John Hillery Osteen (1921-1999)

    John Osteen, founder and first pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, was born in Paris, Texas, August 21, 1921. He earned his bachelor's degree from John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, and his master's degree from Northern Baptist Seminary; he also held a Doctorate of Divinity degree from Oral Roberts University. He did not begin thinking seriously about God or religion until 1939, after leaving a nightclub he frequented. Within a couple of months, he began preaching in Paris, Texas and was apparently ordained to the gospel ministry shortly before his 18th birthday by a church affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. He served as an Associate Pastor at First Baptist Church in San Diego after completing his studies at NBTS and by the late 1940s as a minister at First Baptist Church in Hamlin, Texas. John left Hamlin in 1948 to become an traveling preacher, but within a year he became pastor of Central Baptist Church in Baytown, Texas. During his pastorate of Central Baptist Church, Osteen and his first wife, Emma, began to experience marital unrest and subsequently divorced. 

    He married Dolores "Dodie" Pilgrim on September 17, 1954, and the following year resigned his pastorate. Osteen again entered pastoral ministry at Hibbard Memorial Baptist Church in Houston, Texas, but left in 1958. That same year, John and Dodie's first daughter Lisa was born with severe health issues. As he wrestled with her circumstance, his theological beliefs began to shift and he had ecstatic religious experiences that he called "the baptism of the Holy Ghost". A year later, on Mother's Day, May 10, 1959, he and Dodie started Lakewood Baptist Church in an abandoned feed store in northeast Houston as a church for charismatic Baptists. The church soon dropped "Baptist" from its name and became independent and non-denominational. Lakewood developed into a body of approximately 15,000 members with active ministries in televangelism, conferences, missionary support, and food distribution. He hosted the weekly John Osteen television program for 16 years, reaching millions in the U.S. and in many other countries. On January 23, 1999, he died from a heart attack at the age of 77. His youngest son Joel later succeeded him as pastor.

Chapel Mausoleum
Klein Memorial Park
Tomball

COORDINATES

30° 05.433, -095° 34.335

James Gillaspie (1805-1867)

    James Gillaspie, prison superintendent and army officer in the Texas Revolution, the Mexican War, and the Civil War, son of William and Elizabeth Gillaspie, was born in Virginia on January 5, 1805. He traveled to Texas in 1835 and on January 14, 1836, enlisted in the volunteer auxiliary corps for the Texas army at Nacogdoches. On February 1 he was elected first lieutenant in Joseph L. Bennett's volunteer company. On April 8 Gillaspie became captain of the Sixth Company, Second Regiment of Texas Volunteers, which he commanded in the battle of San Jacinto. He was discharged from the army on May 29, 1836. Gillaspie married Susan Faris of Walker County; they had seven children. During the Mexican War he raised a company for the First Regiment, Texas Mounted Volunteers, for service under John C. (Jack) Hays. With the outbreak of the Civil War Gillaspie again raised a Walker County company for the Fifth Regiment, Texas Infantry Volunteers, and was stationed on Galveston Island. Gillaspie was superintendent of the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville from 1850 to 1858 and again from May 1867 until his death, on October 3, 1867. He was buried in Oakwood Cemetery, Huntsville. The monument near his grave lists the personnel of the various units that he commanded during three wars. Source

Oakwood Cemetery
Huntsville

COORDINATES

30° 43.641, -095° 32.806

Michael Castaneda Pena (1924-1950)

    Mike Pena, Korean War Medal of Honor recipient, was born in Corpus Christi, Texas on November 6, 1924. He joined the U.S. Army as an infantryman in 1941 when he was 16 years old and served in both World War II and the Korean War. On the evening of Sept. 4, 1950, near Waegwan, Korea, his unit was fiercely attacked. During the course of the counter-attack, Pena realized that their ammunition was running out, and ordered his unit to retreat. He then manned a machine gun to cover their withdrawal and single-handedly held back the enemy until morning when his position was overrun and he was killed. Michael Pena received the Medal of Honor posthumously in 2014. The award came through the Defense Authorization Act which called for a review of Jewish American and Hispanic American veterans from World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War to ensure that no prejudice was shown to those deserving the Medal of Honor.

