Emmett Shelton Sr<\/a>., one of the foundational developers of West Lake Hills, and the individual who named Terrace Mountain Drive for the area’s distinctive terraced terrain,\u201d Michael Puntch says. \u201cAs 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.\u201d<\/p>\nArticle continues below this ad<\/p>\n
![\"Expert]()
<\/p>\n
Expert house flippers Ashley Michael Puntch and Taylor Puntch with their son, Hudson, at the redone Sinz House.<\/p>\n
Michael Barnes\/American-Statesman<\/p>\n
Those collected materials include:<\/p>\n
Letters, photographs and video that document the interactions of Sinz and the Johnsons from the LBJ Presidential Library
\nAudio recordings of\u00a0Sinz speaking about the early history of West Lake Hills during Garden Club presentations in the 1960s and \u201870s
\nHistorical articles that\u00a0Sinz wrote about life in West Lake Hills
\nDocumentation related to Sinz’s introduction of LBJ and Lady Bird
\nHistorical research on Emmett Shelton Sr. and the development of West Lake Hills from his stepson, Jeffrey\u00a0Dochen, who grew up neighboring the Sinzes<\/p>\n
Alternate accounts<\/p>\n
Despite all this reporting, there is some cloudiness in the record about LBJ and Lady Bird\u2019s first days together.<\/p>\n
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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\u2019s insistence that she never dated LBJ.<\/p>\n
One is from the online transcript of an interview on March 10, 1981, with Eugenia Bohringer \u201cGene\u201d Lasseter (1906-1982), a friend of both Lady Bird and Sinz. Lasseter told Gillette that the following group meetings took place in her office.<\/p>\n
\u201cLyndon 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,\u201d Lasseter said. \u201cHer 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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, \u201cLady Bird Johnson: An Oral History\u201d (2012).\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cGene and I would always get together as often as we could think up a good reason. She was Mr. C.V. Terrell\u2019s very trusted secretary and had been around for years. I think I just went into Mr. Terrell\u2019s 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 \u2018Here I\u2019ve been trying to get y\u2019all introduced all this time\u2019 and \u2018I\u2019m so glad,\u2019 and told each one of us a lot about the other one.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Whether Lasseter and Lady Bird misremembered a previous date between LBJ and Sinz, it\u2019s clear the first encounter \u2014 the day before the LBJ-Lady Bird first date \u2014 was a social one shared by a group of mutual friends.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What\u2019s the house like?<\/p>\n
![\"The]()
<\/p>\n
The Sinz House is perched on a terraced hill above Lake Austin with views of downtown Austin and the Texas Capitol.<\/p>\n
David Stewart\/David Stewart Photography<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 and an imposing but clean-lined fireplace faced with similar stones \u2014 the open plan draws the visitor toward the exterior views.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt hadn\u2019t been lived in for five years or more,\u201d said Michael Puntch, who purchased the house from an investor who made no improvements. \u201cIt was like a jungle with at least 30 dead trees. We cleared out the brush and put in a sprinkler system.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was like a house floating on a sea of dead wood,\u201d says her New Mexico-born husband and collaborator Taylor Puntch, whose day job is in software sales.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI haven\u2019t found the architect,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Emmett Shelton Sr. developed the neighborhood, but did he construct the Sinz home that the couple restored?<\/p>\n
\u201cI am not sure who built the home for the Sinzes, but it was not Emmett,\u201d his stepson Jeffrey Dochen says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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The most likely architect was A.D. Stenger<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\nHarris 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 \u201copen plans\u201d borrowed in part from traditional ranch houses, and add high ceilings, statement centerpieces and a taste of outdoor living.<\/p>\n
Growing up on Terrace Mountain<\/p>\n
![\"Emmett]()
<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Tom Lankes\/American-Statesman File<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Dochen, whose mother\u2019s married name was Joyce Shelton, is a font of information about life on Terrace Mountain and about his stepfather, author of the 1994 memoir, \u201cMy Austin: Remembering the Teens and Twenties.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe didn’t use civil engineers back then,\u201d Dochen said about Shelton. \u201cHe would walk through the woods and determine the best place to put the road. Then he would meet the maintainer \u2014 or bulldozer \u2014 crew and say, \u2018Follow me through the woods, we are going to build a new road today.\u2019”
Shelton built Red Bud Trail \u2014 including what is now the low-water crossing known as Emmett Shelton Bridge \u2014 as his personal driveway from Bee Cave Road to above Caravan Circle until he started selling lots and it became a public road.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe had a water well on top of the Caravan Circle hill and a large concrete water tank,\u201d Dochen says. \u201cHe kept extending a water line along Red Bud Trail every time he sold a lot. That water system eventually became Water District 10.\u201d
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe lived in several homes in the\u00a0Westlake area over the years,\u201d Dochen says, \u201cbut in the mid-\u201860s, we lived at 505 Terrace Mountain. There were about 10 or so families that lived (there) then.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cThe families got together to form a supper club,\u201d Dochen continues. \u201cEvery 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I remember Dorothy and Col. Sinz were always very nice to me.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dorothy Muckleroy Sinz had a part in introducing LBJ to Lady Bird. She later owned a dramatic\u00a0home in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":402163,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":["post-402162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402162\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/402163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}