I’m closing out my series on Sparkman/Hillcrest’s mausoleum with a study of the many examples of stained glass they have. So this post will be more pictures than words.

I would like to add that from what I’m able to tell, the mausoleum was built in the early 1940s. Not the 1960s as the woman who answered the phone at Sparkman/Hillcrest told me a few weeks ago. It’s possible the Sparkman family built onto what was already there in the 60s.

Some of them were created specifically for families, like these.

This glass was created for Corda William Boller, who lived from 1882 to 1944 and was a successful oil operator. The Boller family owns a niche at Sparkman/Hillcrest.

Dr. William Samuell was a prominent Dallas surgeon who lived from 1878 to 1937. According to Find a Grave, Dr. Samuell was first interred at Oakland Cemetery in Dallas. Later, his remains were moved to Sparkman/Hillcrest.

Insurance salesman William Jerome Hayes was only 33 when he died in 1955 from a heart problem. His stained glass window features a familiar Bible reference to the Good Shepherd.

Some of the stained glass is decidedly religious in theme. This one features the “Agony of Gethsemane” the night before the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Jesus prays while his disciples sleep in the Garden of Gethsemane.

This panel depicting the parable of the Good Samaritan also features four artistic subjects in the corners: music, painting, sculpture, and writing.

The grandest example of stained glass work is located as you come in the main entrance of the mausoleum in the George family memorial room against the back wall.

The stained glass was created to honor the life of Sudie Hancock George. A native of Kentucky born in 1857, her journey to Dallas was a circuitous one but when she did arrive, she made quite a mark.

Life of Sudie George

Sudie, who was related to Declaration of Independence signer John Hancock, married Henry George in 1882 in Louisville, Ky. At that time, he was a banker and a sheriff.  Together, they had four children (two sons and two daughters). They later moved to Jennings, La.

Henry died not long after the move. Sudie and her children remained there operating a sugar and rice plantation before moving to Houston, Texas in 1908 and then on to Dallas in 1916. Sudie got involved in local organizations and joined the First Presbyterian Church of Dallas.

Sudie’s son Robert Bohannon “Dick” George prospered, making his fortune in Caterpillar heavy equipment dealerships. He was deeply devoted to Sudie as well. He tried to recreate much of the atmosphere of their Kentucky home in a place called Glad Acres for the family residence. He never married and had no children. Dick, Cleo (Sudie’s youngest daughter), and Sudie all lived at Glad Acres.

Like his mother, Dick was involved in many charitable causes. The principal interest in his life was helping sick and disabled children. He was president of the executive board of Children’s Hospital of Dallas. In 1961, the hospital was renamed the R. B. George and Miss Cleo George Memorial Hospital for his service to generations of sick children.

When Sudie died in 1942 at the age of 85, R.B. and other family members gave $100,000 for the construction of a chapel in her memory at the First Presbyterian Church. It is used today for weddings, concerts, and other special events.

Sudie was entombed in the Hillcrest Mausoleum. According to a source, Dick saw to it that every day a lily was placed on her sarcophagus. In his will, he set up two $50,000 trusts. Three fourths of the income from the first trust was to be used to provide flowers weekly for the family tomb and the remaining one fourth was to be used for the upkeep of Hillcrest. The other $50,000 trust fund was set up for the Sudie George Memorial Chapel’s upkeep and operation.

Dick George died at the age of 71 in 1956. He is entombed in the George family memorial room with his mother. Cleo, who married later that year to Morton McClure, died in 1991. But I couldn’t find where she is buried.

I don’t know who created the stained glass for the George family memorial room but it is quite a sight to behold.

There are a wide variety of styles of stained glass in the mausoleum. This one has a pane cut out of it for an air conditioning unit, which is rather sad to me to see.

There’s also a number of more modern looking pieces as well.

I like this one of the two deer.

This one has a lot of blues and violets in it.

