Amos Milburn (1927-1980)

    Amos Milburn, rhythm-and-blues pianist, singer, and bandleader, was born in Houston on April 1, 1927. Milburn, called "the first of the great Texas R&B singers," began developing his talent at an early age. When he was five years old his parents rented a piano for his sister's wedding, and in less than a day young Amos had taught himself to play Jingle Bells. His parents enrolled him in piano lessons, but Milburn jumped ahead by lingering outside local taverns and juke joints and imitating what he heard. In 1942 he lied about his age to enlist in the United States Navy. He spent just over three years in the Pacific Theater, where he entertained troops with his lively piano tunes. 

    Upon returning to Houston he put together a band and played in clubs all over the city and the surrounding suburbs. His music so impressed local fan Lola Cullum that she allowed him to practice on her baby grand piano and helped him to record After Midnight. She then took the record and Milburn to Los Angeles, where she visited Eddie Mesner, president of Aladdin Records, in his hospital room and played the record for him. Mesner signed Milburn immediately. Milburn began recording for Aladdin on September 12, 1946. In twelve years he recorded about 125 songs, most of them arranged by saxophonist Maxwell Davis. After Midnight sold more than 50,000 copies. In 1949 Milburn was Billboard's best-selling R&B artist. Davis, acting as sax soloist and producer, helped Milburn on seven of his greatest hits: Chicken Shack Boogie, In the Middle of the Night, Hold Me Baby, Bad Bad Whiskey, Good Good Whiskey, Vicious Vicious Vodka, Let's Have a Party, House Party (Tonight), Let Me Go Home, Whiskey, and One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer. These songs and others made it to the Top 10 of Billboard's charts in the early and mid-1950s. 

    Milburn's rocking, boogie-woogie piano style greatly influenced such younger stars as Fats Domino and Little Richard. Some of Milburn's songs, such as Let's Rock a While (1951) and Rock, Rock, Rock (1952), anticipated mid-1950s rock-and-roll. Milburn ended his association with Aladdin in 1954. He continued to perform, often with such greats as Charles Brown and Johnny Otis. He toured the country, playing nightclubs in various cities, including Los Angeles, Cleveland, New York City, Dallas, Cincinnati, and Washington. He also recorded for labels such as Ace, King, and Motown. However, he had achieved his greatest success by 1953. No stranger to alcohol, as his song titles suggest, Milburn was often ill. He suffered two strokes, lost a leg to amputation, and was an invalid for some time before his death in Houston on January 3, 1980. He was honored with induction into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 2010. Source

Section A
Houston National Cemetery
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 55.681, -095° 27.127

Mary Kathlyn "Mary Kay" Ash (1918-2001)

    Business leader and entrepreneur Mary Kathlyn Wagner was born on May 12, 1918, in Hot Wells, Texas. She was a pioneer for women in business, building a substantial cosmetics empire. In 1939, she became a salesperson for Stanley Home Products, hosting parties to encourage people to buy household items. She was so good at making the sale that she was hired away by another company, World Gifts, in 1952. She spent a little more than a decade at the company, but quit in protest after watching yet another man that she had trained get promoted above and earn a much higher salary than she did. After her bad experiences in the traditional workplace, Ash set out to create her own business at the age of 45. She started with an initial investment of $5,000 in 1963. She purchased the formulas for skin lotions from the family of a tanner who created the products while he worked on hides. With her son, Richard Rogers, she opened a small store in Dallas and had nine salespeople working for her. The company turned a profit in its first year and sold close to $1 million in products by the end of its second year driven by her business acumen and philosophy. The basic premise was much like the products Ash sold earlier in her career: her cosmetics were sold through at-home parties and other events. However, she strove to make her business different by employing incentive programs and not having sales territories for her representatives.

