Lloyd Herbert Hughes (1921-1943)

    Lloyd Hughes, Jr., Medal of Honor recipient, was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, on July 12, 1921, the son of Lloyd Herbert Hughes, Sr., and Mildred Mae (Rainey) Hughes. Hughes’s parents divorced sometime after his birth. Mildred Hughes found employment as a postmaster in Onalaska in Polk County, Texas, in November 1923. In 1924 his mother married John Raymond Jordan. Between 1927 and 1931 the Jordan family lived in Oak Hurst in San Jacinto County, Huntsville, Josserand, and Refugio, Texas. By 1931 the Jordan family added four sons in addition to young Lloyd who was called “Pete” by family and friends. Lloyd Hughes experienced success in academics and athletics in school. After beginning school in Oak Hurst in 1927, he spent most of his early years in the Refugio school system. Hughes was valedictorian of his seventh-grade graduation class. In high school, he served as the captain on both the football and basketball teams. He also found employment as a roughneck in the oil industry and with a newspaper and ice route during the summers and after school. After graduating from Refugio High School in the spring of 1939, Hughes enrolled at Texas A&M in the fall as a petroleum engineering major. Assigned to the infantry in the Corps of Cadets, Hughes experienced academic problems during his first semester and withdrew at the end of the term.

    He then moved to Corpus Christi (where the Jordan family had moved in early 1939) and attended Corpus Christi Junior College (now Del Mar College) for two terms where his grades improved. He enrolled at Texas A&M in September 1941 and remained there until leaving school on December 3, 1941, due to his desire to assist his family and ailing stepfather. On January 28, 1942, Hughes enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps as an aviation cadet in San Antonio. After completing his primary pilot training in Tulsa and his basic pilot training at Enid, Oklahoma, he finished the advanced pilot training at Lubbock, Texas. On November 8, Hughes married Hazel Dean Ewing in San Antonio. He was assigned to the Four Engine Transition School, Combat Crew School at Tarrant Air Base in Fort Worth and finished his training and received his pilot’s wings and his commission as a second lieutenant on November 10, 1942. In early 1943 Hughes was assigned as a pilot to the newly-formed 389th Heavy Bombardment Group at Biggs Army Air Field, Texas. This group was designated as part of Operation Tidal Wave (a low level bombing attack by B-24 heavy bombers on the Nazi-held oil refineries at Ploesti, Romania). After final instruction at Lowry Field, Colorado, and receiving crew formations and assignments to a B-24, the group arrived in England in June for flight training at treetop level. The group departed for Benghazi, Libya, on June 30, and in July Hughes’s unit flew four combat missions over Italy and the Mediterranean and spent ten days of intense low-level training for the raid on Ploesti.

    In the early morning of August 1, Hughes’s plane Ole Kickapoo departed Benghazi as part of the 179 loaded B-24 Liberators (divided into five groups) for the 2,400-mile roundtrip to Ploesti. The 389th (nicknamed the “Sky Scorpions”) flew in the rear with two other groups. With Hughes as the pilot, Ole Kickapoo in the last formation approached its target region with enemy defenders fully alerted. Flying through intense anti-aircraft fire, Hughes’s plane took several direct hits that caused gasoline leaks in the bomb bay and the left wing. Aware of the danger and unwilling to leave the formation, Hughes piloted the plane to his assigned target in a blazing area where the bomb load was dropped. Flying away from the target with the left wing aflame, Hughes sought to land the aircraft in a dry riverbed, but the plane “crashed and was consumed.” Only three men of the ten-man crew survived the crash, and one died from burns two days later. The two survivors remained prisoners of war until the end of the conflict. Romanian authorities retrieved the bodies of Hughes and the other crewmen and buried them in Bolovan Cemetery. Fifty-four B-24s did not make it back to Benghazi. Military reports indicated that Hughes’s target area was so damaged that it did not resume production during the war. For his “heroic decision to complete his mission regardless of the consequences in utter disregard of his own life,” the twenty-two-year-old Texan was recommended for the Medal of Honor; four other airmen also received the medal for their performance in Operation Tidal Wave. On April 18, 1944, Hazel Ewing Hughes was presented her husband’s posthumous Medal of Honor by Lt. Gen. Barton Yount in a ceremony at Kelly Field. Second Lieutenant Lloyd Herbert Hughes, Jr., was honored in a number of ways years after his tragic death. In 1950 his body was returned to Texas, and on April 12 he was buried with full military honors at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio. Texas A&M renamed a dormitory Lloyd H. Hughes Hall in 1969. In Corpus Christi, Del Mar College added Hughes to its Wall of Honor in 1995. A portrait of Hughes hangs in the Memorial Student Center at Texas A&M. The Sam Houston Sanders Corps of Cadets Center at Texas A&M also displays his original Medal of Honor beneath a bronze plaque of the former cadet. Hughes was the first Texas Aggie to receive the Medal of Honor. Source 

