Dorothy Muckleroy Sinz had a part in introducing LBJ to Lady Bird. She later owned a dramatic home in West Lake Hills, recently rehabbed to enhance its midcentury glories.
Liz Muckleroy
In late August or early September 1934, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Taylor met for a first date at the Driskill Hotel, the grand old palace located at Brazos and East Sixth streets in downtown Austin.
After breakfast, they drove for hours around the countryside, deep in discussion. Before the date ended, LBJ had asked Lady Bird to marry him.
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She demurred. Still, they wed Nov. 17, 1934 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in San Antonio.
Knowing about this famous whirlwind romance — recounted in books by Robert A. Caro, Michael L. Gillette and others — you might have wondered: Who played the crucial role of matchmaker for this couple that would later alter Austin, Texas, Washington, D.C. and the world?
Although others have claimed to have introduced LBJ and Lady Bird — when they met the day before the fated date, a group of friends had gathered in the same room at the same time at the Texas Capitol — that honor almost assuredly is shared by Dorothy Johnson Muckleroy Sinz.
Unbeknownst to all but a few Texans, Sinz, who later served as LBJ’s aide, left Austin an architectural landmark, a striking midcentury modern house, recently rehabbed and put on the market in West Lake Hills.
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Who was this matchmaker?
Newlyweds Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson posing in a boat on the Floating Gardens. Honeymoon in Mexico after November 17, 1934 Wedding in San Antonio
LBJ Presidential Library
A smart and stylish woman, Dorothy Johnson — not directly related to LBJ — was born in Giddings on July 7, 1909. By the 1930s, the University of Texas graduate and widow, whose first husband died in a West Texas gas explosion, worked in downtown Austin. By some accounts, she actually dated LBJ first, but during her lifetime, Sinz firmly denied that story, a memory confirmed by her granddaughter, Liz Muckleroy, founder of L. Muckleroy Design in Oklahoma City.
LBJ, as chief aide to the U.S. Rep. Richard Kleberg of King Ranch fame, had run Kleberg’s office as if it were his own. Sinz later served in Kleberg’s office and as LBJ’s secretary and aide when he was a congressman. Among other jobs, she later worked as a journalist for the San Antonio Light and the Express Evening News, ultimately as fashion editor.
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She married Lt. Col. Richard Sinz in Germany in 1952. After his retirement, they lived in Austin and San Antonio.
At age 97, she died peacefully in Winter Park, Florida on May 24, 2006.
A historic house is rescued
803 Terrace Mountain Drive in West Lake Hills is a midcentury mini-masterpiece once owned by Dorothy Muckleroy Sinz.
David Stewart/David Stewart Photography
One thing cannot be denied: Sinz had good taste.
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We know that because her 1950s-era West Lake Hills home was recently rescued and restored by a young couple, Ashley Michael Puntch and Taylor Puntch, who thoroughly researched the midcentury mini-masterpiece and the wide-ranging stories told about its owners.
“What began as a renovation project at 803 Terrace Mountain Drive quickly evolved into an effort to preserve and document an unexpected piece of Texas history,” says Michael Puntch, a Maryland native who owns and operates ATX Home Buyer with her husband. The couple has flipped houses in several old Austin neighborhoods. “Throughout the restoration, we’ve uncovered archival materials that help illuminate both Dorothy’s long relationship with the Johnson family and the largely untold story of West Lake Hills’ earliest years.”
The property itself is also connected to the early history of West Lake Hills.
“The home appears to date to the 1950s, and the homesite was likely purchased from Emmett Shelton Sr., one of the foundational developers of West Lake Hills, and the individual who named Terrace Mountain Drive for the area’s distinctive terraced terrain,” Michael Puntch says. “As we’ve researched the home’s history, we’ve assembled a substantial archive of materials related to Dorothy, the property, and the development of West Lake Hills.”
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Expert house flippers Ashley Michael Puntch and Taylor Puntch with their son, Hudson, at the redone Sinz House.
Michael Barnes/American-Statesman
Those collected materials include:
Letters, photographs and video that document the interactions of Sinz and the Johnsons from the LBJ Presidential Library
Audio recordings of Sinz speaking about the early history of West Lake Hills during Garden Club presentations in the 1960s and ‘70s
Historical articles that Sinz wrote about life in West Lake Hills
Documentation related to Sinz’s introduction of LBJ and Lady Bird
Historical research on Emmett Shelton Sr. and the development of West Lake Hills from his stepson, Jeffrey Dochen, who grew up neighboring the Sinzes
Alternate accounts
Despite all this reporting, there is some cloudiness in the record about LBJ and Lady Bird’s first days together.
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Two accounts buried in oral histories conducted by Michael J. Gillette, who formerly ran Texas Humanities after a career at the LBJ Presidential Library, contradict Sinz’s insistence that she never dated LBJ.
One is from the online transcript of an interview on March 10, 1981, with Eugenia Bohringer “Gene” Lasseter (1906-1982), a friend of both Lady Bird and Sinz. Lasseter told Gillette that the following group meetings took place in her office.
“Lyndon was in Washington as secretary to Congressman Kleberg at that time, and he came to Austin, I don’t know why. But anyway, Bird was visiting me. He asked if I would get him a date, and Dorothy Johnson Muckleroy was there,” Lasseter said. “Her husband had been killed in a gas explosion at Monahans, and she and I had been friends since we lived together at Mrs. Randolph’s there on Lavaca Street. I did ask Dottie to have a date with Lyndon, and she did. She liked him, and he liked her. She was a beautiful girl. But not too much, you know, not the kind that he wanted a date with her the next night. Then I think he came by the office, and Bird came by the office, and I introduced them and they had a date that night.”
