Max Starcke

Starcke also worked as a real estate developer, then established a funeral home, and helped organize Farmer’s State Bank in Seguin.

After helping to revive the local Chamber of Commerce, he headed its effort to recruit the Chicago White Sox for two seasons of spring training in Seguin, in 1922 and 1923.

Toward the end of his service as mayor, Starcke totaled up the trophies that had transformed his hometown, including the city's first water-filtration plant, a new post office, a new municipal building, a new courthouse, a new jail, new storm sewers and sidewalks, a fountain in the town square, a small park built by the Civilian Conservation Corps along the banks of a stream fed by Walnut Springs, and a park that stretched for a mile along the beautiful Guadalupe River.

Besides the fine swimming pool, it boasted a golf course, picnic tables and bar-be-que pits along a scenic river drive, a pavilion for parties, a Recreation Building with a rooftop space for dancing under the stars.

Starcke's chief responsibility was to sell the electricity generated by the LCRA, and at the urging of then-Congressman Lyndon Johnson, to make it as inexpensive as possible to poor consumers.

At the same time, the LCRA built transmission lines to carry the power into distant areas, which came to be served by rural electric coops organized under laws that Franklin Roosevelt got through Congress.

Again at the urging of Lyndon Johnson, in the late 1940s, not long after World War II ended, Starcke led the LCRA into an extensive soil conservation effort.

A natural salesman and a gregarious politician, Starcke was active in the Elks, the Masons, the Lions, the Rotary, and the Sons of Hermann, as well as serving as a deacon at the University Presbyterian Church in Austin.