Photo: Sharon Steinmann, Staff / Houston Chronicle Photo: John Van Beekum, HC Staff / Houston Chronicle Photo: Courtesy Anna Russell Photo: Courtesy Family Photo Photo: Courtesy Anna Russell Photo: Courtesy Family Photo Photo: Sharon Steinmann, Staff / Houston Chronicle Photo: John Van Beekum, HC Staff / Houston Chronicle

Anna Russell, the petite powerhouse who oiled the engine of government as Houston’s city secretary for nine mayors during a nearly 70-year career defined by her sharp eye and quick wit, died Monday. She was 88.

Russell had not attended a City Council meeting since October 2018, when she made the first of several hospital visits over the last year and a half. Yet for months Russell insisted she would return to work and, to the surprise of no one, continued to handle paperwork and field questions from home well into last summer.

As friends and colleagues put it, “Anna was Anna.”

“Houston will have other city secretaries, but there will never be another Anna Adams Russell,” Mayor Sylvester Turner said in a statement emailed to news media. “Today, my heart is broken following news of Anna’s death.

“Employees all over the city can claim dedication to their jobs; some can claim top seniority at their workplaces. Anna humbly made no claims and didn’t need to,” the mayor said. “I’d ask God to rest her soul, but she was hardly interested in rest. Getting the job done for the public was her constant quest.”

Turner asked all Houstonians to “join me in sorrow” and in uplifting Russell’s daughters, three grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

As a young single mother, Russell often brought her three daughters to City Hall on weekends and had them do homework while she worked. She went to work during floods and blizzards — ignoring mayors who told city workers to stay home — and she rarely took vacations; she had accumulated more than three years of paid time off when she first fell ill.

“I think she felt like she couldn’t, that if she missed a day that something wouldn’t get done,” said Pat Jefferson-Daniel, who worked 34 years in the secretary’s office with Russell and has led the office in her absence. “This work was her life. It gave her life, and she honored it. Being away from it just wasn’t anything she wanted to do.”

Russell’s role, along with her nine staffers, was to compile the council agenda, keep the minutes and maintain all city records, including ordinances and motions, candidate filings, campaign finance reports and lobbyist registrations.

The more visible part of her duties was to oversee council meetings in a chair to the mayor’s right, calling items to the floor and enforcing speaking rules.

Her trademark, “Thank you, your time has expired,” was almost as distinctive as her voice, a sweet but steely drawl that drew its twang from her girlhood in 1930s Lubbock and its roughness from decades of cigarettes.

Even more memorable to colleagues was her unwavering integrity, even when — perhaps especially when — it was indistinguishable from stubbornness.

Turner last summer recalled Russell sending him documents unsigned because she knew the proper protocols had not been followed — even when city attorneys had already signed off.

Even when Russell made a two-page copy of a city document for her daughter, Jefferson-Daniel recalled, she would pay the 20-cent bill for the copies

Known for being right

Former agenda director Dan Jones met Russell as a reporter in the 1970s and then worked with her at City Hall for more than 25 years, some of them as a senior aide to two mayors, when part of his job was to sit next to Russell and recognize council members who wanted to speak.

Jones sometimes was accused of following Robert’s Rules of Order, referring to then-Mayor Bob Lanier, rather than the bible of parliamentary procedure. When this took the form of being deliberately slow to spot an opposing council member who was trying to chime in, Jones said he would feel Russell tugging on his shirtsleeve to alert him, like a referee ensuring a fair fight.

“She knew more and she was right more often than everybody around her. That’s why she was able to do that job for so long,” Jones said. “I was supposedly her boss for several years, but that was nonsense. She was Anna, she was the city secretary’s office, she was like a free-standing institution, and you don’t boss free-standing institutions.”

Even when Russell’s duty to certify citizen petitions placed her in the middle of divisive issues, the parties typically knew questioning her integrity was a doomed argument.

That was true in 2018 when firefighters sued to force Russell to count their pay “parity” petition and won; they focused not on Russell but on the mayor, who they claimed was impeding her work. Russell denied that, saying she was handling several pending petitions in the way she always had: “The first one in, the first one out.”

The same was true during the fight over a nondiscrimination ordinance under former Mayor Annise Parker. Public speakers at one point tried to rile conservative council members by questioning Russell’s count — and got nowhere.

“None of them were going to go anywhere near the idea that Anna wasn’t being straightforward,” Parker said of the council. “She had absolute integrity. If it went through Anna’s office, it may not be fast, but it was going to be fair.”

