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“Let me just point out a few of the reasons why we residents love Austin so much — the diversity of the city, and the great natural beauty of the city. We’ve got some beautiful parks, Zilker Park, for instance, and Barton Springs. You know, you can float on your back in the water down there and you can see the skyscrapers downtown…..”
Who do Austinites have to thank for Zilker Park, the Austin Nature & Science Center, Town Lake parkway, and all the greenbelts, playgrounds, and swimming pools that have made Austinites the envy of other city dwellers across the nation? Why, Beverly Sheffield.
Who?
Anyone who frequents Barton Springs pool has probably seen the former Parks & Recreation director out there clad in his blue nylon swim trunks; at 84, Sheffield still swims three to four times a week. One Saturday not long before the city renamed the Zilker Hillside Theatre in his honor, Sheffield was resting near the pool in the shade of a pecan tree, motioning out over the water where nearly 60 years ago he directed a water pageant which Cactus Pryor emceed from a floating dais. Sheffield told how he had seen a man crossing Lake Austin in an amphibious car, and wanted to use such a vehicle to convey Pryor to the dais in spectacular fashion. At this point, Sheffield’s visitor laughed. An amphibious car? What was that — a quirky military experiment that someone tried to cross-market into domestic use? Sheffield smiled blankly. “I… I don’t know,” he said, as though the oddity of an amphibious car had never struck him. “Well, anyway,” he said, maneuvering around the intrusion into his story, “We got the car, and we did it.”
Sheffield was never one to be distracted much by idle speculation. His convictions, learned at an early age, taught him to make the world a better place, not question its premises. And although he spent a good portion of his life teaching others to play and creating the space for them to do it in, he did it with such focused, religious intensity that a reporter described him in 1948 as “a serious young man who can play 12 hours a day without frittering away his time.” Today, Austinites can be thankful that parks and recreation were never a frivolous matter to Bev Sheffield.
“Sheffield was the one who was instrumental in developing the master plan, the long-range plan, for the parks system in Austin,” says Jack Robinson, who inherited Sheffield’s office when the veteran director retired in 1973. “His thinking set the direction for the future of Austin. Nobody in the city has done more to establish the quality of life in Austin, in terms of open space, than Beverly Sheffield.”
Politicians who worked with Sheffield knew him as a hardheaded problem solver who refused to fail at any task he accepted. Yet underneath Sheffield’s hard-working persona beat the heart of that boy who had earnestly and solemnly listened as ministers at YMCA youth camps extolled the virtues of humble service to humanity. “To work with boys is to work with God,” is one of the maxims Sheffield remembers from those days, along with the Biblical verse: “He who would be great among men must first be the servant of all men.”
Unpretentious and unassuming, Sheffield was also talented, rising to the director’s post only a few years after he joined the Recreation Department in 1934. He was an expedient right-hand man for Mayor Tom Miller, who entrusted Sheffield and his department to oversee fundraising dinners given for visiting Democratic leaders.
“When some politician came to the city, you’d better believe that Tom Miller wanted to do the town up right,” says Robinson, “and who else would you turn to besides Beverly Sheffield? Nobody.”
But Sheffield’s unadorned principles and simple logic sometimes rendered him awkward in the political arena. When John F. Kennedy visited Austin in 1960, Mayor Miller called Sheffield to a meeting with numerous party leaders and Kennedy’s advance man. The leaders were asking who was to be the “honcho” in charge of preparing the Capitol for the presidential candidate’s visit, and the mayor said, “Beverly Sheffield.”
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Beverly Sheffield enjoys a moment during “Learn to Swim Week” at Deep Eddy Pool in 1938 |
Delmar Groos, a lifelong friend of Sheffield’s and the former city architect who designed the Barton Springs and Deep Eddy bathhouses, adds that Sheffield’s sincerity also makes it difficult for him to recognize tomfoolery and wile.
“He’s a funny guy,” says Groos. “You can tell him a joke, and he doesn’t get it. I know he’s as honest as the day is long, and I know that whatever he says, you better not joke with him because he won’t understand.”
