Remembering three women who helped shape Austin

The theater shimmered in shades of lavender, rose and purple. Images of the departed leader emerged from the surrounding darkness. 

For some 90 minutes, a full house of family, friends and admirers hung on every word and note delivered by the speakers and performers during the tribute.

On the afternoon of March 1, the Boyd Vance Theater was entirely devoted to memories of the late Bernadette Miles Phifer, community advocate and former curator and director of the George Washington Carver Museum, Cultural Center and Genealogical Center. 

She died Jan. 6 at age 77.

Phifer was one of three significant women Austin lost in recent weeks, along with professor and City Council member Emma Lou Linn and business and philanthropy executive Retta Kelley van Auken.

Although their deaths have been reported in the American-Statesman and elsewhere around town, it seems particularly apt to gather together some thoughts about their singular roles in Austin’s story in honor of Women’s History Month.

Born July 12, 1948, in Montgomery, Alabama, to David Miles and Hazel Smiley Miles, Bernadette Miles attended St. Jude Educational Institute in Montgomery. She graduated in 1966. 

Trained as a dietician, she moved to Texas to lead the marketing efforts of the Texas Department of Agriculture. Soon she joined Austin’s active cultural and social scene.

“I cannot imagine Austin without her,” said Parra Agboda, who led the March 1 memorial ceremony. Agboda recalled Phifer’s laughter, faith, tenacity and — shared lovingly — her bossiness. “A life like Bernadette’s should not turn into a whisper in the wind.”

In Austin, Phifer took on one particular cause — the Carver Museum. Often working behind the scenes, she campaigned to give this key East Austin institution an expanded home beyond the small structure that had once served as a temporary downtown library. It was moved in 1933 to a site above what is now Kealing Middle School to become the segregated “Colored Branch.” 

During the 1990s, Phifer supported a Carver expansion project, and one for the Mexican American Cultural Center. The campaign lost a city bond election in 1992, but triumphed in 1998 when the Carver and MACC were bundled with other cultural projects. 

Designed by Donna Carter, the handsome new museum and cultural center opened in 2005 on a campus that now includes a 1979 branch library and, in the 100-year-old museum building, a critical genealogical center. It was among the first such centers in Texas to focus on the African American experience.

“The place where you are sitting, this grand museum, we have her to thank for it,” said Texas state Rep. Sheryl Cole, who observed Phifer’s unstinting efforts during the Carver campaigns. This day, Cole and Austin City Council Member Natasha Harper-Madison were among the public servants who saluted Phifer from the museum’s Boyd Vance Theater stage.

Currently, museum supporters are organizing to triple the size of the current 36,000-square-foot space.

“I grew up on the East Side,” Harper-Madison said. “I learned the importance of community gathering places like this one. They make us whole.”

Always attired with flair, Phifer lent her posed presence and leadership skills to Texas Performing Arts at the University of Texas, the Texas Music Museum, and The Links, Incorporated, a service group. After she retired as director, Phifer worked as president of the George Washington Carver Ambassadors, a group that advocates for the Carver Museum, and that organized this day’s tribute.

Phifer was an active member of Holy Cross Catholic Church. She loved gospel and jazz music. During the tribute, LaMonica Lewis contributed her gospel voice, while Pam Hart shared her jazz stylings.

“She gave of herself and tried to make a difference in this world,” said the Rev. Sylvester Chase, retired pastor of Wesley United Methodist Church. “She was always offering an open hand. As long as she helped those in need, her life was not in vain.”

“She was strong in her faith and spoke courage in all her steps forward,” wrote her daughter, Dawnyale Micol for the memorial’s printed program. “Her gifts of love showed in many ways personally and professionally. She knew not to turn away from a stranger, knowing they each held their own gifts.”

One thing Phifer said regularly and persuasively — and this was repeated by Agboda at the close of the March 1 ceremony: “We must all tell our own stories.”

To put it succinctly, Emma Lou Linn was a hoot. At the same time, the longtime professor at St. Edward’s University took the academic field of psychology seriously, served on the Austin City Council during a time of noisy social change in the 1970s and spearheaded efforts to preserve the fabric of historical Austin. She was among the first of those who returned to live downtown. She set up house in the East Sixth Street entertainment district in the old St. Charles House, which she and a friend converted.

“I’ve always loved old buildings and old people,” Linn, who died Jan. 12 at age 89, told the Statesman. 

She was born Sept. 14, 1936, in tiny Rocksprings in South Texas. “I was really fortunate to be born in 1936. I’d hear stories from hobos camping on the back property. Daddy would take them canned goods and hear the ghost stories and tall tales. I would go to Mexico with my daddy and ranchers on rainy days, and there I heard stories of the Alamo and cathedrals in Mexico. Years later, I saw a three-story building in Philadelphia restored with an apartment on top. I thought this would be a neat, neat way to live.”

Funny, sporty and even a little outrageous, she grew up among ranching folks on the Edwards Plateau, where she wanted to be a sheriff or maybe an astronomer. Linn didn’t become either, but she did run a gang of kids as a youngster and she recorded a comet somewhat like Halley’s Comet.

Austin entertainer and humanitarian Turk Pipkin grew up nearby on the South Llano River.

