Krier, herself a former vice chairwoman. ?In those years the chairman was a man who had a full-time job somewhere else. She ran headquarters on the day-to-day basis, planned the day-to-day activities.?
?One of the biggest impacts she had was when she was Tom Loeffler's campaign manager in 1978,? Margaret Grier said. ?It was a huge responsibility. They spent a lot of time on the road going to every single county and talking to anybody who would talk to them.?
She also worked in the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Outdoor Recreation as deputy director and acting director; as deputy advocate for advisory councils in the Small Business Administration; and deputy director and acting director in the National Park Service. ?She would commute every weekend,? Margaret Grier said. ?She lived in the D.C. area, flew home on Friday evening.?
?All of us who were young and impressionable in college at that time, to see a Republican woman running for statewide office, that was terrific,? Krier said. ?That's when I first got to know her and that made me realize a woman can do this, too.?
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