This is just a sampling of what we saw the day we visited. There’s so much more I could share with you but it would overwhelm you.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this visit to Sparkman/Hillcrest Memorial Park. If you’re ever in Dallas, you should definitely take the time to visit. Make sure to save some time for the mausoleum, the treasures there are worth the time.

 

 

The moment you’ve been waiting for is here! I’m going INSIDE the mausoleum at Sparkman/Hillcrest Memorial Park. This post is longer than usual but trust me, it’s worth it.

I wish I could tell you exactly when the mausoleum was built, who the architect was, and an estimate on how many people are entombed within it, but I don’t know. When I called to ask, the woman who answered the phone could only say she knew it was built in the early 1960s and didn’t know who the architect was. That was it.

 

Once you walk inside, it can feel a bit overwhelming. The main entrance opens into a high-ceilinged hall.

With one long main hall, the mausoleum has a gazillion smaller halls that extend off of it. The only other person we saw the entire time we were there was a member of the cleaning crew who was mopping the floor. Otherwise, it was eerily quiet.

Fortunately, I knew where to go in order to find the first person I was looking for. We were just two of the scores of people who take the same route to the Saint Mathew hall to visit his final resting place.

Birth of a Baseball Legend

Born on Oct. 20, 1931 in Spavinaw, Okla., Mickey “The Mick” Charles Mantle would become a beloved yet controversial figure in American baseball. A man of humble origins, Mantle’s prowess on the ball field wowed millions. Some consider him the greatest switch hitter in baseball history. At the same time, his personal life included much turmoil.

Mantle began his professional baseball career in Kansas with the semi-professional Baxter Springs Whiz Kids. After graduating from high school, Mantle signed a minor league contract and was assigned to the Yankees’ Class-D Independence Yankees of the Kansas–Oklahoma–Missouri League, where he played shortstop.

Mantle was invited to the Yankees instructional camp before the 1951 season, becoming a right fielder. In the second game of the 1951 World Series, he was injured while racing for a ball and tripped over an exposed drain pipe. This was the first of numerous injuries that plagued his 18-year career with the Yankees, playing the rest of his career with a torn ACL in an era when such surgeries to repair them weren’t done the way they are routinely done now.

“Favorite Summer”

Over the next years, Mantle’s star would rise as a Yankee, the only MLB team he ever played for. He had his breakout season in 1956, which he described as his “favorite summer.” He had a major league-leading .353 batting average, 52 home runs, and 130 runs batted in (RBIs). He brought home both the Triple Crown and first of three MLB Most Valuable Player Awards.

On January 16, 1961, Mantle became the highest-paid player in baseball by signing a $75,000 (equivalent to $640,000 in 2019) contract.

Mantle announced his retirement at the age of 37 on March 1, 1969. He gave a farewell speech on Mickey Mantle Day, which was June 8, 1969, in Yankee Stadium.

Personal Struggles

Mantle married Merlyn Johnson in Oklahoma in 1951 and together they had four sons. While the media did not report on his many affairs at the time, Mantle was notorious for his dalliances. He was also an alcoholic, an affliction shared by his wife and three of his sons.

After Merlyn and his sons sought treatment, they urged Mantle to do the same. He checked into the Betty Ford Clinic on January 7, 1994. Although he received a liver transplant at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, on June 8, 1995, Mantle died on August 13, 1995. He was 63 years old. Despite the fact he and Merlyn had been estranged for years, they never divorced and she was with him at the end.

Two of Mantle’s sons are also entombed with him and Merlyn, who died in 2009 at the age of 77. Billy Mantle, who suffered from Hodgkin’s Disease, died at the age of 34 in 1996. Mickey Jr. died in 2000 at the age of 47.

Mantle’s tomb is located in the only area in the entire mausoleum that is fully air conditioned, which appears to be a more modern section. All I know is that it was a welcome relief after the rather stagnant air in the rest of the building.

Located in the same blessedly cool air as Mantle is the tomb of another well-known person but her distinction is not from baseball. However, I’m sure the founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics had to keep cool under pressure while making her company world famous.

