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By Jeff Barton
He walked fast and he grinned big.
And when he died this week, a decade out of public office, 15 years since redistricting took him away from Hays County, thousands still thought of him as their congressman.
In the day, he advised presidents and made the pompous squirm with pointed Texas homespun humor. But as his sometimes stormy early career as an aide and politician ripened into legend, people didn't think of J.J. Pickle as a Washington powerbroker, they thought of him as "Jake," the guy they could count on to stand up for them, the guy who got things done.
An amazing number felt like they knew him personally. And an amazing number loved him - for what he was, and what he wasn't.
Pickle came to Austin from Big Spring to attend the University of Texas, where he soon fell in with a future governor, John Connally. Eventually, they would split ways over politics, but they never lost their friendship.
Both were soon campaigning for a larger-than-life young man who came out of college in San Marcos and ran for Congress in the Great Depression. That man, Lyndon Johnson, would serve as congressman, senator, vice president and president - and Pickle would criss-cross Hays County, and the state, countless times, helping him achieve each of those offices.
Over the next few decades he would work for governors and ad agencies, and co-found a radio station, KVET, after returning from World War II. But he really came into his own in middle-age, when he ran for congress himself, taking LBJ's old seat, the historic 10th district of Texas, which then included Hays County, Austin, parts of the Hill Country, and the blackland farm communities stretching past Columbus to the outskirts of Houston.
It was the fall of 1963, and his old mentor LBJ had just become president on the heels of JFK's assassination. When Pickle retired, 31 years later, he had survived stiff challenges from the left and the right to become undoubtedly the best known and best loved politician in Hays County and, probably, in all of Central Texas, even though his district, because of population growth, had shrunk down to basically just Austin.
Pickle was proud to be a Democrat, and a politician. He thought it an honorable profession. He was energized by meeting people and, especially, by helping them. In turn, his infectious good humor, his work ethic, his transparent West Texas sincerity, slowly won most critics to his side. If he was sometimes called a hack and a sidekick early in his career, disparaged by liberals for not breaking with Johnson on the Vietnam War, or attacked by conservatives on civil rights and busing, he was by the end of his career a supernatural force in regional politics, unchallenged, unassailable, with job ratings impossibly high, mobbed by well-wishers at local events - and relishing every moment of it.
In Texas, he was known for constituent service - helping average Joe's cut through Washington red tape to get their GI pension benefits, or to find grandma's lost social security check, or to bring a loved one in trouble home safely from overseas. In Washington, he was known first as a junior member with the president's ear; then, as presidents came and went and his own seniority and confidence grew, as someone who had risen in the job, whose word could be counted on, someone with friends and confidants on both sides of the partisan isle.
He brought life-changing flood control to San Marcos, and helped create the high-tech wave that rose so many boats across Williamson, Travis and Hays Counties. His district got its fair share of research dollars and higher education money, and then some.
But that, of course, is not what earned him such prominent play in the New York Times when he retired, or when he died. No, the ultimate local pol, "good old Jake" was also widely credited with defying a Republican president and a Democratic speaker of the House to save social security in the 1980s. He led major investigations into corporate skullduggery and foul play within the Teamsters Union. He helped reform pension laws and the IRS.
Pickle always said one of his proudest votes was one he thought might cost him his career before it had hardly started, when as a freshman, he was one of only a tiny handful of southerners who voted for President Johnson's civil rights package. That vote caused outrage back home at the time, but Pickle lived long enough to see his decision accepted and, in time, honored.
If he was loyal to his old boss, LBJ, he in turn inspired extreme loyalty in those who worked for him over the years. Until his death at 91 last week, former employees many of them now successful and aging in their own right -- still gathered round he and his second wife Beryl (his first wife died before he was elected to congress) for periodic parties and sentimental, laughter-filled get-togethers in which Pickle would promise not to give a speech and then, inevitably, would rally to the stump and give one, or five, and regale his former aides and campaign soldiers with old war stories of justice and Tom Foolery. Notably different from LBJ in one respect, Pickle never berated his staff or colleagues in public; a stern look and gentle sarcasm in private was usually enough to cause the criminal to correct his or her ways and to re-double efforts to win approval.
He believed in the goodness of politics and he made other people belive in that nobility too - cynical colleagues and jaded constituents, both. At least, while he was in the room, they believed.
Now, Jake has left the building.
He was far too much fun to be perfect, but he was, in a way, the perfect congressman for a certain time and place.
Pity those who were not a part of it.
His footprints are all over Hays County, just as his fingerprints are on so many good things in the old 10th District, which he haunted and then, fnally, made his own.
No congressman since (five have shared the 15 years with all or parts of hays County) has even approached his standing. If Mr. Pickle were here, he would tell you, gentle reader, just to have faith, to give these new guys time. He would tell you the bitterness and mudslinging will wash away with time. He would sayanother great congressman will come along, sooner or later. And then he might smile, that big boyish smile of his, and shake his head, and scatch his hair, and add, "Of course, they won't be as good as me."
He was a mischevious West Texas boy and he was loved.
J. J. Pickle was always going some place, and if you wanted to keep up, you had to be quick on your feet.
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