Encoded for the Experiencing War web site for the Veterans History Project.
The recording of the interview with Robert Dohoney was digitized.
This transcription was encoded with minimal changes to the original text in an effort to preserve original content and idiosyncrasies of the person interviewed. Period language and terminology are also retained. Encoding is literal with regard to the transcriptionist's capitalization, punctuation, and spelling.
All right. We'll get started. Today is October 12th, two thousand -- excuse me. Today is October 1st, 2012. We are at the Hill County Courthouse in Hill County, Texas, Hillsboro, Texas. We're on the second floor in the district courtroom, very appropriate place for us to take this oral history interview. My name is Lee Harris, and I am a resident of Hill County, serve as the County Court at Law judge. Today I will be interviewing Robert Dohoney, who is the senior district judge of the 66th District Court of Hill County, Texas, and so throughout the interview I will be referring to him as Judge. I say that to -- if you're reading this, please understand I -- Judge Dohoney is who I'm speaking to. All right. Judge Dohoney, would you give us your name, please, sir?
Robert George Dohoney.
And where were -- where do you live at this point?
Right now I'm living at 225 Teeling Trail, Whitney, Texas 76692.
And your date of birth is what?
June 4, 1929.
And you served in the United States Air Force. Is that right?
Correct.
All right. What were your parents' names, Judge?
My father's name was Robert Gilmer, G-I-L-M-E-R, Dohoney. My mother's name was Kathleen George Dohoney.
And you are married to Betty Ray Dohoney, and for the life of me, I can't remember. Is Betty Ray's maiden name Smith?
Betty Ray Smith Dohoney, yeah.
And you --
Ray is spelled R-A-Y. It was misspelled on her birth certificate R-A-E, but it was R-A-Y.
And is it still on the birth certificate as R-A-E?
No. She changed it.
She got it changed? It's funny how many times that happens. And did you have any siblings growing up?
No. We're both only children.
You grew up here in Hillsboro in Hill County. Is that right?
Yes. I was born in Italy, Texas in Ellis County, and we moved here when -- I think when I was about five years old and been here ever since except for college and military service.
Was -- of course, I don't think at the time of your mother's time that women served in the military, but did your father serve in the military?
Yes, he did. My father was a pharmacist, and he was with the Baylor hospital unit out of Dallas and went to France in 1918 and, of course, was there when the first World War ended. Came back to Dallas. He married my mother just before he shipped out to France.
And you mentioned that you grew up here. My knowledge of your dad is owning the car dealership. Is that what he did by the time --
Uh-huh.
-- that you moved here or was he still being a pharmacist?
No. He had -- he had -- he left the pharmacy. He married my mother and remained with Eli Lilly Company for a while. And my mother was a banker's daughter in Italy, and he became the vice president of that bank. The bank folded in the cotton crash of the early '30s, and he bought into a dealership in Hillsboro and that's when we moved here.
Do you recall what vehicle -- what brand of automobiles they were selling at that time?
At that time it was Chevrolet, and then it was later Oldsmobile-Cadillac.
You received your undergraduate degree from Texas A and M University. Is that right?
Correct.
And what did -- what was your field of study at Texas A and M?
Business administration.
Okay. And when you were there, you were in the Corps Cadets?
Yes.
I guess everybody was in the Corps Cadets --
You had to be unless you had -- were a veteran or had a physical disability.
And so you came out with -- and I guess in case anybody doesn't know what the Corps Cadets is, that's A and M's ROTC, correct?
Correct.
So you came out with a commission. Is that right?
Second lieutenant.
Okay. And so you were not drafted, but were an enlisted man or enlisted as an officer, I should say.
Well, what I was doing was fulfilling my military requirement. After you -- the second -- the last two years of ROTC you were under what we call contract, and we received a dollar a day and we were committed to at least two years' military service, if needed. So when we graduated, the Korean War was going on and --
What year was that?
I graduated in '51, 1951.
Okay.
I graduated, I think, on June the 3rd of '51, and I reported for active duty June the 10th of '51 at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio.
Military gave you a whole week off after you graduated?
Sure did.
That was kind of them.
Yeah.
So you went to Kelly Air Force Base, and how long were you there?
I shipped out of Kelly in January of 1952, reported to the town in California just outside of San Francisco that was a processing center for the Far East, and I stayed there for probably two or three weeks, got an assignment, and was shipped to Japan. And I was assigned to an outfit in Japan, southern part on the island of Kyushu outside of the city of Fukuoka, and from there I was assigned to a detachment that they had that was just inside the war zone in Korea on -- just off -- it was a Japanese island that was just off the southern tip of Korea -- South Korea. So it was technically in the war zone, but we didn't see any action.
Got combat pay, but --
Well, the enlisted men got combat pay, but the officers didn't.
Ah.
And it was a -- the outfit I was assigned to was an aircraft control and warning squadron, which were assigned for the Japan Air Defense Force, and we had the southern part of it and we had detachments scattered all in that southern island.
People don't realize it, I don't believe, but there was, at least amongst the Truman administration, a great fear that that war would spill over into northern Japan, if I remember correctly.
Well, there was a -- the great worry was that -- and it did --
Change?
-- later spill over into China. The Chinese came in, and we were almost to the Chinese border when they got into it and pushed us almost off the whole peninsula.
Not just back to the 38th parallel?
Huh-uh. No. I think what saved us, if you remember, was General MacArthur went -- swung around behind the Chinese and landed at Inchon, which nobody thought was possible, and when the Chinese realized they had been flanked, they withdrew and eventually it stabilized on the, what, 38th parallel?
38th, I believe, is -- if I remember, MacArthur had to do quite the job to sell the President and his advisers that he could --
Well --
-- land at Inchon because of the --
Right.
-- situation there.
And he wanted to go further. He wanted to go into China --
Yes.
-- and that's when Truman let him go.
Yeah. He fired a very popular general at the time, didn't he?
He did.
You know, the script here we work off of, we're not really working off of it too closely, but I don't care. There is a question here, though. It says, you know, Why did you join the service? You knew when you picked A and M and you picked the Corps Cadets --
Uh-huh.
-- that was a pretty good chance you were going to --
Well, sometimes it's mandatory. It -- the reason -- really the reason I went to A and M, I was second for West Point and the number one guy from West Point was from Waxahachie, and he decided not to go and they called me and they said, You're now number one. In the meantime, I had been recruited by A and M to play football. So I had a football scholarship to Texas A and M, so I turned down West Point. And I went to A and M with -- when you went to A and M, I knew that I would have to be in ROTC.
Same, of course, would have been true if you'd gone to West Point.
Oh, double.
Yeah. And was the appointment to the military academies the same back then as it is now, that each congressman makes an appointment?
Congressman was Tiger Teague.
Okay.
Olin Tiger Teague.
And he -- was he -- did he happen to be from Waxahachie or --
No. He's -- Teague was from somewhere down in -- south of College Station, somewhere down in there.