    She wanted everyone in the organization to have the opportunity to benefit from their successes. Sales representatives (she called them consultants) bought the products from the company at wholesale prices and then sold them at retail price to their customers. They could also earn commissions from new consultants that they had recruited. All of her marketing skills and people savvy helped make Mary Kay Cosmetics a very lucrative business. The company went public in 1968, but it was bought back by Ash and her family in 1985 when the stock price took a hit. The business itself remained successful and now annual sales exceed $2.2 billion, according to the company's website. At the heart of this profitable organization was Ash's enthusiastic personality. She was known for her love of the color pink and it could be found everywhere, from the product packaging to the Cadillacs she gave away to top-earning consultants each year. She seemed to sincerely value her consultants, and once said "People are a company's greatest asset". Her approach to business attracted a lot of interest. She was admired for her strategies and the results they achieved. She wrote several books about her experiences, including Mary Kay: The Success Story of America's Most Dynamic Businesswoman (1981), Mary Kay on People Management (1984) and Mary Kay: You Can Have It All (1995). While she stepped down from her position as CEO of the company in 1987, she remained an active part of the business. She established the Mary Kay Charitable Foundation in 1996. The foundation supports cancer research and efforts to end domestic violence. In 2000, she was named the most outstanding woman in business in the 20th century by Lifetime Television.

    Married three times, Ash had three children - Richard, Ben and Marylyn - by her first husband, J. Ben Rogers. The two divorced after Rogers returned from serving in World War II. Her second marriage to a chemist was brief; he died of a heart attack in 1963, just one month after the two had gotten married. She married her third husband, Mel Ash, in 1966, and the couple stayed together until Mel's death in 1980. The cosmetics mogul died on November 22, 2001, in Dallas, Texas. By this time, the company she created had become a worldwide enterprise with representatives in more than 30 markets and more than 1.6 million salespeople working for Mary Kay, Inc. around the world. Source

Hillcrest Mausoleum
Sparkman-Hillcrest Memorial Park
Dallas

COORDINATES

32° 52.102, -096° 46.847

Clark Wallace Thompson (1896-1981)

    Clark Thompson, politician and military leader, was born on August 6, 1896, in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, the son of Clark Wallace and Jesse Marilla (Hyde) Thompson. He grew up in Oregon and from 1915 to 1917 attended the University of Oregon, where he was a member of Phi Delta Theta. On May 25, 1917, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. After basic training he was stationed at Fort Crockett in Galveston, Texas, where he met Libbie Moody, daughter of William L. Moody, Jr. He was discharged from the marines as an enlisted man on December 15, 1918, and commissioned a second lieutenant in the marine reserves on December 16, 1918. Thompson married Libbie in Richmond, Virginia, on November 16, 1918. They had two children. Shortly after he was commissioned, the Thompsons moved to Galveston.

    In 1919, Thompson became treasurer of the American National Insurance Company. In 1920 he left that business to open a mercantile firm, Clark W. Thompson Company, which he owned until 1932. In 1927 he became involved in the Cedar Lawn Development Company; he served as its secretary-treasurer until 1934. He was appointed public relations counsel for the Moody interests in 1936 and served until 1947, when he was elected to the United States House of Representatives. Continuing his connection with the United States Marine Corps as a member of the reserve, Thompson organized the Fifteenth Battalion of the USMC Reserves in 1936. He was called up to national service in 1940, attended the Naval War College in 1941, and in 1942 was sent to the Southwestern Pacific Theater with his unit; he was the oldest officer in his theater. In 1943 he was returned to Washington, D.C., to become director of the marine reserves, a position he held until he retired as a colonel in 1946. He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his service.

    Thompson's concern with national defense led him into politics. In 1933 he was elected to represent the Seventh (later the Ninth) Texas Congressional District to fill the seat left vacant by Clay Stone Briggs. He made a mark with his legislative efforts to strengthen the military before he was redistricted and chose to step down. He was elected in 1946 to the same seat, on the death of Joseph Jefferson Mansfield, and held it until he retired on January 3, 1967. In the Congress he was a member of the Agricultural, Maritime and Fisheries, and Ways and Means committees. He and his wife were also an important part of the Washington, D.C., social scene; their home was known as the "Texas Embassy" or "Texas Legation," a central feature in the life of Washington during the 1950s and 1960s. Thompson played an important role in bridging the gap between different factions of the state Democratic party. In 1968, after retiring from the House, he became legislative consultant for Hill and Knowlton and director of the Washington office of Tenneco. Thompson was a member of the Episcopal Church. He was president of the Galveston Chamber of Commerce in 1931 and 1935–36 and a member of the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Texas State Society; he was also a thirty-second-degree Mason and a Shriner. He died in Galveston on December 16, 1981, and was buried in Galveston Memorial Cemetery.


