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Henry Jordan Houston April 20, 1873-December 24, 1934
Henry Jordan & Martha Anna (Hamilton) Houston The following narrative is from personal recollections as well as many documents left by my grandmother and mother. I spent many years with my grandmother pictured below. My mother, Mary, her only child, passed on to me these family records and photographs. This historical accounting of memorable events in her life is now a treasure trove of reading. In one such short conversation she told about Henry taking his family into Dallas in a horse drawn buckboard. According to my grandmother the shopping trip would take all day, as it was about 10 miles “as the crow flies”. The road would have been approximately located on about the present day Beckley Avenue. The Henry Jordan Houston family lived in a two-room house that was located in the trees along Five-Mile Creek, about 300 yards from the main house. Lorena and Leonard were born in their home. The house was still there (1997), even though the roof had caved in. In 1999 the land, next to Interstate 20 through south Dallas County, was purchased by a trucking company, and the old house was demolished. Lorena was married just short of her 18th birthday to Eugene McKinley Patterson. Mary Eugenia Patterson was born on February 28, 1916. (Her original birth certificate was amended in 1969, obviously because of an oversight, from her original name of Eugenia to Mary Eugenia). Eugene and Lorena did not remain together long as on April 17, 1917 Lorena filed and received $6.00 per week as alimony. On August 18, 1917 Eugene wrote a post card to my grandmother from Fort Logan, Colorado where he was serving with Company M. 1st Infantry. He stated that he was sorry he could not pay the child support, etc. In August 1918 he wrote that he was in Nashville, Tennessee working on “the largest job in the world outside of the Panama Canal”. During and after World War I (1914-1918) she corresponded with a Lt. L. Polk Denmark who was with the American Expeditionary Forces in France. Here is a portion of his letter to Pat on November 13, 1918:
This letter was written 2 days after Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, which since 1954 is known as Veterans' Day. He goes on to describe in much detail the fireworks display and the joy shared by all on that momentous occasion. The letters continued from “Polk” until early 1923, when he was working for the drafting department of the State of North Carolina. It seems from the tone of his letters that Grandma was not corresponding as much as he wished. Some 15 of these letters remain today. She later married Doc Travers and was known to all her friends as Pat Travers, a name combination of her two husbands. With Doc Travers she bought a duplex on Bonita Street and moved her mother, Martha, with her brother Leonard into the other side. Lorena went to work for a small stock brokerage firm in Dallas named Fenner & Beane in 1923. She went to school again and she graduated from the Shamburger Select Business College on April 17, 1924. Later the firm she worked for merged with two other brokerage firms to become Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner & Beane (now Smith). She eventually became the executive secretary to Edwin Orville Cartwright, the manger of the Dallas office and remained in that position until her retirement in 1963, almost 40 years after she began. As a pre-teen and teenager I spent many an afternoon in the board room of Merrill Lynch visiting with the sales people and watching quotes on securities being written on the large wall of the office. Henry Leonard Houston, Henry Jordan’s only other child lived with Lorena during his early years. In 1943 he married Rose Marie Howell, and in 1950 had a daughter, Anna Margaret Houston. (Add more here about Henry, Rose and Anna.) Mary, Lorena’s only child was healthy until in her early teens when she contracted asthma, according to my grandmother, because she went swimming in a pond. Mary eventually became so sick that at about the age of 17 (1933) she was sent to Hendricks-Laws Sanitarium for Tuberculosis in El Paso, Texas to help dry out her lungs. At that time Lorena (Pat) was making $50 per month as it was in the middle of the depression which began with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, and was at it's height in 1933. Mary’s care cost $25 per month. Lorena lived about 5 miles from the office in downtown Dallas. She obviously had very little to live on as she could not afford the $.05 cent ride on the trolley. She walked both ways! My grandmother was able to visit Mary occasionally. On one visit, on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, December 24, 1934 while she was in El Paso at the Sanatorium Lorena received the following telegram from Western Union:
On January 10, 1935 she received a letter from the Terrell State Hospital in Terrell, Texas stating that “Mr. H. J. Houston’s death was sudden, that is, his only complaint was shortness of breath a few hours before he passed away.” Lorena buried her father, Henry Jordan Houston next to her mother, Martha Ann at the Wheatland Cemetery in south Dallas. In April, 1966 Lorena bought the tombstone for her father and mother and paid $132.60. Unfortunately she had the wrong date of death for Henry engraved as December 25, 1935, when it was really December 24, 1934. This is the same cemetery that many of the Houston’s are buried including her grandparents, Henry W. and Mary A. (Jordan) Houston. Mary, after spending about 2 years there, left the sanatorium by 1936 and by May of that year she had met and married Foy Wilson Murray in Clovis, New Mexico. They moved to, or lived in Lubbock, Texas where he was employed as a salesman for the Leftwich Pontiac Company. At 11:10 A.M. on the morning of October 24, 1939, I was born. Seventeen days later Mary left, with me, and moved to Dallas to live with Lorena, her mother. At Easter, 1940 I received a card from Foy. That is the last communication that I have a record of receiving from my father. That year, or early 1940, Lorena bought a 2 bedroom, 1 bath home at 1570 E. Missouri in south Dallas. She paid $1900 for the home. Mary and I moved into this house and lived for the next 6 years together with “Babaw” as she was soon called by me because I could not say “grandma”. We left in 1945 when Mary married Marvin Eugene “Jack” Pearson. Babaw continued to live in that house with Katherine “Ruby” Harrison, an old friend, who died in 1953. Jack Pearson died from his third heart attack in 1963, and shortly after that Mary sold the house they had lived in for about 10 years. "Babaw" also sold the house she had lived in since 1940 and together they lived in the same apartment complex near White Rock Lake in east Dallas. Mary and Babaw rented identical apartments across the street from each other, and traveled frequently together. Mary died first, from a heart attack, in the summer 1972. She had suffered all of her adult life from breathing problems, and unfortunately had breast cancer as well. Babaw died the following year from old age, a broken hip, and a grieving heart.
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