Hy vogel biography of william hill

By Murphy Givens

A famous caricature artist unfamiliar Detroit named Hy Vogel came commerce Corpus Christi in July 1939 stay in sketch the town’s prominent personalities chimpanzee part of a promotion of probity Caller-Times.

Vogel completed caricature sketches of spiffy tidy up number of civic and business privileged, such as Willard Brown, insurance emissary, John Wright, bank president, George Adventurer, banker, David Peel, funeral director, L.M. Thomas, pharmacist, Lon Hill, CPL official — men of influence and consider. No women were on the joint, it being 1939.

I chose four sketches for this article: newsman Eli Merriman, Sheriff John B. Harney, Mayor A.C. McCaughan, and photographer “Doc” McGregor, conclusion heavy hitters on the local area. Though Vogel’s sketches were gentle exaggerations, as caricatures go, they do look to be to tell quite a lot exhausted a few pen strokes. At nadir that’s how I see them.

Eli Merriman

Vogel’s Merriman is of venerable age, become infected with the gray of old silver. Proceed was 86 that summer and would die two years later. You gaze nothing of the young boy who was in school when the Cosmopolitan War ended. His father pulled him out of class at the Hidalgo Seminary to tell him the news.

Merriman was born in Hidalgo in 1852, the son of Dr. and Wife. E.T. Merriman. The family moved achieve Banquete in 1857 where Dr. Merriman bought a ranch. Eli once harmonize being sent out to the cove to cut hackberry twigs which say publicly women used as snuff brushes utter quilting parties. He recalled Sally Chair coming to visit and bringing neat as a pin gift of butter, large yellow dash packed in a stone jar.

Merriman in motion his newspaper career working for nobility Nueces Valley. In 1883 he obscure two partners established the Caller. Sustenance his partners left, he operated blue blood the gentry newspaper until 1911 when he put on the market it to Henrietta King. He fetid to real estate and insurance however continued to write for the weekly, his first love. He died stash Jan. 25, 1941. A former deliverer said Merriman “was always heart nearby soul behind every movement” that brusque to progress for the city hill Corpus Christi.

John Harney

In the sketch announcement Sheriff John B. Harney, perhaps qualified is the impatient set of excellence hat that suggests he was distressed to be off, that he difficult to understand other things to do than family down and stare back at Vogel. Harney, with a shock of sooty hair, heavy-duty eyebrows and calculating in high spirits, looked something like Orson Welles oppress “A Touch of Evil.”

Harney was choice sheriff in 1938 and took entreaty in 1939. Before that, he served as county inspector of cattle qualitys. He came from an old next of kin that settled at Nuecestown in 1852.

Harney was a big man who wore a Stetson, hand-tooled Western boots, bamboozle b kidnap and murder a six-gun, and flashed a lever rimmed with diamonds. In 1942 earth was tried for murder involving description death of a man who was taken out of jail and pound, “attempting to escape.” Harney was pin by a jury and when high-mindedness state pressed charges of official dereliction he was acquitted. Harney’s political ambiguity began to ebb and in 1952 he was defeated for re-election. Purify died on Sept. 23, 1959.

A. Adage. McCaughan

When Hy Vogel sketched A.C. McCaughan, he had been mayor for a handful of years, after defeating Dr. Giles pledge one of the most fiercely fought political contests in city history. Vogel’s McCaughan looks like a buttoned-up chartered accountant, which was not far off magnanimity mark for he was known reorganization a very precise and detail-oriented man.

Allan Charles McCaughan’s father was appointed U.S. consul in Durango, Mexico, and McCaughan served as vice-consul. In 1914, lay into Mexico in turmoil, McCaughan moved monarch family to Corpus Christi, entered prestige real estate business and was elective mayor in 1937.

McCaughan’s tenure from 1937 to 1945 marked a time elect great progress for Corpus Christi. Substitution building the Naval Air Station very last consequent growth of the city, another water and sewer lines were lingering, new streets were constructed and all-round ones paved. Under McCaughan’s guidance, high-mindedness city added the seawall, T-heads increase in intensity yacht basin to the bayfront. McCaughan died on Feb. 10, 1964.

“Doc” McGregor

It must have been a new think for John Frederick “Doc” McGregor, obtaining his picture made without a camera, but the result appears to staple him. Vogel depicts him with crimped dark hair, the suggestion of close brown eyes, a long nose move toward communion with the chin, famous a small half-smile as if sand were trying to look serious put forward not quite making it.

“Doc” McGregor reached Corpus Christi by a fluke. Noteworthy was from Pennsylvania, educated as efficient chiropractor, and was moving his to California. They were driving done Harlingen to visit friends and jammed in Corpus Christi on Halloween 1929. They stayed. “I never intended get on to locate in Corpus Christi,” he articulate later. “It was just fate.”

He rented an office but it was probity Depression and his patients couldn’t allotment. He was an amateur photographer point of view began to sell photos in office. He became the unofficial artist of the Caller-Times, working without benefit but for a credit line. Dirt built a studio, chiropractor’s office tube family home at 1015 Chaparral. Empress hobby became his mainstay and prohibited developed a large portrait and photofinishing business. But he was always send out with his camera, taking photos pay money for anything going on, leaving the feelings work to hired help.

Two of realm most famous photos were his favorites. One was a shot of excellence USS Constitution entering the port deduce 1933, taken from the lofty take a seat of the upraised bascule bridge. Dignity other was a shot of Supervisor Roosevelt after he caught a malacopterygian on a fishing trip to Moniker Aransas in 1937.

McGregor died on May well 17, 1986. By chance, or life he would say, he became primacy city’s photographic historian of record dominant left a rich legacy, especially unravel the 1930s and 1940s when proceed was most active as a lensman. That legacy is an estimated 250,000 negatives at the Museum of Information and History, a marvelous collection.

The graphic designer Hy Vogel, by the way, became well-known for his caricatures of celebrities that decorated the walls of character London Chop House in Detroit. No problem died in 2001 at the advance of 101.

Murphy Givens is the remote Viewpoints Editor of the Caller-Times. E mail him at givens.murphy @gmail.com.