Marriage and Family
The Hobby family: Bill Hobby, Jessica Hobby, Oveta Culp Hobby, William Pettus Hobby. Courtesy Bill Hobby.
Everything that ever happened to me fell in my lap, and nothing in my life would have been possible without Governor.
OVETA CULP HOBBY
In 1930, after losing her political campaign by only four thousand votes, Oveta resumed her work as assistant to Houston’s city attorney. She advised lawyers, wrote opinions, and drafted ordinances.
She then joined the Houston Post-Dispatch newspaper as assistant to a cartoonist, and soon transferred to the circulation department.1 While at the Post-Dispatch, she met and maintained a casual friendship—always in groups—with her father’s old friend, the former Governor William Pettus Hobby.
Governor Hobby had served two terms as governor of Texas, and Oveta’s mother had campaigned for him. After his governorship, he became a successful businessman and the president of the Houston Post-Dispatch.2 Oveta remembered Governor Hobby from the time she was in Austin with her father. He was a fifty-three-year-old widower, whose wife had died from a stroke two years before, in 1928. When Oveta visited Governor Hobby’s family in Dallas, she began to realize he was courting her.
Returning to Austin, Oveta was elected state president of the League of Women Voters.3 She also served as parliamentarian for another session of the House of Representatives. Meanwhile, she and Governor Hobby continued to see each other, and they soon decided to get married.4
Oveta had promised to stay on at the legislature until the session closed. She planned to remain in Austin and marry after the legislative session ended. Some of Governor Hobby’s old-fashioned friends advised against this, calling it a “Hollywood marriage.”
In what was known as a “gentleman’s agreement” between Governor Hobby and the speaker of the House of Representatives, Oveta was effectively discharged from her parliamentarian duties so she could return to Houston as soon as she was married. But she was not told of this agreement until the night before her wedding, after everyone had already committed (she to Governor Hobby and the House speaker to a new parliamentarian). Since the men did this behind her back, the situation came as an unpleasant surprise to Oveta when she heard about it. She thought it a tricky prank, though she made the best of it at the time.5
On February 23, 1931, a Monday afternoon, Oveta Culp and Governor William Hobby wed in her parents’ Temple, Texas, home. Oveta was twenty-six years old and her husband was twice her age, fifty-three.
Oveta’s father, Ike Culp, is said to have told Governor Hobby, “Will, she is going to embarrass you. She doesn’t give a hang about clothes and doesn’t dress the way she should.”6 By all other accounts, Ike approved of the marriage. Oveta was always more concerned with intellectual pursuits than fashion, never bothering to chase after the latest fashion ideas or trends. During the ceremony, she carried the point-lace handkerchief that her grandmother and sister had also carried down the aisle at their own weddings. Afterward, the couple took a short honeymoon to points in Texas.7
Oveta and Governor, as she liked to call her husband, made their home in Houston. Governor restored the Houston Post-Dispatch to its original name, the Houston Post, and Oveta went to work there learning the newspaper business, first as a research editor and then as a book editor.8 She thought of herself as assistant to the editor and publisher—her husband.9
Oveta first met Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) in the offices of the Houston Post, when as a young congressman he had come to meet with Governor Hobby and ask his advice. After Johnson left the governor’s office, Will told Oveta, “That’s a young man to watch. He will go far.”10 And go far he did, eventually all the way to the White House and the presidency of the United States.
On January 19, 1932, Oveta gave birth to their first child via Caesarean section, a surgical procedure by which an incision is made in the mother’s abdomen and the baby is removed through her belly. They named their son William Pettus Hobby, Jr. He was born on Oveta’s twenty-seventh birthday.11
The governor was delighted with his new eight-and-a-half-pound son, and was quoted several times as saying, “I had no idea babies were so popular, or I would have had them in my platform.”12 This was a joke: a platform consists of the items a politician promises to bring to fruition after a campaign.
Following her son’s birth, Oveta returned to work at the newspaper, doing research in the executive department. Shortly afterward, she wrote editorials, produced articles on community issues, and became the literary editor in charge of the Sunday book page. Typical of Oveta Culp Hobby, she didn’t stop there. She became involved in a number of committees and boards, like Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Junior League, and the Houston Symphony Orchestra Committee. She became the regional chair of the Depression-era-born group Mobilization for Human Needs, and she was the sole female member on a citizens’ committee that planned a flood control program for Houston in 1935–1937.
On June 12, 1936, Oveta and Governor took a trip to Dallas to hear President Franklin D. Roosevelt give a speech. On the way back to Houston, flying at an altitude of seven thousand feet, the pilots of their private plane smelled gas and discovered a fire in the oil line. Edwin Hefley, the pilot, threw the plane into a nosedive as flames leaped into the cockpit.
Running into the main cabin, the copilot Eugene Schacher yelled to the four passengers, “Put on your seat belts! We’re going to have to land this thing in a hurry!”
