Grainger Hunt and Uncle Ryland Howard

Grainger Hunt with his Uncle Ryland Howard II 1943-4

This is one of my favorite pictures ever. It is a tender photo of my brother Grainger draped in our uncle Ryland Howard’s Army Air Corps jacket soon before he was deployed as an artillery spotter officer to the European Theater, where he would be killed in action in Normandy. Grainger was born on 7/23/1940. Uncle Ryland died July 7/4/1944, so my brother was likely 3 1/2. Uncle Ryland had been an attorney in civilian life. He was survived by his wife Edith Anson Howard and infant son Alfred Ryland Howard III born in 11/16/1944.

An Excerpt from Ryland Howard’s 42 page account of his trip to Normandy in 2019

Alfred Ryland Howard

The following was written by Alfred Ryland Howard’s son Ryland Howard in 2019.

This is an excerpt from my 42 page account of my trip last year. As if you had not heard enough.
I certainly enjoyed enough with my time with M. V.
By then the afternoon was well along, my car was low on fuel, and I was planning to drive by Blosville, a small town not far away on the main road from Carentan through Ste Mere Eglise. In reviewing my father’s service records, I had discovered where he was first interred (or last interred in Normandy). It was a US cemetery for temporary burial of the soldiers who died in Normandy. There were three of them. Two were near Ste Mere Eglise, and this one was near Blosville. In Blosville, I asked where the cemetery might have been. I was given good directions. Close to the turn outside of town, I gassed up and asked the nice young lady attendant where I would find the location of the cemetery. I was almost there – la prochaine gauche, prenez la route, et c’est tres proche a gauche (very close). I did and there was the monument, flanked by the French flag and the US flag. In the field that lay beyond the monument, 6,000 men had been buried, awaiting final disposition of their remains after the war ended. Now there was just a beautiful, large Norman field, with cows in the distance and the house and barns of a typical farmstead. There was no one there, just peace. It was so peaceful. It was so appropriate. It was sacred ground, but had returned to its bucolic origins.


Well, it was possible that he was originally buried nearer the battle site, along with all the others who died near Mont Castre, but this was the definite last resting place in France. Some time later, between 1948 and 1950, my father’s remains were repatriated, at the wishes of his mother and father, to the family plot in the venerable Glenwood Cemetery in Houston, north of Buffalo Bayou. When I would stay in Houston with my grandparents over Easter, my grandmother Howard would take me over, we would purchase an Easter Lily, and place the flowers at my father’s, grave, the resting place of their eldest son.

The Wedding Rehearsal

The Wedding Rehearsal
by Sperry Hunt

A Saturday in June, 1918.

Streaming through the landing window of her home, the sun falls on Jean as she looks up the stairway. Eight-years-old, she looks like Alice in Wonderland in her white dress.

“Momma?” she calls out too softly to be heard. “It’s hot. Can I go outside?”
Jean waits, then waits a minute more. She unbuckles her shoes and mounts the stairs, easing her weight on each tread. Cresting the last step, she skims her stockings across the varnish. She peeks around a door jam to find the four-poster empty. She crosses the carpet and leans into the screen porch where Momma and the baby face one another asleep on the daybed. A pillow bracing his back, the boy pooches his lips against his mother’s breast. A tempting breeze soughs through the crisp leaves outside.

The girl steals back down the stairs, pulls on her shoes and slips past the French doors into the stifling living room. She glances at a gilt clock on the mantle as it ticks toward one o’clock. Beside the clock stands a photograph of her father in his uniform. He has been with the Army in France since Thanksgiving. The thrust of his jaw speaks of his strength, which Jean misses, and of his temper which she does not.

She pads past the velvet couch and lifts the latch on the louvered door. She slides quietly through the doorway and flies down the steps in a patter and a rustle. Skipping up the sidewalk, Jean pauses in a dapple of shade to close her eyes and taste the breeze with her skin. Further along – in front of the Horton’s house – she leans her back against an oak and watches a pair of gibbering squirrels skitter among the limbs above her. Across the street a mockingbird apes their chatter.

A bark startles Jean as the Horton’s Scottie tears around a hedge his leash flouncing behind him.

“Toodles!” Mrs. Horton trills from the side yard.

Jean pulls herself from the tree, rushes around the corner and dashes up the empty sidewalk stopping in the first patch of shade. A column of black automobiles stands along the curb. A middle-aged man in a dark suit emerges from one of the cars. He hastens toward Jean then turns onto a walkway. He hustles up the stairs and into a brick bungalow with broad eves and a black shake roof. Behind its deep porch; wide, screened windows reveal the back of a crowd facing the fireplace ahead.

