All over the country
folks made fun of her name.
And said she had a
twin sister, name of Yura.
Ima Hogg.
But they never made
fun of her in Houston. In Houston she was a cultural leader, a
patron of the arts and generous contributor to good causes. All
over the state she was known as "The First Lady of Texas." And
we called her Miss Ima. And she never had a twin sister named
Yura, or any sister at all. She had three brothers and her daddy
was Big Jim Hogg, a governor of Texas. How big was Jim Hogg? O.
Henry, who once worked for the Houston Post, said "he was about
the size of two butchers" and back in those days it took a big
man to cut a cow up into steaks and chops.
Her name was not a
cruel, quirky joke of her father’s. She was named after the heroine
of an epic poem by his brother, Thomas Hogg. And she never raised
any little Hoggs. Miss Ima’s young fiancé’’ was killed
in World War I and she never married.
She was born in the
little Texas town of Mineola in 1882. Nine years later she was
living in the Texas Governor’s Mansion in Austin, the state capital.
She moved out with the rest of her family in 1895 when her father’s
second term ended. After attending the University of Texas she
moved to New York to study music.
Ima continued piano
studies in New York and Germany and in 1909 moved to Houston to
teach. She helped organize the Houston Symphony Society in 1913
and was its second president, from 1917 to 1921. Maybe it was
then they stated calling her Miss Ima instead of Miss Hogg. I
know when I started working for the Houston Post in late 1939
that’s how she was referred to in newspaper stories. I was in
the entertainment department and got free tickets to Houston Symphony
concerts and other events. Miss Ima was always there, graciously
holding court, like royalty.
Not just because she
was rich, which she was. In 1918 her family had developed an oilfield
on their property south of Houston. Miss Ima was a philanthropist
as well as a social leader. Among other things, she endowed the
Houston Child Guidance Center, which must have been a pioneer
in the field of child psychology. She was on the Houston School
Board from 1943 until 1949 and she was president of the Houston
Symphony Society from 1946 until 1956. In 1948 she became the
first woman president of the Philosophical Society of Texas (you
probably didn’t know they had philosophers as well as cowboys
in Texas and that some of the cowboys were philosophers) and still
had time to help out the Welfare Association, Daughters of the
Republic of Texas and The Texas State Historical Association.
She went national in
1960, when President Eisenhower appointed her to the advisory
committee of the National Cultural Center in Washington, DC. precursor
to the Kennedy Center For the Performing Arts. Two years later,
Jackie Kennedy appointed Miss Ima an advisor to the White House
Fine Arts committee.
Honors and philanthropies
kept piling up.
She was the first woman
to receive the University of Texas Distinguished Alumnus Award,
she was honored at the annual awards banquet of the National Trust
For Historic Preservation and won the Louise du Pont Crowninshield
Award. She gave the State of Texas the land and buildings for
what later became the Winedale
Museum (an outdoor museum and study center) supported the
Houston Museum of Fine Arts donating, among other things, Bayou
Bend, her 15-acre estate.
Bayou Bend was on of
the six sites in Houston on the Azalea Trail, which thousands
of Houstonians visited every March. I never took the Azalea Trail
but Dody and her sister did. Bayou Bend is actually located in
a bend of Buffalo Bayou, the largest of the many bayous running
through the city. (Braes Bayou, the one I used to skinny dip in
when I was a kid, is lined with cement now and looks man-made.)
When Bayou Bend was built in the 'twenties it cost $217,000, which
would be many millions in today's money. It was pink stucco with
a copper roof. Over the years she filled it with costly antique
furniture (her first purchase was an eighteenth-century American
Queen Anne armchair), paintings and artifacts. And then she gave
it to Houston Museum of Fine Arts, which converted it into a museum.
It is now listed in the National register of Historic Places.
Miss Ima died in 1975,
93 and still on the go. While visiting London.
Miss Ima left most
of her considerable estate to the Ima Hogg Endowment which supports
children’s mental health services in the greater Houston area.
And no one in Houston
laughs when they hear that name.
David Westheimer lives
with his wife of 57 years, Dody, in the same Los Angeles apartment
they moved into from Houston, Texas 40 years ago. Their son, Fred,
is a Senior Vice-President at the William Morris Agency and his
younger brother, Eric, is a veterinarian. Succeeding generations
include five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. As a journalist,
David worked for Oveta Culp Hobby. At 83, David Westheimer continues
to write, and not just for Senior Women. His latest effort, "The
Great Wounded Bird", his recollections of World War II, winner
of the Texas Review 1999 poetry prize, was published this year
by Texas Review Press and may be ordered from Amazon Books, where
it is 1,458,159th on their sales list, from Barnes & Noble and
Borders Books. He is a novelist and a retired Air Force Officer.
He can be reached for a repertoire of feigned curmudgeonly remarks
at: DWestheime@aol.com.
