Two years later, Agnich married Brooksie Jeanne Penland Willie (born 1932), the mother of three daughters and two sons.
Agnich raised funds for the Texas Republican Party during the 1950s and in the unsuccessful 1960 and 1964 presidential campaigns for Richard M. Nixon and Barry M. Goldwater, respectively.
He won as a Republican in a heavily Democratic year with the Texas statewide candidates for U.S. senator and governor, George Herbert Walker Bush and Paul Eggers both going down to defeat at the hands of Lloyd Bentsen and Preston Smith, respectively.
[5] Instead Smith was denied re-nomination, and the Republicans chose State Senator Henry Grover of Houston, who then lost to the Democrat Dolph Briscoe of Uvalde.
[2] In 1977, he hired young Karl Rove to his first job in Texas as a legislative assistant in Agnich's Dallas office.
[7] Agnich served on House Appropriations and Finance and was the chairman of the Environmental Affairs Subcommittee on Wildlife throughout his 18-year career in the legislature.
[9][10] Yet, he was also a member of the "Dirty Thirty" legislators who exposed the Sharpstown banking scandal in Houston and challenged the power of Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives Gus Mutscher of Washington County.
In 1989, Agnich, with his wife Brooksie, retired to their homes in Dallas and Athens, Texas, and on Lake Lenore in Ouray, Colorado.
He died of a lengthy illness in Dallas at the age of ninety-one,[4] just days before the reelection of U.S. President George W. Bush.