My Dad, Judge Wilmer Brady Hunt by Sperry Hunt

Born in 1903, my dad, Wilmer Brady Hunt, was a husband, father, son, Catholic, American, lawyer, judge, gambler, sportsman, and entertainer.

His father was a Houston lawyer from Ripley, Mississippi. His mother was the witty daughter of a Houston land speculator. He was educated in mostly Catholic schools including Georgetown University. He studied law at UT Law School in Austin – as did his father.

My father dressed well. I never saw him outside without a hat. He hunted and fished in pressed kaki, not denim.

In the late 1920’s he was a bachelor, working for his dad. He went by Bill in law school. The song he said described him best was “Big Bad Bill.” It was a 1924 song that Van Halen covered. The critical lyric line was, “Big Bad Bill is Sweet William now.” The song tells the tail of a wild young tough who was domesticated entirely by love.

He met my mother at a formal dance. His account of the meeting was that when she saw him, she extended her arms to stop the advance of the girls behind her. “Hands off,” she said. “That one’s mine.” My mother disagreed with his version vigorously. She said that when he saw her, he rushed up and plucked her dance card from her hand and substituted it for one he had drawn up with all of the dance numbers followed by his name.

When they formally met, my mother was a nineteen-year-old art student. In a few months she would leave Houston for the Philadelphia Art School. Part of her education was an art tour of Europe in 1930. When she returned, he took a train to Philadelphia. On the stairs of her dormitory he begged her to marry him. She agreed despite having serious objections about giving up her education and career, a career she rekindled some years later.

Dad was a strong and graceful swimmer. I remember how handsome he looked emerging from the water with his shiny black hair and his bright blue eyes. He was also a Houston tennis champion until, that is, my mother ended his competitive edge. Mom’s parents had a heavy wooden swing hanging from the porch ceiling. One night my mother stood behind the swing in the darkness. He was on the opposite side. She thought he was facing away so she drew back the swing and let it go into what she thought was the back of his knees. As it turned out, he was facing her. The swing hit him square in the kneecaps, ending his run of tennis victories.

Two years after the wedding Dad’s father died as a result of a car accident. Dad was forced to take over the firm at thirty. It was 1933. Houston and the nation were in the clutches of the Depression. Cash was hard to come by. Many of his clients either couldn’t pay him, or paid him in kind. One was Jamail’s Grocery. Mom said they received a weekly allotment in food, which Mom said they really needed. They had two daughters then: Nancy born in 1932 and Robin, in 1933. My brother Grainger followed in 1940.

I mentioned the word “American” above. My father was very patriotic and romantic about his country. A month after Pearl Harbor, my mother came home from shopping on a weekday to find Dad’s car in the drive. She noticed the shades were drawn in the living room. She found my father on the couch sobbing. When she asked what was wrong, he said, “The Army said I was too old. They won’t take me.” Of course they didn’t. He was not only 39 but had three kids, flat feet and, of course, bad knees. Nevertheless he was crushed that he couldn’t serve his country

In 1947, the year I was born, he became a civil judge in the 133rd District Court. He told a story about the day I was born. He said he had the usual group of criminals in his court, which was an utter lie. He wasn’t a criminal judge. He said he called out to the prisoners, “Does anyone have a birthday today?” No one answered. “That’s too bad,” he claimed to have said. “My son was born today, and I was going to let anyone go whose birthday this is.” Hands shot up.

On his docket in those days, were not only civil lawsuits, but cases that would now appear in family court including divorces, child custody and adoptions. There was a particular case that my father made the mistake of telling Mom about. He had jailed a woman who had taken her baby from its father, despite my dad’s order that she not have custody. It was Christmas. Mom couldn’t stand that the mother couldn’t be with her baby over the holidays. So she went to the courthouse and told Dad’s bailiff that the judge had asked her to tell him to release the woman. My mother was a terrible liar. The bailiff was suspicious immediately and located my father who, on this very rare occasion, was very angry with her.

