Richard Ashton is a longtime resident of Brownwood and Brown County. He moved here in 1949 from a ranch in a nearby county. He attended East Ward, now East Elementary, before his family moved away for a few years. He returned in 1965 and helped his parents restore a couple of homes before joining the Army in late 1965.
Most of his service time was spent in Vietnam where he helped and directed refugees in the building a new town complete with a small hospital and a large school. He volunteered for a second tour to complete the work. In 1968 he helped defend the new town during the “Tet” offensive. He spent some time in military hospital and was awarded the Bronze Star.
He vividly remembers meeting Robert Kennedy and John Steinbeck while they were touring the new town during his days there. He says “it was a real honor to meet them.”
He returned to Brownwood after his discharge and married Marie Cox of Sidney and Brownwood. They have 5 children who all live in Brown County, 8 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren.
He spent a number of years as a Real Estate Broker and later started his own oil field operating company. He has retired twice once from oil operations and later from being an Oil operations consultant.
As with many people that believe in hard work he could not spend his retirement being idle. He and his wife started an orchard – Oak Creek Orchard here in Brownwood on Willis Creek as a hobby and business.
Also, during his “retirement” he has written 5 books on fruit growing one of which is an international best seller in its category. He is also on the writing staff of Texas Gardener magazine and has had numerous articles published in several publications.
He likes to research and breed new fruit varieties and has released 4 new varieties of pomegranates.
Pomegranates are a special interest to him. He founded the Texas Pomegranate Growers Cooperative and is currently an officer and director. The cooperative plans to build a new state of the art plant somewhere in Central or West Texas. He hopes to have it built here in Brownwood.
Helping bring new industries and retail stores to Brownwood is what he considers an important objective as a potential councilman. As he says “with plenty of available good jobs, a community cannot help but prosper.” In order to bring those new jobs to Brownwood the community and the council will need to show-off the community to potential companies.
“Having good city services including police and fire protection are very important to potential new industries as they want a good place for their employees to live. Having tax incentives and land available upon which to build are also important. We do need some street improvement in several areas of the city and those will need to be addressed.”
During this period of downturn in the economy he believes that city taxes and service fees should not be raised. He stiles himself as a progressive conservative and does not believe in spending unless it has very good benefits for the citizens of Brownwood. He realizes that nothing can be done about the unfunded mandates of the State and Federal governments but in other areas there can be some discretion.
He is on the board of the new Brownwood Community Garden and the Brownwood Farmers Market. He has spent quite a few volunteer hours working on designing and building the new garden. The community garden is open to all in Brownwood. It serves two purposes – to help feed the hungry and to provide places for apartment dwellers to garden. It even has a few very high raised beds so people in wheelchairs can garden right from their chair.
Richard Ashton holds a degree in Business Administration and has been awarded honorary credits in horticulture. His knowledge in business and business administration should be very helpful tools as a councilman.
Richard says that “God and Family should come first in all things closely followed by neighbors and community.”
