Denton Arthur Cooley (1920-2016)

    Denton Cooley was born August 22, 1920 in Houston and graduated in 1941 from the University of Texas at Austin (UT), where he was a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity and majored in zoology. He became interested in surgery through several pre-medical classes he attended in college and began his medical education at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. He completed his medical degree and his surgical training at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, where he also completed his internship. At Johns Hopkins, he worked with Dr. Alfred Blalock and assisted in the first "Blue Baby" procedure to correct an infant's congenital heart defect.

    In 1946 Cooley was called to active duty with the Army Medical Corps. There, he served as chief of surgical services at the station hospital in Linz, Austria, and was discharged in 1948 with the rank of captain. He then returned to complete his residency at Johns Hopkins and remained as an instructor in surgery. In 1950 he went to London to work with Russell Brock. In the 1950s Cooley returned to Houston to become associate professor of surgery at Baylor College of Medicine and to work at its affiliate institution, The Methodist Hospital. During the 1950s, Cooley began working with American cardiac surgeon, scientist, and medical educator Michael E. DeBakey. During that time he worked on developing a new method of removing aortic aneurysms, the bulging weak spots that may develop in the wall of the artery. In 1960, Cooley moved his practice to St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital while continuing to teach at Baylor. In 1962 he founded The Texas Heart Institute with private funds and, following a dispute with DeBakey, he resigned his position at Baylor in 1969. He and his colleagues worked on developing new artificial heart valves from 1962 to 1967; during that period, mortality for heart valve transplants fell from 70% to 8%. In 1969, he became the first heart surgeon to implant an artificial heart designed by Domingo Liotta in a man, Haskell Karp, who lived for 65 hours. The next year, in 1970, "he performed the first implantation of an artificial heart in a human when no heart replacement was immediately available."

    On March 13, 1972, the Denton A. Cooley Cardiovascular Surgical Society was founded at the Texas Heart Institute by the Residents and Fellows of Cooley to honor him. Founding President Philip S. Chua had envisioned this exclusive society to foster academic, professional and personal camaraderie among cardiac surgeons in the United States and around the world through scientific seminars and symposia. There are now more than 900 cardiac surgeons from more than 50 countries around the globe who are members of the Denton A. Cooley Cardiovascular Surgical Society. In the HBO film Something the Lord Made, Cooley was portrayed by Timothy J. Scanlin. Cooley filed for bankruptcy in 1988, citing real estate debts during a market downturn. Cooley and the heart surgeon Michael E. DeBakey had a professional rivalry that lasted more than 40 years. They made amends in a public rapprochement on November 7, 2007, when DeBakey was 99 years old (Cooley was 87). He died on November 18, 2016, at the age of 96. Source

Section E-2

Glenwood Cemetery

Houston

COORDINATES

29° 76.451, -095° 38.641

Andrew Jackson Hamilton (1815-1875)

    Andrew Jackson Hamilton, governor of Texas, son of James and Jane (Bayless) Hamilton, was born in Huntsville, Alabama, on January 28, 1815. He was educated and admitted to the bar in Alabama. Late in 1846 he joined his older brother, Morgan, in Texas. He practiced law in La Grange, Fayette County, for three years, then moved to Austin. His marriage to Mary Bowen, also of Alabama, produced two sons and four daughters. Hamilton's political career began in 1849, when Gov. Peter H. Bell appointed him acting attorney general. He also represented Travis County for a single term (1851-53) in the state House of Representatives. By the 1850s he had become a member of the "Opposition Clique" in Texas, a faction of the regular Democratic party that opposed secession, reopening the slave trade, and other Southern extremist demands. As such, in 1859 Hamilton won election to the United States Congress from the Western District of Texas. 

    He served on the House committee formed during the secession winter of 1860-61 to try to solve the sectional crisis. When he returned to Texas in the spring of 1861 he won a special election to the state Senate, and he remained in Austin until July 1862, when alleged plots against his life forced him to flee to Mexico. Hamilton became a hero in the North and delivered speeches in New York, Boston, and other Northern cities. His rhetorical targets included slavery, disunionists, and the "slave power," which he believed was trying to subvert democracy and the rights of non-slaveowners. After he met with President Abraham Lincoln in November 1862, he accepted a commission as brigadier general of volunteers and an appointment as military governor of Texas. Hamilton accompanied an unsuccessful federal expedition into South Texas in late 1863 and spent most of the rest of the war in New Orleans, where his family joined him late in 1864. 

    His career during Reconstruction was stormy and frustrating. As provisional governor from the summer of 1865 to the summer of 1866, he pursued a program of trying to limit officeholders to former Unionists, ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and granting economic and legal rights (although not the vote) to freedmen. When the Constitutional Convention of 1866 refused to enact most of Hamilton's suggestions, he rejected presidential Reconstruction and promoted the harsher program of the Radical Republicans. He endorsed black suffrage and helped organize the Southern Loyalists' Convention in Philadelphia in September 1866. For a time he served as a bankruptcy judge in New Orleans, but in 1867 he returned to Texas as an associate justice on the state Supreme Court. 

    Hamilton played a leading role in the Texas Constitutional Convention of 1868-69 and served on the Republican National Executive Committee. His political views changed again, however; he once again came to favor a quick reconstruction of Texas. He opposed the Radicals' scheme for turning West Texas into a separate, Unionist state and withdrew his support for black suffrage. As a result, although his brother Morgan C. Hamilton was a leading Radical spokesman and United States senator, Hamilton became one of the state's leading moderate Republicans and ran against Radical Edmund J. Davis in the 1869 governor's race. Davis won, but Hamilton remained a vocal opponent of Radical policies. Hamilton never sought public office after this defeat. In 1871 he was a leader in the Tax-Payers' Convention. He practiced law and worked on his farm near Austin. He died of tuberculosis on April 11, 1875, and was buried in Oakwood Cemetery, Austin. Source

Section 1
Oakwood Cemetery
Austin

COORDINATES

30° 16.548 -097° 43.628

Robert Hugh "Pete" McClanahan (1906-1987)

    Pete McClanahan was born in Coldspring, Texas on October 24, 1906. He began his baseball career in 1927, as pinch hitter for the Palestine Pals of the Lone Star League. In 1929, he was traded to the Shreveport Sports in the Texas League, then traded again in 1931 to the Fort Worth Panthers. He was given his major league shot on April 24, 1931, for the Pittsburgh Pirates, but after only seven games he was sent back down to the minors. In 1933, he played for the Henderson Oilers of the Dixie League before retiring for the sport entirely. McClanahan died at his home in Mont Belvieu on October 28, 1987 and buried in Coldspring.

Oakwood Cemetery
Coldspring

COORDINATES

30° 36.118, -095° 07.916

Jacob Maybee (?-1838)

    As is often the case with early Texas settlers, little is known of Jacob Maybee's history; nearly everything is from his initial military papers. He came to Texas in 1835, and sometime afterward enlisted in Captain William S. Fisher's Company of "Velasco Blues." He was discharged on June 22, 1836 and made his way to Houston, where he settled. It was there that he died on February 8, 1838, and buried in the City Cemetery, now Founders Memorial Park.

Note: This is a cenotaph. 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.


Founders Memorial Park
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 45.437, -095° 22.728