Sheffield might have been a preacher or a teacher but for his experiences at youth camps, where he discovered he had a “knack” for leading camp activities. He became a counselor by the time he was 16. When he graduated from the University of Texas, his path was clear.
“I said, `Public recreation — that’s going to be my chance.’ I had found my way of expression, my way of life. And until I had a family, I never even worried about what they were going to pay me,” says Sheffield. He had come to believe that people were not living fully unless they were playing at something — whether sports, theatre, dance, or art — and he made it his personal mission to see that they did.
In the Thirties, playgrounds were the backbone of the parks system. During summers, the city planned and directed organized activities — from card games to storytelling to drama productions — throughout the days and into the evenings. Sheffield began as a playground leader, then was named aquatics director — teaching swimming classes at city pools.
He worked with troubled youth in the city’s rough Tenth Ward. As part of a program to keep juvenile offenders out of trouble, Sheffield organized a boys club for which he acquired an office and a few bicycles so the members could operate a messenger service. The boys’ crude and violent behavior was an affront to Sheffield’s genteel character, but his work and patience earned him a place in their society. “Let’s be honest with ourselves and Mr. Sheffield. To hell with the rest of the world,” the boys agreed at one meeting.
Sheffield seemed to inspire the same loyalty from the boys that would later make him popular with his staff. During Governor Lee O’Daniel’s inauguration party, Sheffield left one of them to guard a stage, telling him to only allow bands up the stairs. He had to rush over shortly after when the boy started swinging fists rather than let anyone disobey Sheffield’s order. Sheffield says he later had the satisfaction of seeing some of those wild teens become settled, respectable individuals.
In 1937, Sheffield was asked by then-Recreation Department director Jim Garrison to develop a show that would attract more people to the sparsely attended concerts given by the municipal band.
Sheffield’s solution was to create a theatre in Zilker Park. It was nothing fancy — just some wooden risers for the band fronted by a small stage facing a grassy slope, with a backdrop trellis of moonflower vines.
Under Sheffield’s direction, the outdoor theatre began drawing thousands of visitors on Thursday evenings, providing a welcome respite from homes stifling in the summer heat. In addition to the band concerts, Sheffield’s programs included amateur entertainers — singers, dancers, comedians, jugglers — and sing-alongs facilitated by a projection screen. For the first year, the theatre’s shows were broadcast on local radio, with Sheffield serving as emcee. Later, Sheffield added gospel-singing night on Sundays, which he called the “Church of the Moon & Stars.” Sheffield says it was not unusual for him to be away from home five nights per week traveling from park to park in his car, hosting shows, overseeing activities, and learning what still needed to be done.
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For a few hours each week, Sheffield was the man a depression-era city depended on for fun. |
Driving past Brentwood Elementary, Sheffield points out a little stage his department constructed behind the building where children could entertain their parents at “community nights.”
Following Sheffield’s eyes, one begins to see the city as a fantasyscape in progress, full of wonderful, fun places just waiting to be used. It’s hard not to think of a child building a city in a sandbox — we’ll put a creek here, with a waterfall, and here a bridge, and this is where we’ll have a theatre….
As an administrator, Sheffield was a hands-on leader who managed to be effective without demanding a huge slice of the city budget. Roy Guerrero, an area supervisor for Sheffield on the city’s Eastside, remembers Sheffield as a prudent spender who would even agree to cuts in his budget if the city manager asked.
“A lot of cities were judged on how effective their program was, by the amount of recreation dollars they were able to get,” says Guerrero. Sheffield “took care of the money that he got — he didn’t misspend it. In the depression days, you had to watch every penny. And he only asked for those things that he needed.”
One initiative Sheffield championed was cooperation between the school system and recreation department to share facilites and develop park areas around new schools. The idea met resistance from school administrators who didn’t want the city intruding on their turf and from teachers nervous about outside visitors invading their classrooms. But Sheffield had little patience for those who looked for problems rather than solutions.
“Why, they’d come up with this and that reason why we couldn’t do it. Hell, just use your head,” Sheffield would say. When one teacher worried about her desk being burglarized, he attached rollers to the desk so that it could be locked in a room in the evenings. Today, the Pan American Recreation Center stands as an example of one of Sheffield’s hard-fought victories, giving both Zavala Elementary students and area residents access to basketball courts.
