In his late forties, sitting across from a psychiatrist he had been seeing for three months, Bronson Dorsey was asked to do something simple: look over his shoulder, and tell him what he saw. He didn’t expect an answer to arrive so fast, or without his permission. But there it was — his father, watching him. Judging him.
“I told him that I saw my father and that I felt he was judging me,” Bronson says now, more than three decades later. He hadn’t been thinking about his father when he walked into that room. The answer, in his words, came without conscious thought.
It was the kind of moment that could have ended right there and gone no further. Instead, his therapist suggested something almost old-fashioned: write your father a letter. Tell him what you feel. You don’t have to send it.
Bronson sent it anyway.
His father wrote back — caught off guard, he said, and sorry for whatever part he might have played, unknowingly, in his son’s struggle. It was a small exchange, two letters between two men who had never talked about feelings. Bronson marks it as the beginning of a turnaround.
I told him that I saw my father and that I felt he was judging me.
Bronson Dorsey was born in Bay City, Texas, the son of parents who had come of age during the Great Depression — people, he says, who were raised by loving but stoic, emotionally unavailable parents, and who raised their own sons in much the same way.
For the first eleven years of his life, the family moved every few years, following his father’s work in the petroleum industry, until they landed in Tulsa in 1956, in time for Bronson to start sixth grade. Frequent moves did not, by his own account, make for a childhood of lasting friendships.
He graduated from Edison High School in 1963 and enrolled at Oklahoma State University to study architecture, riding the confidence of a life that, so far, had come easily. It didn’t last. Two failed semesters and de-pledged from his fraternity, a draft notice arrived in the mail. By the end of July 1966, Bronson Dorsey had enlisted in the Air Force.
He is candid about what the next four years gave him: a broader view of the world than his sheltered upbringing had allowed, and — improbably — his self-confidence back.
He returned home in 1970, enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, and in 1973, in his last year of school, met a woman named Cathryn. They married that August, a matter of months after they’d met. He graduated the following year with a degree in architecture. Fifty-three years later, they are still married.
Bronson’s career, like most long careers, did not move in a straight line. He started at one of Austin’s largest architecture firms, then in 1980 formed a partnership with two friends — a firm that would grow into one of the city’s most respected. In 1986, economics pulled the family to Washington, DC, where his path shifted away from design and toward the less glamorous, but more rewarding work of construction and facility management. It was, he admits, like starting over. The first year or two were hard — hard enough that at one point, laid off with a newborn son and few friends nearby, he found himself, in his own words, “really down in the dumps.” He worked with several therapists before finally being prescribed antidepressants. A friend — a real estate broker who hired him to finish out her basement, then sent him more work — helped pull him through.
The family returned to Austin in 1998. Over the next twenty-five years, Bronson would retire three times, by his own count. The first came involuntarily, in a round of layoffs at Dell. The second came at the close of a two-year contract managing construction of a battery storage facility on a wind farm outside Odessa. The third, he says plainly, was the hardest.
In 2010, a few months after leaving Dell, Bronson was asked to join the board of a small private girls’ school in Austin that had outgrown its building. He spent five years helping the school plan, build, and move into a new campus — work that, once finished, turned into something he hadn’t expected: a part-time job managing the school’s facilities, and an unplanned second career greeting students at drop-off every morning. The girls called him Mr. Bronson. When he retired in 2023, after thirteen years with the school, they gave him a binder full of drawings and notes — the kind of thing, he says, that made the whole chapter the most rewarding of his career.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, Bronson Dorsey became a different kind of storyteller.
After leaving Dell, he picked up his camera more seriously — first shooting buildings for architects and contractors around Central Texas, then, almost by accident, the buildings nobody had asked him to shoot. Driving the state’s back roads for work, he began noticing what was falling down instead of what was going up: gas stations, schools, churches, and homes left to economic changes and weather, their histories going with them.
What began as pictures taken out a car window became, over eight years, a serious pursuit — researching county records, genealogical archives, and old Sanborn insurance maps to find out who had built each place, and why.
In 2010 he started a blog with a title that made him smile: Lost, Texas. In 2018, Texas A&M University Press turned it into a book of the same name, now in its third printing. He began giving talks about it around the state — an unusual position for a man who describes himself as unaccustomed to standing in front of a room.
Asked once to explain the project’s appeal, he put it simply: every building in the book, he said, “was an embodiment at some time of somebody’s hopes and dreams, and their desire for a better life.”
It is hard not to notice the echo. A man who spent much of his early life learning to keep things hidden spent the second half of it driving hundreds of miles to make sure other people’s histories weren’t lost to silence. Whether Bronson has ever put it in quite those terms himself is his to say — but the shape of it is there.
Every building in the book was an embodiment at some time of somebody’s hopes and dreams, and their desire for a better life.
Not everything in Bronson’s later years has been about rescue. Some of it has simply been about loss. His closest friend, Larry York, died of pancreatic cancer in 2013. The two men met when their sons were born the same year, and spent the better part of three decades sailing Larry’s boat out of Galveston Bay, playing tennis badly, and finishing both with a gin martini or two — “an appropriate salve,” Bronson says, “for our aching muscles and bruised egos.” Larry, he says, had a wicked sense of humor unlike anyone else he has known, and a kindness that ran deeper than most people ever saw. Their wives became close too — close enough that Bronson still calls Larry’s widow, Peggy, his “sister-wife.”
These days, Bronson’s biggest challenge isn’t emotional — it’s physical. Spinal surgery a few years ago corrected the immediate problem, but it revealed something underneath: a peripheral neuropathy in his left leg that has cost him strength and, more than anything, balance. He has fallen more times than he’d like to admit, worked his way from a cane to walking sticks to a rollator, and spent years in physical therapy, acupuncture, and — his firm recommendation to anyone else navigating aging — Pilates, which he credits with more improvement than anything else he’s tried.
What bothers him most, he says, isn’t the falling. It’s what the falling has taken from him: long hours in his woodworking shop, and his willingness to travel. For most of his life, a wheelchair would have been unthinkable to him — a surrender, an admission of defeat. That has started to change. Watching a friend’s husband travel comfortably with a folding motorized wheelchair planted the idea that it might not have to mean what he’d always assumed it meant. He hasn’t bought one yet. There’s no trip on the calendar that requires it, not yet. But something has already shifted.
“My ego wouldn’t even let me consider a wheelchair,” he says, “viewing it as a sign of giving up. Now I am seriously considering getting one, so Cathryn and I can travel further.”
Getting to that sentence, he says, was itself the hard part.
My ego wouldn’t even let me consider a wheelchair. Now I am seriously considering getting one, so Cathryn and I can travel further.
Ask Bronson Dorsey how he hopes to be remembered, and he doesn’t reach for anything grand. He hopes his friends and family remember him as kind, caring, a little kooky — someone who was always willing to help with a project or offer advice, whether anyone asked for it or not. He hopes his sons remember that he always believed in them.
And he hopes his granddaughter remembers that he liked to make things with her.
It is, in its way, the same wish that sent him down every back road in Texas with a camera: that something — a building, a friendship, a father and son who didn’t know how to talk to each other — doesn’t simply disappear without anyone noticing it was there.
Bronson Dorsey is a retired architect and project manager living in Austin, Texas, with his wife of fifty-three years. His photography and research on abandoned buildings across the state became the book Lost, Texas: Photographs of Forgotten Buildings (Texas A&M University Press, 2018), the subject of a PBS documentary segment. He spent the final chapter of his career as Director of Facilities at The Girls’ School of Austin, and is an Edison High School classmate of Bill’s.
