Fifty years ago, Dallas City Hall underwent a change that lasted only a few months but made history.

On Feb. 11, 1976, Mayor Wes Wise resigned to run for Congress. Mayor Pro Tem Adlene Harrison stepped into his place, becoming Dallas’s first woman to serve as mayor and the first Jewish woman to lead a major American city.

For Harrison, a longtime Preston Hollow resident who would spend decades shaping Dallas politics, environmental policy and public transportation, the milestone was only one chapter of a much longer career.

And she was careful about how that chapter was remembered.

“I was acting mayor. I wasn’t the elected mayor,” Harrison said in a 2000 oral history interview. “I was the mayor pro tem, and the mayor resigned, and I became acting mayor until there was an election.”

Dallas’s own archives make the same distinction. The City lists Wise as mayor from 1971 to 1976, followed by Harrison as acting mayor in 1976. Annette Strauss later became the first woman elected mayor of Dallas in 1987.

But Harrison’s path to the mayor’s office had begun years earlier.

Born Adlene Nathanson in Dallas in 1923, Harrison graduated from James Madison High School and attended the University of Missouri before leaving college and joining the Red Cross during World War II. She married Maurice Michael Harrison in 1955, and the couple had one daughter, Jane.

Harrison entered Dallas civic life through the City Plan Commission, where she spent eight years before winning election to the Dallas City Council in 1973. For much of her early public service, she operated in institutions where few women held power.

“When I was on a Plan Commission, I was the only woman on it,” Harrison recalled decades later. “That didn’t really bother me. I mean, they didn’t intimidate me.”

Her work encompassed planning and zoning, historic preservation and environmental issues. She supported protections for wetlands and advocated for preserving railroad rights-of-way that she believed could eventually be used for mass transit.

“I could already see the air pollution, you know, the handwriting on the wall,” Harrison said in 2000, explaining why she pushed to preserve those corridors for a future transportation system.

That foresight would become particularly significant later in her career.

First, however, came 1976.

When Wise left the mayor’s office, Harrison suddenly found herself leading a city confronting one of the most consequential issues in its history: school desegregation.

She considered running for mayor herself. Instead, she decided her place was on the City Council.

Harrison later recalled believing Dallas needed a steady voice on the council as a federal-court decision on school integration approached. Some council members, she said, were preparing to oppose the ruling.

“I decided we needed someone with stability on that council to speak out to the citizens of this city,” Harrison said.

She spent weeks preparing a statement explaining why Dallas needed to comply with the court order while warning against civil unrest. Harrison later pointed with pride to the relative calm surrounding the implementation of the decision.

The choice meant giving up a chance to seek the mayor’s office in her own right.

“So, I gave up the opportunity to run for that office,” she said.

Her brief tenure nevertheless placed Harrison in the city’s history books. Dallas Municipal Archives now lists her among the city’s “firsts” as its first appointed female mayor.

Harrison’s career hardly ended at City Hall.

After Jimmy Carter became president, Harrison left the Dallas City Council when she was appointed regional administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Region 6, serving from 1977 to 1981.

Environmentalism had long been intertwined with her work in Dallas. She advocated for wetland protections, challenged development practices and opposed the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant. She also helped create a Dallas environmental commission.

Harrison traced some of those convictions to childhood. Her father, she recalled, took the family to national parks, oceans and mountains and taught his children that the natural world was something they were responsible for protecting.

“He also taught me that I’m a custodian of everything,” Harrison said in the 2000 interview.

After leaving the EPA, Harrison returned to an issue she had championed years earlier: public transportation.

She became the first chair of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit board, serving during the formative years of the agency that would become what it is today.

Creating a regional transit system required convincing cities and voters to participate in something that did not yet exist. Harrison later described building consensus around a regional plan and winning voter support for the sales tax needed to fund it as among DART’s greatest early accomplishments.

The agency quickly expanded bus service, including express buses from Richardson and Plano, while laying the groundwork for the light-rail network that followed.

Decades later, Harrison still viewed the creation of the system as one of her proudest achievements.

Her career connected several of the defining questions Dallas faced during the second half of the 20th century: how the city would grow, whether its schools could integrate peacefully, how it would respond to pollution and development, and whether a sprawling North Texas region could build a public transportation system.

It also unfolded at a time when women were still uncommon in the rooms where those decisions were being made.

Harrison remembered being excluded from what she called the “good old boy network,” but she did not remember being particularly troubled by it. In one story she recounted years later, a male architect who served with her on the Plan Commission tried to pay her a compliment after the two had repeatedly disagreed.

“You think just like a man,” he told her.

Harrison had a question for him.

“Is that a compliment?”

Her three months as acting mayor in 1976 would remain the most obvious historical first attached to her name. But the years that followed demonstrated that Harrison’s influence was not defined by the brevity of her time in the mayor’s office.

She spent decades involved in the decisions that shaped the Dallas residents know today – from environmental protections and development to buses and rail.

Harrison died at her Preston Hollow home in February 2022. She was 98.

Decades after Harrison walked into the mayor’s office, Dallas has elected two women to the position, Annette Strauss (1987-1991) and Laura Miller (2002-2007), and seen women lead across city government.

But in 1976, there had to be a first.

For three months, it was Adlene Harrison of Preston Hollow.