Tom Vandergriff: A Legacy of Leadership in Arlington, Texas (1926–2010)

Tom Joe “Tommy” Vandergriff, Arlington mayor, congressman, and Tarrant County judge, was born in Carrollton, Texas, on January 29, 1926. His father, William Thomas “Hooker” Vandergriff, and his mother, Charles Pleasant (Mayes) Vandergriff, moved to Arlington in 1937 and opened a Chevrolet dealership. His father and grandfather, John Thomas Vandergriff, were both well-recognized for their civic-mindedness. Graduating from Arlington High School in 1943, Vandergriff attended Northwestern University and Southern Methodist University and matriculated in broadcast journalism from the University of Southern California in 1947. That same year he returned to Arlington to join his father’s car dealership. Two years later, on March 19, 1949, he married Anna Waynette Smith, and together they had four children: Victor, Vanessa, Valerie, and Viveca.

Shortly after he married, Vandergriff became president of the Arlington Chamber of Commerce. In 1951 Arlington covered four square miles and had a population of approximately 7,800. Vandergriff, at the age of twenty-five, ran for mayor and won in a landslide; while only 999 total votes were cast. The “boy mayor,” as he was initially called, served as Arlington’s mayor for twenty-six years, from 1951 to 1977, for which he refused a salary but accepted $10 a month. As an undergraduate, Vandergriff had been impressed with the managed growth of Anaheim, California, as clusters of populations spread at development points. He sought to emulate that pattern in Arlington. The city’s first master plan reflected this idea. Each neighborhood was to have its own schools, churches, shopping centers, green spaces, recreational facilities, and businesses. Vandergriff is credited with numerous capital improvements and projects that energized Arlington’s and Tarrant County’s growth. During his tenure as mayor, he made Arlington a major industrial, entertainment, and sports center in North Texas.

At the time Vandergriff was elected mayor, there were rumors that General Motors (GM) was interested in building an assembly plant in the Southwest. Two months after he took office, Arlington annexed six square miles near Tarrant County’s eastern county line. Two months later GM bought 225 acres within the annex and announced its plans to build a plant there that would employ 6,000 to 10,000 people. For a number of years, Amon Carter had attempted to get GM to return to Fort Worth, but it was Vandergriff who convinced the company to build in Arlington. In 1954 Vandergriff watched the first car roll off the assembly line. The General Motors Arlington Assembly was the catalyst for Arlington’s and the area’s growth. The population grew from less than 8,000 in 1950 to more than 150,000 by 1980. In anticipation of Arlington’s growth and increased water needs, Vandergriff proposed to dam Village Creek. The project was completed on July 19, 1957. Lake Arlington not only increased Arlington’s water supply, but it became a popular recreational area.

In 1954 Arlington had no hospital. The young mayor visited Clint Murchison who agreed to finance the building if Arlington citizens raised $250,000. The Vandergriff family gave a nine-acre plot of land valued at $50,000 along Randall Mill Road. The Arlington Memorial Hospital was officially opened on February 10, 1958. In 1976 Vandergriff, with a grant from the U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, helped form Trinty Emergency Medical Services Association, a non-profit corporation, to provide ambulance services in an eight-county region which included the hospital. He served on the hospital’s board of directors for nearly fifty years and was its chairman from 1968 until he retired in 2006. In November 2007 Arlington Memorial Hospital opened the five-story, $76-million Tom Vandergriff Surgical Tower.

Early in his mayoral career, Vandergriff encouraged and supported the growth and expansion of Arlington State College (ASC), a two-year institution. As chairman of the Education Committee for the Arlington Chamber of Commerce, Vandergriff, among others, campaigned for ASC to become a four-year school, which was accomplished in April 1959. He worked for several years with the Texas legislature to have ASC transferred to the University of Texas System, which was done in April 1965. ASC’s name was changed to the University of Texas at Arlington two years later. Vandergriff broadcast the schools’ football games for a number of years, and when Black students complained to him that they had difficulty finding suitable housing, he interceded and called a number of apartment owners to locate accommodations for them. He was also the chairman of the University of Texas at Arlington Foundation’s Advisory Council. Vandergriff was president of the Pecan Bowl Sports Association, which hosted the Pecan Bowl, a NCAA College Division’s Midwest Championship between 1964 and 1970.

Vandergriff encouraged Dallas developer Angus Wynne, Jr., to build the amusement park Six Flags Over Texas, which opened in 1961. In the mid-1960s, as president of the Greater Fort Worth Council of Governments, Vandergriff worked toward the canalization of the Trinity River to connect the Dallas-Fort Worth area to the Gulf of Mexico (see TRINITY RIVER NAVIGATION PROJECTS). He chaired the Tarrant County United Fund’s 1964 fund drive. In 1965 Vandergriff was elected president of the Fund and successfully raised $2,632,000. The following year he headed a drive to raise $400,000 to build a new YMCA and boy’s club and was elected vice president of the Texas United Funds governing board. Vandergriff was also the chair of the Fort Worth Convention Center Board and helped secure support for the convention center, which opened on September 30, 1968. He was an avid proponent of the establishment of what became the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. In the mid-1960s he headed campaigns to turn out Tarrant County voters in support of the airport. In the 1970s Vandergriff helped secure Arlington as an official Amtrak stop. He was also instrumental in getting major highways—the Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike, Interstate 20, and State Highway 360—built through Arlington.