Galveston Memorial Cemetery
Hitchcock

COORDINATES

29° 21.256, -095° 00.360

Michael Roup Goheen (1808-1852)

    Michael Goheen was born in Catawissa, Pennsylvania sometime in 1807 and arrived in Texas in 1834. He applied for a land grant in October 1835, but did not receive it. In September of that year, he enlisted in the Texas army and commanded a company at the Storming and Capture of Bexar (December 5-10), after which he left the service. He re-enlisted in March 1836 during the Texas Revolution as a member of James Gillaspie's company and fought with that unit at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21. During his enlistment, he served as postmaster of Electra and stayed in the army until November 20, 1836 when he was discharged. He was living in Grimes County in June 1850, but shortly thereafter moved to Harris County where he died some time prior to August 30, 1850.

Note: Unmarked. Founders Memorial Park, originally founded in 1836 as Houston's first city cemetery, was rapidly filled due to a yellow fever epidemic and closed to further burials around 1840. The cemetery became neglected over a period of time, often vandalized and was heavily damaged by the 1900 hurricane. In 1936, despite a massive clean up effort, a century of neglect had taken its toll. The vast majority of grave markers were either destroyed or missing and poor record keeping prevented locating individual graves. Several cenotaphs were placed in random areas throughout the park in honor of the more high-profile citizens buried there, but a great number of graves go unmarked to this day. Michael Goheen's is one of them.


Founders Memorial Park
Houston

COORDINATES

N/A

Edwin Alan "Bud" Shrake (1931-2009)

    Bud Shrake was born September 6, 1931, in Fort Worth, Texas, and attended Paschal High School where he wrote for the school newspaper, the Paschal Pantherette. He served in the Army and attended the University of Texas and Texas Christian University. In 1951, he started on the police beat of the Fort Worth Press while he earned a degree in English and Philosophy at TCU. In 1958, he moved to the Dallas Times Herald as a sportswriter, followed by a move in 1961 to the Dallas Morning News in order to write a daily sports column. He wrote his first novel, Blood Reckoning (1962), about the Comanche’s final battle against the United States Army and followed up with But Not For Love, published in 1964, which looked at the post-war generation. In 1964, Shrake moved to New York City to join the staff of Sports Illustrated, where he was often allowed to write long feature stories, sometimes barely related to sports. He returned to Texas in 1968 and continued his association with Sports Illustrated until 1979, while also writing novels and screenplays. His 1968 book Blessed McGill, set during Reconstruction, is often cited as a classic of Texas fiction, as is his 1972 novel Strange Peaches. In 1969, Shrake wrote what is perhaps his best-known article, Land of the Permanent Wave, about a trip to the Big Thicket in East Texas. He intended the article for publication in Sports Illustrated, but it was rejected and instead published in the February 1970 issue of Harper's Magazine. 

    He became involved with Hollywood in the early 70s as a screenwriter and occasional actor. Shrake's screenplays include Kid Blue (1973), Nightwing (1979), the Steve McQueen western Tom Horn (1980), and Songwriter (1984), which starred his friend Willie Nelson. He had a small part in the TV movie Lonesome Dove and wrote his last screenplay in 1991 for the TV movie Another Pair of Aces: Three of a Kind, a sequel to his 1990 movie Pair of Aces. Night Never Falls, the only one of his novels not set in Texas, was published in 1987, and became his favorite of his novels. He was twice married to and twice divorced from Joyce Shrake, with whom he had two sons; his marriage to Doatsy Shrake also ended in divorce. From then on he acted as Texas Governor Ann Richards' companion for 17 years, escorting her to her inaugural ball and other social events until her death in 2006. He suffered from both prostate cancer and lung cancer in his final years, and on May 8, 2009, died at St. David's Hospital in Austin, of complications from lung cancer. He is buried next to Ann Richards in the Texas State Cemetery.

Monument Hill
Texas State Cemetery
Austin

COORDINATES

30° 15.934, -097° 43.614