3755 Richmond Ave.
Program Committee
713-412-1875
Bill King is an outspoken independent who has, for years, written about the political dysfunction in our country. But he has done more than just pontificate from an armchair. In 2015, he ran as an independent for mayor of Houston, losing a nail-biting runoff in the closest mayoral race in the city’s history. Prior to running for Houston mayor, King wrote over 500 opinion pieces for the Houston Chronicle and served a stint of that paper’s editorial board. Today he publishes a widely read newsletter and blog, www.BillKingBlog.com.
Over the years he also served as the mayor of his hometown, Kemah, Texas, was a successful businessman and lawyer, and served in many other public and civic capacities. He is perhaps best known for his work on Houston’s evacuation procedures in the wake of the disastrous Hurricane Ike evacuation. His work on a Gubernatorial commission and a regional task force charged with review evacuation procedures won the National Hurricane Conference’s Outstanding Achievement Award in 2006.
Bill’s father was a union pipefitter and he spent much of his formative years “pipelining” across our country with his family, providing him early lessons in the diversity of America and its great natural beauty. He worked his way through the University of Houston as a pipefitter summer apprentice eventually earning political science and law degrees.
The road was not always smooth for Bill. Shortly after leaving law school he was recruited by Houston firm specializing in representing Texas savings and loan association, leading him to enter that industry as principal. After much initial success, he was swept up in the collapse of Texas oil and real estate in the mid-1980s eventually losing everything he had built. He chronicled that life-changing experience in his 2008 book, Saving Face.
Bill has enjoyed a vast variety of experiences during his life, ranging from traveling to Cuba with the late Congressman Mickey Leland to negotiate the release of political prisoners with Fidel Castro to captaining his own boat on a 10,000 nautical mile tour of America and Canada. It is this incredibly diverse set of experiences that have provided the context for his “search for a rational center in American politics.”
