Truth or Consequences

Denver-born Jon Lindsay grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the son of a nurse and a door-to-door salesman who never had much money, but did manage to purchase land that later escalated in value as the city became a playground for the arty and the rich. Lindsay earned an engineering degree through a work-study program at New Mexico State, where he met future wife Tonita Davis, a home economics major, in the school cafeteria. During summers he worked in the electronics shop and ran construction crews on the White Sands missile range, and later surveyed for the U.S. Forestry Service in Montana. After graduation, he took a commission in the Air Force as an engineer and eventually, through an odd coincidence, wound up in Houston. Lindsay had already perused an engineering magazine, found a hundred companies, and wrote them all. Ten job offers, including one from Brown & Root in Houston, came back.

During the closing stages of his Air Force hitch, Lindsay had worked with a Korean Air Force major assigned to his unit to learn American procedures. "He had a buddy on the Air Force base in San Antonio," recalls Lindsay. "They went to a San Antonio bar, were drinking, and met a contractor from Houston who was looking for a civil engineer. He called from that bar that night and he offered me the job." The pay was $600 a month, better than the salary offered by Brown & Root, so Lindsay packed up the family, which now included two young boys, and moved to Houston.

Lindsay's employer eventually went under, and he moved on to a job at Tellepsen, a large engineering firm, that ended with his being fired after just two weeks. The company's procedure for estimating job costs and Lindsay's didn't quite match up. "Howard Tellepsen [the Port Authority chairman at the time] and I laugh about that to this day," says Lindsay. "He hated [Democratic County Judge] Bill Elliott, and he was my biggest contributor when I ran against Bill Elliott. When I went to see him about a contribution in 1974, you'd think we were the best of buddies. Course, he didn't even know he had fired me."

Lindsay is somewhat hazy about his motivation for his initial run for office in 1972, which he made as a Democrat for a state representative seat against then 21-year-old Don Henderson. "In my construction work, I was doing a lot of county and city, school district work, so that kind of got me involved with the politicians," he remembers. "Because of the work I was doing, I would get acquainted with them. It just seemed like the thing to do."

Unfortunately for Lindsay, it was also the year of President Nixon's landslide re-election over George McGovern, and the neophyte pol had chosen to run in a freshly carved district in heavily Republican territory. "I didn't even know it was a Republican district," says Lindsay with a laugh. "I was real popular around here at the time. I was a member of everything -- president of the North Houston Association, the Rotary Club, had a lot of friends up in Tomball, where we went to church. I was very well known, much better known [than Henderson]."

Lindsay lost by just 111 votes, which encouraged him to switch parties and attempt a countywide challenge only two years later. Incumbent County Judge Elliott, dogged by corruption charges that included misappropriation of county materials, went down to defeat, and Lindsay had the office without serious challenge for the next two decades.

From the beginning of his tenure as county judge, Lindsay exploited the connection between government and public works projects. To hear him tell it, his main achievements as county judge were construction projects such as the Hardy Toll Road and the South Belt.

That has led more than one person to profess amazement that Lindsay can run for office on Republican rhetoric about limiting government.

"I don't really think he's capable of staying off the government tit," says former Post reporter Brewton. "It's interesting he considers himself to be sort of a conservative and anti-big government. He can't live without government funding. It's just ironic as hell."

During last spring's legislative session, Lindsay would occasionally be seen loitering in the second-floor hallway outside the chambers of the Texas House. That station is the traditional hangout for the gaggle of white males who wait to buttonhole lawmakers before they go out onto the House floor, where lobbyists are forbidden to venture. It's also a post from which lobbyists can send importuning notes to lawmakers via a guard at the door. It's not a place where Jon Lindsay seemed to be at home.

"He was out there standing by himself, and no one was talking to him," recounts one capital lobbyist. "He looked lost -- a fish out of water. When he saw me, he practically ran over to have someone to talk to."