“I was 87,” Jane Sibley says. “Then somebody told me: ‘You were born in 1924! You’re 88!’ Hell, I’m 88.”
A wicked sense of self mockery is unexpected in a woman who has ridden atop a traditional part of the Austin social and arts scene for more than 50 years.
“I’m convinced that anybody should take advantage of what’s presented to them,” she says. “Now some of what came my way came in a negative way. But they turned out to be interesting experiences.”
Her early civic work helped energize the Texas Historical Commission and what was known as Laguna Gloria Art Museum.
Since the early 1970s, however, Sibley has served as either president or chairwoman of the Austin Symphony Orchestra, which traces it roots back to a community ensemble founded in 1911. The organization nurtures some of city’s most complex and arcane social hierarchies.
This past summer, after 40 years at the top, she ceded symphony board chairmanship to lawyer and investor Joe Long. At the same time, Long handed over the presidency to banker Tom Neville, 48, considerably younger than either longtime leader.
“I chose Joe,” she smiles. “Joe chose Tom.”
Few notables have dominated an Austin social set — while accomplishing so much — for as long as Sibley has.
“Jane is an original thinker,” says Long, namesake with wife Teresa Lozano Long of the Long Center, which Sibley campaigned tirelessly to build. “She never loses sight of her objectives. She has greatly enriched the cultural life of this community.”
Up from the ranch
Stroking a 13-year-old chihuahua named Killer, Sibley sits regally among her Asian, Italian and Spanish antiques. Nearby hangs large portraits of Jane Dunn Sibley and her late husband, Dr. D.J. Sibley, by artist Bill Wiman.
Comanches, Kiowas, drifters and rogue livestock played key roles in their West Texas family histories. Sibley’s parents met at a Fort Stockton courthouse dance in 1910 or 1911. “It was a tiny little village then,” she says of the isolated former military town.
Her parents might have lived on the edge of civilization, yet they insisted she take piano, elocution and dance lessons. Otherwise, she was outdoorsy, always on horseback or swimming in Comanche Springs, the lifeblood of Fort Stockton.
“I also played golf, but they asked me to stop because I was tearing up the greens,” she jokes. As a child, she broke her arm. But there were no X-rays or hospitals in the vicinity. “It’s OK,” she says while displaying the arm’s irregular regrowth. “It works.”
Water ballet at the first Fort Stockton Water Carnival in 1936 sparked the girl’s love of the arts and athletics. She stayed in touch with her carnival swimmates for decades.
“Two of us swam our 50th anniversary,” Sibley says. “Which is a lot of swimming.”
She staged one spectacle to the tune “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” using building supplies to simulate Ziegfeld-style headdresses. Her team was invited to perform in larger Odessa with band leader Harry James. The musician was indifferent to the opportunity, but Sibley refused to go on without his accompaniment. “We came to swim to Harry James and we are going to swim to Harry James.”
Not for the last time, she got her way.
In segregated schools, Sibley studied Latin, Spanish, English and math. Her personal connection to history came early.
Her future husband’s family owned the parade grounds and officer’s house at Fort Stockton, the 1859 camp near Comanche Springs that helped protect trails west and had a part in the Army’s experiment with camels for transport.
Later, the couple helped start the local historical society and encouraged the preservation of nearby Fort Davis, which Lady Bird Johnson pushed as a national monument.
Preservation leader Wayne Bell, formerly of Austin, worked with the Sibleys early on in West Texas, where Jane had already begun to groom a public image for herself.
The road to Austin
Sibley entered the University of Texas in September 1941.
“I had no choice,” she says. “My father said it’s to be a great school some day and you are going to go there.”
Three months later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
“It became a changed school,” she recalls. During the war, her future husband served in the medical corps in New Guinea, where the locals resisted the Japanese occupation.
For a vivacious student from West Texas, however, Austin was a city to conquer, socially.
“Austin was larger than Fort Stockton but smaller than any place else,” Sibley says. “It was very much a city of Democrats. We were conservative Democrats. The ones in Austin were much more liberal. In Fort Stockton, there was only one Republican. If you saw him, you crossed the street. I later found out he was a nice guy. “
Despite her rightward leanings, Sibley chaffed at the era’s social limits on women.
“I don’t believe we could have our bank accounts or borrow money,” she says. “Husbands had to sign certain things. I knew women who ranched, but they had to have a man sign with them. I didn’t go anywhere without DJ. If he couldn’t go, I didn’t.”
Eventually, she ignored frowns when she invited men to lunch at the Headliners Club on symphony business. As the head of various Austin groups, she didn’t bother her husband with the details.
She says with a dismissive nod: “There was no reason for his opinions to enter my activities.”