CITATION  

For acts of gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty while serving as a member of Company F, 5th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division during combat operations against an armed enemy in Waegwan, Korea, on 4 September 1950. That evening, under cover of darkness and a dreary mist, an enemy battalion moved to within a few yards of Master Sergeant Pena’s platoon. Recognizing the enemy’s approach, Master Sergeant Pena and his men opened fire, but the enemy’s sudden emergence and accurate, point blank fire forced the friendly troops to withdraw. Master Sergeant Pena rapidly reorganized his men and led them in a counterattack which succeeded in regaining the positions they had just lost. He and his men quickly established a defensive perimeter and laid down devastating fire, but enemy troops continued to hurl themselves at the defenses in overwhelming numbers. Realizing that their scarce supply of ammunition would soon make their positions untenable, Master Sergeant Pena ordered his men to fall back and manned a machine gun to cover their withdrawal. He single-handedly held back the enemy until the early hours of the following morning when his position was overrun and he was killed. Master Sergeant Pena’s extraordinary heroism and selflessness at the cost of his own life, above and beyond the call of duty, are in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit and the United States Army.

Section 8
Cedarvale Bay City Cemetery
Bay City

COORDINATES

28° 59.939, -095° 57.800

Leonidas "Leon" Jaworski (1905-1982)

    Leon Jaworski, lawyer, was born in Waco, Texas, on September 19, 1905, the son of Polish and Austrian immigrant parents Rev. Joseph and Marie (Mira) Jaworski. The family lived for several years in Geronimo, Guadalupe County, where Reverend Jaworski pastored an evangelical church, before returning to Waco, where Leon finished high school. He graduated from Baylor University law school in 1925, then attended George Washington University and received the LL.M. degree in 1926 before returning to Waco to practice law. Jaworski moved to Houston in 1930 and practiced in the firm of Dyess, Jaworski, and Strong until April 1931, when he joined the firm of Fulbright, Crooker, Freeman, and Bates. He became a partner in 1935 and managing partner in 1948; his name was added to the firm's in 1954. Twenty years later, the firm name was shortened to Fulbright and Jaworski. By the time Jaworski retired in 1981 the firm ranked among the largest in the nation; it maintained offices in Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, Washington, and London. 

    Jaworski was a leader in the legal profession and had held the presidencies of the American College of Trial Lawyers (1961-62), the State Bar of Texas (1962-63), and the American Bar Association (1971-72). In addition to private practice, he served in the United States Army judge advocate general's department during World War II and was made chief of the trial section of the war crimes branch in the late stages of the war in Europe. In this office he directed investigations of several hundred cases concerning German crimes against persons living and fighting in the American zone of occupation. He also personally tried two cases - the first having to do with the murder of American aviators shot down over Germany in 1944 and the second involving the doctors and staff of a German sanatorium where Polish and Russian prisoners were put to death. Jaworski had risen to the rank of colonel by the time he returned to civilian life in October 1945. He later wrote about his wartime experiences in After Fifteen Years (1961).

    Jaworski successfully represented Lyndon B. Johnson in the case that allowed Johnson to run for both the Senate and the vice presidency in 1960. After Johnson became president in 1963 he appointed Jaworski to important positions on the President's Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, and the Permanent International Court of Arbitration. Jaworski's most widely remembered public service occurred in 1973 and 1974 when he headed the Watergate special prosecution force charged with uncovering the facts surrounding the Republican break-in at the national Democratic party headquarters during the presidential campaign of 1972. In July 1974 he argued the case of United States v. Nixon before the United States Supreme Court and won a unanimous decision ordering President Richard Nixon to turn over to the district court magnetic audio tapes that implicated him and members of his staff in a conspiracy to obstruct justice. Shortly thereafter, President Nixon resigned from office. Jaworski published his account of the Watergate prosecution as The Right and the Power (1976). In 1977 Jaworski was called back to Washington to serve as special counsel to the United States House of Representatives Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. In what the press referred to as "Koreagate," he developed cases of misconduct in an influence-buying scandal that resulted in disciplinary action against six members of Congress and two private citizens.