“A wedding,” Jean whispers excitedly. She pauses for a moment to look behind her. She draws a full breath and strolls up the walk with the careless air of an invited guest. She mounts the steps, strides across the porch and slips through the unattended screen door.

The interior is plain and handsome with dark beams, white plaster and bronze light fixtures. An electric fan thrums overhead. A candlestick telephone and a spray of flowers rise from a plain, white table by the door.
Jean wipes her forehead with her sleeve and glances to her left where a white cake and a tall stack of small plates ascend from a dining room table. To her right elderly women fan themselves from chairs arranged along the front windows. The ladies lean forward listening to the solemn voice of a man beyond a crowd of onlookers. To her right, the floor cracks beneath the weight of a restless fat man. Glancing above his oily red hair, the girl sees the orange ball of a cat’s face poking between the white banisters of a staircase. Someone shuts an ice box door in the rear of the house, rattling the bottles inside.

Jean walks on tiptoes along the back of the crowd struggling to see the wedding couple. She passes a blonde woman in a hobble skirt and a feathered Robin Hood hat. The lady stands beside a gaunt man in a brown suit draping loosely across his bony shoulders. Beyond him, a short, powerful man twists his neck popping a joint loudly.

Jean continues moving forward, sliding between two gray-haired men with flushed cheeks and sweat rolling down their necks. Threading her way through the crowd, she finds herself in a well of towering guests.

Sighing deeply, Jean attracts the attention of a tall boy in a cream linen suit. Fifteen-years-old, his oiled black hair is combed straight back. He stares down at Jean who rocks left and right, searching for a seam in the bulwark before her. Having younger sisters, the boy is familiar with the girl’s situation.

He taps her shoulder and opens his hands to her.

Jean hesitates. She doesn’t know him, but there is a naturalness about him that eases her caution. She raises her hands. In one swift move, he sweeps her up and swings her across his body. She scissors her legs around his waist, reaches across his back and grasps his shoulder.

“Can you see okay?” he whispers adjusting his arm beneath her.
She nods then turns quickly toward the bride and the groom facing one another before man standing before the fireplace.

In the moments that follow, the boy and the girl feel each other’s heat. They draw one another’s breath, and they listen to the couple’s earnest vows.

When they meet again ten years later, neither recognizes the other. The occasion is the girl’s debut party where the boy is now a man just out of law school. He has arrived late. He is struck immediately by the fine face and manner of Jean as she dances with one man after another. He waits for a break then startles her by snatching her dance card from her hand. Smiling with his whole face, he offers her another with his own name penciled on every row. She laughs. They talk about the weather, the clarinet player and her ambition to be a great artist.

As the music comes up, a hopeful young man approaches, his own dance card extended toward her.

“Next dance, Charles,” she says hold up a finger. “I promise.”

Jean takes the young lawyer’s hand. They clutch one another again as they dance.

Forty years after that night, the couple sits beside their swimming pool watching their grandchildren. One mentions a recent home wedding. The other speaks of another wedding long ago. It is not until then that my parents realized that they met as children watching a wedding in each other’s arms.

They were married on April 29th, 1931.

Jeana, the Jazz Singer

Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Eugenia Howard Hun
Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Eugenia Howard Hunt

Jeana wrote this in a journal 12/8/1973:

Sperry and Spring had a party at their Sausalito house and Barbara [Dupuis Hunt Hames] and Ted [Hames] were there – Here I am at this accelerated age [63]. Sperry sang with his guitar and I chimed in which never before was true – and sang “Down in Old Joe’s Barroom” [St. James Infirmary Blues] and dear Sperry made it all come out so I sounded like a jazz pro – How? Christopher seems not well – He was sweet past the cookies – but seemed at 2 years and 11 and one half months to bear with us. We all had such a gorgeous time – Her food was delicious. Sperry did the salad. Our daughter-in-laws are a perfect foil for one another. Spring with her black hair and liquid, large brown eyes – and Barbara pert, Irish and flame red hair. December cold is creeping in, damp and foggy – the California roses seem never to wilt. We leave Sunday for Texas.

Spring and Sperry early ’70s
Barbara and her kids Philo and Marybelle in the ’60s

My mom was a fighter.