A lot different shape the judicial district got back then --
Well, he was an Aggie. Teague was an Aggie. And when I called his office and said I withdraw the -- my appointment, he wrote me and said it would -- he could understand anybody wanting to go to A and M.
Well, I'm glad he didn't hold it against you.
He was a highly decorated and much wounded World War II veteran.
Back --
He got the nickname Tiger because of some of his exploits on the battlefield.
Do you know what branch of the service he was in?
He was Army, but --
He was Army?
-- I don't know if he was armor or infantry or what. I think he was infantry.
Back then a career like that would automatically get you a spot in the United States Congress.
Right. When he came back and he ran, he didn't have any trouble getting reelected.
I don't know about anymore, but that sure would have done it back then. Coming out of ROTC, did you have a basic training or anything that you had to go through like we normally think the folks --
Well, in the summer between -- first of all, your freshman and sophomore years was compulsory. You were not being paid. And if you did okay in those two years, you were tendered a contract for your junior and senior years. And as I told you, they paid you a dollar a day, but you had to furnish some of your uniforms. But in between your junior and senior year, you went to summer camp, and summer camp was -- in those days was probably 30 or 45 days in the summer.
Where was that? Do you recall?
All over.
All over.
Camp Polk in Louisiana, Camp Hood, now Fort Hood --
Now Fort Hood.
-- in Texas, Fort --
Back -- I guess the largest --
It is now, but then it was pretty small.
Yeah.
And the -- another town was Fort Bliss out of El Paso, and another one was out of -- in Oklahoma.
Fort Sill?
Fort Sill.
You guys did do a lot of traveling.
Well, it would just depend on where -- you know, they would assign you different places. I think also probably Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio.
My knowledge of A and M and ROTC is somewhat limited. My father spent the fall of 1957 in ROTC at A and M at which point the university said he was wasting his money and their time, but he did tell me a great -- he said the one thing he learned in ROTC was how to know the difference between getting mad and getting even. Do you recall the freshman orientation, I'll call it, when you went through ROTC and how the upper classmen handled the freshman?
Yeah, but it -- when I went there, it wasn't that way exactly for this reason. In the year preceding my -- me going to A and M in '47, in 1946, they had had a hazing scandal involving freshmen on campus. So in 1947 the incoming freshmen were all quartered out at Bryan Army Air Base.
Off campus.
About ten miles off campus.
Yeah. It's well off campus.
And so there were no freshmen on campus except those of us who were -- had an athletic scholarship. We were the only freshmen on campus.
Was there an athletic dormitory then that you lived in?
Hart Hall. It's been torn down.
Yeah.
And that was the athletic dorm, and all the athletes, both freshmen all up through seniors, were housed in Hart Hall. Well, we were the only freshmen on campus, but we were athletes. So they pretty much left us alone. There was some hazing. Not much, but there was some.
A fair amount --
Nothing like it had been.
Yeah.
And --
Or apparently like it would later become again.
Yeah. It's come and gone. So I didn't experience any of that and I didn't have any freshmen orientation. I reported early for football, and we -- that's all we did, was work out. And in those days freshmen could not play varsity ball. You had to play freshmen ball. We would play other teams' freshmen like University of Texas, University of Houston, Rice, SMU, TCU, and we played NTAC, North Texas Agricultural College, which is now University of Texas at Arlington.
Okay.
Huge. And when -- in '47 I think they had one or two buildings. And so that's the type of -- and with a very limited schedule. It wasn't 10 games or 11 games. It was probably six. Five or six.
And not too long after that, Bear Bryant came along as the head coach of A and M, but who was the head coach when you were there?
When I started, Homer Norton.
Homer.
And he was fired my freshman year and replaced by really one of the -- probably the reason I was recruited. He was replaced by Harry Stiteler, and Stiteler, when I was in high school, had coached at Waco High School, which was our district. We played Waco every year. And he had a -- really an All American prospect, and he did make All American. His name was Froggy Williams, played end, what we now call a tight end, and was a wonderful kicker, both field goal and punter. And Rice recruited him, and as part of the deal, they hired Stiteler as assistant coach at Rice under Jess Neely. And when they fired Homer Norton, they hired Harry Stiteler, and Harry Stiteler was an A and M grad, played football for A and M. And he was there until -- they fired Stiteler my senior year, but I had quit football. I stayed out of football two years, and everybody decided, me included, that I was not Southwest Conference material. And so I played on the golf team, and I was captain of the A and M golf team for two years.
And was the Bear after Stiteler or was there someone between the two of them?
There was someone between, maybe two between, but I can't remember their names.
I guess it was, what, '56 or 7 that he won the national championship at A and M? Isn't that right?
He never did that at A and M, I don't think.
Oh, I thought he won it at A and M one time.
No. He did very well at A and M.
Okay. I had it in my mind when John David Crow and Bobby Joe Conrad were seniors, they had actually broke through. That's strange I thought that all these years.
I don't think they were national champions at all, but I saw, you know, later on Gene Stallings, who was a coach at A and M.
Certainly.
Later, Alabama.
Alabama. Won a national championship at Alabama.
He did. He was coaching at A and M and A and M played Alabama in the Cotton Bowl and Bear Bryant was coaching Alabama and Bear Bryant was coach at A and M when he took the boys -- you heard of the Junction boys?
Junction boys, uh-huh.
He took his football team to Junction to a deserted church retreat.
Toughened them up.
Toughened them up. I think they said they went down on three school buses and they came back in two station wagons. And one of the survivors was Gene Stallings, and A and M defeated Alabama in the Cotton Bowl and Bear Bryant carried Gene Stallings off the field.
What a story.
I was there. I saw it.
Saw it actually happen. My biggest memory of Bear Bryant was him retiring, and I think it was exactly 30 days later he was dead and --
Yeah.
-- he didn't last, so -- how long were you in the Air -- United States Air Force?
I -- let's see. I think I went in on June 10, 1951, and I was separated at Connally Air Base, I think, October 31 of '53.
Okay. And --
A little over two years.
Okay. And so your entire service was during the Korean Conflict or --
Well, it's --
-- whatever we wanted to call it.
There's -- they've signed a cease-fire, but that's all that's ever been signed.
I guess technically we're still at war with --
The cease-fire was signed in '53 -- '52, I think.
I think, if I'm not mistaken, we're still technically at war with North Korea.
Yeah.
Were -- now, you and Betty Ray married somewhere in that time period.
Married December the 29th of 1951.
And was she allowed to join you overseas?
We paid her way. If she -- she -- I could have brought her over as an officer, but there was a waiting list. She had a friend in New Orleans that was affiliated with the Lykes, L-Y-K-E-S, line, and they ran freighters out of New Orleans through the Panama Canal to the Far East. And they -- each freighter had room for probably four to six passengers, so she got on a freighter in New Orleans, went through the Panama Canal.
Young woman by herself.
By herself. Came to Japan, and I -- we -- I had a friend who was the commanding general of -- he later came to Hillsboro, managed the Hillsboro Chamber of Commerce, and was a state legislature. Name was Aubry Moore. He was a brigadier general and he was commanding general of what was then called Haneda Air Force Base. It's now called Tokyo International.