CITATION

For conspicuous gallantry in action and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. On August 1943, 2d Lt. Hughes served in the capacity of pilot of a heavy bombardment aircraft participating in a long and hazardous minimum-altitude attack against the Axis oil refineries of Ploesti, Rumania, launched from the northern shores of Africa. Flying in the last formation to attack the target, he arrived in the target area after previous flights had thoroughly alerted the enemy defenses. Approaching the target through intense and accurate antiaircraft fire and dense balloon barrages at dangerously low altitude, his plane received several direct hits from both large and small caliber antiaircraft guns which seriously damaged his aircraft, causing sheets of escaping gasoline to stream from the bomb bay and from the left wing. This damage was inflicted at a time prior to reaching the target when 2d Lt. Hughes could have made a forced landing in any of the grain fields readily available at that time. The target area was blazing with burning oil tanks and damaged refinery installations from which flames leaped high above the bombing level of the formation. With full knowledge of the consequences of entering this blazing inferno when his airplane was profusely leaking gasoline in two separate locations, 2d Lt. Hughes, motivated only by his high conception of duty which called for the destruction of his assigned target at any cost, did not elect to make a forced landing or turn back from the attack. Instead, rather than jeopardize the formation and the success of the attack, he unhesitatingly entered the blazing area and dropped his bomb load with great precision. After successfully bombing the objective, his aircraft emerged from the conflagration with the left wing aflame. Only then did he attempt a forced landing, but because of the advanced stage of the fire enveloping his aircraft the plane crashed and was consumed. By 2d Lt. Hughes' heroic decision to complete his mission regardless of the consequences in utter disregard of his own life, and by his gallant and valorous execution of this decision, he has rendered a service to our country in the defeat of our enemies which will everlastingly be outstanding in the annals of our Nation's history. 

Section U
Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery
San Antonio

COORDINATES 

29° 28.688, -098° 25.822

Charlotte Ganahl Walker (1878-1958)

    Charlotte Walker, actress, was born in Galveston to Edwin A. and Charlisa (De Ganahl) Walker and was the mother of character actress Sara Haden. Walker made her stage debut as a teen, when at nineteen she performed in London, England in a comedy called The Mummy. She performed with Richard Mansfield and later returned to her native Texas. She appeared as June in Trail of the Lonesome Pine in 1911 and would later reprise the role in Cecil B. DeMille's 1916 film Trail of the Lonesome Pine. David Belasco noticed her in On Parole and signed her for starring roles in plays The Warrens of Virginia, Just a Wife, and Call The Doctor. In 1923 she played with Ethel Barrymore in The School For Scandal, produced by the Player's Club.