A Start in Sales

Mary Kathlyn (Mary Kay) Wagner was born in Hot Wells, Texas in 1918 to  Edward Alexander and Lula Vember Hastings Wagner. At 17, Mary Kay married Ben Rogers and they had three children. While Ben served in World War II, she got her first taste of the arena she would eventually master when she sold books door-to-door.

After her husband’s return in 1945, they divorced. Over the next two decades, she worked in sales. Irritated when passed over for a promotion in favor of a man that she had trained, Mary Kay retired in 1963. She wrote up a business plan for her ideal company, and in the summer of 1963, Mary Kay and her new husband, George Hellenbeck, planned to start Mary Kay Cosmetics.

However, one month before Mary Kay and George started Beauty by Mary Kay, as the company was then called, George died of a heart attack. A month after George’s death, with a $5,000 investment from her oldest son, she started Mary Kay Cosmetics. She copied the same “house party” model used by Stanley (who she had worked for), Tupperware, and others. It was a tremendous success.

Going Public

In 1968, Mary Kay married Melville Ash. That same year, she and her partners took the multi-level marketing company public. In 1985, the company’s board decided to take the company private again. Ash remained active in Mary Kay Cosmetics, Inc. until suffering a stroke in 1996.

As many know, Mary Kay Ash loved the color pink and it was a key theme in her company, from the product packaging to the Cadillacs she gave away to top-earning consultants each year.

Son Richard Rogers was named CEO of Mary Kay Cosmetics, Inc. in 2001. At the time of Ash’s death in 2001, Mary Kay Cosmetics had over 800,000 representatives in 37 countries, with total annual sales over $200 million. As of 2014, Mary Kay Cosmetics had more than 3 million consultants worldwide and wholesale volume in excess of three billion.

Another trailblazing woman is entombed in Sparkman/Hillcrest’s mausoleum, paving the way for other women in a male-dominated career field. But most people only know her from a photograph of the back of her head.

Blazing a Judicial Trail

Born in 1896 in Baltimore, Md., Sarah Augusta Tilghman (later Hughes) stood only five feet one inches tall. But Hughes let nothing get in her way, be it academics or excelling in sports. After graduating from Western High School, she attended Goucher College, an all women’s college in central Baltimore.

Hughes taught science at Salem Academy in North Carolina for several years. In 1919, she moved to Washington, D.C. to attend The George Washington University Law School. She went to classes at night and during the day, worked as a police officer. Amazingly, she lived in a tent home near the Potomac River and commuted to the campus by canoe each evening. She graduated in 1922.

Hughes moved to Dallas in 1922 with her husband, George Ernest Hughes, whom she met in law school. While George quickly found employment, Sarah struggled since law firms generally did not regard women as qualified at the time. The small firm of Priest, Herndon, and Ledbetter gave her a rent-free space and referred some cases to her in exchange for her services as a receptionist.

The First of Many Firsts

But Hughes was preparing for broader horizons. After practicing law for eight years in Dallas, she got involved in politics, first being elected in 1930 to three terms in the Texas House of Representatives as a Democrat. In 1935, Hughes accepted an appointment as a state judge from Governor James Allred for the Fourteenth District Court in Dallas. In doing so, she became the state’s first female district judge. In 1936, she was elected to the same post. She was re-elected six more times and remained in that post until 1961.

Judge Hughes received a recess appointment from President John F. Kennedy on October 5, 1961 to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas to a new seat. She was nominated to the same position by President Kennedy on January 15, 1962. She was the only female judge appointed by President Kennedy, the first female federal judge in Texas, and the third female to serve in the federal judiciary.

It almost didn’t happen. Her friendship with Vice President Lyndon Johnson helped, having campaigned for him in the past. At age 65, many (including Kennedy and his brother, Robert) thought Judge Hughes was too old for the job.

On Nov. 22, 1963, Judge Hughes was thrown fully into the spotlight when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Amid the ensuing chaos, she was summoned to administer the oath of office to Vice President Johnson, who chose her for the task. Hughes was driven to Love Field, while Air Force One was held up just for her.

