Fred Agnich

Frederick Joseph Agnich (July 19, 1913 – October 28, 2004) was a Minnesota-born geophysicist who served from 1971 to 1987 as a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives. From 1972 to 1976, he was the Texas Republican National Committeeman.

Background Agnich was born in Eveleth in St. Louis County in northeastern Minnesota. He attended the University of Minnesota at Saint Paul, from which he received a Bachelor of Arts in geology in 1937.

In 1939, Agnich married Ruth Welton, also a native of Eveleth, Minnesota. The couple had three sons, William Frederick Agnich (born ) of Richardson, Texas, Richard John Agnich (born 1943) and wife, Tory, of Dallas, and James Randall Agnich (born 1950) and wife, Betsy, of Houston, Texas. Ruth Agnich died in November 1975. Two years later, Agnich married Brooksie Jeanne Penland Willie (born 1932), the mother of three daughters and two sons.

From 1955 to 1959, Agnich was chairman of the board of Greenhill School in Addison, the first co-educational, non-denominational pre-kindergarten through grade 12 private school in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. 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. Agnich was also a fundraiser for Republican U.S. Senator John Tower of Texas, who won his third term in 1972. Agnich was tapped as minority leader in 1972 by his Republican House colleagues. In 1974, Representative Agnich was part of the state constitutional convention held that spring to draft a document to replace the Texas Constitution of 1876. However, the new constitution fell three votes short, 118 votes instead of 121, of the two-thirds majority required in the combined state House and Senate.

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. His interest in the environment was an outgrowth of the management during the 1960s of his 3,500-acre ranch near Athens in Henderson County east of Dallas. He built a 3,000-foot dam to fill a 500-acre lake. He turned his ranch into a wildlife refuge for the undertaking of research into habitat conservation. who then unseated Jimmy Carter, thus far the last Democrat to have won the electoral votes of Texas. Agnich was considered generally conservative. In 1975, he criticized higher education in Texas for excessive spending. 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. He did not hesitate to use state power to promote his favorite interests, environmental legislation, and wildlife preservation, specifically the Wildlife Conservation Act of 1983.

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, just days before the reelection of U.S. President George W. Bush. His widow, Brooksie, died on April 26, 2016, at the age of eighty-three.

Agnich is honored through the Fred J. Agnich Scholarship Fund at the Texas Association of Professional Geoscientists in Austin.