MY DAD, EBB AARON BERRY, JR

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

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

ent day. No one was better qualified to do that than my father, so the family moved from Madisonville to Laredo. In our new house in Laredo, Dad decided to convert a room into an office, so he put on his “thinking clothes,” which were the most awful, worn out, beat-to-shit, never-washed pants you could imagine. The rest of his ensemble included some house shoes that he had worn for as long as I could remember. One afternoon, we heard him screaming for help. The whole family ran to save him from some horrible fate, only to find him sitting in the middle of the floor unable to stand up. He was using some awful black mastic to lay cork tile and it had squeezed up between tiles. Since Dad always sat on the floor with his legs crossed to do everything, he had managed to sit on some of the black muck and glue the seat of his pants to the floor. After we caught our collective breath after our hysterical laugher, it was suggested that he simply unzip his pants and stand up. The group dispersed and left Dad to his construction work. The sounds of sawing and hammering could be heard throughout that afternoon. Then, from the new office came a terrible crashing sound. Again, we all dashed to his rescue. His newly constructed bookshelves and piles of law books were scattered all over the floor. Dad didn’t own a tape measure, square or level, so his shelves were anything but plumb, level or square. Not to be foiled by such mundane issues, off he went to the local hardware store. A little later, he called a family meeting to view his handiwork. There he stood, shoulders back, chest puffed out with pride. His shelves were upright and loaded to the max with law books. He had fixed them to the wall with giant screen door hooks. A night or two later, I was awakened by a horrible crash and the sound of breaking glass. The noise seemed to be coming from the direction of Dad’s bedroom and office. I peeked through one eye at the clock and saw that it was in the neighborhood of 2:00 a.m. The next thing I knew, Dad was sitting on the side of my bed with a large, iron skillet in his hand. He wanted ME to go see who was breaking into the house. I said, “Ah, Dad, the door to the office is locked. An intruder can’t get into the rest of the house, and there’s nothing for him to steal, except your bookshelves.” He promised to follow and back me up with his skillet. I turned over and stuck my head under a pillow and started drifting off to sleep. He kept insisting that I stay awake and keep him company. Finally, since he refused to return to his own bed and the mysterious invader, I moved over, handed him a pillow and talked him—and his skillet—into sharing my space and resting his eyes. As the sun rose out of the east, Dad and I ventured into the hostile office territory. Seems that a window weight had failed allowing the window to crash down and break all the panes. Either that, or he had scared the burglar off with that terrifying skillet. Dad’s construction ability was legendary. Ten or fifteen years earlier, he decided to build a chicken house on our farm in Madisonville. He assembled a stack of old corrugated tin, some left over chicken wire from someplace, some mismatched poles from some-other-where and began his project. Fortunately, Mom had insisted that he build it quite a distance from our new home behind some trees. As young as I was at the time, even I knew it was one of the ugliest things ever built, but Dad was proud of his accomplishment. He called his brother-inlaw, Jack Scott, over to see his Taj Mahal. With metaphorical trumpets blaring, he said, “Well!! What do you think of my chicken house?” My uncle Jack said, “Well, you know, Brother, if I saw this chicken house in Bumfuck, Egypt, I’d know Ebb Berry built it!” A couple of years before we moved to Laredo, Dad demonstrated his leadership ability in the security field. Our house was built on piers and beams and we always had a problem with armadillos digging under the house. Often in the middle of the night, they would wake everybody up with their banging against the beams under the floor. On one such night, the armadillos were having a major gathering under the house and on the back terrace. My collie, Tippy, was barking like crazy, so Dad got us all up, and took command of the unit that would repel the armadillo invasion. He armed my brother, who was 14 or 15 years-old at the time, with a shotgun. I’m not sure what jobs he assigned to the rest of us. What a picture the Berry family made that night. Mom in her cute little nightgown with her high heel mules, General Dad in his BVDs, my brother in his shorts, my little sister in her jammies, and I had on somebody’s big tee shirt. Out of nowhere, a scared-to-death armadillo ran across the terrace and over all the feet of the entire squad. Squeals, screams, yips, shotgun blasts… When the dust cleared, Dad was standing on the top step trying to escape into the house, only to have the door blocked by the rather large collie dog that had hidden behind him and was peeking between his legs. Mom, little sis and I had run the opposite direction, and our artilleryman was in the center of terrace, smoke curling out the barrel of his weapon, shaking and looking dazed. The armadillo was nowhere to be seen, but it’s said that one was found not too far from the battlefield, dead, apparently of fright. Thankfully, Dad was a better lawyer than he was a constructor or security expert.