A new gallery at the Bexar County Archives Building showcases memorabilia from the remarkable, half-century political career of San Antonio native Nelson Wolff.
First elected to the Texas House at age 29, Wolff went on to win a seat in the state Senate, serve on the San Antonio City Council and as mayor, and eventually spend more than two decades as Bexar County Judge.
Throughout that time, Wolff collected press clippings, campaign material and other souvenirs from a bygone era in Texas politics: A Democrat-controlled Legislature ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment, Texas lawmakers honoring labor organizer Cesar Chavez, and a young freshman lawmaker taking the state capitol by storm.
“It was a very much different time than today,” Wolff said said at the gallery’s ribbon cutting ceremony Wednesday. “There was only really one political party back then, and it was the Democratic Party, but it had a big tent: Conservatives, moderates, liberals, all under one tent, and I think it worked very well that way.”
The Bexar County Archives, located at the corner of West Nueva Street and South Main Avenue, regularly features rotating galleries open to the public.
The Nelson W. Wolff Gallery, however, will be on display indefinitely, offering a wealth of history on the many major projects he helped shepherd, including the River Walk extensions and the creation of the Alamodome.
“[These are] pieces of history stretching over 54 years that I think would be valuable to some,” Wolff said. ” … If you don’t understand where we came from, you don’t know where we’re going.”
Among the first pieces in the collection is a newspaper column from the San Antonio Light’s Don Politico, who deemed then-32 year old Wolff, “one of the most promising political comers of South Texas” after he’d unseated an incumbent in the Texas Senate.
The column noted highlights from Wolff’s freshman term in the House, including a bill to provide addiction treatment to heroin addicts.
“Most bills that Nelson Wolff touch turn to legislation,” the piece reads.
The political landscape has changed dramatically in Texas since those days — causing many old Democrats to switch to the now-dominant Republican Party.
But Wolff stuck by his “moderate to liberal” Democratic politics throughout two unsuccessful bids for Congress in the late 1970s.
“You pay the price for that, I lost a couple elections,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “But you should stick to what you believe, fight for it and pay the price if you lose. That doesn’t happen much these days.”
A shelf of albums in the back of the gallery contain hundreds more news clips — some hilariously annotated by Wolff’s former staff.
The gallery also features his chair from the Texas Constitutional Convention of 1974, NBA Spurs championship rings won during his leadership, and a snapshot of him with Selena.
Though the collection is largely dedicated to his political career, Wolff’s favorite piece harks back to his start as a businessman.
A county record from 1962 features Wolff and his father’s signatures from when they registered a business to sell roofing material.
Wolff was just 21 years old at the time, and said they grew the business over two decades, reaching a total of nine building material stores before eventually selling the company.
“He didn’t realize we had it preserved until we presented it at his retirement,” said County Clerk Lucy Adame-Clark, whose office is digitizing all of the records from the gallery. “When he saw his father’s signature, he got emotional.”
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