A Recollection by Sperry Hunt … with a little help from my friends.
A few months before my birth, my father Wilmer Brady Hunt (1903-1982) was appointed, and later elected, judge of the 133rd Judicial District Court of Texas where he remained unopposed for 22 years. A humorist and a concise storyteller, Dad created a ludicrous tale about the occasion. The morning began, he said, with his speaking from the bench to a mass of prisoners brought before him. He asked the men if it was the birthday of any among them. Perplexed and wary, no one spoke. He said that was a shame because, in honor of his son’s birth, he would have release them had they said yes. Hands shot up.
Another humorous fabrication was the account of meeting my mother at her debutante ball in 1928. As he described it, she stepped in front of the other girls, extended her arms, and said, “Stand back, girls! This one’s mine.” My mother’s version of the story involves the tradition that the debutants were given dance cards filled with the names of young men who wished to dance with them. Upon meeting her, my father asked to see her card. When she gave it to him, he quickly switched it with one with his name written in pencil on every line. I have that card.
My father was gracious and gentle. He could be stern, but never lost his cool. (The exception was when my mechanically challenged dad had to change the license plates. There was much swearing.) His own father, my mother said, had a temper. In one reported incident, Grandpa pulled a pistol on a streetcar conductor in New York City. My grandpa’s temper likely tempered his son’s.
Dad enjoyed solitude and measured conversation. A devout Catholic, he spent a number of weekends during my childhood in silent meditation at a monastery not far from our home in Houston. I believe one of the reasons he loved the court so much was that the conversation was civil, and he was in charge of it. Many times, I waited for him in the gallery, watching how relaxed and often jovial he seemed, seated between his clerk and bailiff, elevated above everyone.
But as peaceful as my dad was, he was equally proud, patriotic and fearless. My mother said he dreamt of fighting for his country. He was born in the American South filled with aging veterans and the glory stories of the Civil War. When he was a boy, President Teddy Roosevelt, the hero of San Juan Hill, sent the Great White Fleet around the world. Dad was thirteen when America joined the first World War. A year later the United States was a global power.
Dad glorified fighting with words. His favorite retort to a challenge was, “I’m a match. Strike me and see where you light.” Raised by a lawyer to be a lawyer, my dad was heavily schooled in poetry and oratory. As treatment for a serious boyhood stammer, he memorized large blocks of poetry. His favorite was the chivalric verse of Alfred Tennyson. He could recite “Lancelot and Elaine” in its entirety, beginning with the lines “Elaine the fair, Elaine the loveable, Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat,” His favorite books as boy were those of Sir Walter Scott, notably the tale of the bold knight Ivanhoe. As a man, he read the Horatio Hornblower naval novels of C. S. Forester and the plays of Shakespeare his entire life. Some of my best teenage memories of him are of sitting together watching Shakespearean on television. His favorite characters were the warriors, particularly John of Gaunt and Henry V. Dad could recite the entire St. Crispin’s Day speech which ends …
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition…And gentlemen in England now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”
Mom told me a story of coming home from shopping one winter day to discover Dad’s car in the driveway. She put the groceries in the kitchen and searched the dim, still house. She opened the library doors to find him on the sofa with the curtains drawn. Sitting beside him, she asked what had happened.
“They wouldn’t take me,” he replied sobbing into his hands. It was soon after the Pearl Harbor attack, and the army had rejected for him for having three kids, flat feet, and being thirty-nine.
A story both of my parents told me took place at a restaurant across Texas Avenue from the Rice Hotel in downtown Houston. The occasion was a visit by my mother’s friend Georgia Bell Duncan, whom she described as “young and lovely.” As she was only a few years younger than my mother, I would put the date in the late 1930s.
During the meal a drunk approached the table and began making suggestive remarks to Georgia Bell. After trying to reason with the man, Dad asked the maître d’ to call the police, which he apparently did not do. The drunk persisted which prompted my dad to attempt to eject the man out himself. The result in a brawl across the restaurant. My father said he traded punches with the guy for some time. He was getting the best of the man, but he kept coming at him. Unable to knock him out with his fists, Dad grabbed the man’s tie in one hand and his hair in the other and broke his nose on the bar, ending the struggle.
My dad told me a story which, though it isn’t about him, seems significant to his character because he repeated the tale several times. In the story, a white farmer married a black woman. The farm, as I remember, was near Brenham. The couple had several sons and did well for many years. One day the farmer received an anonymous letter from the KKK directing him to leave town or die. (My father hated the Klan for their bigotry and despised them as cowards, for their masks.) Without hesitation, my dad said, the man drove into town and walked into the office of a prominent attorney, who everyone knew to be the local Klan leader. He grabbed the lawyer by his lapels and stood him up. “If you kill me,” the farmer told the lawyer, “you’d better kill all of my sons too. If one of us is left alive, you’ll be the first to die.” The farmer was never bothered again. My dad believed in the direct, manly approach in some situations, which is not necessarily what one would expect of a judge. The following story exemplifies that attitude:
I have a vague memory of what happened in the house that night. But I must have been young. On reflection I think it was the vivid way Mom told the story that makes me believe I witnessed it.