D.J. Sibley also shared deep West Texas roots. His parents owned the Stockton Hotel, where established citizens, by custom, took Sunday lunch. She knew his family, but didn’t get to know D.J. Sibley until after the jungle fighting in World War II, where he had developed tuberculosis.
On their first date, they attended the ballet in Dallas.
“I remember he had a little puppy dog,” she laughs. “I had my fur coat. That dog thought my coat was its mother!”
The couple married in the fort’s old adobe officer’s house, a small wedding since the bride’s father had recently passed away.
“Went on a honeymoon to the Bahamas without a reservation,” she says. “It was so British. So impeccable. Yachts. The wealthy English had gone to Bahamas during the war.”
For a while, D.J. Sibley didn’t know whether to continue in medicine or follow the family ranching traditions. The drought of record in the 1950s decided that for him. They let go of the main herds in 1955.
“I remember the round up when we sold 600 units (cows and calves),” Sibley says. At times, they had tried grazing sheep along the mesas and arroyos spiked with sotols. “I’ll never have sheep again on my land again. They graze too close to the ground.”
As late as the 1950s, their ranches had no electrical or telephone service. Water came from windmills.
“And the wind blew!” Sibley says, whose memories are timed to major floods and droughts. “I love that sound.”
Although the Sibleys kept the Glass Mountain Ranch and a small place near Fort Stockton called Salt Grass, they and their children didn’t actually live on the ranches during the 1950s, but rather in Fort Stockton. A foreman took care of the land.
During the 1970s, D.J. had a tuberculous relapse and nearly died. They moved back to the West Texas ranchland for a year.
“It’s been a very happy place,” Sibley says. “Some places are happy.”
West Texas was rough on humans and their animals, but it did produce some unexpected wealth. A profitable mineral lease on the Sibley’s Coyonosa Ranch allowed them to move to Houston, then to Austin in 1961.
While the land was scorched, the Castle was saved during the vast West Texas fires of 2011, but only because a crew cut down the piñons around the house.
“I had fought a fire out there one time,” she says. I know how you can’t fight fire.”
The family has known other tribulations.
The couple had three children. Jake, born in 1950, married and had two children. In law enforcement, he died in an auto accident in 1991. Mahala, born in 1952, was an artist who lived in Mexico, married an English artist, had two children and died of a brain hemorrhage in 2003. Hiram, a New Year’s arrival, lives in Alpine, looks after the family property and runs an art gallery. He has two children.
J.D. Sibley, who for decades squired Jane to society events, died in 2005.
Running the show
After starting a family, Sibley’s first big project in the 1960s was Laguna Gloria.
She had majored in art at UT and had visited the villa on Lake Austin built by local benefactor Clara Driscoll. The tiny art museum served as the local chapter of the Texas Fine Arts Association, a statewide advocacy group founded by Driscoll. (Decades later, the two groups reunited as AMOA/Arthouse.)
“They were always so desperate for money,” Sibley remembers. “They had no organization. A part-time executive director and no business manager. It was sad.”
The museum, supported mainly by UT faculty and friends, asked Sibley to chair Fiesta, its arts fair and fundraiser.
“Like an idiot, I said yes,” she says. Every year, Fiesta, more a “fun-raiser” than a moneymaker, made or lost a few hundred dollars. During her first year as chairwoman, it netted $10,000, Sibley recalls.
“The main thing was planning,” she says. “Everybody knew what everybody was doing.”
Another secret to success?
“We salted the popcorn next to the beer,” she says. “We sold a lot of beer that year.”
With a group gathered around her Old Enfield dining room table, she sorted out the finances and hired a new service firm. Before she know it, the museum wanted her to serve as board president.
“I found out how bad it was,” she says. “They were always trying to build a new building. I said: ‘You don’t own this building. You don’t own this land. You can’t build on somebody else’s land.”
In fact, Texas Fine Arts Association owned it, though Laguna Gloria was responsible for upkeep.
“There’s a lot I don’t know,” she says. “But there are folks who know a lot less.”
It took three presidents’ terms to secure the the deed, but it happened.
Her next project in the late 1960s was a campaign to save prehistoric rock art paintings in West Texas.
“Vandals were destroying them as fast as they could,” Sibley says. So she teamed with a UT archaeologist and two other activists to secure some kind of protective status. They targeted Gov. Preston Smith.
“We decided he needed to see them,” she says. “He didn’t know prehistoric rock art from a hole in the ground.”
At one point, they interested eccentric Galveston benefactor Mary Moody Northen.
“She loved pictographs and wanted to see them,” Sibley says. “Well, they are often on rock walls way up high. Here she was in a skirt and old lady shoes. She just climbed up to see them.”
After some success setting up security for the art, the governor named Sibley to the Texas Historical Commission, where she encouraged countless other preservation projects.
“I enjoyed them all,” she says. “It always led to something else.”