“There’s no retrieving our lost childhoods, but around Emma Lou, I always felt that my time on the river was still close,” Pipkin said. “And I eventually made it back to the river, though nearly a hundred miles downstream and on 5,000 less acres.”

Interviewed for a 2014 Statesman profile that ran under the headline, “The truly remarkable life of Austin’s Emma Lou Linn,” she remembered being propped up on the back of a flatbed truck during a statewide political campaign for musician and flour salesman W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel when he was running for Texas governor or U.S. senator. 

At the University of Texas, Linn studied psychology and played three women’s sports. She served in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve and did research on Texas school districts. In Austin, she served on several commissions and was among the founding backers of what became the Pecan Street Festival.

Fond of big hats, Linn was sworn in for a special term by groundbreaking lawyer Sarah Weddington.

“We had a group called ‘Uppity Women Unite,’” Linn remembered. She followed up that service with a regular term that ran from later in 1975 to 1977. Among her proudest achievements was an anti-discrimination ordinance that included age, physical disabilities and sexual orientation.

“I was so delighted when she was elected to City Council,” said Alyssa Burgin. “I had known her only from the county Democratic Party, where she was an outspoken advocate for women and an inspiration to younger women like me, but I didn’t know she was such a strong voice for historic preservation until she got on council. And thank goodness for her role in that, because the city would probably have bulldozed everything older than 1999 were it not for her! She’ll be missed, because she was a force of nature.”

As noted in her Statesman profile, a divided Austin City Council in 1975 considered renaming 19th Street after civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Newly minted Council Member Linn — only the second woman, after Emma Long, to serve in that capacity, although she was soon joined by Margaret Hoffman and Betty Himmelblau — listened as J.J. Seabrook, president emeritus of what was then Huston-Tillotson College, spoke eloquently in favor of the proposal.

“As he fell to the ground, I ran to him and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” Linn, then 78, told one historian. “Seabrook died. But a photographer snapped a photo and it circulated nationally! That brought me great praise from many groups, but threats from a few.”

Linn is survived by her partner of 34 years, Lauren Love.

“Lauren always made sure Emma never skipped a beat,” reads Linn’s obituary. “She took her all over the world and kept the party going. Emma felt incredibly lucky to have Lauren in her life. She was right.”

An executive at the American-Statesman and a public face of Cox Enterprises for decades, Retta Baker Kelley van Auken used her sharp journalistic mind and deep, smoky voice to persuade other leaders in business and philanthropy to do the right thing.

An admiring reporter once commented: “With that voice, you should go on the stage.”

“I was on the stage,” she replied without pausing. “All this comes naturally.”

Turns out, van Auken was the middle daughter of legendary Texas theater director and educator Paul Baker. (The same Statesman reporter spent an awed afternoon at the Baker family ranch near Seguin listening to his theatrical war stories with van Auken.) Supervised by their mother, Kitty Baker, who taught math at Baylor, she and her two sisters, Robyn and Sallie, grew up in the theater. Her father chaired the drama departments at Baylor University and Trinity University. An irascible advocate of new ideas, he founded Dallas Theatre Center and the Dallas school district’s Booker T. Washington School for the Performing and Visual Arts. Kitty founded Baylor Children’s Theatre in Waco, and Retta’s sister, Robyn Flatt, founded Dallas Children’s Theatre. 

Van Auken, who was born June 20, 1942 in Waco and died Feb. 16 in Austin, found her way into journalism as a features writer, columnist, features editor, advertising director and business manager with the Dayton Daily News in Dayton, Ohio, part of Cox Enterprises, which owned the Statesman. She moved on to become publisher of the Longview News Journal in Longview. Later, these experiences served her well in her role as editor for the Pew Partnership for Civic Change publication, Community Matters.

“She was my first publisher in Longview, and she had to impart some lessons to shape my, um, youthful nature,” posted Christian McDonald, a journalist formerly with the American-Statesman. He now teaches at UT. “She did so with grace and good will. We crossed paths ever so briefly again in Arizona — one day! — before working together again in Austin. A damn fine person.”

At the Statesman, van Auken ran a large department as director of community development and InfoVentures. In this role, she helped shape Season for Caring, Statesman Cap 10K, Newspapers in Education and Swim Safe, for which she created a charitable foundation to ensure the program’s future after she learned how many disadvantaged kids drowned because they never had the opportunity to learn how to swim.

“Retta wasn’t just a mentor, she was also a great and loyal friend with a wicked sense of humor,” said Jeff Simecek, who picked up where van Auken left off when she retired from the Statesman. “Everyone who worked with her, myself included, was always amazed at her energy and creativity.  She managed from a strictly collaborative standpoint; every project, large or small, was about winning together.

“And losing wasn’t in her vocabulary.”

Van Auken served on numerous community boards, such as Literacy Coalition of Central Texas, which she helped found, United Way of the Capital Area, Texas Book Festival, I Live Here, I Give Here and the Austin Theatre Alliance.

In retirement, she founded Gone for Good, a nonprofit group that collected valuable items to be auctioned off at charity events and ran charity estate sales.

Van Auken raised two children, Melissa Ferrell and Marshall Ferrell.

“Retta was an amazing mix of intelligence, compassion, beauty and more,” posted Sharon Roberts, a former Statesman manager. “We all looked up to her.”