Schacher raced back to the cockpit, bracing himself against the seats as the plane plunged almost vertically earthward. Seconds later, he and the pilot burst from the cockpit, flames licking at their heels. But they had to go back in to land the plane.
Reaching through the fire, the pilot thrust his arms into the cockpit and grabbed the control sticks so he could maneuver the plane safely to the ground. But he was too far away from the controls to properly land the plane. Defying death, the pilot climbed back into the fiery cockpit. The copilot was right behind him, attempting to put out the fire as the pilot landed the plane. Nearing the ground, Hefley pulled the plane’s nose up as it approached a farmer’s plowed cotton field. They were only about twenty miles out of Dallas when they crash-landed in the field. They hit so hard, the landing gear tore off the bottom of the plane.
The passengers pulled the pilot and copilot out of the plane and away from the burning mass of metal. Governor Hobby was knocked unconscious in the crash, and Oveta had to pull him from the plane—no easy feat for a petite woman. Because a lot of fuel remained in the plane’s wings, once the fire hit those sections, the plane ignited into a blazing inferno.
The copilot who had fought the flames was badly burned. Oveta commandeered a dilapidated old car that belonged to Mexican field-workers and drove the injured men to a nearby town where a physician administered first aid.
There, Oveta continued to help care for the injured. She even helped the doctor cut charred clothing from the badly burned pilot and accompanied him in the ambulance to a Dallas hospital. She was so calm throughout the aftermath of the horrible event that it never occurred to the doctor or the hospital attendants that Oveta, too, had been a passenger in the plane when it crashed.
She survived the experience with iron nerves and would allow no one to do anything for her. But as soon as the doctors realized she, too, had been a passenger in the plane, they promptly hospitalized her.13 Few of those who saw Oveta’s calmness that day knew that she was two months pregnant.14
Hefley, the pilot, survived the crash, although he spent three months recovering in the hospital. His copilot, Schacher, unexpectedly died the day after the crash due to smoke inhalation and lung damage.
Because they had been in a hurry to return to Houston, the trip was the first time Oveta and the governor broke their pact to never ride in a plane together at the same time. From then on, they honored that agreement.
In true Oveta Culp Hobby fashion, she returned home from the accident and reported for work within a few days. She wanted to write a handbook on parliamentary law and decided to do it that summer. She had been writing a daily newspaper feature on parliamentary law, and her readers indicated to her great interest in the subject on the part of clubwomen, as well as high school and college students. Moving her office to the first floor of the newspaper’s building, Oveta wrote her book while continuing her executive and literary editor duties at the Houston Post. The book was called Mr. Chairman.
On January 19, 1937, Jessica Hobby, Oveta’s second child, was born, also via Caesarean section. Her daughter arrived on Oveta’s thirty-second birthday.15
Caesarean procedures are usually done when a normal childbirth would risk either the baby or the mother’s life. But because of the timing of the children’s births, both on Oveta’s birthday, many years later one of Oveta’s granddaughters suggested that her grandmother actually chose for her children to share her birthday.
A few months after Jessica’s birth, Oveta went horseback riding in the park. The horse was skittish and, while cantering, threw Oveta off. The fall broke Oveta’s leg and shattered a wrist. But being laid up didn’t stop her! She edited the Sunday book page from her bed and continued a research study she had started for the Post. As soon as she was able, she returned to the office on crutches and resumed her newspaper work.16
Also in 1937, Oveta was elected a member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors—only the second female in the history of its membership. She was chair of the Speakers’ Bureau for the first Women’s Crusade (Community Chest work) and chair of the Crusade itself for two consecutive years. In November of 1937, she was appointed the Texas chair of the Advisory Committee on Women’s Participation for the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
Meanwhile, her book Mr. Chairman was published by the Economy Company in 1936, and in October 1938 was adopted as a textbook for Texas public schools.
In 1938, Oveta was named executive vice president of the Houston Post. Under her direction, the newspaper began covering events important to Houston’s black community and featuring blacks in newspaper stories.17
In 1939, for about $4 million, the Hobbys bought the Houston Post from Houston financier Jesse Jones, who also owned the rival newspaper, the Houston Chronicle.18 Oveta and Governor worked hard together to pay off this large debt.
Over time, the couple made a number of other business decisions that grew their family wealth. One of them was the purchase of their first television station, KLEE, which later became KPRC.
Oveta had been sitting in her office when her phone rang. It was Judge Elkins calling.
“I want you to see W. Albert Lee,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because he owns KLEE and he wants to sell half his interest.”
At the time, KLEE was Houston’s only television station. The Hobbys had an application in with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a broadcasting channel, but at the time the FCC had frozen all the applications pending the results of a survey.
“So, how much money is he losing?” Oveta asked.
“Lots,” the judge said.
