Formica

Oooh, I'm looking forward to seeing this...

The last three lines:

"The body was to be accompanied by Adjutant General K.L. Berry.The body will lie in state from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. tomorrow in the Senate Chamber at the capitol. Brief funeral services will be held

at 2 p.m. and the body then will be taken to Corsicana where services will be held on Wednesday."

Gen. K.L. Berry is my other grandfather!

The two men were in First Officers' Training Camp in WWI and had been friends for years when Berry was head of the National Guard in Jester's term.

I can't remember which suggested it, but the two men set up their kids (my mom and dad) on their date.

And it worked

Alice Jester Berry

So this is the Reagan Lodge (a great old building) on Heights Blvd?

I live very close to there and walk by there often.

Suppose there are any members now who'd have known our grandfathers?? (Or at least know who they were?)

Makes me want to poke my head in there sometime.

ab

Jim, you have now confirmed for me that the internet is THE BEST THING EVAR!!

Seriously, everyone, how funny/great is that - that the grandchild of the deceased (and slandered) governor could hear from the grandchild of the Pullman man (and Tyler) who guarded his body!!

It's an honor to hear from you, Jim. I thank you for this amazing story.

(How did you stumble upon this little exchange here?)

alice b

LOL, marmer! Quite true!

Regarding the politics, Filioscotia, my mom always said that Beauford never carried Austin, which was always more liberal than he (and the rest of Texas) was. Indeed, a smear like that (fabricated love affair) would be the perfect one for a man like him.

It's funny too, because his stance of separate-but-equal education, while appalling today, was back then quite progressive. And he was the one who signed for Texas Southern to be chartered. It was and is a fine school; he really did mean equal.

This is really funny/weird discussing my family with strangers on the Internet! I'm on a a few forums, but I'm friends IRL with the bulk of the members. But I appreciate all of y'all's desire to discuss/find the historical truth of any and all topics, while admitting (and enjoying) the rumors. That the rumors exist is part of the history too, no?

You know, my father died in his sleep after having not felt well (flu-like symptoms) for a day or two. It appears to have been a heart attack.

I wonder if in retrospect Beauford's "food poisoning" was actually an oncoming heart attack?

Purely conjecture, of course.

isuredid, that news service sounds like a [nerdy] gold mine!!

I could lose myself for days in something like that.

Thanks, isuredid.

I wondered about several of Patterson's bits. Granddad was indeed not in his 40's, nor living a bachelor life! Mom says she remembers already being in bed upstairs at the governor's mansion when her father was saying goodbye to her mother downstairs that fateful night. She decided not to get out of bed to say goodbye, because she'd be seeing him soon. I'll have to ask her about the food poisoning; she's never mentioned that to me.

And he was in fact 55 or 56, not late 40's.

People love a scandal, don't they?

(Of course, I'm guilty there too.....)

I'm so very glad to hear that my friend's dad was indeed as good a doctor as I'd always felt and heard that he was.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Morse does indeed sound a man you would not want working on your case!

Glad you liked my recollections. I had always love the detail of the gym shorts holding the evidence, and I'm glad I have a place to pass that on!

This is a walk down my childhood memory lane.

Literally.

I grew up one block away from the Hill house, on the corner of Brentwood and Chilton, and am Boot's age. I did not know him, really, but he knocked on our door when his mother died. I answered the door and he asked me to pray for his mom. It broke my heart.

I recall Dr. Hill's death having occurred on a Sunday night; we always said that our German shepherd, who regularly stuck his head through our fence's bars on Chilton, saw the murderer toss items into the bushes across the street (on Chilton still). But we were at church! (Maybe it was a Wednesday night? Church on Wednesdays too, in the South, darlin'!)

Thompson made me mad when he described the children who found the briefcase as having gotten their grubby little fingers all over the evidence. I'll have you know that when 11-yr-old Helen and her 8-yr-old little brother John were walking past my house home (4 doors down Brentwood from the Hills) from school and found the briefcase, they had no idea what the thing was doing there. They opened it to see to whom it belonged; it was Hill's. They closed it immediately, and Helen used her gym shorts to avoid getting any more fingerprints on it!! So *there*, Thompson! We neighborhood kids weren't nasty little urchins! Lol! The police then found the gun in the same spot. John would have gone *nuts* had he found the gun. (And some squirrels and birds might have lost their lives before the gun was reported.)

(I am very interested to know who the family was that lived on the street - who moved because their children were being threatened (someone's post a while back)? I knew every child on the two blocks of Brentwood (although, as I said, Boot the very least).)

Regarding the music room, my mother went in at Connie's invitation. She says it was absolutely state-of-the-art, which really only means that there was a lotta stuff my mother didn't recognize, but the interior was enormous and the sound perfectly crystal clear! I think Connie let my mom pick something out (since my mom's not a classical buff) and she played either South Pacific or My Fair Lady, I believe.

Dr. Radelat, the pathologist on the case about whom WestUNative spoke negatively on p. 4 here, was the dad of one of my close friends. Having been a child then myself, I can in no way defend his abilities or confirm the poster's complaints, but I do know he seemed like a very competent man. (Or, WestUNative, were you referring to Helpern, against who Radelat himself railed?)

But more interestingly, my parents had dinner with him a while ago. Somehow, the Hill case came up (my mother probably brought it up! Ha!). Dr. Radelat says now he is absolutely convinced that it was Toxic Shock that was the source of Joan's infection, a syndrome that indeed was simply not commonly diagnosed (or even named?) then.

And to confirm: yes EVERYBODY then thought that Dr. Hill had killed his wife, either by the botulism/whatever in the eclair or at least by neglect ("He's a doctor! He knows about petri dishes and how to do things like that!"), and EVERYBODY thought (nay, *knew*) Ash had had Hill killed. I cannot imagine, though, that Ash had any intention of his beloved grandson's witnessing the death of his father. Horrible. But none of us blamed him very much for [allegedly] avenging his daughter's death.

Note: my family was *not* in the Hill's social circle, despite our living on the same street. But this case swirled all around me, even though very *very* peripherally! (I even went to school with Racehorse Haynes' son through high school! Ha!)

And now I too have to take my copy of the book off the shelf and re-read it!

(He was actually en route from Austin to Galveston, but died in his sleep before the Houston station.)

Beauford H. Jester was my grandfather, and I can assure you that that this is indeed a false rumor.

But it certainly is a hoot to think that anyone would think of him as a ladies' man!

Where on Earth did you get this story? I love it! My mom and I are dying to know.

Alice Jester Berry