    Jaworski became a trustee of the M. D. Anderson Foundation in 1957 and was later on the boards of the Texas Medical Center and the Baylor College of Medicine. He was the president of the Houston Chamber of Commerce in 1960 and a director of the Bank of the Southwest; Anderson, Clayton, and Company; Southwest Bancshares; and Coastal States Gas Producing Corporation. Among his many other activities, Jaworski promoted the building of the Astrodome, belonged to the Philosophical Society of Texas, and received many honorary degrees, including an LL.D. from Baylor in 1960. He coauthored two autobiographical volumes, Confession and Avoidance: A Memoir (1979) and Crossroads (1981). On May 23, 1931, Jaworski married Jeannette Adam of Waco; they had three children. Jaworski was a member of the First Presbyterian Church of Houston. He died of a heart attack at his ranch near Wimberley on December 9, 1982, and is buried in Houston. Source

Section 3A
Memorial Oaks Cemetery
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 46.941, -095° 36.903

Karle Wilson Baker (1878-1960)

    Karle Wilson Baker, writer, daughter of William Thomas Murphey and Kate Florence (Montgomery) Wilson, was born on October 13, 1878, in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her first name was originally spelled Karl; the e was added later, first appearing in Kate Wilson's diary in 1893. She attended public schools, Little Rock Academy, and Ouachita Baptist College and returned to graduate from Little Rock Academy, a high school, in 1898. She attended the University of Chicago periodically from 1898 to 1901 and later attended Columbia University (1919) and the University of California at Berkeley (1926-27). The only university degree that she held, however, was an honorary doctorate of letters conferred in 1924 by Southern Methodist University. From 1897 to 1901 Karle Wilson alternately studied at the University of Chicago and taught at Southwest Virginia Institute in Bristol, Virginia. In 1901 she joined her family, which had moved to Nacogdoches, Texas. She went back to Little Rock to teach school for two years but returned to Nacogdoches, and there, on August 8, 1907, she married Thomas E. Baker, a banker. They had a son and daughter. Karle Baker devoted the remainder of her life to maintaining her household, to writing, and to teaching (from 1925 to 1934) at Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College (now Stephen F. Austin State University).

    She wrote personal and historical essays, novels, nature poetry, and short stories. Her early writing appeared in such journals as Atlantic Monthly, Century, Harper's, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Scribner's, Putnam's, and the Yale Review, under the pen name of Charlotte Wilson. Yale University Press published her first volume of poetry, ninety-two lyrics collected under the name of the title poem, Blue Smoke (1919), which received favorable reviews in the United States and England. Yale also published a second collection of her poems, Burning Bush (1922), as well as two prose volumes, The Garden of Plynck (1920), a children's fantasy novel, and Old Coins (1923), twenty-seven short allegorical sketches. Baker was anthologized in The Best Poems of 1923, English and American, published in London, and in 1925 she won the Southern Prize of the Poetry Society of South Carolina, a competition open to poets living in the states of the former Confederacy. In 1931 a third volume of her poems, Dreamers on Horseback, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. By that time, however, she had begun to concentrate mainly on prose writing. As early as 1925 she had written The Texas Flag Primer, a Texas history for children that was adopted for use in the public schools. In 1930 The Birds of Tanglewood, a collection of essays based on her birdwatching, appeared. Tanglewood was the name that she gave to an area around her parents' second home in Nacogdoches. A second reader for children, Two Little Texans, was published in 1932. Her most notable prose works were two novels published when she was in her late fifties and early sixties. Family Style (1937), a study of human motivation and reaction to sudden wealth, is set against the background of the East Texas oil boom. Star of the Wilderness (1942) is a historical novel in which Dr. James Grant, a Texas revolutionary, figures. It later became a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. In 1958 Baker was designated an honorary vice president of the Poetry Society of Texas, of which she was a charter member. She had served in 1938-39 as president of the Texas Institute of Letters, of which she was a charter member and the first woman fellow. Still other recognition was given her by the Authors League of America, the Philosophical Society of Texas, and the Poetry Society of America. She died on November 9, 1960, and is buried in Nacogdoches. Source

Oak Grove Cemetery
Nacogdoches

COORDINATES

31° 36.206, -094° 38.904