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The FiFTies CourT When Alexander died, Governor Beauford Jester appointed the popular, Bible-teaching John Hickman as chief justice and filled the vacancy on the Court with prominent Houston attorney Wilmer St. John Garwood. Garwood was the scion of an important political family in Bastrop—his father had served in both the state House and Senate—and was representative of a new breed of Texas justice. Impeccably educated at Georgetown University, the University of Texas, and Harvard , Garwood and his generation of more urbane and scholarly jurists began to shift the perception of the Texas Supreme Court away from its uniquely colorful heritage. Chief Justice Hickman’s health was not robust, and Garwood sometimes stood in as acting chief during his decade on the Court.1 Local color was not dead yet, however, as following Garwood onto the Court in 1949 was Meade F. Griffin from the Texas Panhandle. Born in Cottonwood (Callahan County), he was formerly county attorney and then mayor of Tulia (Swisher County), and served as county judge in Plainview (Hale County) before spending seven years as district attorney of the SixtyFourth Judicial District. He was a past president of the state bar, and had served as prosecution subsection chief during the war crimes trials in Germany . Griffin’s subsequent two decades on the Court place him in a very select company of judicial longevity, and after his retirement in December 1968 he was appointed a special judge of the Court of Criminal Appeals, making him one of a very few to serve on both benches.2 The fifties opened with a number of other personnel changes on the Supreme Court. Since being run as AngusWynne’s weapon to unseat Richard Critz, Gordon Simpson had served three and a half creditable years on the Court, but resigned to enter private practice in Dallas. Appointed to that vacancy was Ralph Hicks Harvey, a native of northeast Texas who had taught history and Latin before entering a judicial career that had taken him as high fifTeen THe Texas supreme CourT 186 as the Sixth Court of Appeals. He died in September 1950 after only a year and a half on the high bench, two months before the general election.3 Interestingly , despite having a terminal illness, Harvey had run for his seat on the Court in the July 1950 Democratic primary. He lost to Robert W. Calvert, who, before being elected in November, was appointed by Governor Jester to complete Harvey’s term. (Harvey’s term expired on December 31, and Calvert’s service would have begun on January 3 had he not been appointed to the seat.)4 Calvert, forty-five, was a man who had already demonstrated immense determination to succeed. He was the son of a Tennessee sharecropper, so poor that when his father died, his mother was compelled to place Robert and his sister in the Corsicana State Orphans’ Home. Surviving ten Dickensian years there, nearly dying in the influenza epidemic in 1918 (his sister did perish), he embarked on a course of legal study at the University of Texas. It took eight years to complete his education, allowing for times he could not afford to continue. He graduated in 1931, settled in Hillsboro to practice, entered politics, and in six years was Speaker of theTexas House. He returned to Hillsboro’s local politics after being defeated in a run for attorney general in 1938.5 In his run for associate justice in 1950, he had the advantage of voter confusion over his name, which was similar to that of Texas state comptroller Robert S. Calvert, and also a timely advertising campaign by Calvert Whiskey. “I couldn’t have bought that for a million dollars,” he recalled near the end of his life.6 His luck was Texas’s gain, however, for his own twentytwo years on the Court were highly distinguished. With the Court expanded to nine members, an increasing number of justices came and went, but a few stayed long enough to leave their mark. After Beauford Jester became the only Texas governor to die in office, his successor, Allan Shivers, appointed Clyde Earl Smith, judge of the Seventy-Fifth Judicial District, to fill a vacancy on the Court in 1950. His was a Texas Horatio Alger story, with a Shivers family connection. Born into grinding poverty in the hardscrabble Hill Country of Central Texas in 1897, Smith’s tenantfarmer father died when Clyde was only four, and he spent several years at...

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