Overall my father was rarely angry with Mom. He wanted peace in the house above all things. That was his constitution really. He was truly judicious. He spoke softly. He chose his words carefully. He never discussed politics. He never told anyone how he voted. He didn’t gossip. I never saw him rude to anyone in his life, though I did hear of one incident. He was driving my sister’s mother-in-law to a dinner. (There was a wedding going on that weekend, as I recall.) The woman criticized my sister in the car. He pulled over abruptly and told the woman that she could call him anything she wanted to, but to never criticize my sister in his presence. And that was that.

As for being a sportsman, Dad hunted and fished from boyhood into his seventies. I recall his waking me up at 3:45 AM to drive two hours to sit in a tree stand or a duck blind. In his last years he hunted south of Houston with a group of highway workers. They loved him. He was very relaxed around them. They would be waiting for us in a dark forest with black coffee, pan-fried biscuits and fried squirrel.

Most often we hunted quail and dove. We fished for perch and bass. He was an excellent shot. I recall my brother and I trying in vain to hit a beer can with Dad’s .38 at seventy-five feet or so – a difficult shot. Dad walked up, took the pistol from Grainger and nailed a can with the first shot. Grainger said he was lucky and demanded that he do it again. Dad refused and walked off whistling.

He always beat me in pool, and I was pretty good. He loved playing cards. For twenty years he played a regular Monday night poker game with other lawyers and judges. He always wore a hat (to hide his eyes) when he played cards. He often brought a fabric bag with him with his bank’s logo on it. He would toss it cavalierly onto the table and say, “Fill ‘er up, boys.” He played bridge and hearts with his mother, who, he said, was a better card player than he was.

In his profession, he felt much more at ease as a judge than as a lawyer. Mom said he had a terrible stutter as a boy. He overcame it for the most part, with speech therapy and memorizing poetry. Still, he was never comfortable as a trial lawyer. He was born to be a judge. He loved presiding over people and setting the tone and pace of the trials and motions. He could manage this in his court, but not so much at home. Someone asked me once what he was like. I said the thing that popped into my head. “He was a cat in the court and a mouse in the house.” That wasn’t entirely true, but he did not like to see my mother upset with him.

The memorization therapy and his natural love of romantic literature helped to make him such a good entertainer. He could recite lengthy passages flawlessly. His forte was Shakespeare and Tennyson. He could perform the entire St. Crispin’s speech from Henry V and long passages from Lady of the Lake. He would have been a fine actor or orator, I believe. He was quick and dramatic with swaggering sayings like “I’d rather owe it to you than beat you out of it” or “I’m a match. Strike me and see where you light.” He quoted W. C. Fields in appropriate situations with “Never give a sucker an even chance.” He never passed up a chance to tease a toddler by telling them their red shirt was blue, or say that he could kiss his elbow, which of course they would immediately try.

My dad had an uncanny gift for figuring out what my brother and I tried to conceal. I had a motorcycle in New York at 18 – 1200 miles from home. I still don’t know how he found out about it. He told me not to try to impress him with clever stunts. He had already done anything I could possibly think of, and that his dad always knew what he was up to.

I mentioned that he was Catholic. He was very devout. He went to early mass often on his way to work. He went on three-day silent retreats several times that I recall. He was a member of the Nights of the Holy Sepulcher, a chivalric order that goes back to the Crusades. Robert the Bruce was one. The Pope is the head of the order. The knights are given ceremonial velvet robes. There is a Church of the Holy Sepulcher on Cavalry hill where Jesus was crucified.

It was my dad’s wish that his robe be taken to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher for internment after he died. On the day of his funeral, his fellow knights appeared wearing their robes. Knowing my dad’s request, they asked for the robes to fulfill his wishes. My mother said politely that she always thought he looked so good in them that he was being buried in them. The knights left empty handed.

My dad died in his sleep early in the morning of March 12, 1982. My mother told me that they made love the night before he died. It seemed a perfect farewell to me. The funeral service nearly filled up St. Anne’s Church. In attendance at the grave were not only our large family and his many friends but the hunters/highway workers he loved so much. They had driven over a hundred miles with a display easel that held a large target. Strapped to it was a toy rifle and the letters “Rest in Peace.”

My dad was much beloved and will be long remembered as a good husband, a good father, and a gentleman of the first order.

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