Thanks go to Uncle Ryland’s son cousin Ryland Howard for the newspaper article and the touching note below.
It is a memorial monument to the 90th Division and the two men who went down with their Piper L-4 liaison plane on July 4, 1944. It is in the village of Pretot, less than a mile from where Ryland’s plane went down. Pretot was liberated the day before by the 90th, in the jump off to the battle for Hill 122, which lasted another 10 days of struggle and the 90th alone suffered 5,000+ casualties.
The monument idea was started by one Louisa Howard contacting my French friend Christian about a small stone memorial somewhere. He took off with it, made a deal with the mayor and there it is. This is what Christian does. His father did this most of his life, as an avocation. I call his father Henri the French father of the 90th Division men in WWII.
The monument is across from another monument, to the 82nd Airborne and one of their men, Lt. Williams. Ironically, I took a photo of Lt. Williams’ stone when I was there in 2019. On the day that Williams died, age 21, the message came through that evening that his wife had given birth to twins. He never knew. The twins were Green Berets in Vietnam and a grandson is a Marine fighter pilot.
Tugs at your heartstrings.
Informal dedication is this June; formal, with family is next May. The kids and the township paid for it. I knew nothing about it until we the whole family were gathered for Louisa’s virtual graduation ceremony at the ranch three weeks ago.
So, you see, another chapter.
And I knew exactly where it was going to be when they told me about it. I had been there on a warm afternoon in June, 2019.
The above attached by Sperry Hunt
Below is a photo of the same Piper L4-B model flown by Uncle Ryland.
I wrote this on September 10, 2021 in Houston, Texas.
On the morning of September 11, I was driving to work listening to the radio. The announcer said that there were reports of an airplane crashing into the World Trade Center in New York City. I thought someone in a piper cub type airplane had practiced in Microsoft Flight Simulator and decided to try it in real life – then ran into trouble. Maybe caught by an updraft and crashed into someone’s office. I had an irreverent thought. John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, walks past his secretary and into his office. There is a small plane, possibly from the WWI era, three quarters of the way into his office, papers are all over the place, the walls are black with soot. The pilot looks up and says, in an English accent “Dreadfully sorry about the office old chap.” Cleese backs out of his office and exclaims to his secretary “There’s an areo-plane in my aw-fice!”. The secretary replies “Yes sir, that came for you about an hour ago.” and she returns to her typing.
I worked in a building on Houston’s beltway about 10 or so miles from downtown and arrived at work about 8:30 to find out that this wasn’t a minor event involving a little piper cub, but a full-sized disaster – a commercial passenger airplane had hit the Trade Center. Of course, there was no work getting done – everyone was looking at news sites on the web and constantly refreshing their browser. I went upstairs to get a Coke in the break room. Several people were gathered around a TV and we saw a replay of the footage of the second airplane hitting the South Tower. About 10:30 or so, we were told that building management was closing the building and that everyone needed to go home.
On the news I heard that the nearest hospital to the Trade Center was St. Vincent’s. There was something oddly familiar about that name. After a while, I remembered that my Aunt Ellen, (my father’s sister), worked at St. Vincent’s. St. Vincent’s was a major trauma/critical care center and the primary admitting hospital for Trade Center victims. After Ellen moved back to Houston, she told me that on September 11 they went into full disaster mode – extra cots, ready to triage badly hurt people, surgeons on stand-by, etc. However, most of the people that came in were not that serious; just treat and release. Ellen said that what was hard was all the people coming to the hospital looking for their family and loved ones and not finding them.
My father and I went on many a hunting trip. He invariably told stories during the pre-dawn and dusk drives. When Dad finished UT law school and passed the bar, he worked for his father who had a thriving civil law firm in downtown Houston. It would have been around 1928. They had just moved into offices, high in the new Esperson Building. At first he did research and filings only for the firm. Then one day Grandpa handed him his first court case. Dad said he was very nervous. Having studied the case extensively, he drove forty-five miles south to Angleton, Texas, the seat of Brazoria County. It was a hot day in the unairconditioned courthouse. The high windows and the transoms were open wide, and the paddle fans whirred overhead. Nonetheless, Dad sweated profusely in his linen suit.
Brazoria County Court House (1894)
The client was very upset and demanding justice. My father did his best, but his best wasn’t good enough, and he lost the case. He felt terrible that he had let his client and his dad down.
He went home and apologized over dinner. (He lived at home with his parents until he married.) “I’m so sorry, Papa,” he told his father. “You sent me down there to win the case, and I lost it.”
My grandfather laughed and shook his head. “I didn’t send you down there to win, son.”
Dad was dumbfounded. “What do you mean?”
“It was hopeless,” Grandpa said. “The client was out of his mind to think otherwise. I couldn’t have won it. Clarence Darrow couldn’t have either.”
“Then why…?”
“I sent you down there to lose,” my grandfather said. “You’re going to lose lots of cases, and you need to know what that feels like, so you don’t get so rattled in the future. Now you know. Let’s eat.”
It was a good story, a good lesson for me, and a way for him to let me know that he was vulnerable and sometimes unwise. Thanks, Dad.
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.
Dad in the 1940s
Proving to my dad that I did know where the library was.
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.
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.
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 ’70sBarbara and her kids Philo and Marybelle in the ’60s
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.
Chan, Holland and Eugenia Hunt late 1980sDan and Chan HuntDan HuntEugenia Hunt house at Muir Beach 1980sHolland and Chan HuntHolland, Dan, Eugenia Hunt Judge Wilmer and Chan Hunt 1970sJudge Wilmer and Chan Hunt ThoughtfulMill Valley and Richardson Bay CA from Panoramic Hwy