Though Sheffield was never one to stick his nose where it didn’t belong or impose on his superiors, he is remembered as a “major rattler and shaker in recreation” by former employees.
“People actually came here to work [with him]….” says Robinson, who notes that Sheffield trained more parks and recreation directors than anyone else in the country.
One of the largest civil issues the city faced during Sheffield’s time as a city employee was racial integration. While he did not take a public stand, neither did he stand in its way. He had his own ways of chipping away at Jim Crow. In 1956, at the ceremony opening what is now the Palmer Auditorium, an assistant city manager asked the auditorium’s director if he had put up his signs marking the “white” and “colored” restrooms. Sheffield intervened.
“I said, `Forget it,'” Sheffield remembers, “and he looked at me. I said, `I’ve already taken those signs down over at the coliseum. Have you had any trouble?’ And he said, `No, we haven’t had any trouble.'”
Former councilmember Emma Long, the first woman elected to the city council in 1948 as a “wild-eyed liberal” who fought for desegregation, says Sheffield never made a fight on the issue, but quietly let integration in the parks and swimming pools happen with neither fanfare nor resistance.
“I always felt like if they didn’t like what I was doing, they could fire me,” says Sheffield, “but I also didn’t think that, politically, they wanted to make the decision.”
“He was a real humanitarian,” says Guerrero, “He believed in helping people who needed helping, and race, color, creed — it didn’t make too much difference.”
But if Sheffield was never a firebrand — always hesitant to raise his voice or draw attention to himself — he seemed to attract the attention and support of assertive people willing to help him with his projects.
“He knew the right people to go to to get what he needed. And they liked it, [being asked], evidently, because they sure gave him the dough,” says Groos, laughing.
“I always thought he was a little too timid,” says Long, “He needed some fire behind him. He was vigorous in carrying out anything that he got his hands on, but he needed some support, and he got it from me and other councilmembers… I guess you could say he was a plodder,” says Long, smiling as she remembers, “oh, but a lovable plodder.”
“She’d ‘a got me fired if I’d done like she wanted,” Sheffield replies good-naturedly, saying his strategy was to retreat when he had to, outlast a mayor or city manager, and come back another day.
When Sheffield drew up a plan for the Town Lake parkway in the Sixties, it did not attract sufficient interest from the council or the city manager. So when Ladybird Johnson returned from Washington, he asked her for help. The city manager fumed at Sheffield’s “audacity” when a message from Mrs. Johnson came to his office requesting a meeting to discuss Sheffield’s Town Lake parkway project. But thanks to Sheffield’s connections, which also included prominent citizen Roberta Crenshaw, the Town Lake Beautification project was realized.
“He was effective and sage, with everything well-thought-out and worthy,” former first lady Johnson says of Sheffield. “It was grand to work with him.”
Sheffield, of course, did not always get what he wanted. An environmentalist before the term was fashionable, Sheffield repeatedly petitioned the city in the Sixties to buy land upstream from the Barton Springs pool to better protect the Edwards Aquifer. Unfortunately, he was ahead of his time.
“He wanted the city to purchase land up along Barton Springs Creek, and we should have done it…. Land was very cheap then; it’s such a shame that we didn’t purchase it,” says Long. After Sheffield’s retirement, the city did eventually purchase land upstream from the springs, at significantly higher prices. Sheffield continues to be outspoken about preserving the waters of the springs to this day.
When Sheffield joined the Recreation Department, it managed 12 playgrounds and 14 athletic fields, and had a budget of around $20,000. When Sheffield retired in 1973, PARD’s budget was nearly $3 million and it managed 39 parks and 25 playgrounds, plus golf courses, museums, swimming centers, the Austin Nature & Science Center and Zilker Botanical Gardens, eight greenbelts, and 14 parks along Town Lake. Quietly, steadily, Sheffield crafted a parks system that became a national model. His fame as a leader in the field led to an offer of a considerably higher-paying job in Los Angeles in 1953, but Sheffield chose to stay in Austin, unwilling to abandon the project he’d put so much of himself into. In the Sixties, Sheffield became dissatisfied with the quality of park maintenance, then the responsibility of the Public Works Department. So the city turned the job over to Sheffield, creating the Parks & Recreation Department as a result.
