Eckels' father, Robert Young "Bob" Eckels, Jr., was a trustee of the Houston Independent School District who in 1972 was elected the Precinct 3 county commissioner, a position that he filled until shortly before his death on Christmas Eve in 1989. As commissioner, the senior Eckels was accused of having tapped his office telephones, mail fraud, and theft of timber used on county bridge construction. In 1987, he pleaded no contest to charges that he had accepted from a county contractor the construction of a road on his farm in Austin County within the Houston metropolitan district. Eckels told The Houston Chronicle that his father "played the game by their rules. The world has moved." The senior Eckels had close political ties with Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush. In 1984, while his son was a first-term legislator, Commissioner Eckels turned the Harris County government into a virtual arm of the Reagan-Bush re-election campaign. He used county telephones, computers, and employees to establish an organization called the National Conference of Republican County Officials. An official in Roanoke County, Virginia, said that the conference was "a working arm for the White House and the national Party." Eckels later said that he had used at least $20,000 of his own funds for Reagan-Bush mailings and did not report the expenditure to the Federal Election Commission. Eckels died less than a year after Bush became the U.S. President. The seventeen-year commissioner was convicted of theft and forced to resign. For a number of years his name was synonymous with political corruption in the Houston area. Eckels' uncle, Paul Glenn "Buck" Eckels, Sr., for many years owned the Lawyers Title Insurance Company of Houston. Eckels graduated from Houston Christian High School, the University of Houston, and the South Texas College of Law in Houston. He currently practices law with Husch Blackwell. He is also the president of Texas Central High-Speed Railway, also called Lone Star High Speed Rail. He was formerly affiliated with Fulbright & Jaworski in Houston. His wife, the former Jet Winkley, was a lobbyist for the Metropolitan Transit Authority while she and Eckels were engaged and he was a state legislator. Eckels said that because of their relationship he avoided sponsoring transit authority bills. The couple has a daughter, Kirby Eckels.
Political life
In 1982 at the age of twenty-five, Eckels was elected to the first of his six terms in the House. At the time Bill Clements, the first Republican governor of Texas since Reconstruction, was simultaneously unseated by the DemocratMark White, then the state attorney general. Eckels did not seek a seventh term in 1994, when George W. Bush was elected governor. He represented the newly numbered House District 133 in Harris County. In his last general election for the legislature in 1992, Eckels had no Democratic opponent but defeated Clyde Garland, nominee of the Libertarian Party, 39,518 votes to 5,413. Eckels was succeeded in the House in 1995 by the Houston lawyer Joe Nixon, a Republican who also served District 133 for six terms. Upon leaving the house, Eckels began a twelve-year stint as the county judge of the most populous county in Texas. He succeeded the 20-year incumbent, Moderate RepublicanJon Lindsay, who caught up in scandal did not run again for county judge. Lindsay and the senior Eckels had been colleagues and occasional rivals on the commissioners court. However, Lindsay supported the younger Eckels for county judge in 1994, when Eckels defeated the Democrat Vince Ryan. Lindsay himself rebounded politically to win election in 1996 to the District 7 seat in the Texas State Senate. As county judge, Eckels also chaired the Harris County Toll Road Authority, the only county-owned toll road system in the United States. Judge Eckels received international recognition for the response by Harris County to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The Astrodome and Reliant Park became the largest shelter operation in American history, with more than 250,000 residents given refuge during the storm. In 2005, Esquire named Eckels the "Best and Brightest - Citizen of the Year" for his leadership during the storms: "When the City of New Orleans evacuated to Houston, Harris County Judge Robert Eckels was an island of competence in the face of catastrophe." The American City and County Magazine named Eckels "County Leader of the Year 2006." In 2006, Eckels was actually elected to a fourth term as county judge but left some four months later to enter the private sector. Commissioners named transportation consultant and former state Representative Ed Emmett of Kingwood in northeast Houston to succeed Eckels as county judge. Upon his death, Eckels will be interred at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.