‘She was a force’

Born Anna Jeane Adams in Lubbock on Aug. 5, 1931, Russell moved to Houston at 18 and started work as a junior clerk in the city secretary’s office, earning $150 a month. She married and had three daughters before divorcing in 1966.

Her employee number was 45; fresh-faced aides’ badges now carry numbers north of 167,000. The City Hall lunchroom was segregated, and Russell was taught to prepare the list of public speakers at council by using “Mr.” and “Mrs.” only for white people. She later worked for two black mayors.

She was appointed city secretary in July 1972, by former Mayor Louie Welch, but it was another eight years before she was joined at the council table by the first female council members.

There were no computers, no internet, not even Wite-Out. Not that she had any great love for the technological revolution.

“She never lost a piece of paper and had a phenomenal memory, but while she slowly brought the city secretary’s office into the 21st century, she didn’t get much into the 21st century,” Parker said, recalling a showdown with Russell over the launch of an electronic agenda system. “I actually had to order her to do it. And she did it to the best of her ability once she realized she had no choice.”

Whether such spats put any mayor in Russell’s doghouse was anyone’s guess, however. She was loath to dish on city officials.

Pressed to describe the differences between Roy and Fred Hofheinz, father and son who both served as mayor, she said, “Roy was the oldest.” Asked who would win an election, she’d quip, “Whoever gets the most votes.”

That inscrutability even extended to her own family.

“I’d call her and say, ‘I’m confused who to vote for for mayor. Do you have any comments?’” said Russell’s eldest daughter, Janet Spencer. “She’d go, ‘I do not. You need to study your candidates.’ To this day, I do not know her political party.”

Longtime agenda director Marty Stein, who worked closely with Russell, got a few stories from her early years, such as the time Russell sewed a button on Mayor Fred Hofheinz’s cuff during a council meeting.

Russell was even less interested in talking about herself, though Stein recalled her speaking of coming to work sick in her younger years because she had no savings and figured she might need the payout from her banked sick time to cover her retirement.

“A lot of people sort of dismissed her as being this bean-counter, stickler person who kept records,” Stein said. “And yet, she wasn’t a genteel librarian. She was a tough broad who had kind of a rough life as a single parent, and she had a job to do and she was going to do it the best she could. That’s why she could sort of stare people down. She was a force.”

Russell frequently greeted office visitors with a wary, “What do you want?” — the look in her eye the only hint of whether that was a warm greeting or a warning. Bureacrats in need of her signature sometimes approached her in pairs, seeking safety in numbers.

Spencer, Russell’s daughter, visited once when a young city attorney arrived with questions. “I’m not going to tell you. Go look it up in the charter,” Russell told him.

“But you’re so much quicker and you’ll just correct me if I get it wrong,” he replied — only to be shooed away again.

Spencer saw the man later that day and apologized, and was surprised when he gushed, “We love her. We just love her.”

Zen and sorcery

Russell quips often were deployed in response to council meetings, though colleagues said she vented only about the overall spectacle of inefficiency, not specific politicians.

Asked how the meeting had gone that day, her go-to lines included: “The regular weirdos,” “Can you believe that?” and “Well, I’ll be damned.” Perhaps her favorite was, “God protects fools and idiots.”

Other “Anna-isms” included: “There’s no reason for it, that’s just our rule”; “You can go to hell for lying as easy as you can for stealing”; “You’ll never know what’s going to end up in court”; and “I don’t have to get ready, I stay ready.” Colleagues’ questions often were met with “Use your own brain.”

And when it came to documents, Russell’s singular ability to find misplaced paperwork was nearly supernatural, a mix of zen and sorcery.

“Look for it where it’s not supposed to be,” she would tell young staffers befuddled by an absent ordinance. Then she would disappear among cabinets of decades-old files and emerge with the document.

The development of Lake Houston was filed under “reservoir project,” Russell knew, just like graffiti was “visual blight,” and that before it was Interstate 45, it was “Gulf Freeway,” or “Interurban Expressway,” or even “Highway 75.”

Jefferson-Daniel said she knows the secretary’s office will function in Russell’s absence, as it must. She worries, though, what Russell’s loss means for civic life in Houston.

“I’ve been saying for years I was going to sit down with her and get information and write it down, and I just didn’t,” she said. “Some of this stuff is not in a book. Some of it is in her head. There’s just so much nobody will ever know because she’s going to take it with her.”

mike.morris@chron.com