Is that the one built out -- actually, into the ocean?
It is now. It wasn't then, but it is now because of the longer runways. But he -- his wife was here in Hillsboro and she later came to Japan, but she called him and she said, you know, she's coming in. So I caught a plane up to Tokyo. He put me up in a BOQ, and he called admiral somebody and we got a tender, a ladder, and went out to -- because when her ship came in, they couldn't find a place to dock it. They said they'd have to wait several days to get to the dock.
Had to wait for another ship to leave --
Right.
-- so they can take their place.
Right. So Aubry Moore calls in admiral somebody, and he said, Sure, and he put a crew and a tender. We went out to the freighter --
And lowered --
-- and anchored out in the bay and brought her in. And when we -- I had to stand in -- I had to wait in line for a BO -- base officer's housing. So until I could get that, we lived in a Japanese house that we rented from a family in a little town called Dazaifu, which was probably ten miles from the base.
There's no way to get around what was going on at that point. We were six and a half years post having dropped -- maybe six years -- having dropped two atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we were essentially occupying Japan at that point.
That's correct.
How did the Japanese people receive --
Completely docile because the emperor told them to.
We made sure we didn't kill the emperor then.
Oh, we -- smartest thing MacArthur ever did was to leave the emperor in charge. If the emperor had told them to fight, we'd still be digging them out of those tunnels because that -- the island of Japan was absolutely honeycombed.
I've heard it described as a catacomb.
I'm telling you. There were tunnels everywhere. We had --
Same thing at Okinawa and Iwo Jima --
That's what we found at Okinawa and Iwo Jima. We had a -- we had two detachments on little islands off of Kyushu -- the big Kyushu island coast, and we were using the Japanese replacements and they were significant, pillboxes, tunnels. And that's where we located our radar because we were darting the air approaches to southern Japan. And they had tunnels everywhere, and even on the main island, as Betty Ray and I have traveled around, you'd still see tunnels. We were over there in '52 and '53, and you could still see damage in their railroad facilities in their terminals. You could see shrapnel holes in the roof. They were still rebuilding. Roads were almost nonexistent. Everybody went by train. The roads were terrible.
Not as a result of what we had done. Is that --
No. Just bad roads, you know.
Bad roads.
And today I was -- we were in Japan last year. Roads are wonderful. I mean, just super highways. They have really done a nice job. But if --
Well, they build plenty of cars. They ought to know how to build roads.
I know. Tell you a funny story. We had a guy who worked in our office. His name was Kisikawa, and I can't remember his first name except we called him Charlie, Charlie Kisikawa. And we said, Charlie, what did you do during the war? He said, Well, I was a kamikaze pilot. We said, Wait a minute, Charlie --
They don't --
-- if you're a kamikaze pilot, what are you doing here? He said, Well, he said, We were off the coast and there was these naval ships -- U.S. Naval ships and my lead man was here and the next man was here and Charlie was here in the back, and he said, The lead man went (sound effect) and the next man went (sound effect) and Charlie went (sound effect), and ditched.
I started to say he had to have ditched. They didn't --
And ditched and we picked him up and -- and he was our interpreter. The smartest Japanese I ever met.
Yeah.
We had a lady that worked for us doing cleanups and stuff like that at the apartment, and she lost her husband. He was killed on Okinawa. Her name was -- we called her Susie. It was Takayanagi -- Takayanagi, something. Nice lady, had a little girl, and they really suffered. How they ever thought they could take us on and win, I'll never know.
Well, I don't remember if it was the emperor or the head of the --
No. It was the emperor.
-- that said that he feared they had awakened the sleeping giant.
Yeah. That was --
Hirohito, I think.
Probably. Yeah. The warlords took over, and then when the -- when we dropped the atom bombs, that's when the emperor stepped in and said, That's it, that's enough. And once he did that, Japanese people just followed whatever he said.
I've always heard the story, and David McCullough doesn't give it much credence, but that after we dropped the first one the Japanese maybe believed that there was no way any country could have two such weapons, that surely only one of those had ever been made, and that we dropped the second one essentially to prove that we'll make as many as we have to.
Uh-huh. Yeah.
Do you think there's any credence --
I don't know about -- I don't know. I don't know, but it ended the war and it saved not only thousands or maybe millions of Allied lives, it saved more than that Japanese.
Yeah. I think the Allied estimate was we'd lose a million to a million and a half --
Yeah.
I think --
Well, think how many Japanese would have gone down.
Sure. Sure. But they weren't going to quit if you didn't kill them.
I was in Hiroshima, and that place was flattened. There was not -- we had spheres of occupation after the war. We had U.S. sphere. We had, you know, Russian.
Sure. Stalling wanted his part.
Yeah. Then we had British.
I think Stalling lined up to come across, didn't he?
Well, yeah. He was just taking advantage.
Yeah. He didn't do much good.
But Hiroshima was in the British sphere and they had a lot of trouble. But the British were --
Too arrogant --
-- pretty authoritarian. Yeah.
Yeah.
And they had some problems, but we didn't have any.
It's somewhat hard to imagine, I suppose, if -- I had -- strangely enough, I had this conversation with my wife last night about why we're having the problems of the people we're training in Afghanistan turning around and killing us, and I said, Well, you know, I don't care who you are, I wouldn't like it if there was a Soviet standing at my front gate with an AK-47 --
Right. That's right.
-- and most people don't like to be occupied. That's the reason I wanted to know how they accepted us because it's just not normal.
Well, they did. I never had any trouble and I traveled a lot. We had -- when I first started, I didn't have an automobile. Automobiles were not particularly useful over there anyhow if you were going any distance at all, but I had a friend that had an automobile and we would go with him and his wife different places. Never had any trouble. We went to Nagasaki and didn't have any trouble, and we traveled quite a bit in -- by train and no trouble at all.
And you said, going back to your actual job -- if I remember, you and I had talked one time. You -- it started out you were going to be an actual aviator, and then you got married and decided --
I had applied and had been accepted for flight school, flight training, and my A and M roommate and my roommate after we both went on active duty the same time, guy named Don Joseph, we were living in a rented house with another officer. And they got their assignments and I didn't get an assignment. And so Betty Ray and I were -- we knew we were going to get married.
Let me make a record of this. Of course, she's a Hill County girl as well.
Yeah. And so we decided that if I had gone to flight school, I had six years to do, I was locked in for six years, and we decided we didn't want to get locked into that. We were already locked in for two. So I resigned and my resignation met my assignment coming down, and that's the reason I didn't fly, which is probably good, probably saved my life because a lot of the guys at A and M that did fly didn't come back.
They were still building jets on the lowest bid back then, so -- your actual job assignment primarily was what?
Personnel officer.
Personnel officer.