1929: Eugenia Howard Hunt (2nd from left) at 19 in Bavaria on an art school tour.

I alway thought of my mother as a gentle woman. She was normally very understanding and always seemed willing to overlook or excuse the occasional slight. She most often took the high road by saying, “You never know what people have been through to cause them to act that way.”

Evidently she took a different tack when she was a child as I discovered in a passage in one of her many journals that I have fallen heir to:

I was little and thin, wiry and wild and loved. I loved people, days, and God with passions which I spread about. I loved physical combat and for my size enjoyed many victories. I learned to fight fair, so I enjoyed a certain amount of respect from my antagonists.

One of them Clark [Wren] (a cousin), his sister and my [younger] brother were in the kitchen one summer evening. Clark decided he wanted a drink out of the [unsanitary] water cooler by way of mouth. I’d been slapped [!] for that several days before. I was custodian of the water cooler.

I objected violently.

With his mouth still on the cooler he kicked out at me. I grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him off. He let the spigot go and put his arms around the cooler. I grabbed the mop and worked him over. He spun around and tried for my weapon. I drove the beautiful , dirty thing deep in his red and freckled face. Finally he took it away from me, and slapped me soundly.

I boiled over and closed in. He hit me twice with his fists hard enough to raise all of my remaining anger to the surface. I was out of my class. I was being boxed and I was not a (?) fighter. So I clawed him from elbow to short shirt sleeve while he relieved me of a tuft of hair.

By this time, our audience screamed for the mothers sitting in the moonlight on the front lawn. Was Clark’s mother mad? She was a beautiful titian-haired, pink cheeked goddess and her children were her children, right or wrong.

Mother poured campho phenique in his mouth, which was horrible because as soon as my anger passed I could not bear to have my victims suffer, and I cried profusely and wanted to kiss him, which he said if I did, he was going to “beat the hell out of me!” So he was taken home and had his mouth soaped out for cussing.

Then Mother made me spend the next hour writing him a letter of apology while I did my sobbing and examined my purple bruises.

Clark fought in Europe during the 2nd World War from Africa to the victory in Germany. He was never wounded. He says his only battle scars were from The Water Cooler Episode, which he still bears in little white marks on both forearms.

Alfred Philo Howard, Jr (1922-2013)

Front and center in this photo is my uncle, my godfather and my friend Alfred Philo Howard, Jr (1922-2013). A P-51 pilot, he was shot down during an attack on a German airbase. Actually, I should say he shot up. He told me he was trained to fly as fast as he could during the attack. As soon as his motor was hit, he pulled back on the stick hard, driving his plane skyward. The speed allowed him to climb high enough so that when he bailed out, his chute had time to open, at least partially. He was knocked unconscious upon landing. According to my mother, the first thing he saw when he woke up was a gray-haired farmer in a WWI greatcoat holding an old rifle on him. The farmer was kicking his boot, saying, “Zon, vor you de var ist ovah.” Uncle Philo was liberated from his POW camp a year later by none other than General George Smith Patton, Jr. who promptly excused himself by riding off in his open jeep, shouting, “Sorry, boys, but I’ve got to go kill me some Nazis,” meaning the SS troops who had earlier that day threatened to kill all the American prisoners. Uncle Philo returned to Texas to become a husband, father, insurance salesman, sportsman and my beloved uncle.

Sperry Eugene Hunt, December 2019

Judge Hunt and D.C. Baseball

Left: Walter Johnson and Ty Cobb| Center: Georgetown Freshman Class 1921; Right Judge Hunt (upper right) in the 1920’s

10/31/2019

Last night the Washington Nationals beat the Houston Astros in a magnificent seven-game World Series. My father, Judge Wilmer Hunt, loved baseball especially the hometown Houston Astros. He and I went to many games going back to when they were the Houston Colt 45s. He would have been very happy to have seen the Astros win the 2017 Series. But I think he would have been equally happy at last night’s Washington Nationals victory.

Dad got his undergraduate degree at Georgetown University in D.C. He was in the class of 1924 and would certainly have attended series games that year to see the Washington Senators to prevail behind their star pitcher Walter Johnson affectionately know as “The Big Train,” He spoke of watching Johnson many times, and of his team’s duals with the Yankee’s Babe Ruth and Detroit’s Ty Cobb.

Here’s a Wikipedia report of the last series the Washington team won.