    Walker's motion picture career began in 1915 with Kindling and Out of the Darkness. Sloth (1917) is a five-reeler which features Walker. In the third reel of this film she plays a youthful Dutch maid who is about sixteen years old. The setting is an old Dutch settlement on Staten Island, New York. The theme stresses the perils of indolence to a nation of people and cautions against permitting luxury to replace the simplistic life led by America's forebears. In her later silent film work Walker can be seen in The Midnight Girl (1925) starring alongside a pre-Dracula Bela Lugosi. The Midnight Girl is one of Walker's few silents that survives. As a film actress she continued to perform in films into the early 1930s. Her later screen performances include roles in Lightnin' (1930), Millie (1931), Salvation Nell (1931), and Hotel Variety (1933) She married her first husband, Dr. John B. Haden, on November 16, 1896 in New York City. With him she had two daughters, Beatrice Shelton  and Katherine, who later changed her name to Sara Haden. After her divorce, she returned to the stage. Her second husband, Eugene Walter, was a playwright who adapted the novel The Trail of the Lonesome Pine for Broadway; the second marriage also ended in divorce in 1930. Charlotte Walker died in 1958 at a hospital in Kerrville, Texas at age 81.

Note: Crypt is unmarked. There are several crypts inside the Haden family mausoleum, all marked with a small nameplate except for two - those of Charlotte and her daughter Sara.

Haden Mausoleum

Trinity Episcopal Cemetery

Galveston

COORDINATES

29° 17.621, -094° 48.682

Marvin Ivan "Buck" Barrow (1903-1933)

    Buck Barrow was born in Jones Prairie, Marion County, Texas, the third child of Henry and Cumie Barrow. He got the nickname Buck from an aunt, who said he ran around like a horse. In the early 1920s, Marvin went to Dallas, ostensibly to work for his brother Clyde repairing cars, but he quickly became part of the West Dallas petty-criminal underworld. He began his criminal career as a cockfighter, but moved up quickly; just before Christmas 1926, Marvin and Clyde were arrested with a truck full of stolen turkeys they intended to sell. Marvin took the rap for himself and his brother and went to jail for a week. He met his future wife, Blanche, on November 11, 1929 in West Dallas and she soon became part of the loose Barrow gang. He was shot and captured two weeks later after a burglary and given four years in the state prison. He escaped from the Ferguson Prison Farm on March 8, 1930 by simply walking out and stealing a guard's car. 

    He and Blanche married on July 3, 1931 in Oklahoma. Blanche convinced him to return to prison and serve the rest of his term, which he did. After two years, he was issued a pardon by the governor, mostly due to the lobbying done by his wife and mother, partly due to the effort to reduce prison overcrowding. Upon his release on March 22, 1933, he and Blanche joined Clyde, his girlfriend Bonnie and W. D. Jones and began the crime spree the Barrow gang became notorious for. A few robberies and murders later, Buck was mortally wounded during a shootout with the police at the Red Crown Tourist Court in Platte City, Missouri. He hung on for a few days in a delirium until July 29, 1933, when he died of pneumonia aggravated by his head injury.

Note: Marvin's year of birth on his stone is incorrect. His mother gave the engravers her daughter Nell's birth year by mistake.


Western Heights Cemetery
Dallas

COORDINATES

32° 45.957, -096° 84.663

Theron Eugene "Ted" Daffan (1912-1996)

    Early steel guitarist and songwriter Ted Daffan was born in Beauregard Parish, Louisiana, on September 21, 1912, the son of Carl and Della Daffan. Ted Daffan pioneered in the electrification of instruments and was an active figure in the Houston-area country-dance-band scene of the 1930s. His most lasting contribution to country music was in songwriting. The Daffans moved from Louisiana to Houston, where Ted graduated from high school in 1930. Having developed a fascination with electronics at an early age, he opened a repair shop for radios and electric musical instruments. The shop served as a center of experimentation with pickups and amplifiers. Daffan also developed an early interest in Hawaiian guitar and played in a Hawaiian music group called the Blue Islanders that performed on Houston radio station KTRH in 1933. Drawn to country music mainly through the influence of Milton Brown, in 1934 Daffan joined the Blue Ridge Playboys, an influential group whose membership included two other legendary early honky-tonk figures, Floyd Tillman and Moon Mullican. He also performed with several other Houston-area bands, including the Bar-X Cowboys and Shelly Lee Alley's Alley Cats, before starting his own band, the Texans, in 1940. The Texans leaned more toward honky-tonk than swing.