Shortly after their conversation, Mr. Lee came to see Oveta, at Judge Elkins’s suggestion.
“I haven’t seen your financials, of course,” Oveta said to him, “but I understand that you are losing money on a regular basis.”
Lee said he had to have a cancer operation on his leg and felt he needed to partner with someone who knew how to run a TV station. He wanted to sell half his interest in the station. In reality, television was so new at the time that there weren’t many who knew anything about running a station. And so far, all the Hobbys’ experience lay in newspapers and radio.
When Oveta later recounted the meeting to Judge Elkins, he said, “Why don’t you buy 100 percent?”
“Because,” she replied, “I don’t have the money to buy it, and I don’t have the money to lose.”
The judge kept after Oveta to buy KLEE until she finally said, “Can I borrow the money from you?”
“Yes.”
Oveta knew television was an unknown field but felt it held great promise. She and Mr. Lee talked it over and came to the agreement that she would buy half his interest in the station. Then, however, the FCC came out with a ruling saying it would only grant a license to someone owning a controlling interest, which meant 51 percent ownership.
The good Judge Elkins called Oveta again.
“Mr. Lee wants to sell 100 percent, and it’s a good investment.”
“We don’t have the money!” Oveta told him.
“I’ll lend you the money,” the judge told her.
So Mr. Lee and the Hobbys agreed that the Hobbys would buy the whole station for $745,000. Mr. Lee tried to strike a side deal, asking Oveta, “If I sell you my television station, will you take your clothes to my laundry?” He owned the Walee Laundry.
At the time, the governor had been at Dr. Turner’s Neurological Center for six months being treated for another illness, often near death. Oveta told him the whole plan. They could see the dangers, but they wanted a TV station and had no way of knowing when the FCC might lift its freeze on granting new licenses.
The governor told Oveta, “I will rely on your judgment.”
Since televisions were just being developed, TV sets were expensive, and only the wealthy could afford them. Television producers were just starting to figure out what types of programs would be popular and how to make money from them. Because the industry was so speculative, Oveta called her good friend, Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson. Senator Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, owned a television station in Austin. Oveta asked what he thought about the future of TV. Senator Johnson told her he “thought it would go through some rough days, but the future was very bright.”19
Oveta was convinced that buying the station was the right thing to do. She just wasn’t sure they could afford it. Still, she attended the meeting, with Judge Elkins there to represent her. The judge put a check down in front of her to sign, and she whispered to him, “You know this check will bounce, don’t you?”
Judge Elkins didn’t bat an eye. He said very quietly, “I have other papers for you to sign, and by the time this check gets to the bank, the money will be in your account.”
When Oveta got back to the Post, she told her chief financial officer what she had done.
He climbed one hundred walls straight up. “You don’t have the authority to sign such a check!” he said.
“I know,” Oveta said, “but I’ve done it.”
“According to the bylaws, there have to be TWO signatures,” he said. “Does the governor know about this?”
Oveta nodded. “In detail.”
But having signed, Oveta had to tell George Butler, who was on her board of directors and who should have been notified of the signing before it happened.
George was beside himself. By this time, Oveta had brought Governor home to convalesce. George called her and said, “I feel that I must register my disapproval.”
“Fine. Come tomorrow and tell Governor, and then stay for lunch with me,” Oveta replied.
On Friday, George came by. Oveta insisted that he see Governor alone so he would not modify his disapproval because of her presence. When George came downstairs after seeing Governor, he told Oveta, “Governor said that you now have the responsibility of running things, and ‘I’ve never doubted her judgment before. I shan’t start now.’”
When Mr. Lee died, Judge Elkins escorted Oveta to the funeral. He leaned over and murmured, “And you never did take him your laundry.”20
While the Hobbys were in the early stages of building their personal fortunes, across the ocean things were getting dire. Germany had invaded Poland, and two days later, on September 3, 1939, France and Britain declared war on Germany. This marked the beginning of World War II.
At the time, the top military brass had gone to Congress asking for a peacetime draft in an attempt to increase the number of enlisted men in the military. Although the United States had not yet joined the war effort, military leaders could see it was only a matter of time before the U.S. would need to get involved. As a result of the draft, the War Department started receiving thousands of letters a day from women all over the country, wanting to know what, exactly, the government would be doing with their sons and brothers who were being forced into military service.
In response, the White House created the Women’s Interest Section in the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations. General Surles, the director of public relations for the Army, had been searching for a woman who was willing to come in and set up this bureau.
Oveta happened to be in Washington, D.C., attending a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) meeting on KPRC business, the radio station that she and the governor owned. General Surles invited her to take the job of running the bureau, where she would to try to communicate to women across the country the necessity of the peacetime draft and explain the types of training the men had to have.21
Oveta refused the offer, explaining that she had a husband, two small children, and a full-time job with the Houston Post.22