The court system was simpler in the 1950s. There was no family court. A civil state judge handled pretty much everything non-criminal including civil suits, adoption, divorce and child custody. The most contentious were the latter two. In one case, a man called our house at night angry about Dad’s decision to grant his wife a divorce. The man said he wanted to fight him over it.
“Where are you?” my dad said. “I’ll be right there.”
The man paused, then said he was at a diner on Telephone Road, a wide commercial street that runs behind Hobby Airport.
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” Dad said and hung up the phone.
An extremely emotional woman, Mom pleaded desperately that he not go. Bear in mind that Dad was in his fifties and had already had a heart attack. He had been a local tennis champion as a young man, but he had done little physically since except to hunt, fish and swim laps.
“Call the sheriff,” Mom said. “No, and don’t you either,” he said. “I’ll take care of this.” Dad dressed and left. My mother immediately called Sheriff Clairville “Buster” Kern whom they knew as a friend. Kern was an institution, serving from 1949 to 1975. Mom pleaded with him to help, but not to let Dad know that she had called him. Sheriff Kern assured her he would send plain clothes officers who would not reveal themselves if possible.
My dad returned later to say he had waited for some time, but the man didn’t appear, and that was the end of it.
My mother became the owner of a Smith & Wesson .38 Special pistol. She told me the sheriff gave it to her for protection. She kept it around the house and in the glove compartment when she travelled alone. (As a cautionary tale, I will tell you that on a visit to my parents’ house, my three-year-old son discovered it, loaded, and brought it downstairs and into the living room where I gently took it from him.)
My brother Grainger has what he believes is an account of this, though I think it was a different event. Here is his recollection:
The man was a foul-mouthed lawyer that lost a case in Dad’s court and was calling the house every half-hour or so. Dad remained calm and borrowed a little baseball bat from me and stuck it under his coat before leaving. He’d been gone about ten minutes when the man called the house. I told him Dad was on his way. When Dad got there, the guy was not home.
I only saw my father touch the pistol once. We were at our little summer house high on a dry, stony hill overlooking Alpine, Texas in the Chihuahua Desert five hundred miles west of Houston. I was eleven. Grainger was target shooting in the dusty driveway. He had just shot four or five rounds unsuccessfully at a bottle cap hanging from a clothespin on the line..
My dad strolled by, and said, “Let me show you how it’s done.” He took one shot and blew bottlecap off the line.
My brother and I were stunned. “I’ll bet you can’t do that with your next shot,” Grainger said.
“You first,” Dad said walking away.
My dad retired in 1969 and my folks moved to Austin where my brother and I were in college. By the mid-70s, my mother’s mother’s health failed. Nanny Mine, as my cousins and I called her, was in her late eighties. My folks rented an apartment in Houston near her home in the old Montrose.
One weekend in the early 1970s, my dad decided to pay Nannie Mine a visit. As he walked from the apartment to her house, two men appeared from behind, punched Dad, knocking him down. They took his watch and wallet and left him there. “They were experts,” he said anxiously when I saw him soon after. “They could have killed me.”
Several months later my parents visited my sister Robin and their house on 13th Street. near the Bowery in New York City. The neighborhood was frequented by prostitutes and drug dealers. When Dad took Robin’s Weimaraner dog Eva for a walk, he was confronted by a much younger man. Dad told him something like, “If I don’t get you, this dog will.” The man walked away.
A few days ago I sent a draft of this post to my dear friend Andy Wilhoit in Houston. He replied with an account of an event I had forgotten. I put it at 1969-70 when Andy and I lived near each other in Austin. To my dad’s actions displayed how bold he still was, despite his age and vulnerability. This story also speaks to my mother’s respect for his pride.
Your father was quite a man[, Andy wrote]. I think we spoke of this before but I don’t know if you remember the incident. We were together one day where you were living and if I remember right your mother called and said your father had his briefcase taken from [my] yellow mustang. She said some guy had called and said he had “found” it and wanted a reward for returning it. Your father had agreed to meet by the [University] COOP on Guadalupe to exchange. She was alarmed so you and I quickly drove down to support him and step in if needed. We stood a way off( I remember us taking off our shoes and prepping to step in if needed). We watched from about two stores away. We saw your dad walk up and a young guy approached him and the exchange went fine. Your dad went back to his car and left never seeing us or knowing about your mother’s call. We were glad it was just a shake down and not a stick up.
My dad spent his last decade with my mother in a beautiful home at the summit of Red Bud Trail in Austin. The house had a long lawn leading to a pool perched on a bluff that offered a fine view of the Colorado River and the Capitol. He and Mom travelled to Europe and California. They formed lasting friendships with good people and often visited by their many grandchildren. My last memory of the fighting judge was in in the rearview mirror of the U-Haul truck that Springer, Chris and I would take to Vermont to build a new home. Dressed in slippers and a burgundy robe, his silver hair freshly combed, he waved to us with a smile. I miss him every day.