By the early 1970s, Sibley had earned a reputation for getting things done. Nettie Jones, a friend of Houston philanthropist Ima Hogg, who pushed classical music across the state, got her named to the symphony board.
Almost immediately, she discovered that nobody wanted to lead as president.
“Frank Erwin had already done it,” she says. “St. John Garwood told us no. On the elevator leaving Garwood’s office, Jim Leach, a professor of botany, said: ‘Jane, you have to do it. There’s nobody else to ask.’”
Sibley remembers having a ready answer: “That’s the only way I know how to do it.”
Soon after that, the board’s executive committee met. Except for Sibley, they were all men. Her first challenge: Dealing with an executive director who wrote her suggestions down on pieces of paper, stuck them in the pockets of his seersucker suits, then lost them in the wash.
“I demanded to see the books,” she says. “He brought me a shoebox of check stubs. Those that he hadn’t washed.”
She asked to see the union musicians’ contract. He couldn’t produce it. The symphony could have lost its nonprofit status overnight.
“I think he thought I was bossy,” she says. “I thought he was stupid.”
Facing such a financial mess, some on the symphony board suggested bankruptcy.
“The Sibleys don’t take bankruptcy,” she insisted. “In those days, it was a blight. You didn’t come out of it. People have to get to the brink of danger before anything happens!”
Like anyone in a new position, she called around to find out the industry standards. Many American symphonies carried millions of dollars in debt, expecting future donors to pick up the tab.
“We could not go on the way other symphonies do,” she says. “They put important people on the board, then the important people just sit there. They expect the people in the office to raise the money. And they don’t know anyone with money.”
Sibley got a line of credit then organized a “phone-a-thon.” Board members sat behind 25 telephones and made cold calls. At first, Austinites, with no history of arts philanthropy, balked.
“Years later, they’d say: ‘I’ve been expecting your call. I wouldn’t give to anyone but you,’” Sibley reports.
If Austinites were slow to give, the city’s corporations were even slower.
“We didn’t have a bank that gave to us,” she says. “That’s usually where you start. We went to the head of Austin National Bank. He said no. We stayed for hours and drank all his scotch and he said yes. They gave a couple thousand. That was a lot. Nobody wanted to step into it. We had been a an absolute failure.”
“One musician was always trying to sue us,” she says. “Sometimes they were mad because they were playing and sometimes because they were not playing more. They are a different breed.”
If Sibley’s tight fists and exasperated dealings with the artists left her with a reputation for high-handedness, she didn’t seem to mind. The symphony survived.
“All of the Austin Symphony Orchestra’s extended family are so indebted to her for not only allowing the organization to grow but for keeping it afloat during the lean years,” says much-admired music director Peter Bay. “She has a mysterious power which allows her to separate philanthropists from some of their savings.”
Sibley also teamed with UT music department head Robert Bays to create a joint conducting program. When they brought on Maurice Petis, he insisted that university musicians play with the orchestra, unheard-of “moonlighting” back then.
“That gave us quality,” Sibley says. “Now all our principals are professors.”
Later in the 1970s, Sibley’s interest in the arts and historic preservation were united in the Symphony Square Project. Federally funded urban renewal board were clearing all the old structures between East 10th and East 15th streets along Waller Creek.
Sibley, who had restored 19th century buildings in Fort Stockton, chose a handful to save and turn into the symphony’s headquarters.
Three decades later, they purchased the modern office building next door on Red River Street. Board vice president and baker Eddie Safady had seen a sign on the building while driving to work.
“He called Joe (Long) and said: ‘I think we ought to buy that,’” Sibley says. “By noon, it was purchased. When you need something, you have to have it.”
In the 1990s, the symphony, along with other large arts groups, needed a new place to perform. Bass Concert Hall, dreamed up by legendary UT regent Erwin, a lover of symphony and opera as well as big-time collegiate sports, had served moderately well for a decade or so.
Yet the university eventually wanted control over booking. So the indigenous symphony, opera and ballet groups crusaded to turn the outdated 1950s-era Palmer Auditorium into the Long Center for the Performing Arts.
“Jane never wavered in the vision,” Christian says. “Nor in her determination to see the completion of this wonderful building.”
Clearly, they needed a white knight. They got two in the form of the Joe and Teresa Long, who donated more than $20 million. After multiple designs and much drama, the Long Center opened to citywide applause in 2008. Never before had such a vast project been funded almost exclusively with private Austin donations.
Sibley had approached this mountain of a challenge as she had most problems.
“I’d go out to the ranch, sit on a hilltop and watch the buzzards and think,” she says. “Just try to figure things out.”
Still a stylish figure on the social scene, Sibley is content with her “emerita” status at the symphony.
“Once it’s going, like anything, if it’s well built, it will last,” she says. “But it won’t run on its own.”