And I did a lot of -- as I told you, we were in a aircraft control and warning outfit, which meant we had people in small detachments, maybe 30, 40 people here, 30, 40 people here, scattered all out, and they were living -- really just living like natives, you know. We were living out of pillboxes and all that kind of stuff. So when they'd get on leave or anything, they'd blow off a lot of steam, and we had a lot of people getting court-martialed. And the base commander told my CO, We need somebody to prosecute special court-martials. That's misdemeanors.
Right.
Not general, but special. And so my commanding officer - his name was Lieutenant Colonel O'Rourke - walked into my office one day, handed me a code -- Uniform Code of Military Justice, UCMJ, and told me to sic'em tiger, and that's one reason I kind of got to thinking about the law. So I thought --
So you became Judge Dohoney there, huh?
Well, I wasn't a judge. I was a prosecutor.
Prosecutor.
The judges were officer -- were --
JAG?
-- JAG, and usually defense attorneys were JAG. So -- and I had another lieutenant in the same AC and W group. Then the both of us did special court-martials and -- but he didn't do much. That's mostly what I did. And I was also a paymaster. I would take a suitcase, put half of it full of dollars and maybe more than half full of yen. And the dollars were not dollar bills like we have. They were military pay certificates, MPCs. And so everybody would line up, the enlisted men, and I would get their name and how much they had and I'd pay them and they'd take their money and they'd go to the end of the line. And then after I paid everybody in the MPCs, they'd line up and change it into yen because most of them had -- we'd call them josan -- had a josan off base that they were living with, a Japanese girl, and they needed the yen. And there was a fixed rate, MPC to yen. So I'm walking around trains, jeeps with suitcases full of money and a .45 on my hip that, if I'd had any trouble, I'd been better off throwing it than I would have been shooting it.
They didn't -- they either didn't build yours as good as they built mine or you just didn't have --
Well, it was the old Colt .45, you know.
1911.
Kicked like a mule. 1911. But I never had any trouble, and a lot of times I'd have to spend the night in a Japanese hotel. And I'd take my suitcase full of money, put it under the bed or next to me, because a lot of -- the Japanese didn't -- really didn't have a bed. They'd have what they call a tatami that they'd --
Just a mat?
-- just roll out on a rice straw floor.
Those detachments that you had, did they ever actually see any combat or have any issues with the --
No.
-- North Koreans?
Not that I know of.
Let's go back to you and your wife, early married, trying to make a life in a foreign country. Where did you buy groceries? Where did you --
Well, we -- on your base you had a commissary.
Okay.
And the prices were really cheap, very good. You had the officers' clubs, enlisted men's clubs, first three graders' clubs of enlisted men.
What about when you-all were out at the -- if you had to go out and spend the night at one of these detachments, what was the -- did they have a mess hall at these things or --
Well, they'd put -- they had a BOQ.
Okay.
And I -- if I was going to spend the night on the detachment, they'd have officers' quarters. If I was traveling and couldn't get from one to another, I'd spend the night in a Japanese hotel. And she never -- Betty Ray never went with me on any of those trips. She'd stay at the base. She got a job -- while we were over there, she got a job as a secretary for some officer, not sure what his job was.
So you-all didn't have to -- because of the base PX or grocery deal, you didn't have to resort to eating the local Chinese -- or Japanese cuisine.
You had to be very careful because they -- well, their strawberries looked like grapefruit, but they were --
Fertilized with human waste --
-- they were deadly. They would kill you because they fertilized with human waste. When we lived in a Japanese house, we had -- for our bathroom, we had a hole in the floor, and underneath it was a crock and they called them honey buckets. They'd come around so often, empty that, and then put that on their fields, and that would kill you if you're a --
Typhoid.
-- if you're an American. So we had a lot of fruits and vegetables that were grown in Japanese soil, but it was under our supervision or maybe hydroponic that didn't use their -- that type of fertilizer and they were okay.
I'd have probably been worried about what was left over in the soil before we got there.
Well, yeah. That was --
Or what got in the soil from one of those two bombs, but --
Well, they -- and around their fields, they'd have these pits where they'd dump all that stuff. It was pretty bad. In fact, I was officer of the day one day, and they brought this guy in on the hood of a jeep. They wouldn't let him in the jeep. They had chased him down and he had fallen into one of these pits, and they hosed him down. He did not smell good.
I'm assuming he -- was he one of ours or --
Yeah, he was one of ours.
I'm assuming he had a misdemeanor or something more serious if he did something like that.
I think -- I don't know what charge came out of it, but fortunately it was some other outfit that we didn't have to worry about.
Had to deal with him? How well supplied were you-all over there? I mean, did you have any issues at all that --
Not at all.
-- being supplied? There can never be a time I can imagine when you're in the U.S. military that there's not some pressure or stress, particularly knowing that the United States is one step away from China stepping in and --
Uh-huh.
-- the thing escalating, them potentially invading Japan and all that. Do you remember any particular worries or stressful pressure situations while you were there?
No, not particularly. I did go on one trip with this general I was telling you about. He called me and he said, I've got a -- he was a MATS, Military Air Transport Service, general, and he said, I've got what we call a Bangkok turnaround flight. And they were -- at that time they were flying probably C-54s. I don't think they were flying any 124s, but C-97s, maybe. And a four-engine transport. It was a flight that would leave Tokyo International and fly to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, then fly and land in Saigon, French -- at that time it was French Indochina -- and then fly to Bangkok, Thailand, turn around and retrace back to Tokyo.
Thailand was still under --
It was neutral.
-- British -- or it was neutral.
No, no. It was -- they were an independent country.
Oh, independent.
They had a king. And, matter of fact, when we spent the night in Bangkok, we stayed with the officer who was in charge of that detachment out of Tokyo. He was a major. And he had this villa that was the king's sister's house. She lived in Paris. And so they put us up in this villa, and they said, Be sure and -- when you go to bed, be sure that the net is closed all around the bed.
A mosquito netting or something or --
Lizards.
Lizards.
And as you would walk up the stairs, these lizards would scurry ahead of you. They were all over the house and the walls, but they kept them out of the beds with the netting. And that was the king's sister's house. Well, I've got a good friend over there, went all through high school and Texas A and M with, Alan Eubank, who's a missionary in Thailand and he comes back every so often. And I said, Are those -- you still got lizards over there? He said, They're everywhere. And they don't pay them any mind. They just scurry around the house.
Let's go off the record just a minute. (Off the record)
So you fly all the way in to Bangkok, Thailand, and then you --
Turn around.
-- turn around and come right back?
Yep. And we went -- we stopped in Saigon, and the French were in charge there. That was before Dien Bien Phu when they left Saigon and we took over, much to our sorrow. We -- Saigon was a beautiful town. It was just like France, sidewalk cafes, everybody speaking French, French perfumes on sale, really a pretty town. We were there just a short period of time. And then while we were at Clark on the way over --
It's now, what, Ho Chi Minh City, right?
Right. I think so. When we were in Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, there was a friend of mine that I had known at Kelly Air Force Base and Betty Ray had known because he was a University of Texas grad, ROTC, later went back to Texas after the -- Korea, got his law degree, and is now a retired Court of Appeals justice. Name is Pepe Dial, Preston Dial.
