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My Dad, Judge Wilmer Brady Hunt by Sperry Hunt

My and my dad at the Dobbs House at Memorial and Post Oak in Houston 1966

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.

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

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 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.

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.”