DE LEON HANDBOOK/De Leon History

Page last updated Aug 29, 2009

SPEAKER BEN BARNES 

    Ben Frank Barnes was born April 17, 1938 in Gorman. to Mr. & Mrs. B. F. Barnes.  He attended Comyn’s school until it consolidated into De Leon and graduated from De Leon High School.  As a four year letterman for the Bearcat’s he was known as “Bomber” Barnes.  He attended T.C.U. for one semester before he married De Leon’s Martha Morgan Barnes on February 22, 1957.  He later attended Tarleton State College and then the University of Texas where he received his BBA.  He also attended the University of Texas School of Law. 

    Among his early jobs were baling hay, hoeing peanuts, working at a mine, driving a creamery truck and selling vacuum cleaners.  The mine work occurred one summer at a molybdenum (a white metallic element that resembles iron) mine in Climax, Colorado.   While attending the University of Texas in the morning hours, he worked part time at the State Health Department Records Division i the afternoon and sold vacuum cleaners at night and on weekends.

     After earning his degree, he and Martha returned to De Leon to make a run for the Legislature.  Together they knocked on nearly every door in the district and handed out about 65,000 campaign cards.  Ben has been quoted as saying, “We had to, I was running against a Brownwood man--and a good one, a member of the City Council there.  There were 20,000 people in his hometown but only about 2,000 in De Leon.”

     He carried every precinct in the district except one in Brownwood and was sworn in to represent the 64th Legislative District of Texas in January 1961.

      During that first session in the legislature, Barnes became a close friend of Byron Tunnell, ramrodding Tunnell’s campaign for Speaker of the House and in the 1963 session served as Tunnell’s right hand man and his liaison between the Speaker and other house members as well as between Tunnell and the newly elected Governor, John Connally.

        Ben first met John Connally in Brownwood shortly after the then Secretary of the Navy decided to run for Governor in 1962, introducing him at a banquet.   A little more than a year later on December 17, 1963 as a capacity crowd honored Representative Barnes at a testimonial dinner in Brownwood, the Governor called the banquet to congratulate Barnes.   Connally was still bedridden and recuperating from bullet wound received in Dallas only 25 days earlier.  President Johnson also praised Barnes as he telegraphed a tribute.

      Ben had been working to secure representative’s pledges to vote for him as Speaker of the House in 1967 under the assumption that Tunnell would be moving up the political ladder.  But, at 7:30 a.m.  on January 8, 1965, Tunnell called Barnes to let him know that he was stepping down as Speaker to accept an appointment to the Texas Railroad Commission.  By the time the legislature convened four days later Barnes had secured enough votes and was elected the youngest Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives since 1870 and the second youngest ever.  He was 26 years old.