Preston.
Everybody called him Pepe. Well, Pe -- I looked Pepe up. He was at the Clark's Air Force Base, and Pepe and I were coming out of the BOQ and we heard these shots. And we found out -- have you ever heard of the Huks, H-U-K-S?
Not that I'm aware of.
Well, they were a unit trying to overthrow the government of the Philippines, trying to get us out. And they attacked the main gate at Clark Air Force Base, and that's as close as I ever got to shots fired in anger. But we were -- we heard it, but we didn't see it.
I'm assuming we suppressed it fairly quickly over there --
Pretty quickly. Pretty quickly.
Did you spend essentially all of your active duty in Japan, all of your active duty time, other than --
Most of it.
-- the first six months or so at --
Oh, let's see. I shipped out of Kelly. I went to Kelly in June. I shipped out probably in January. So a little over six months. And the rest of the time I was either en route or in Japan.
You came -- you and your wife came back from Japan and you had fulfilled your obligations. You-all, for the record, had three children together. Is that right?
Uh-huh.
You've got Betsy and Pat --
Well, actually, their names are -- Kathleen is the oldest, and then Beth, but we call Kathleen Kathy and call Beth Betsy, and Patrick.
Patrick is a lawyer.
Pat is in Fort Worth.
Comes here. And then Betsy, or Beth, she's -- works at the University of Texas Southwest Medical Center.
Yeah. She's a doctor -- she has her doctorate in psychology. Kathy has a doctorate in psychology, and she's in charge of the alcohol and drug treatment center at the VA Hospital in Dallas. And she got with the VA -- she was with a private psychiatric hospital in Dallas, and she married her husband Craig, who was in the Navy. And so as she would go around with him, she would work for the VA, so she had a lot of years -- when he had to get out -- he was disabled. He was on a nuclear sub and a torpedo got loose from its carriage, and he grabbed it to keep it from falling and injured himself.
Probably not a good idea to have some torpedos falling inside submarines, I would imagine.
I don't -- or trying to pick one up --
Yeah. Or --
-- or hold it up.
-- hold it. Did you-all take a lot of photographs in your unit or anything that we might could supplement this record with or did you --
Not much.
Did you keep any kind of personal diary while you were over there?
No.
You came back home. Kids were born. You went into business with your dad, right?
Uh-huh. Right.
And you-all had the Oldsmobile-Cadillac dealership by that point?
Uh-huh.
And I'm trying to jump forward several years, but Betty Ray actually was the first one decided she wanted to go to law school. Is that right?
She went to law school, graduated, and was licensed. I went to law school in self-defense.
Needed to learn what community property meant.
I sure did. That was one of the first things I wanted to find out about it.
Did -- she, in fact, would have been one of the -- not the first women in the United States, but a very early -- or put it this way. She would have been a notoriety at the time she graduated from law school.
Yeah. She -- when she entered law school, there were -- she was one of three females at Baylor. When she graduated from law school, I think she was one of two. When I went to law school, which was not too long after she got out, there was probably four or five, maybe six, seven, and now it's about 50 percent, isn't it?
I was going to tell you, we accepted 51 percent females --
Yeah.
-- last fall.
And she taught at the law school for a long time, and we had a mutual friend that we became acquainted with through our law school. He taught practice court. Name was Frank Wilson.
Judge Frank Wilson.
Right. And he was on the Court of Appeals in Waco. And he had never had much use for a female lawyer until Betty Ray came down here, and he often said, You know, that's the first woman I've seen that's really got a legal mind. So he was -- we became real friendly with Frank, and she -- he later was instrumental in persuading Baylor to let her teach a course as an adjunct like you're doing.
Like I do.
And they liked her. The students liked her, so they hired her and she was -- I guess she was at Baylor for 14, 15 years.
She was associate dean of students, wasn't she?
She was associate dean of law school, helped McSwain, and she was pretty much in charge of admissions. She and Peter Williams and one other constituted three professors that went over the -- reviewed the admissions applications.
Applications.
And then when she -- she was commuting every day.
At some point when she was an employee of the university, she was also county attorney, wasn't she?
No.
That was when I --
Well, when she was adjunct --
When she was an adjunct.
-- she was county attorney.
Okay.
But when they hired her, she quit county attorney.
I want to go back to something you told me years ago about a gentleman coming in to see the county attorney.
Yeah.
Do you remember that?
Oh, yeah. He came in and -- you have to understand how the law -- how that office was configured. It was configured after the courthouse had been remodeled, and the judge's bench used to be over here. And so they carved that space out and that was the county attorney's office, and the judge's bench was moved here. Well, you had a -- you walked into the county attorney's office, and the office was right off the landing at that second-story landing. You walked right into the office, secretary sat here, and then there was a door and then her office with bookcases all around. So this guy walks in. He said, I want to see the county attorney. And the secretary said, Just a minute. She -- Betty Ray said, Send him in. So he comes in and, Where is he? And she said, Where is who? She said -- he said, The county attorney. She said, I'm the county attorney. You're the county attorney? Yes. Well, I knew -- once knew a lady who was a whizbang motorcycle rider.
And that was the closest comparison he could come up to.
So she was kind of a pioneer really because it was unusual to have female lawyers.
You -- as we said, you went on and went to the same law school, went down to Baylor.
Uh-huh.
You continued to work with your dad the whole time that you were down there.
I would get all the morning classes I could get, and you've got to remember, in those days Baylor Law School started class at 7:30. They don't anymore, but --
Start at 7:45.
-- they do -- they did then. And so --
And, actually, only practice school starts at 7:45.
I was going to say, I think others are later. But I would get all the morning classes I could get. So I'd go down there and get through and race back to Hillsboro and spend the rest of the day in the dealership.
You had a private pilot's license by that point or along about that time?
I had one, yeah, but -- for a 182, but I never -- I rarely used it in business and I never used it to commute to Baylor, but I did use it -- I can remember several times going to San Marcos and some other places to pick up cars.
It's just I remember you telling me about flying to go pick up cars from time to time.
Yeah. Yeah.
So you opened your office there actually in Dohoney Motor Company, if I remember correctly, to begin with.
Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
And how long did you practice out of the actual same building that --
Oh, probably two or three years. And my dad -- I would have sold the dealership. My dad didn't want to. He wanted someplace to go to. So we hired Doug Beard. Now, the Beard Motor Company was folding, and we hired Doug to run the dealership. And I practiced law and Dad had a place to go to. And we eventually sold it to Doug, and then he sold it to somebody and it folded. But, yeah, I practiced here probably a couple of years, and then I went in with Henry Moore and Jack Sims.
Henry Moore was the son of Ike Moore --
Right.
-- who had been the curator of the museum at San Jacinto, but was actually killed in World War II. Is that right?
He was killed in -- he went in the service. He was in the Navy. He was a talented historian. He's written several not books, but treatises on different Texas history. He was well recognized as a historian.
