All the Way from Yoakum: The Personal Journey of a Political Insider

Chapter 1. Yoakum

Cha pter 1 Yoakum O n March 31, 1913, my father, Marcell Achille Meyer, thirty‑two, married my mother, Myrtle Levy, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She was twenty. Born in Galveston, Texas, my father managed the Woodring log‑ ging camp in Sweetville, Louisiana, ten miles from Lake Charles. Sweetville was hardly a town at all, just a few buildings housing the workers and a country store. My father traveled to town on horseback and then engaged a carriage and a matched pair of prancing stallions to court the young ladies of the town. A young man with light eyes and chiseled features, he was much in demand. My mother, with an eighteen‑inch waist and ample bosom, had large dark eyes and black hair. Being the daughter of a leading mer‑ chant in Lake Charles and the niece of the celebrated couturier Henri Bendel of New York enhanced her desirability as a prospective wife, especially to a young man like my father, whose only assets were his intelligence and good looks. According to the custom of that day, Daddy courted Mama the required nine months before asking her to marry him. Her unequivo‑ cal response was, “I will not live in or near that logging camp.” “I’ll talk to Mr. Woodring,” my father replied. “He has some retail lumber outlets in Texas.” Mr. Woodring accommodated them. His largest Texas lumberyard was situated in Yoakum. The trip from Lake Charles to Yoakum was their honeymoon. In 1913, Yoakum was a busy little town where the Southern Pacific Railroad had located its repair shops. It also functioned as the center  Chapter 1 of a cotton‑ and corn‑farming community with a population that included many German and Czech (we called them Bohemian) im‑ migrants. Farmers came into town on Saturday to do their shopping for the week. On Sunday, abiding by the Texas blue laws, all of the stores closed, and the populace, dressed in their Sunday best, went to church. Such a rough‑edged South Texas country town came as something of a shock to my mother, who was accustomed to the relaxed, genteel atmosphere of southern Louisiana. After a brief sojourn in Yoakum’s St. Regis Hotel, my mother and father moved into a small white cottage on Coke Street, where, according to the custom of delivering babies at home, Dr. Thomas James brought me into this world. My birth certificate read: “Female, born to Myrtle and Marcell Meyer in Yoakum, Texas, November 1, 191.” And it stayed that way until 1933, when I was eighteen years old and needed a name for a passport. Yoakum today remains much as it was when my parents arrived, an unpretentious little South Texas town, located thirty‑five miles south of Interstate 10 between Houston and San Antonio. Over the last half‑century, the population of approximately four thousand souls has remained relatively constant. The town reflects the same measured pace of living it enjoyed throughout its past. No Jewish house of worship has ever existed there, and only two or three Jewish families ever lived in Yoakum at one time. On the holy days of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, my father took me to Houston or San Antonio, alternating between Reform temples and orthodox synagogues. The tradition of both my parents’ families, however, was distinctly Reform. When Reform Judaism was trans‑ planted from Germany to the United States under the leadership of Isaac Mayer Wise, many of the old traditions, such as dietary laws and ritualistic circumcision, were no longer considered mandatory. Those customs, originally based on health and cleanliness consider‑ ations at a time when there was no refrigeration or medical practice as we now understand it, seemed irrelevant in the New World. My mother rarely went with us to holy day services. Unlike my father, who had received an in‑depth Jewish religious education under the tutelage of the famous Rabbi Henry Cohen of Galveston, my mother had attended a Catholic school in Lake Charles. Her par‑ ents simply considered it the area’s best school. As a result, however, Yoakum  her understanding of Judaism and its customs was limited to the use of occasional expressions she thought were “Jewish.” I always imagined these expressions were Yiddish until my mother‑in‑law said she’d never heard of some of them, words like “lahockalus,” meaning “just to make trouble.” My mother’s mother, Grandmother Lena Bendel...