The Legacy of Craig Brown

The biggest item on the list, then and now, has been Pelican Island. The thousand-acre piece of land just north of the harbor that nobody ever quite figured out what to do with. For most of my lifetime it has been a place people drove past on the way to somewhere else. Craig saw something else there. He talked about it from our first meeting. Most people wrote it off. He didn’t.

“I stand on the shoulders of many individuals in the past that have had the same idea,” he said when I brought it up on his last day. “But it’s so good to see it coming to fruition. We’re talking about the future here. I think we’ll be really surprised at how Pelican Island will develop.”

He is going to be right about that. Davey Defense is coming. A new feasibility study may finally bring rail across the bay. A thousand acres of long-ignored land are moving, slowly, into what will be their real life. He campaigned on a vision other people thought was impossible. He delivered on it.

The hardest stretch of his tenure was at the beginning. Mayor Jim Yarbrough stepped down for health reasons. Craig was the mayor pro tem. Within days he was the mayor. Within weeks, Hurricane Laura was bearing down on the island.

“During an emergency like that,” he told me, “the mayor of the island takes over the management of all aspects of the government here.”

He sat down with the city manager, the police and fire chiefs, the emergency management director, and his deputy, and he ordered a mandatory evacuation. Then he went down to the buses to help people get on them.

“It was a day full of anxiety,” he said. “But it was also a time where I was very proud of our citizens, where they stepped up and understood the need to remove themselves and get out of harm’s way.”

He is afraid for people, and then he is proud of them. That is the distinction that defines him.

He had Angela through all of it. She has been his sounding board for twenty years of public service. She had been at home for Hurricane Laura, and at home for the late-night emails, and at home for every draft of every speech he ever asked her to read, including the one he was going to give a few hours after we finished talking.

“Having her input and her ideas and her thoughts,” he said, “it’s been very, very enlightening and very helpful to me.”

She has been a quiet partner to him in the way anyone who has built anything has had a partner. He thanked her, more than once, on his last day.

He never once gave himself credit for anything in our interview. Twelve years of work, and he refused to claim it. He named Marty Miles at the Park Board and Roger Reese at the Port. He named the city staff who do the work behind the work. He named the residents who come to council meetings. He named the past mayors he had read about — one of whom, he told me, had been immortilized in a scrapbook.

A Galveston resident had handed Craig the book a few years back. It had belonged to Herbert Yemon Cartwright Jr., a Galveston mayor in the 1950s, and it was full of the things Cartwright had done and the things he hoped someone someday would do. Cartwright had widened Broadway. He had brought the Lipton Tea plant to the island. He had built the first bridge to Pelican Island, and he had convinced investors from the east coast to dredge the island into something that could carry industry.

Craig sat down and read the book.

“What an innovative individual this mayor was,” he told me, “to bring these ideas forward. He saw the future of Galveston.”

The man who had built the first bridge to Pelican Island was the man whose unfinished work Craig had spent seven years finishing. The scrapbook had landed in his hands at exactly the moment he could understand what it was. He read it, took the message that was meant for him, and put the book in his office, where it still sits.

He has been wary, throughout his time in office, of letting national politics seep into local elections.

“Potholes, street repair, drainage improvements don’t care what your party affiliation is,” he said. “It’s so important for individuals not to get caught up in partisan politics. When you do that, you lose sight of the issues. That is something that will undermine a community.”

He is not naive about this. He has watched outside money try to capture local races. It has mostly failed. He hopes it continues to. So do we.

Craig endorsed John Paul Listowski to succeed him. JP won. Christy and I helped run that campaign too — the same way we helped Craig run his three. The handoff is a real one. Same values. Same focus on the people who live here. Same patience with the long view. Different generation.

I asked Craig what he would tell JP, if he could say one thing, on his first morning as mayor.

“You’re an advocate for the citizens out there,” he said. “For them to be seen and be heard is very, very important. That’s your role. Most individuals that I’ve worked with over the years, they may have disagreement in my position on a particular subject, but if they feel like I’ve appreciated their side of it, and really took into consideration their thoughts as I was making my decisions — they’re not real concerned about what the decision is. They want to make sure they have a role.”

It is a piece of advice that sounds simple and is not. The job is to make people feel heard. The reward, if you do it well, is that they will understand almost any decision you make.

JP already lives by this. It is one of the reasons Craig endorsed him. It is one of the reasons we were proud to help him win.

He closed our interview with a line that sounded almost rehearsed and wasn’t.

“People say the journey is as important as where you arrived,” he said. “It’s been a great journey.”

The City of Galveston was incorporated in 1839. There has been a chain of people, in every generation, doing the work of holding it together — declaring evacuations, widening streets, dredging islands, returning phone calls, sitting in front of cameras on the last day to say a few quiet things about the people they had served. Cartwright was one of them. Craig is one of them. JP is one of them now.

Craig is going to go travel with Angela. He has worked since he was twelve. The empty Tuesday morning is coming.

The scrapbook is still in his office. I do not know what he will do with it. I hope he keeps it.

Someday, somebody is going to need to read it.