1924: World champions

Washington’s Bucky Harris scores on his home run in the fourth inning of Game 7 of the 1924 World Series.
In 1924, Griffith named 27-year-old second baseman Bucky Harris player-manager. Led by the hitting of Goose Goslin and Sam Rice, and a solid pitching staff headlined by the 36-year-old Johnson, the Senators captured their first American League pennant, two games ahead of Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees.
The Senators faced John McGraw’s heavily favored New York Giants in the 1924 World Series.[11] Despite Johnson losing both of his starts, the Senators kept pace to tie the Series at three games apiece and force Game 7. The Senators trailed the Giants 3-1 in the eighth inning of Game 7, when Bucky Harris hit a routine ground ball to third which hit a pebble and took a bad hop over Giants third baseman Freddie Lindstrom. Two runners scored on the play, tying the score at three.[12] In the ninth inning with the game tied, 3–3, Harris brought in an aging Johnson to pitch on just one day of rest – he had been the losing pitcher in Game 5. Johnson held the Giants scoreless into extra innings. In the bottom of the twelfth inning, Muddy Ruel hit a high foul ball near home plate.[13] The Giants’ catcher, Hank Gowdy, dropped his protective face mask to field the ball but, failing to toss the mask aside, stumbled over it and dropped the ball, thus giving Ruel another chance to bat.[13] On the next pitch, Ruel hit a double and, then proceeded to score the winning run when Earl McNeely hit a ground ball that took another bad hop over Lindstrom’s head.[12][13] It was the only World Series triumph for the franchise during their 60-year tenure in Washington.

Malcolm Scott McCorquodale’s Letters to His Daughter Ellen

From an email Malcolm Scott McCorquodale III wrote to Sperry Hunt: “I found the attached documents at my aunt Ellen McCorquodale Martin’s condo. Her father, Malcolm Scott McCorquodale, Sr., wrote these letters to Ellen shortly before he passed away from a heart attack during a hunting trip in West Texas a few weeks later on December 15, 1958.  Reading the letters and knowing the future caused me to have bittersweet feelings. 

Amid this tragedy, there arose joy as my mother Robin Howard Hunt, the daughter of Eugenia and Judge Wilmer Hunt, who had been engaged to my father, Malcolm McCorquodale, Jr, were married on December 27.”

Envelope of Letter 1958-11-18 from Malcolm to his daughter Ellen
Letter 1958-11-19 from Malcolm to his daughter Ellen
Letter 1958-12-11 from Malcolm to his daughter Ellen

The National Park Born in a Poker Game

The National Park Born in a Poker Game

Below is a bit of West Texas history from Jane Dunn Sibley’s book: Jane’s Window. Jane was a friend of Euguenia Howard Hunt. It covers the origin of Big Bend National Park and then Texas itself.

Senator Winfield’s major achievement was persuading the state to appropriate money to establish Big Bend State Park, which was a Texas state park before it became a national park. Obtaining funding to acquire the park land from a conservative legislature was not easy. It took Mary’s father many hard years of lobbying and arm-twisting to convince his colleagues to fund the Big Bend Park acquisition. Finally, he got a group of legislators to agree to take a look at the proposed park site. Sen. Winfield arranged a special train to transport them from Austin to the small town of Alpine, way out in West Texas.

Upon arrival, the state legislators would be greeted by local dignitaries and then taken by automobile to tour Big Bend. However, on their long train ride west, the legislators started drinking. They also became seriously involved playing a serious poker game. When they arrived in Alpine, the game was still going strong, so they moved it directly into the Holland Hotel. They were not about to leave that game until it was over, so local officials were left waiting outside with empty cars. Heine could not persuade a single one of them to leave that game. Finally, the legislators all agreed. “Hell, Heine, we’ll pass your bill if you’ll just leave us alone!” He did and they did. So that’s how Texas got Big Bend State Park, which was later transferred to the Department of the Interior under the supervision of the National Park Service.

Mignon Rachal Mignon is descended from Texas pioneers on both sides of her family. Her mother’s ancestors arrived in Texas in the eighteen thirties and her father was a descendant of the Peters Colony, which came to Texas under a contract from Stephen F. Austin, the charismatic entrepreneur from Missouri, who helped colonize Texas. In 1821, after Mexico broke away from Spain, they gave Austin permission to invite American settlers to Texas, thus creating a buffer between the North American Indian tribes and the people of northern Mexico. The Texans became the first line of defense against the Indians, who had frustrated two hundred years of Spanish efforts to conquer them and convert them to Catholicism.