San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
A teacher, an administrator, a friend for life
On the wall of Charlie Cotrell’s recently vacated third-floor office in St. Louis Hall at St. Mary’s University was a framed 1894 photograph of a horse-drawn carriage traveling east on the dirt road that is now Cincinnati Avenue. In the background is St. Louis Hall.
The picture hung next to a window looking out onto Cincinnati Avenue. In the window next to it, San Antonio’s downtown skyline is etched in the distance. It’s the same window out of which Cotrell leaned, in October 1961, to catch a glimpse of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower on the front steps.
“Looking out this window reminds me I’m always part of a city,” he said. “The city is always right here.”
Cotrell arrived at St. Mary’s as an 18-year-old student in the fall of 1958, a kid born on San Antonio’s South Side and raised by a single mother. They moved to Waring, in the Hill Country, where he attended a one-room school and most of his classmates were Mexican American.
When he left St. Mary’s — he doesn’t like the word “retired” — this spring, Cotrell did so as a revered elder. Except for three years at the University of Arizona, where he earned earned his Ph.D., one year teaching at Texas A&I and a year-long sabbatical, this Marianist institution is where he’s been, and it will always be as identified with him, as he is with it. It’s where he taught and became its first lay president.
To have Charlie Cotrell as a professor for one political science course, or several, is to have a friend and mentor for life and access to a never-diminishing well of spiritual and intellectual sustenance, compassion and inspiration.
“I have always admired and been amazed by Charlie’s deep commitment to teaching,” his wife of 52 years, Abbie, said. “He has held many administrative offices at St. Mary’s, including that of president, but his love for teaching runs through everything. In that light, I believe his greatest accomplishments are the lives that he has touched and encouraged through the years.”
He wanted to be a journalist, but since St. Mary’s didn’t have a journalism program he turned to political science.
“The heart of political science for me then, and now, is a focus on people and community, involved with strategies and actions to bring about justice, equality and the common good,” Cotrell, now 80, said in late May as he cleaned out his office.
“These principles came alive for me, beyond textbooks, when I had the opportunity to work with the excluded and disenfranchised for 25 years as a researcher and witness in voting rights cases in many Southern, Southwestern, and Western states. These principles lived in the just aspirations of the African Americans, Latinos and Indians with whom I worked in federal voting rights cases.
That moved me then and now.”
Among his students were Willie Velasquez, who founded the Southwest Voter Registration and Educational Project; José Angel Gutiérrez, who founded the Mexican American Youth Organization and La Raza Unida; and Ernesto Cortes, who founded Communities Organized for Public Service, or COPS. He was the treasurer of the charter group that founded the organization.
The Express-News once had four Metro columnists: Roddy Stinson, Rick Casey, Carlos Guerra and myself. All of us, except Roddy, had Cotrell as a professor.
Cotrell worked with Rosie Castro on voting rights. He was with her mother, Victoria, in September 1974 when she won $300 in a menudo cook-off. Victoria took her winnings to pay the bill at Robert B. Green Hospital, where her grandsons, Julián and Joaquin, had just been born.
Cotrell’s reach has been long, his influence deep. He’s always been the teacher and calm voice in troubled times. He said, “If you want a more peaceful, prosperous world, you have to work together, and that’s an art. It’s an art for all of us to learn.”
On his last day at St. Mary’s, he loaded up his 2004 Honda Element and drove east on Cincinnati Avenue from which St. Louis Hall, sitting on a rise, can be seen several miles away.
Cotrell called it “a good memory.”