In the photo above, you can only see the back of Judge Hughes’ head. But to me, this photo taken by Cecil W. Stoughton has always been a powerful picture of what took place on that terrible day. In that horrible moment, Hughes became the only woman to swear in a president – and the only Texan.

Hughes retired from the active federal bench in 1975, although she continued to work as a judge with senior status until 1982. She remained a close friend of Lyndon Johnson and his family, participating in his inauguration in 1965 and in the dedication of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum.

In 1982, Hughes suffered a debilitating stroke which confined her to a nursing home in Dallas. She died three years later on April 23, 1985. But she will never be forgotten for pushing forward into a world where she was often told “no” with her intelligence, determination, and talent.

Next time, I’ll be showing off some of the amazing stained glass at Sparkman/Hillcrest’s mausoleum in Part IV.

I’m still outside at Sparkman/Hillcrest Memorial Park in Dallas, Texas. Not in the mausoleum yet. I’ll go in there in Part III. There’s still a few stops I need to make outside.

Sparkman/Hillcress has dozens of little grottoes surrounded by shrubbery that contain family plots, enabling a sense of privacy. I imagine these are comparably more expensive as well.

One of these grottoes contains the grave of a famous actress whom I had not expected to encounter in a Dallas cemetery when I did my initial research. I’m speaking of British-born actress Greer Garson.

Late Start to a Dazzling Career

Born on Sept. 29, 1904 in Manor Park, England, Eileen Evelyn Greer Garson was the only child of Nina Greer Garson and George Garson. The name Greer is a contraction of MacGregor, another family name. She attended King’s College in London and did post-graduate studies at the University of Grenoble in France where she earned degrees in French and 18th-century literature.

I was surprised to learn that due to her devotion to her studies, Garson’s acting experiences didn’t come until her late 20s. Her early professional appearances were on stage, starting at the Birmingham Repertory Theater in January 1932, when she was 27 years old.

Garson was signed to a contract with MGM in 1937, but didn’t start work on her first film, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, until late 1938. She received her first Oscar nomination for the role but lost to Vivien Leigh for Gone with the Wind.  She received critical acclaim the next year for her role as Elizabeth Bennett in the 1940 film Pride and Prejudice.

Garson received a record seven Academy Award nominations and starred in six Best Picture nominees, most often paired with actor Walter Pidgeon. She is best known for the 1942 movie for which she won her only Academy Award, Mrs. Miniver. Her acceptance speech clocked in at five minutes and 30 seconds, the longest Oscar acceptance speech according to the Guinness Book of World Records and led to the Academy instilling a time limit.

Third Time’s the Charm

Garson was married three times. Actor Peter Lawford introduced Garson to her third husband, millionaire Texas oilman and horse breeder E.E. “Buddy” Fogelson, when she was starring with Lawford in the 1948 movie Julia Misbehaves. The couple married in 1949.

After her MGM contract expired in 1954, Garson only made a handful of films. In 1967, the couple retired to their Forked Lightning Ranch in New Mexico. They purchased the U.S. Hall of Fame champion thoroughbred Ack Ack from the estate of Harry F. Guggenheim in 1971 and were successful as breeders.

The Fogelsons maintained a home in Dallas, where Garson funded the Greer Garson Theater facility at Southern Methodist University (SMU). She founded a permanent endowment for the Fogelson Honors Forum at Texas Christian University (TCU), Buddy’s alma mater, in nearby Fort Worth.

Buddy passed away in 1987 after suffering from Parkinson’s Disease for five years. Garson lived her final years in a penthouse suite at the Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas, where she died from heart failure on April 6, 1996 at the age of 91.

Located near the front of the Sparkman/Hillcrest mausoleum is a small unpretentious marker you might not normally notice. But the man it was made for had a place in Dallas history not once but twice.

Henry Menasco Wade, one of 11 children, was born outside Dallas on Nov. 11, 1914. Shortly after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin in 1939, Wade joined the FBI as a special agent investigating espionage cases along the East Coast and in South America. During World War II, Wade served in the U.S. Navy, taking part in the invasions of the Philippines and Okinawa.