“I think the man saw the needs of people,” says Robinson. “He didn’t get into the politics of it. He simply said, `Here are the people — now how do I provide for their recreation?’ And then he did.”
Greenbelts were not a new thing when Sheffield took over the Recreation Department — the concept was part of a national movement in city planning in the Twenties — but Robinson credits Sheffield with taking a good idea and running with it.
Sheffield, however, credits Janet Long-Fish as being the true pioneer of greenbelts in Austin, saying her gift of $5,000 and initial supervision preserved the first open spaces along Shoal Creek.
Groos remembers returning to Austin in 1968, after an absence of 20 years, and receiving a call from Sheffield, who wanted to take him out immediately and give him a tour of the parks. “We drove around,” says Groos, “and the more we went around, the more joyful I got about it. He did do great things for the city.”
Sheffield left PARD in 1973 to take charge of Austin’s bicentennial celebration. In 1976, still a couple years shy of retirement, Sheffield was made the city’s first director of Trusts & Endowments. The program was not an immediate success, and Sheffield’s salary was criticized by some as a waste of taxpayer money. After Sheffield’s retirement in 1978, recognized by the bestowing of that year’s Austin’s Most Worthy Citizen Award, Sheffield continued the work, accepting the salary of a part-time secretary.
“If they had paid me $100,000, I couldn’t have worked any harder,” Sheffield says. “I worked my butt off.” Soon, the Austin Community Foundation was formed, and the gifts began rolling in. This year, the ACF will give out $1.5 million to various charities and cultural endeavors, including Meals on Wheels, the Center for Battered Women, symphonies, and museums. Sheffield feels the ACF is the greatest legacy that he leaves to the city. Today, Sheffield remains active traveling, tending the complex array of botany in his backyard, and occasionally dropping by the PARD office. While being interviewed for this article, Sheffield suffered a respiratory ailment that landed him in the hospital. Incredibly, however, the next day he was ready to talk again and was soon giving a tour of the city’s parks.
The parks system administration has changed considerably since he left office. Short-term directors are more common now, and the department receives much less personalized direction. Sheffield, however, is not critical of the present system.
“In some ways, it’s 100 times better than it used to be,” says Sheffield, “but when you get old like me, you like to see the things that you felt were so good and so wonderful remain.” He regrets that children are no longer offered free swimming lessons by the city, for instance, and misses the spontaneous fun of amateur performances at the Hillside Theatre.
“Of all the things I did, the theatre was the neatest thing,” he recalls, struggling to describe his feelings. “I mean, I was so personally involved; I emceed it and put together the programs.” Though the right words do not come easily, the sentiment is clear. For a few hours each week, Sheffield was the man a depression-era city depended on for fun — and that was just the responsibility Sheffield loved.
Some feel that renaming a theatre after Sheffield does not yet give the man his due. Certainly, he has not received the recognition afforded other prominent citizens with whom he worked — Emma Long has her park, and Tom Miller has his dam, but Sheffield’s name has yet to be affixed to a permanent city landmark. Sheffield has always been shy around the spotlight, but it is also, perhaps, his popularity that makes him difficult to celebrify. People don’t just know of Sheffield, they know him personally.
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“He’s always trying to give other people credit for things,” his wife Lois comments.
Sheffield recently called his friend Delmar, just before going in the hospital, wanting Delmar to take a last swim with him before Delmar, 85, moves to Santa Fe to live near his daughter. “I like Bev,” Delmar says, “and I like him because he’s one of the few, honest friends I’ve ever had; and whatever he told me, it was that way.”
It’s such a shame, though, that the two of you didn’t get to take that last swim because of his respiratory trouble, I remark. “Oh, he’ll be bugging me about it again,” says Delmar, “He won’t stop at that.”
This article appears in November 28 • 1997 and November 28 • 1997 (Cover).