Yeah. I still see his name on things from time to time, but he's been dead --
Yeah. And he went in the Navy. He married a Hillsboro girl. That was the connection.
Right.
He married Elizabeth Knight, who was a schoolteacher at Franklin school, taught Betty Ray, not me. I think she taught second grade, maybe third. And while he was in the Navy, she took over as curator of the San Jacinto Monument, and as she went along on her pregnancy, she had to give that up. She came back home, had Henry, and died of --
Complications from childbirth or something?
Well, a day or two after Henry was born. And Henry survived and his dad came back. Of course, Henry was an infant, and I think his dad wrote out a history of him and his mother, which Henry still has. And I don't know how old Henry was, but he wasn't maybe a couple of years, a year, when his dad was killed in the Pacific in the Navy.
Ship sunk, I think?
I think his ship was sunk. And so Henry was raised by his grandmother and great-aunt, I guess.
Now, Jack was quite a bit older than you and Henry.
Yes. Jack was --
Jack --
-- he served in World War II with the FBI.
He -- Jack would have been -- well, I guess he would have been a hundred next year, if I remember correctly.
Probably right.
And he was a -- he was kind of a spy chaser, if I recall -- or not a spy. I'm sorry. A Nazi chaser --
Yeah.
-- in his FBI days.
He spent a lot of time in South America.
Posed as a film producer or something, if I remember his story right.
Yeah. There was a -- I remember -- he flew on -- we were in South America and flew on his airlines. I don't -- I think they're defunct now. I can't remember what they're called. I think it was Fossett Airlines or something like that. But he was in Lima, Peru quite a bit. Then he came back and he went into practice with Andy Bryan --
Who was also in FBI.
-- who was also FBI. And he come back and Andy was, I guess, probably one of the best lawyers in town, had the reputation. He's on the wall over there.
Yes, sir.
He -- I think he was appointed when Frank McDonald was elected to the Court of Appeals in Waco and then he was reelected, and then Sam Johnson decided to take him on and defeated him, narrowly, and Andy was really bitter. He left here and went to Fort Worth, made a lot of money practicing in Fort Worth.
I knew he packed up and left town. I heard stories that maybe Sam accused him of spending less time on the bench and more time playing with his projects and things of that nature.
Yeah. He was a -- Andy had a lot of land. He was a farmer. He wasn't a farmer, but he had a lot of land. He represented a guy from Brandon, and the guy from Brandon met this underage girl and had intercourse with the girl. And he was a mechanic, and the father of the girl found out about it and went to this guy's garage. And he was under a car on a thing, and the guy said whatever his name was, and the guy rolled out and the guy --
Shot him.
-- shot him. And Andy represented the guy that shot him, and the guy put up as his fee quite a few acres of land. And Andy --
Believe it or not, in the last year I have gone and pulled that file and looked all of that up because Mel Bryan was telling me he was here as a kid visiting his grandmother and he remembered coming up here to the courthouse every day, and he never got inside the courtroom.
To -- for the trial?
Because the trial was such a circus.
Yeah. It was --
And the jury found him guilty, but gave him probation. And, ultimately, he received one of those orders -- I've got it probably in my desk -- where he was -- the judge signed an order that his -- all penalties and disabilities were removed and all of that business, if you didn't know that.
I didn't know all that, but --
Yeah.
-- I -- and I don't know if that's -- that story is true, but --
No. That holds exactly true to what the --
Well, that's what I've heard.
-- to what the court file shows, and for the life of me, I can't think of his name. But I went through the jury book and figured out when Mel would have had to have been around, and that's how I found the trial.
I used to know the guy's name that was killed because his --
He was a serviceman.
Huh?
He had been a serviceman, if I remember correctly.
Yeah, that's right. And he had been a friend of a guy that was dating my first cousin.
Well, there were two of them that night, the way the thing read, I -- and the -- or the way the story was told, and there was -- one of these girls told her parents she was spending the night at the other girl's house and that girl --
Okay.
-- said she was spending -- instead, they went to one of our speakeasies somewhere around here, and that's where these two young servicemen met up. Then -- one of them, former serviceman. The other one was still in the military. In fact, at one point there was a continuance granted because they couldn't get the other fellow served because he was still in the military.
Ah.
That's how I know that part of the story.
Andy was a good lawyer. And then when -- I'm trying to think -- when he went to Fort Worth, he wound up representing -- I believe he wound up representing the railroad, and he tried cases all around on condemnation cases, railroad accident cases, and all kinds of stuff.
He was known to have a bit of a temper.
He did.
He --
I tried -- Andy came down -- when I was practicing with Jack and Henry, Andy came down, and he had been contacted by a family over in Blooming Grove --
Navarro County.
-- Navarro County, that their son had been accused of murder and killed a grocer in Penelope. So he came down and he wanted me to help him. So Andy and I went to Blooming Grove, interviewed a bunch of people, got ready for trial, and the family hired another lawyer out of Fort Worth. And he came down and interviewed this guy, and the guy told him he did it.
Your client?
Uh-huh. He told us he didn't. And he was with a -- an ex-con, and the ex-con was the one that we had figured did it. But he had -- he -- this lawyer came in, he said, He did it. So that lawyer took over. Andy and I butted out. They paid us a small amount of money, and they pled him. He was a young kid. He was like 19 or 20. And the guy he was with that was -- two of them went in the store together. The guy he was with was, like I said, an ex-con, and he was probably in his late 30s or 40s.
The stories -- well, the reason I mention Andy and his temper is I've heard, apparently, at least one occasion where somebody offended His Honor in this room when he was a lawyer, and I guess he went over and bonds out. I think it settled that.
Yeah.
Did you hear that?
I haven't heard that story, but I wouldn't doubt it.
And then I heard another one where he was with Red Kimbrel at a Lone Star Gas pipeline and a land man of sorts made the same mistake and apparently got the same treatment, but --
I kind of think I -- I think I've heard that story.
So --
And, of course, Red Kimbrel was an unusual man.
Yes.
Had two unusual boys, too.
Well, Ronnie was apparently there when all -- as a little boy when all that --
Yeah.
-- went on, and he said that Andy didn't take much mercy upon the land man when he was -- came in to it. So you come back. You go in with Henry Moore and with Jack Sims. By then, Steve Latham is judge, correct?
Correct.
Steve -- or Judge Latham stayed on the bench --
Well, before that, I had been appointed district attorney.
That's right.
See, I served --
That's right.
-- I served as district attorney from 1971, probably somewhere along about March, April, until the end of 1972.
Okay.
Not quite two years. JUDGE HARRIS. Okay.
And I was appointed because Frank McGregor resigned. He had some problems with his accounts, blamed it on his secretary, and he resigned and was suspended, as I recall, for two weeks. He got his license back, and then he ran against me when I came time to run and he won. So he went back in, and then Chuck Campbell beat him.
Then Chuck went on --
Then Chuck went on to Austin --
Court of Criminal --
-- and Buddy Jones took over. So I had the DA in between.
That's right. I forgot about that.