Man of the Court

In 1947, Wade joined the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office. He won election to the top job only four years later, a position he would hold for 36 years until his retirement in 1987. But it was in 1964 that he was thrust into the spotlight after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated just blocks from Wade’s office in the Dallas County Courthouse.

Wade lost the opportunity to try Lee Harvey Oswald for Kennedy’s murder when nightclub operator Jack Ruby shot Oswald only two days later. But Wade became known nationally for prosecuting Ruby for Oswald’s murder. Wade closely supervised the Ruby trial but appointed his assistan William Alexander to conduct the courtroom proceedings.

Wade and Alexander confronted Ruby’s lawyers, famed trial lawyer Melvin Belli and Texas counsellor Joe Tonahill, in a lengthy trial that concluded on March 14, 1964, with a verdict for Ruby of “guilty of murder with malice.”

The Wade in Roe v. Wade

Wade, as Dallas County District Attorney, was the named defendant when attorneys Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee mounted a 1970 constitutional challenge to the Texas criminal statutes prohibiting doctors from performing abortions. Norma McCorvey (“Jane Roe”), a single woman, was signed up as the representative plaintiff.

The challenge sought both a declaratory judgment that the Texas criminal abortion statutes were unconstitutional on their face and an injunction restraining the defendant from enforcing the statutes. The lower court refused to grant Roe’s desired injunction but declared the criminal abortion statutes were void.

Both sides cross-appealed. The case worked its way through the appellate process, culminating in the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal in the United States.

Despite the loss of Roe v. Wade, Wade’s political career did not suffer. He continued to serve in office for an additional 14 years. In 1995, the Henry Wade Juvenile Justice Center was named in his honor. In 2000, shortly before his death from Parkinson’s Disease, Texas Lawyer magazine named him as one of the most influential lawyers of the 20th century.

The last person I’m going to feature outside at Sparkman/Hillcrest has a name you’re likely already familiar with but not the person behind it.

Man With a Sparkle

Born on September 5, 1901 in Shereshov, Russia, Morris Bernard Zale came to America as a child in 1908. In 1910, the family settled in Fort Worth, Texas. Due to financial difficulties, Zale dropped out of school following completion of the seventh grade.

Zale was introduced to the jewelry business by his uncle, Sam Kruger. In 1920, Zale managed Kruger Jewelry Store in Burkburnett before opening his own business in Graham in 1922. Two years later, Zale rejoined his uncle’s store in Wichita Falls, Texas. He became a partner with his uncle in the Zale Jewelry Corporation in 1924, opening the first Zales store at the corner of Eighth and Ohio.

In 1925, Zale married Edna Lipshy. He and his brother-in-law Ben built the business together. They decided to go against the popular cash-only policy of jewelry retailing, offering credit to working-class customers and allowing payment in installments.

Following World War II, massive expansion took place, ultimately making Zales the world’s largest retail jeweler. Zales Jewelers moved its headquarters from Wichita Falls to Dallas in 1946. In 1957, Zales Jewelers opened its first store in a shopping center, a major shift from operating only in downtown locations.

Morris Zale was also known for his philanthropy, financing an orphanage for young war victims in 1947 in Europe and supporting it for four decades. He started the Zale Foundation in 1951, which supported numerous charities and educational activities.

Zale gave up the company presidency to his brother-in-law Ben Lipshy in 1957 but continued to serve as chairman of the board of directors. Zale retired as chairman of the company in 1971.

Zale died on March 8, 1995 at the age of 93 due to complications from pneumonia. Edna passed away on Dec. 28, 1996 from bone cancer. Although she was very active in charitable activities, she preferred to let her husband and son, Donald, have the spotlight.

The Zales are buried beside their son Herschel, who died at the age of three in 1930 from a childhood illness.

Next time, I’ll be in the mausoleum at Sparkman/Hillcrest.