Birth
Lee, was born at Lufkin in the Piney Woods area of East Texas and grew up an only child on a farm 8 miles south of Lufkin near the tiny town of Burke (you know the kind of place -- both city limits markers on the same post),
which is near Diboll, which is 8 miles south of Lufkin, which is 120 miles north of Houston (that's about as clear as the water in an East Texas cattle tank after a spring thunderstorm, huh?).
Burke was a town past its prime. Formerly a railroad stop on the Southern Pacific Railroad, the trains raced nonstop right on past the Burke Post Office, where Miss Ina McCall was the postmistress for many years. The post office was the location of the only telephone in the area for a time. The same fate befell Uncle Bob Weisinger's Gulf Station when new Highway 59 was built leaving him stranded on old Texas 34, now known locally as the "Old Diboll Highway", which actually went right on past Diboll to Houston..
Parents
Lee's father was Elroy Murrah, whose parents were Virgil and Hester Forsythe Murrah. As a young man he was never far from his guitar; and, like many other country boys of his time and place learned to play the guitar from a Sears chord book and sing the songs of Jimmie Rodgers from a wind-up Victrola. Here Elroy appears to be ready to launch into perhaps "T for Texas" for his sisters Alice and Louise (lower) and his brother Hubert. Pretty handsome fellow that Elroy Murrah.
My mother was Ina Gertrude Johnson, named for Miss Ina McCall but known by her middle name. Her parents were Frank and Florence Largent Johnson, who were farmers. Unlike Elroy she had no apparent musical talent and spoke many times of failing to master the piano.
Gertrude was a woman with fierce determination and a desire to advance her family. She had that quality that Texans often call "gumption". Unlike the serious Elroy, she was full of laughter. She spent her life as a farm wife and housewife. Her desire that Lee get an education and not work on a cotton farm or in a sawmill was a decisive factor in his life.
Elroy and Gertrude eloped to Louisiana and were married when she was 16 and he was 21. My grandfather Frank Johnson vowed to kill Elroy for stealing his only daughter, but they eventually made their peace and eventually proclaimed him a good son-in-law.
The adjacent picture shows Elroy and Gertrude as young lovebirds around the time they were married.
Their early life together was hard, and at one time they lived in an abandoned honky tonk in the Hoshall community south of Lufkin. They eked out an existence farming part of the year and working at the box and handle factories at Southern Pine Lumber Company at Diboll, Texas, the rest of the year.
Elroy was eventually drafted into the Army near the end of World War II, and Gertrude followed him through training on the West Coast. It was her first train trip and first trip outside the county, and she often prodly remarked that she had been in 13 states. During this time she worked at a shipyard in Tacoma, Washington and at a munitions depot in Tooele, Utah. Elroy eventually was sent to Japan as part of the occupation forces, and Gertrude went back to Burke for the duration.
After the war Elroy and Gertrude worked as small time tenant farmers until Elroy took a job "public working" as he called it at Natural Gas Pipeline Company. Gertrude stayed home and presided over a huge vegetable garden. She measured her success in life in number of tomato plants set and quarts of beans canned. Not a bad measure of success once you think about it.
Elroy and Gertrude had two children after the war, Bennie Earvin, who was stillborn, and Lee, your author.
Despite never having much money in life, they were very successful. They eventually owned a farm with a nice home, and they sent their son to college, the first college degree in the family.
Their son is grateful for their love, dedication and inspiration. He will never forget them. While their son has been more successful in monetary terms than they could ever have imagined, his success in life will always pale in comparison to theirs.
Wasted Youth
(Cute kid, huh?)
Lee spend his cotton-headed youth traipsing through the woods of East Texas in the 50's in his bare feet, climbing trees, building tree houses, wading creeks, riding his bike down sandy roads, plinking with a BB gun, catching crawdads from the cattle tank, and hitting the baseball over the barn.
Once Lee was sitting on his grandfather's tractor while his father and grandfather worked on a piece of equipment. When he heard one ask the other to back the tractor up, Lee figured he would have it running by the time the got there. Foolishly, his grandfather Johnson had taught him how to engage the starter,and Lee hit the starter just like Paw Paw had instructed him. Little did he know it was in gear (which his grandfather's instructions had not included), and the two-row Farmall took off and went through the sheet metal tractor shed, ripping out the back, smashing a barbed wire fence behind it. By the time his grandfather caught up with the tractor and depressed the clutch, Lee was headed out through his great-grandmother's corn patch. Lee didn't get a scratch, and because everyone was so relieved, not even on his rear end. Lee remembers being very embarrassed as the neighbors ran over to learn what the ruckus was about.
Lee as always a bit bookish, although there were never many books around the house other than Elroy's old textbooks from his "GI school" agricultural courses just after World War II. In his younger years Lee spent Saturday shopping trips to Brookshire Brother Grocery #5 sitting at the magazine rack reading all the free materials. Later at age 12 he discovered the Angelina County Public Library, and every Saturday the folks would drop him off there while they went shopping downtown.
Education
Lee attended Burke School, which only 8 grades and 5 teachers, one of whom was the principal. Lee had the same first grade teacher as his mother, Miss Tennie Havard. Lee had the good fortune to have as teachers a husband wife team, Abby and Jim Travis, she an English teacher and he a math teacher. The combination of their efforts in those specialties had a profound influence on Lee. Lee was kind of an oddity at Burke School and wound up being the valedictorian of a class of 11.Lee went to the "big city," Lufkin to high school, and graduated with honors in 1965. He then headed off to the University of Texas in Austin and graduated in 1970 in electrical engineering. After flunking the draft physical without such drastic measures as staying up all night chain smoking cigars like some apparently did (a bad eye is all it took), and not knowing what else to do, entered UT Law School and graduated in 1973. Shortly thereafter he became a member of the Texas Bar, but don't hold that against him!. Lee doesn't care much for the shenanigans of the big time trial lawyers either! Spilled coffee lawsuits--gimme a break!
Career
Because of his engineering training, Lee had no choice but to become a patent attorney and worked initially for Sun Oil in Dallas and Houston. He next worked at The University of Texas System in Austin and then for a small law firm in Dallas. When the job market bottomed out in Texas,Lee moved to Iowa in 1986 to take a a job with Rockwell International. He didn't want to go to Cedar Rapids, but now he's sure glad he did! Then in 1997 Lee transferred to Meritor Automotive, Inc., a spinoff of Rockwell. Meritor merged with Arvin Industries to become ArvinMeritor, Inc.