    Daffan is generally credited with writing the first truck-driving song, Truck Driver's Blues, in 1939; the song became a hit for Cliff Bruner's Texas Wanderers, and its success led to Daffan's Texans being signed by Columbia Records in 1940. Three of the songs he wrote and recorded in the early 1940s became honky-tonk classics: Worried Mind, Born to Lose, and Headin' Down the Wrong Highway. Daffan was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Association Hall of Fame as a charter member in 1970. Among the artists who recorded his songs were Ray Charles, who performed versions of Born to Lose and No Letter Today, and Les Paul and Mary Ford, who recorded I'm A Fool to Care. Daffan moved to California in 1944 and led a band at the Venice Pier Ballroom for a short time before returning to Texas in 1946. After leading a band in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, he returned to Houston by the early 1950s. Although his recording career slowed after World War II, he continued a successful career as a songwriter and stayed involved in the music business. From 1955 to 1971 he ran his own record label, Daffan Records, which featured releases by Floyd Tillman, Jerry Irby, and Dickie McBride, among others. Daffan moved to Nashville in 1958 to form a music publishing company with Hank Snow but returned in 1961 to Houston, where he formed his own music-publishing business and continued to live until his death on October 6, 1996.  Daffan was married to Lela Bell McGuire; they had one daughter, Dorothy Jean. He later married Fannie Lee “Bobbie” Martin; they had no children. Daffan was inducted into the Texas Western Swing Hall of Fame in 1995. His song Born to Lose received a BMI "one million air play" award in 1992. Source

Section 20
Forest Park Lawndale Cemetery
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 43.108, -095° 18.238

Ira Ingram (1788-1837)

    Ira Ingram, soldier, legislator, and member of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred, was born in Brookfield, Vermont, on August 19, 1788, the son of Phillip and Rachael (Burton) Ingram. After sojourning for a time in Tennessee he seems to have moved to New Orleans, where he married Emily B. Holt of Tennessee on March 13, 1823; she died in October 1824. They had one daughter. At the instigation of his brother Seth Ingram, Ira moved to Texas in January 1826 and settled in the Austin colony in the area that became Waller County. In 1828 he and his brother were partners in a merchandising establishment in San Felipe de Austin. Although defeated by Thomas M. Duke in the election for alcalde in 1832, Ingram represented the Mina District at the Convention of 1832 and San Felipe in the Convention of 1833. He also served as secretary of the local committee of public safety, organized to resist Mexican Centralist authority. 

    In 1834 he was elected the first alcalde of Matagorda and wrote the Goliad Declaration of Independence, signed on December 22, 1835. During the Texas Revolution Ingram participated in the capture of Goliad as commissary and secretary to commandant Philip Dimmitt. In November 1835 he requested a transfer from Stephen F. Austin. He served in Capt. Thomas Stewart's company of Matagorda Volunteers in 1836. On April 5, 1836, Gen. Sam Houston ordered Ingram, then commissioned as a major, to return to East Texas and the United States to recruit volunteers for the Texas army. Ingram was Matagorda representative in the First Congress of the Republic of Texas and was elected speaker of the House. He resigned from the legislature on May 1, 1837, possibly because of the disclosure that he had once been convicted of forgery and imprisoned in New York. He was again elected mayor of Matagorda, but died on September 22, 1837, before his inauguration. Ingram was present at the first meeting of the Masonic fraternity in Texas on January 11, 1828. In his will he left $70,000 to the Matagorda schools. Source

Section E
Matagorda Cemetery
Matagorda

COORDINATES

28° 42.030, -095° 57.282