The other evidence comes from one of the interviews Lady Bird gave to Gillette and his colleagues from 1977 to 1987, transcribed for the book, “Lady Bird Johnson: An Oral History” (2012).
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“Gene and I would always get together as often as we could think up a good reason. She was Mr. C.V. Terrell’s very trusted secretary and had been around for years. I think I just went into Mr. Terrell’s office. This was one of the great old offices in the Capitol, an impressive office with high ceilings. And Lyndon walked in. She went on a lot about ‘Here I’ve been trying to get y’all introduced all this time’ and ‘I’m so glad,’ and told each one of us a lot about the other one.
“I’m not sure whether (Dorothy Muckelroy) was in the office or not. Lyndon had already made a date with her. My memory is that he asked Gene and me, and possibly Dottie was along with us, to go and have a drink. And we did. We had a pleasant little hour, but he already had a date with Dorothy. He asked me to have breakfast with him the next morning.”
Whether Lasseter and Lady Bird misremembered a previous date between LBJ and Sinz, it’s clear the first encounter — the day before the LBJ-Lady Bird first date — was a social one shared by a group of mutual friends.
What’s the house like?
The Sinz House is perched on a terraced hill above Lake Austin with views of downtown Austin and the Texas Capitol.
David Stewart/David Stewart Photography
Placed lightly on steep, winding Terrace Mountain Drive, the Sinz house follows a long, thin line that seems to grow larger once you enter through a door near the kitchen. Bookended by gray ledge-stone walls — and an imposing but clean-lined fireplace faced with similar stones — the open plan draws the visitor toward the exterior views.
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Picture windows in the living room, main bedroom and office overlook a tree-mantled valley that stretches down toward Lake Austin. Depending on the window, one sees different versions of the downtown skyline, one from an angle that offers a dramatic view of the Texas Capitol dome.
“It hadn’t been lived in for five years or more,” said Michael Puntch, who purchased the house from an investor who made no improvements. “It was like a jungle with at least 30 dead trees. We cleared out the brush and put in a sprinkler system.”
“It was like a house floating on a sea of dead wood,” says her New Mexico-born husband and collaborator Taylor Puntch, whose day job is in software sales.
With design help from Cody and Sarah Caswell of REI Studio, the house flipping couple brought each room up to 21st-century standards, while keeping the scale, proportions, and natural stone elements of the original. During the 1950s, undoubtedly, an architect had been involved. Everything about the finely tuned spaces suggests that.
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Yet Michael Puntch, a prodigious researcher whose journey through the microfiche at the Travis County Archives led her in split directions, could not track down the original specs.
“I haven’t found the architect,” she says.
Emmett Shelton Sr. developed the neighborhood, but did he construct the Sinz home that the couple restored?
“I am not sure who built the home for the Sinzes, but it was not Emmett,” his stepson Jeffrey Dochen says.
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The most likely architect was A.D. Stenger, whose work is sprinkled all over the Westlake area. Along with Arthur Fehr, Charles Granger, Fred Day and Roland Roessner, Stenger was part of a post-World War II community of designers led in the early 1950s by Harwell Hamilton Harris, the first dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas.
Harris brought with him from Southern California the latest thoughts on how to find and respond to a natural site and its context, expand the widely used “open plans” borrowed in part from traditional ranch houses, and add high ceilings, statement centerpieces and a taste of outdoor living.
Growing up on Terrace Mountain
Emmett Shelton Sr., who died in 2000 at age 95, at times played taps outside his front door to his home on Skyline Drive. The lawyer, politician and real estate developer is credited with founding the Village of West Lake Hills.
Tom Lankes/American-Statesman File
Jeffrey Dochen, a real estate broker with Shelton Properties, is a fine historian as well as stepson of Emmett Shelton Sr., the famed lawyer, politician and real estate developer who founded the Village of West Lake Hills.
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Dochen, whose mother’s married name was Joyce Shelton, is a font of information about life on Terrace Mountain and about his stepfather, author of the 1994 memoir, “My Austin: Remembering the Teens and Twenties.”
“He didn’t use civil engineers back then,” Dochen said about Shelton. “He would walk through the woods and determine the best place to put the road. Then he would meet the maintainer — or bulldozer — crew and say, ‘Follow me through the woods, we are going to build a new road today.’”
Shelton built Red Bud Trail — including what is now the low-water crossing known as Emmett Shelton Bridge — as his personal driveway from Bee Cave Road to above Caravan Circle until he started selling lots and it became a public road.
“He had a water well on top of the Caravan Circle hill and a large concrete water tank,” Dochen says. “He kept extending a water line along Red Bud Trail every time he sold a lot. That water system eventually became Water District 10.”
In addition, Shelton built Westlake Drive, High Road, Toro Canyon, Wild Basin Ledge, Yaupon Valley, Slow Turtle, Lost Canyon, Caravan Circle and probably a few more.
“We lived in several homes in the Westlake area over the years,” Dochen says, “but in the mid-‘60s, we lived at 505 Terrace Mountain. There were about 10 or so families that lived (there) then.
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“The families got together to form a supper club,” Dochen continues. “Every month or so, a different family would host the get-together and each member brought a dish. I was about 12 years old and was more interested in playing than in socializing with the adults. I wish I could go back and listen to the stories that all shared with each other.
“But I remember Dorothy and Col. Sinz were always very nice to me.”