RAYMOND HILL: Good Morning

Tape A Side 1 SARAH CANBY JACKSON: This is Sarah Canby Jackson with the Harris County Archives Oral History Program, January 24, 2008. I am interviewing Raymond Hill in Houston, Texas, concerning his knowledge of the Juvenile Probation Department, Judge Robert Lowry, Harris County politics and government and anything else he would like to add. Good morning, Raymond. RAYMOND HILL: Good morning. SARAH CANBY JACKSON: First of all, tell me about your parents.1 RAYMOND HILL: It’s hard for me to do that because it’s hard for anybody to believe a person could have parents as good as mine. I’ve been in a number of groups where the groups had to make disclosures about, you know, their parents and their childhood. I tell mine and they say, “What you really need is a reality check,” and “You couldn’t have had it so good.” I’ll just have to ask you to forgive me, they were wonderful. That would be the overarching generalism that I would make. My father and mother, I truly believe, were absolutely honest. I believe they were extraordinarily generous. I believe they were deeply motivated to do the right thing and to extend the blessings of their lives to as many people as they possibly could during their lifetimes. They were not interested in money, as such, or making money and people would ask, “Well, why did your Dad do this or your Mother do that?” always looking for some sort of an advantage. The fact is that 1 George A. Hill, Jr. and Mary Van den Berge Hill 1 my mother and my father did countless acts of extraordinary community service and in almost every case, and maybe in every case, they were invited to do that. They didn’t thrust themselves into any position. They never campaigned to be made chairman of anything or to get on a particular board or anything like that, which I see so much of today. People came to them asking them, “Would you kindly consider doing this or doing that for the community?” It was pretty much understood that when you got the group together that they were going to say, “Mary Hill, we would like you to be the chairman or George Hill, we would like for you to be the chairman.” And, that’s the way it was in all of the activities, the extraordinary activities of the lives of both of them. They were good to me. Daddy’s probably only failing that I can think of is that when I asked him to help me with my Latin, he just promptly translated it all for me and when I asked him to help me with an essay, he’d dictate and I thought he was kind of wonderful. Looking back at it, I just adore the memory of it. But he was so knowledgeable in any field and every field. We were sitting one day, just for example, in my brother George’s room. He had suffered from polio and had lost the use of his legs and was recovering. In the process of recovering, he needed to get flexibility in his hands and so they said, “Why don’t you take guitar lessons?” Well, he proved to be an extraordinary student. And so we are all up there in my brother’s room -- my brother, Ray Cruse, and Charlie Sheppard and others - - picking away at mandolins and guitars and my Dad walks in and he says, “What are you boys doing?” 2 “We’re just picking out a little music, Dad.” “Let me see that mandolin.” He picks that up and tinkles with it a little bit and said, “Do you all know jarabe tapatio?” which is an extremely intricate and fast thing. My brother George said, “Well, we think we can do that.” “Well, let’s go.” My dad just picks that mandolin like he had been playing the mandolin all his life; none of us knew that he had ever seen a mandolin. He was always surprising us like that. Forgive that little diversion. Mother and my father and our entourage which included a number of visiting guests, all sat down one day in Cuernavaca. We had a guy named Hank Gardner, a young Yale graduate, who was going to jumpstart my brother to go to Hotchkiss and teach him a lot of Latin and French and some advanced Math and whatnot. At Hank’s suggestion, we2 Cuernavaca, Mexico. L to R: Roger Martin, George A. Hill, III, George all decided we A. Hill, Jr., Raymond Hill, Frank C. Smith, Brownie Baker, Hank Gardner. 1937 were going to 2 Thad and Palmer Hutcheson, Billie Carter, Robert Martin, Vessey Rainwater, Frank Smith and Ed Andrews were in and out. On this day there were seven or eight of us. [Information added later]. 3 do portraits of each other. To me, that was a total mystery. I couldn’t play in that game at all, but my brother and sister and mother and father all did very, I thought, credible portraits of each other. And Hank Gardner, who was supposed to be teaching us all this stuff and was supposed to be an accomplished artist, his wouldn’t compare with the spontaneous products of the family members. I was astounded and further pressed back in a way which was how in the world could I compete with this bunch of people? Is little brother ever going to get to be big brother? Can I ever do what my brother and my sister can do, you know, and my mother and my father? But, anyway, I don’t know how to say it other than to say my feeling about them is just boundless in admiration and awe. They were easy to know. A stranger could sit down with them and have the feeling of long standing relationship in an hour’s time. They were not haughty, they didn’t shout their skills. Daddy graduated from the University of Texas Law School at age nineteen. JACKSON: He graduated from law school or undergraduate? HILL: Law school, after being editor of The Texan. At that time, and I don’t know about today, he was the youngest person to have ever graduated from the University of Texas Law School; and he did it with all the undergraduate credits that one should have. It’s not surprising because the rest of his life is very much like that. He died at fifty-seven and to tell his story, what he accomplished before fifty-seven, most people that live to be eighty-five and retain all their faculties are not able to accomplish what my father accomplished. 4 He was internationally known and respected in many fields, not one or two fields. As Randolph Bryan, Sr., who was Chairman of the Bank of the Southwest, remarked, and he was one of my father’s closest friends, he said, “George Hill, Jr. was the only great genius I’ve ever known that was also a very likeable, sensible, loveable person.” Daddy did have all of those characteristics, and he was, lots of times, I think, topped by my mother. She had gone to Sophie Newcomb, was an accomplished artist and studied architecture, but she had organizational skills and perceptive abilities. Mother was a person who very quietly in the background made little suggestions, but people would stop, listen, and take note and the little suggestion would become the next day’s action. There are so many people in Houston who have been placed in very prominent positions on boards and committees and whatnot who are there by the quiet suggestion of my mother. She saw through people, she’d say to my father, “Now, George,” and some of the ways she’d say it would be sorta funny, maybe she believed a little bit in phrenology, “Now that man’s eyes are too close together, I don’t know, George, I’d be a little bit concerned about him.” She didn’t really mean the measurement of the space between the person’s eyes. There was another narrowness that made it self-evident that she picked up on. I don’t want to name names, but her insights were enormously valuable through the years. Particularly in terms of people that she admired and respected, I can remember one of her suggestions that nobody picked up on after my father died. She said, “You know, Morgan Davis, he’d be a good man to be the president of Houston Oil Company.” Well, I don’t know whether he would have considered it 5 or not but he would have been an excellent man to be the president of Houston Oil Company. It wouldn’t have been sold in the way it was and many things would have happened that did not happen. JACKSON: Well, let’s stop here a minute and go back and tell me about what your father did for a living and place him within Houston and its society. HILL: Well, when Daddy came to Houston and married my mother, before he married her, he spoke to my grandfather. My grandfather looked at him and said, “Well, maybe you’ll do.” I think he counseled with my mother a little bit and said, “You know, one of these ranchers in Victoria might really make a good husband for you.” This young lawyer, in Houston and all, he didn’t see it as a great boon or pearl. JACKSON: When were they married? HILL: Let’s see.

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