And then when Steve Latham ran the last time -- and, incidentally, he ran against Frank McGregor.
Would have been 1978.
Something like that. Yeah, that's right. And he said, when he got -- after he got elected, he said, This is it, I'm going to serve four years, and I'm gone.
And at that point he's --
So --
-- he had already been the longest serving district judge ever.
Yeah, already. Yeah, yeah. Till McGregor, Bob McGregor. So he started working on me to run for district judge. I said, I don't think I want that. At the time, I was doing better than what they were paying district judges. As I recall, the annual salary of a district judge was somewhere around 45 to 48,000 a year, and Jack and Henry and I was doing a lot better than that. But I got to thinking about it, and they've got a great retirement program and --
Yes, sir.
-- I was getting up in years anyhow. So I -- I said okay, and Sam Johnson called me. He wanted me to run. He had me come down and talk to Bud Duncan about what a great job it was.
By that time, Sam was on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals --
He was on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Presidential appointment.
And some other people, you know. So I announced that I was going to run, scared to death Frank was going to run against me, but nobody took me on. I ran -- I was elected three times unopposed.
And you served --
Ten years, one month. But the reason I did that, you could buy in your military service, okay? And you needed 12 years to retire -- and be of a certain age to retire under that plan. That's the old plan.
That's the old plan, Plan 1.
Which is better than Plan 2 or all the others.
Yes.
So I had been in office ten years and one month. I bought in 23 months of military, and so I had 12 years and retired.
And you served from January 1, 1983 to January 31, 1993. Is that right?
Right.
Okay.
I have been visiting longer than I was on the bench.
By nearly twice.
Almost. And in -- on January the 1st of this next year, I will have been doing this for 30 years.
And you've been a senior district judge, accordingly. Well, I guess -- I suppose Steve was one of the senior district judges.
Well, you know, Steve --
Although he never --
They didn't have those designations back then, and the reason Steve didn't do more visiting than he did was because, if you served a day and was paid for a day of serving, they docked you a day of retirement. And so Latham thinks, you know, that's just not right, so he didn't do much of it.
Yeah.
And when I started visiting, I would sometimes stop by his house. He said, How do they -- how does that work now? I said, Well, I get all my retirement, and if I work, I get full-time pay. Really, he said. He said, Well, that's a bird nest on the ground. I said, Yeah, sure is.
I guess one of the other curious things you told me about Judge Latham, nobody else had told me, that I didn't know was that prior to that '78 to '80 -- I guess, actually, it would have been January 1, '79 to December 31 of '92 -- or '82, excuse me, term, that Judge Latham changed his attire.
Well, he had a black suit that you could see your face in it, it was so shiny.
Polyester, apparently, huh?
And he wore it every day. And so when he knew that he had four more years and he didn't have an opponent and he didn't have to run, he went out and bought him a bunch of new duds, and he bought a sky blue suit, I mean, really pretty. And I -- he chewed tobacco. And we were in chambers. I had some deal before him. And he had a spittoon right down here.
He also kept a spittoon up here by the bench.
Yeah. Spittoon up here, too, yeah. And he leaned over and he striped that blue suit all the way down, and I thought, Oh, God, Steve. It just -- just all the way down.
Did he seem to respond to having spit on his new suit?
Didn't say a word. Not sure he even saw it.
The other -- and I know this is more about you than it is about Judge Latham, but I like to make history and then I like to make notes of this because I've tried to pay attention to the things primarily you've told me about Hill County, was that Judge Latham had two other interesting hobbies. He smoked on the bench, which is hard to imagine in this day and age --
Uh-huh.
-- and apparently allowed the jurors to smoke if they wanted to smoke.
I think he did.
And he also kept his eyes closed most of the time while he was on the bench. Is that right?
That's right.
He --
He'd close his eyes. I think he did it because he didn't want you to know what he was thinking. I mean, you know, if you hear something, you're -- but if your eyes are closed, you don't know what -- how he received that.
Particularly, probably didn't want to telegraph it to a jury while he was on --
Right. And I had a client and it was a trespass to try title thing and adverse possession, and you won't believe this, but it was Ben Aufill and it was about his -- a place his mother had. And so I said, Ben, I think we need to try this to the Court because it's kind of complicated and a lot of law involved rather than a jury, and he said, Okay, whatever you think. So he called me one day and he said, I've got to see you. I said, Well, come on over. He said, We can't try that before a judge. I said, Why not? Well, he'd been over here at the Metropolitan Barber Shop, and they'd say, Don't do that, that judge sleeps all the time. I said, Ben, his eyes are closed, but you cross over that line, he'll cut your foot off, he knows exactly what's going on. Anyhow, we wound up settling it. The lawyer on the other side was Showers.
Amazing what the spit and whittle club thinks of us --
Well, it -- when I first started practicing law, I was assigned -- me and -- I was assigned with Jack Sims to represent a kid that robbed a bank in Bynum, and there were -- the spectators all faced this direction. Judge was over here.
This is -- we're pointing to the east side of the courtroom.
Yeah. And you'd come through right there and you were -- there's a door that would put you right on the bench that you entered from the hall, and the jury was over here and everybody faced this direction. There were spittoons all over this courtroom. The jury had spittoons. The judge had spittoons. The spectators had spittoons. Everybody was smoking and chewing, you know.
Uh-huh.
It was just -- that was -- what would that be? Fifty -- that would be '69, '70 -- early '70s.
Yeah.
I got out of law school in '69.
Hard to imagine at this point in life --
Huh-uh.
-- something like that going on.
It's totally different. And when -- Judge Latham did a little bit of visiting. He went to Corsicana a few times. And when I first went to Corsicana, they said, Where are you from? I said, Hill County. Do you know Judge Latham? I said, Yeah, sure do. Well, he said, you know, when he'd come over here, they -- as you walk in, they have two doors, and on -- they have free-standing signs just inside the door on the aisle that said No Smoking, and then on the judge's bench they had a sign that said No Smoking. Well, Judge Latham would get there and he'd pick up the signs and put them under the bench and take the No Smoking on the bench, put it under the bench, and light up.
Light up the cigar, because he didn't smoke cigarettes. He smoked cigars.
Huh-uh. Cigars. But he was going to smoke and it didn't matter where he was. He was a character. He was a character.
Do you -- trying to finish this up, do you -- are you a member of any of the veteran service organizations, VFW, American Legion, anything like that?
No.
Did your group ever participate in any reunions that you served with?
No.
Didn't do it.
Never did.
Do you keep in contact with any of the men that you served with or that you went to RO -- or went to the -- through the corps with at A and M?
Oh, yeah. With -- as far as people in the corps at A and M? Quite a few, yeah.
I think a lot of them are gone by now, but --
And a lot -- most of them are dead. My old roommate -- one of my roommates is dead. In fact, two of my roommates are dead and one of my roommates is still alive, lives in Austin. No. I see -- keep in touch with classmates and -- but an awful lot of our classmates were killed in Korea. You know Paul Baker?
Yes, sir.
