For a city that prides itself on being business-friendly, it’s not surprising that Dallas has had many mayors from the business community. Starke Taylor, who died Monday at age 92, exemplified that tradition, while putting his own spin on it.
The Rice graduate didn’t come from the banking or financial worlds, as many establishment mayors had. Taylor, who lived in North Dallas, instead ran a company that traded cotton. His father did that before him, but Taylor grew the firm into a major operation.
In many ways, the folksy, pragmatic Taylor was a transitional figure who bridged the worlds of the downtown establishment and the entrepreneurial, informal business world that Dallas became in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a businessman, all right. And, like many before him, Taylor served on a major board before becoming mayor. He was on the Park and Recreation board under Mayor Jack Evans in the early 1980s. He also had been campaign chairman for Robert Folsom, who became mayor in 1977.
But he was not groomed the way previous business mayors had been. Taylor wasn’t even dead set on entering politics. After Folsom retired in 1981, Taylor reportedly turned down the suggestion that he run next. But he stepped forward after Evans departed and some businesspeople again asked him to run.
Taylor was never known for his oratory, but he still won the office. He used a big campaign chest in 1983 to defeat former Mayor Wes Wise, one of modern Dallas’ first populist leaders.
Dallas was in a boom period at the time, which gave the city terrific energy. But all the building and expanding worried some, who felt the growth would harm their neighborhoods. Taylor’s response was for “planned growth,” which, as Texas Monthly once observed, allowed him to be for both growth and neighborhood concerns. This was one more way he put a new spin on the businessman-mayor.
Planned growth was not always easy to achieve. But Taylor did help launch one of the most important projects Dallas has ever pursued: the Dallas Area Rapid Transit system. It’s easy to take for granted the ease of riding a DART train through the region today. But DART’s creation was anything but simple. Its start was politically brutal, but Taylor helped persuade voters to approve the system.
He also focused on pollution in West Dallas and growth in southern Dallas. Those areas still struggle. But Taylor lifted them up; businessmen-mayors before him had not done much to improve those areas.
Taylor saw that Dallas was better off as a whole. That legacy is one that future mayors, whether from the business mold or not, should make their own.
