Anna Wood – Deputy U.S. Marshal

In a time when many working women were practicing shorthand and typing, Ms. Anna Wood, now a resident at Kaulbach Assisted Living, was transporting women to federal prison as part of her job as a Deputy U.S. Marshal.

The office of the U.S. Marshal is the oldest federal law enforcement office in the United States and is the
enforcement arm of the federal courts, assisting with court security, prisoner transport, serving arrest
warrants and seeking out fugitives.


Anna was married at the age of 17 and, shortly thereafter, her husband became ill with active tuberculosis and was sent to live in a tubercular sanatorium for one year. Since Anna could type, the Marshals office in San Antonio allowed her to take her husband’s desk job for the year until he returned. However, because of her husband’s ailing health, she decided to continue working after he returned home. She stayed on at the Marshals office and moved up through the ranks, from typing assistant, to disbursement officer, who wrote and signed all of the checks, to deputy marshal.


During her early years there, deputy marshals were hired by political appointment, but President Roosevelt changed the process to allow federal employees to take a civil service test, and if they passed, they could stay at their jobs and not have to leave after every election. This appealed to Anna, so she decided to make a career with the Marshals Service.

As a deputy marshal, Anna would post warrants and serve process. Part of her duties was to serve as a guard to women prisoners while they were transported to the federal prisons. At the time, the Western District of Texas served all of south, west and central Texas, from Austin to El Paso, and transported more prisoners than anywhere else in the country.


“I didn’t take the dangerous people, the men did that,” said Anna. “The women I transported were mostly docile and most of the things they did were pretty dumb, not dangerous.”


She recalls one trip where she accompanied a woman to a federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia. The woman had peeled apart a $20 bill, taped the two sides to $1 bills and tried to pass it off as $40. Anna’s boss made her take a relative with her and they traveled, by train, from San Antonio all the way to southern West Virginia. She had to accompany the woman at all times, for rest stops and meals.


Although she was the only woman marshal for a while, there were other women in the office, mostly working clerical jobs. But Anna says the men in the office were always very respectful toward her. “They were nice to me because I handled the money,” she said. “Although things were already beginning to improve for women at that time.”

But times were very different in the work place then. “I was the youngest person in the federal building for a while,” said Anna. “So, when they needed a picture for the newspaper after a big case, they would ask me to pose for it. And you had to wear a jacket, like a men’s suit jacket, just to get inside the federal courthouse.”

She also recalls the days of the “hunt and peck” typewriters and having to make eight carbon copies of everything. “There were no copy machines,” she said. “You had to make every one of the copies yourself. There were no modern conveniences, no office machines. Everything was done by hand. We had no air conditioners, only fans and open windows that just blew all the papers around. “


Anna retired from the Marshals Service in 1970 after 35 years. During her retirement years, she has volunteered at Morningside Manor as a Morninglory and as a Blue Bird at Methodist Hospital. She also traveled all over the world to China, Australia, New Zealand, Africa and all over Europe. She moved into The Meadows in 2004 and has now lived at Kaulbach for the past two years. She has always been an independent woman and a generous person who likes to have fun.

“I’ve had a fun life,” she said. “Live, laugh and love. That’s my motto.”