Okay. Paul Baker's uncle, who was Paul Coffin, was in my class at A and M. He was killed in Korea, never married. He -- just like me, he went in the service right after he graduated and he went to Korea. He was a artillery officer, and he was on his way up to the front in a jeep and it got a direct hit, artillery round. So there were lots of cases like that. The one guy I played football with and he was from Waco was an F-84 pilot. He was coming back from a mission in Korea, and he just went over and never pulled out.
Just pitched in.
Uh-huh. They don't know what -- if he had been hit or if he had vertigo or -- nobody knows. He never said anything on the radio or anything. So there were a lot of cases like that with kids in my class. The class of '50 probably suffered more than '51 because they went in early, and '51, we were getting in toward the tail end of it all.
1950, they had very little help.
Well, they were pretty thin over -- they were totally surprised by that North Korean advance.
Yeah. That's always -- of course, intelligence is much better now than it was then, that we --
Oh, yeah. You'd be looking with satellites telling exactly what was happening.
Harry Truman completely misjudged that or at least the men advising him did, one --
Well, yeah. Nobody expected that.
Sure didn't.
Nobody expected it. I had a --
And as you said, if MacArthur hadn't gone in China, would have been --
I had an officer at A and M who was in charge of the Corps Cadets. The name was Boatner. He was a bird colonel. And a lot of the North Korean prisoners that we had captured we kept down on the southern tip on an island off the coast of South Korea, and they rioted and took over and there were a lot of people killed getting them back under control. Well, they sent Colonel Boatner down there, and he straightened that out quickly.
There weren't any video cameras or anything like that back then.
Huh-uh. No.
Things could be done a little different.
No. No. Judge -- yeah. Boatner straightened them out. We were scared to death of Boatner at A and M.
Apparently, so were the North Koreans by the time he got done.
By the time he got through with them, they were very respectful.
Is there anything I haven't thought to ask about that you would like to add to this whole deal? As I said, I'm so glad we've done this because all this would have just been lost to history at some point, but there are certainly things I probably forgot to ask.
I can't think of anything. I -- I don't think this has anything to do with this, but I recently took a bunch of old correspondence and pictures that my first cousin had saved and gave it to the Heritage Museum. I was her independent executor of her estate, and like I said, it's a box of all this stuff she had saved with her fiance, Frank Breeding, who was from Hillsboro, one of four brothers, all served in World War II.
A mother with four stars, huh?
Oh, yeah. And his mother's name was Estella Breeding. Father's name was Frank Breeding. Brothers were Paul, Leon, and Thomas. Paul was a B-24 pilot, and he took a artillery round or anti-aircraft round in the cockpit and it killed his copilot, and he landed -- got it back to England, landed it on the seat of his pants, holding his guts in. And he came back -- of course, they discharged him. He came back after the war. I was working as a lifeguard at Clarks Mountain Spring. And he looked like a jigsaw puzzle. He had stitches everywhere. He later was a lawyer in Dallas, he's dead, as was his brother Leon, and he's dead, was a lawyer in Dallas. But I took all -- this is all the correspondence from Frank while he was going -- to my cousin, and they were going to get married after the war, World War II. Pictures of his outfit while he was in training. He was a lieutenant. He was armor. And he get the Bronze Star for action probably in March of '45. And then, you know, Germany surrendered, what, April or May of '45? In April a sniper hits him. He got killed. He's buried in a cemetery in the Netherlands. I didn't know this until I got -- I later was -- had this independent executor. I was in that cemetery. I was -- Betty Ray and I were over there with Bud Duncan and his fiancee, and we went all through this cemetery. Well, I didn't know Frank was buried there. And I had a letter in the correspondence that gave the name of the cemetery, the row, the section, and the number, and a picture with Frank Breeding. So I took that out to Versluis, and they were happy to get it and it's in the thing. Jean -- her name was Jean. She was valedictorian of her class in Italy High School and worked in Dallas till Frank got killed, and then she moved to Bartlesville, Oklahoma and got a job in the executive -- executive secretary with Phillips 66 and married her first husband, who was a chemical engineer with Phillips. He died very suddenly, heart attack. She moved to Houston, met her second husband, who was an Aggie. He was a mechanical engineer for Dow. He died, and she left -- she made a bunch of specific requests to Houston area individuals and entities and churches. Then she said, Everything else, it goes 50/50 to the Park Presbyterian Church in Italy and to Texas A and M because of the second husband. Well, that amounted -- those requests to the church and to A and M where about 315 or 20 thousand dollars each. Church in Italy has made some property improvements. It was a church I was raised in, really, and so was she. And then A and M used the money, 50 some-odd thousand dollars of it, as a Rudder corps scholarship after Earl Rudder. And the rest of it, which is about 250,000, went to furnish and equip a meeting room in the Memorial Student Center that was rededicated last April. And when that Memorial Student Center was first dedicated in 1951, I was a senior at A and M and we did a corps review in front of it, which is now full of buildings, but at that time it was a parade ground. We did a corps review in front of it, and we were reviewed by Dwight Eisenhower and Audie Murphy.
Audie Murphy.
At the time, Eisenhower was president of Columbia University. The next year he was elected president.
President --
And Audie Murphy was --
The most decorated soldier.
And was in the movie business. Got later killed in a plane crash in Tennessee. But that was fun, you know, to see Dwight Eisenhower and Audie Murphy. He had -- God, he had ribbons everywhere, little bitty guy.
Yeah.
Little bitty guy. And a lot of Audie Murphy's stuff is out here at --
Hill College.
-- at Hill College at the Heritage Museum. So John is going to take that and make an exhibit out of that because it was a Hillsboro boy, Frank Breeding. Good-looking guy.
What about the other brother, did he make it home? You said there were four of them.
They all made it home. Paul married a girl I used to date, married Joyce Webb. She lived out on a farm out on 171, probably seven, eight miles out of Hillsboro. Pretty girl. She married Paul and they had some children and they lived in Dallas. They're both dead. Leon was a -- I don't think they were married. He was a lawyer in Dallas. He's dead. Thos -- we called him -- Thomas, we called him Thos. I don't know what happened to him, but he came back.
Navy?
He was in the Navy. He and Leon were in the Navy. Paul was in the Air Force. Frank was armor, U.S. Army. But it's an interesting story. And just -- you know, just a few days later, it would have all been over.
But I don't guess we fought a major skirmish in Texas after the Civil War --
Well, we did and won, too.
Won, handedly.
Yes, sir.
Well, Judge, we -- I know a lot of the fellows that come in here and talk to us thought, Well, I didn't serve in combat, so that's not what y'all are interested in, but we're interested in all of it.
Yeah.
Just --
Well, I sure never served in any combat, but --
But it --
-- I did serve.
-- didn't -- sure doesn't mean you didn't serve. That's why --
You want to leave this here?
Yes, sir. And I thank you very much for your service. I guess it's my one regret in life is that they didn't want me, in fact, wouldn't take me, but that's another story. We'll be concluded.
Thank you.