Determined to bring Major League Baseball to Arlington, Vandergriff served as chair of a Dallas-Tarrant bi-county sports committee, tasked with investigating the feasibility of developing a major league-quality baseball stadium, beginning in 1958. As the new stadium was being planned midway between Dallas and Fort Worth, Vandergriff, on December 22, 1959, successfully placed a team in the newly-founded Continental League. “Vandergriff,” wrote Fort Worth sportswriter Bill Van Fleet, “[did] a great deal of behind-the-scenes work to make the stadium and the area’s berth in the Continental League.” However, Major League Baseball countered the formation of a new league by expanding; a Dallas-Fort Worth team was excluded from this expansion. Undaunted, the mayor initiated the construction of what became Turnpike Stadium (later Arlington Stadium) on the selected site. It opened in 1965. Vandergriff made several other unsuccessful attempts to attract Major League Baseball to North Texas. In 1971 he made a proposal, guaranteed by Hooker Vandergriff, to Bob Short, principal owner of the Washington Senators, who was in financial troubles and was fielding offers to move his team. American League owners approved the move by one vote. The Texas Rangers opened their 1972 season in Arlington. Vandergriff threw the first pitch at the team’s first home game and was also the Rangers’ unpaid television color analyst. Years later he helped spearhead the campaign for a proposed half-cent sales tax—passed in January 1991—for the construction of the Ballpark in Arlington.

As Six Flags Over Texas prospered, Vandergriff, to entice more tourism, envisioned a second theme park: Seven Seas Marine Life Park. Finding no private investors, the mayor reached an agreement with the Great Southwest Corporation, then owner of Six Flags. If Arlington financed the park, the company would design, build, and operate it. Encouraged by the mayor, Arlington voters, on May 12, 1970, approved a $10-million bond issue, of which $7 million was for the new theme park and the remainder to expand Turnpike Stadium.

Work on the theme park began in July 1970; however, the Great Southwest Corporation withdrew due to the bankruptcy of its parent company, Penn Central Transportation Company. After considerable debate in the city council, a non-profit company, the Arlington Park Corporation (APC), was formed on April 5, 1971, to manage the construction and operations of the marine park, the ballpark, and Rangers’ radio and television broadcasts.

Seven Seas, a very ambitious attraction, opened on March 18, 1972, a year late and $2.5 million over budget. In April 1973 Vandergriff was unopposed for his twelfth mayoral race, but criticisms had begun over Arlington’s growing entertainment debt, the fear of higher taxes, and the lack of transparency. Just days before the 1973 mayoral election, Vandergriff proposed a refinancing plan wherein the city absorbed APC’s and other debts that amounted to $30,260,000. Five days after the mayor was sworn into office, the Fort Worth Star Telegram, after a three-month investigation, ran three lengthy articles explaining Arlington’s rising debt. The debts of the ballpark and the aquatic park became the focal points of criticism of Vandergrift throughout the remainder of his tenure as mayor.

In 1975 Vandergriff, then forty-nine, faced three opponents as he ran for his thirteenth term as mayor. Amidst harsh criticism for Seven Seas, he won more than 70 percent of the vote and became the longest-tenured elected official in Texas. Vandergriff resigned at the January 11, 1977, city council meeting. He explained that he wanted to spend more time with his family.

During his career as Arlington mayor, Vandergriff was actively involved in a number of regional and national organizations. In 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Vandergriff to the National Commission on Urban Problems. The previous year he became founding president of the North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG). One of Vandergriff’s first directives as president was to appoint a Regional Planning Commission to act as a coordinating and planning agency. He chaired the NCTCOG’s Citizens Committee on Law Enforcement and the Criminal Justice Policy Development Committee and helped establish the North Central Texas Regional Police Academy, opened in 1968. In 1970 he was appointed as chair of NCTCOG’s Regional Transportation Policy Development Committee to establish policies to guide the organization’s transportation planning and to supervise, update, and maintain the regional plan. In December 1973 Vandergriff was made chair for two years of the Regional Transportation Policy Advisory Committee’s steering committee, later renamed the Regional Transportation Council. On November 15, 1974, the steering committee’s $4.2 billion plan was accepted by the advisory committee. It was the region’s first multimodal transportation plan that included air transportation and mass transit. Vandergriff served for fifteen years on the NCTCOG board. On February 13, 1997, he retired from the NCTCG’s Regional Transportation Council.

