Photo of Anna Procaccini by Desiree Espada
Electrician Anna Procaccini, whose company rewired old houses and commercial businesses in our neighborhood for decades, has died. She was 66.
Procaccini was diagnosed with cancer in 2020 and died on Aug. 11.
“That last course of chemo was very hard on her, and she never really bounced back from that,” Procaccini’s husband, Chester Dow, says.
Procaccini and Dow both grew up in Oak Cliff and were married 44 years.
Her dad was a tailor who worked out of their Kessler Park home, and her parents fixed up old houses as a sideline. Anna started working for that venture as a teenager, Dow says.
That’s how she became enamored with electricity.
“I absolutely love electrical work,” she told Advocate Oak Cliff in 2014. “It is so damn dangerous.”
Dow was working for the City of Dallas when he first met Procaccini at the home of a mutual friend, and he encouraged her to apply for a job with the city as well. A female electrician in the 1970s was not greeted kindly by her coworkers.
She was harassed, hazed and groped, but she turned that disadvantage around.
“She paid her dues, and she put up with a lot of things that women wouldn’t think about putting up with these days,” he says.
“It was shameful the way they treated her, but she’s tough. She stuck it out, and that says a lot about her. She wasn’t a quitter.”
A specialty in old houses set her small business apart, and she had a heart for historic architecture, Dow says. She discouraged clients from tearing out meaningful details, he says.
“She would try to convince people to stay original if at all possible,” he says.
A resource of electrical know-how in our neighborhood has been lost, says Bart Thrasher, a Winnetka Heights resident who is the Turner House board member tasked with maintenance.
She explained the electrical work, installed, patched over and replaced over many decades, at the the 110-year-old Turner House, he says.
“She was such a treasure, and she is already greatly missed in Oak Cliff,” Thrasher says.
Procaccini and Dow lived in the Winnetka-adjacent L.O. Daniel neighborhood for 31 years.
Our neighborhood just won’t be the same without the Anna’s Electric 1972 Ford Ranger.
Photo by Desiree Espada
Procaccini kept her business open until this past June, when everything was liquidated, Dow says.
“I hope she’s remembered as a caring, kind person who went out of her way to help people,” he says. “She was smart and opinionated. She could see things that other people didn’t notice.”
A memorial was held recently at Mama’s Daughters’ Diner, whose owner is Procaccini’s former sister-in-law.
Besides her husband, Procaccini is survived by two children, Chester and Nicholas; a brother, Tony; and two sisters, Francine and Caroline.
Procaccini also left Dallas a parting gift. She wrote seven blog posts on the Anna’s Electric website about her experiences working as an electrician in Dallas back in the day.
