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overcome personal adversity, tragedies that might break a less resilient individual, to focus on a larger mission for her life. A Woman of Substance Farenthold's calling, little diminished in her 90s despite the physical challenge of living with Parkinson's, keeps her keenly involved in the state of world affairs as she continues to makes appear- ances for causes. Recently she led a press conference with Barbara Radnofsky on the steps of the Harris County Courthouse, urging prosecution of Attorney General Ken Paxton. She expects friends and acquaintances to be conversant about current events. Her reading list is formidable, as glimpsed from the stacks of history and policy volumes and newspapers overflowing from beneath her coffee table. It can be a challenge to keep up, as I found during our conversations, which required not only knowledge of that week's headlines, but understanding of American military interventions and human-rights hot spots extending back to the era of LBJ, when Farenthold began an unlikely, meteoric rise in her hometown of Corpus Christi. She was a Vassar undergrad during World War II (class of 1946), then graduated from UT School of Law in 1949, one of three women in a class of 800. Her first role in public service was as a member of the Corpus Christi City Council's Human Rela- tions Commission from 1963 to 1965. After that term expired, she returned to law practice, directing the Nueces County Legal Aid Program, where she encountered constituents, especially im- poverished women and children, including Mexican-Americans, desperately in need of services. Farenthold ran next for the Texas House in one of the most turbulent years of the century, 1968, and won. She became the lone woman in that body; she was one of two in the entire Texas legislature, the other being State Senator Barbara Jordan. While she and Jordan were not as close as one might have expected, given their lone-wolf status as women in office, Farenthold lauds her during our visit: "Barbara Jordan did amazing work on voting rights." During these legislative years, Farenthold railed against insider dealing and government scandal, launching her historic bid as governor in 1972, even more of an outsider than Beto O'Rourke running from El Paso in 2018 to take on U.S. Senator Cruz. Fifty years later, she is still making whistle-stop tours — this summer for Beto, repeating her tradition that extends back decades, including campaigning with presidential candidates Barack Obama in Iowa in 2008 and Jesse Jackson in South Texas in 1988. Meanwhile, the efforts of her breaking barriers are nowhere more apparent than Harris Country, where a band of 17 black women attorneys have taken seats not just at the table, but on the bench this month. Farenthold holds forth. Did your father support your going to law school? Oh, yes, he said he couldn't think of anything sadder than young women waiting around to marry. He was very forward-thinking. I love it, because the generation before, my grandfather told his daughter, who was going to be a lawyer — and this is in the 1800s — "Little daughter, there are cases I don't want you to read." Was your mother traditional? She was very bright, but being a housewife wasn't her cup of tea. I wouldn't call her traditional. She was a rebel, too, but in a different way. I think she had anorexia. It wasn't talked about, but one psychiatrist acquaintance said — I must have told him some things about my mother — that it may be anorexia. That was just his opinion, but I think that was the case. She went down to 85 pounds. But she lived to be 82 or 83. She was one for the books. Where do you think your drive came from? I had to grow up in a hurry, because I was the oldest. There had been five children. My brother, Dudley, was the first child of the family, died when he was three, and that colored our whole child- hood, because my parents were always fearful that something would happen to us. The town was small enough, where my father called home if he heard an ambulance: "Are the children all right?" That kind of thing. I was sort of put in charge. My mom was in the hospital in San Antonio, and I remember one Christmas at breakfast, my father said, "You're going to have to help me." We worried about my mother, but she came out of the anorexia, or whatever all of that was. And so that was that. A wall of Farenthold's living room is devoted to an expansive work by Michael Tracy.