MY DAD EBB AARON BERRY, JR. LAWYER, CONTRACTOR, & SECURITY EXPERT Around 1879, my paternal great-grandmother, eight-year old Georgia Cox, and her family, came from a small town in Georgia on the Alabama border to Texas in a covered wagon. It was a perilous trip, crossing the lawless area along the Sabine River, where many travelers were attacked. The Cox family settled in Montgomery County, Texas. About that same time, Watson Alonzo (Lon) Berry, after passing through Alabama and marrying a Cherokee woman, Mary, seventeen years his senior, made the same journey and settled in Madison County, Texas. Georgia married John Lindley and had four sons and one daughter, Jessie, my grandmother. Lon and Mary Berry had two sons, Cade and Ebb. Ebb met and married Jessie, and they had a daughter and a son, Ebb Aaron, Jr., my father. My grandfather became a lawyer and was appointed to the bench at the age of 28. He later sat on the Texas State Court of Criminal Appeals. His son, my father, had a very interesting college experience. He attended several. University of Texas, University of Colorado and Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama, are the only names I ever heard. Dad was asked to leave U.T. after the Texas Rangers raided one of his poker games. He was asked to leave Colorado after taking
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Pat’s Horse Tales
the dorm mother to the grocery store, forgetting that the trunk of his car was full of bath-tub gin. I’m not sure what happened at Cumberland School of Law, but Ebb, Jr., never got a college degree. As the story goes, my grandfather and another lawyer locked their sons in a room at the Driscoll Hotel in Austin, with a pile of law books and told them to study law for the next six weeks. At the time, one could take the bar exam without a college degree. To make a long story short, my dad passed the bar exam with a very high grade, making him the youngest to pass the exam up to that date. That’s how Ebb Aaron Berry, Jr., became a lawyer. The only type of law that Dad enjoyed was the law of the land. He loved tracing the history of a piece of dirt. During the Eisenhower administration in the 50s, Dad was appointed Assistant U. S. Attorney based in Laredo, Texas. Falcon Dam was being constructed on the Rio Grande River and the town of Zapata was due to end up at the bottom of the lake. The government had to relocate the town, so it was necessary to determine who owned what in the existing town. It was a mammoth task to track ownership from the original Spanish land grants to pres-