In May 1970 Governor Preston Smith appointed Vandergriff chair of the Texas Urban Development Commission. The Commission was to identify obstacles that retarded urban problem solving and to suggest long-range development goals and objectives for state and local governments. In December Vandergriff presented “Urban Growth in Texas,” a fifty-page interim report, dense with recommendations to improve the ability of government to respond to urban problems. In March 1971, sixteen bills proposed by the commission were introduced in the Texas legislature, including the legislation creating the Texas Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (TACIR). Smith appointed the Arlington mayor chair of the TACIR. The mission for the new commission was to study, evaluate, and make recommendations to improve the relationships between all levels of government. However, in November 1971 Vandergriff and other members of the Urban Development Commission, convinced that “the state constitution severely restricts the ability of urban government to serve its citizens,” laid out proposals to modernize the Texas Constitution.

In 1972 Vandergriff headed Citizens for Texas, a statewide organization—allied with the League of Women Voters of Texas—pushing for a revision of the Constitution of 1876. Together they were able to get Amendment No. 4 requiring the legislature to form a commission to study the need for a constitutional convention on the November ballot. This amendment passed, and the Texas Constitutional Revision Commission of 1973 was formed (see CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION OF 1974). Vandergriff was named a member of the commission, but he quickly resigned. He was chair of the TACIR until 1977.

Following the disappointing performance of the United States Olympic Team in the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, the Committee for a Better Olympics was formed to pursue the reorganization of the United States Olympic Committee (USOC). Vandergriff was selected as chair and testified before the U. S. Senate’s Commerce Committee in May 1973 in support of a democratic reorganization of the USOC’s administration.

In 1981 both national political parties courted Vandergriff to run on their tickets for the open Congressional seat in the newly-created Texas Twenty-sixth Congressional District. As a Democrat he won the seat by 344 votes. For the Ninety-eighth U. S. Congress, Vandergriff was assigned to the House committees on Public Works and Transportation and Small Business and the Select Committee on Aging. During his tenure in Congress, he sponsored ten pieces of legislation and cosponsored another 460. Of these, sixty-four became law. With no co-sponsors, Vandergriff proposed an amendment to the U. S. Constitution in August 1984 that would respect “the right to [new] life, except in cases of rape, incest, and life endangerment.” It died in committee. Vandergriff’s voting record identified him politically as a conservative Democrat. The Congressman ran for a second term and was defeated by Dick Armey, who labeled his opponent “a closet liberal.” Vandergriff lost the election by 6,220 votes. Due to family financial setbacks and his father’s ill health, he was more than $800,000 in debt at the end of his campaign.

Told that had he run as a Republican, he would have kept his congressional seat, Vandergriff changed parties and was elected Tarrant County judge as a Republican in 1990. Challenges related to the over-crowding of jails and difficult relations with Tarrant County sheriffs vexed Vandergriff during most of his sixteen years as Tarrant County judge. He also faced the issue of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. By 1991 there were 8,000 to 12,000 estimated cases in Tarrant County. Vandergriff became heavily engaged when he lost a close family friend to the disease. He and his family worked with AIDS organizations, while Vandergriff lent his name to many fund-raising activities. In October 1995 the AIDS Outreach Center recognized the work of the Vandergriff family with the Torchbearer Award and called the family “a model of involvement to others in the mainstream business, civic and philanthropic communities.” In 1997 Vandergriff also led the Tarrant County Commissioners’ Court in suing Denton County over the disputed border between the two counties. In 2003 the suit was ruled in Tarrant County’s favor, adding approximately 3,500 acres to Tarrant County.

On April 9, 1994, Vandergriff, Denton County Judge Jeff Moseley, and nineteen other county judges met in Salado and formed the I-35 Corridor Coalition. The coalition’s mission was to secure federal designation of Interstate Highway 35 as a superhighway under the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act. In 1995 Interstate 35 was designated a “High Priority Corridor,” part of the National Highway System. In 2001 Governor Rick Perry appointed Vandergriff to a task force to entice the Boeing Company to move its headquarters to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Vandergriff was among the Arlington officials who negotiated the building the new home stadium for the Dallas Cowboys in Arlington in 2004. He also worked publicly to influence voters to support the cost of Cowboy Stadium (opened in 2009 and renamed AT&T Stadium in 2013).

In mid-December 2005 the seventy-nine-year-old Vandergriff announced that he would not run for another term as judge of the commissioners’ court. On December 20, 2006, he left the courthouse amidst ringing bells and well-wishers. Tom Vandergriff died in Arlington on December 30, 2010. His memorial service was held at the First Methodist Church of Arlington, where he was a longtime member, and he was buried at Moore Memorial Gardens Cemetery in Arlington. Numerous places in Arlington are named after Tom Vandergriff and his family, including Vandergriff Park, the Vandergriff Building, the Vandergriff Town Center, and Tom Vandergriff Way, which runs alongside the General Motors plant. Bronze statues of Vandergriff were erected at the Arlington City Hall in 1987 and at the Ballpark in Arlington in 1997. The Tom Vandergriff Civil Courts Building opened in Fort Worth 2015. Following Vandergriff’s death, Fort Worth Mayor Mike Moncrief said, “Tom was a champion for Tarrant County, and he was a respected statesman who lived a full, complete, and meaningful life. It was a life dedicated to making our quality of life the best it could be. He certainly succeeded in that.”

See also ARLINGTON, TX.