Gertrude Thomas: Monopoly on Heartbreak

 One day in 1975, my city editor at The Houston Post assigned me to investigate a story he thought held the potential for scandal. He had received a wire story about a Louisiana judge who had ordered disabled children removed from a Houston caretaker because she has failed to provide adequate educational opportunities for her Louisiana wards of the state. He told me to go get her. When I returned with my story, however, the final result proved far different from my editor’s expectations.

Unknown to me at that time, I had participated in a stunning example of unexpected ways the press can trigger progress. My assignment introduced me to one of the most remarkable individuals I had the good fortunate to encounter during my 45 year-career in journalism: Gertrude Thomas. As a freelance writer eight years later I decided to update on her status and produced this feature story for the April 1832 edition of a monthly magazine called Salt. It styled itself as a publication for “grassroots Christians seeking social justice.”

Once again, I’ve searched recently for any updated information into 2019 on Thomas or her home, but could find no leads. If anyone reading this blog post knows anything else, please update with a comment.

Salt April, 1983

The Gertrude Thomas home: Where beauty is never skin deep

An idea ahead of its time is usually worth its weight in gold to the person hatching it. Often, however, the gold is not the sort of wealth you can put in the bank. Gertrude Thomas is a Houston nurse who had an idea ahead of her time. On the surface, it brought her a life of isolation. It dealt her a monopoly on heartbreak. It forced her to live for 30 years uncertain about the source of her next month's grocery-bill payment.

But the gold still came shining through just as surely as if it had been in the bank. You could see it in her eyes as she watched scenes so horrible you had to look away. You could hear it in her voice as she talked about the lives touched by her idea. You could feel it in the special electricity generated when she contacted others. And, in the end you had to ask how she could handle the burden of such an idea.

"I practiced self-hypnosis," says the 71-year-old founder of the Gertrude Thomas Home—without cracking a smile.

Things are bright for Thomas these days. She is one of those fortunate beings favored by fate. She lived to see the day when time caught up to her idea. She saw the whole community finally lift from her shoulders the monstrous burden she had borne alone for 30 years.

Now, there's even a little gold in the bank account for the woman who gave her entire life to the severely retarded and abused children of Texas.

The first children

Her story actually begins in the middle of her life. In 1950 she was employed as a nurse at Houston's large, public hospital, Jeff Davis. Each month the facility swells— even today—with record numbers of births. It's the only place in town where women too poor for private obstetrical care can come for delivery. It also records its fair share of children born with birth defects. Most of them, in 1950, had no place to go.

An ectopic pregnancy had left Thomas unable to bear children. She had come to the city in 1939 from West Texas with her husband, a painting contractor. After World War II she decided to sign up for nurse training at Jeff Davis. She was steeped in her career in 1950 when a couple of doctors made a suggestion destined to change her life.

Two Down's syndrome baby boys, both less than 1 year old, needed a home. Their parents had fled the hospital. So Gertrude Thomas took them home to the wood-frame house she shared in northwest Houston with her husband.

"That first night I didn't sleep," she recalls. "I was nervous. They both had baby beds and I ended up sleeping with them."

They were there to stay. She named them Danny and Tommy and raised them as her own. But they were just the start. With her courageous act of generosity was born the Thomas Home for Exceptional Children. Between 1950 and 1978 it was the only facility in Texas and Louisiana where the severely retarded could be sent. Even today, it remains the sole home in Texas for the kids with absolutely no other place to go.

In those days a place like the Thomas home operated in society's shadows. In 1976 she explained her home to reporters: "Most people don't even know there are children like these. They are the forgotten ones. But all you have to do is see what they are like, and the problems of caring for them are obvious."

Soon after she had accepted Danny and Tommy, Thomas found herself in possession of a state license to operate a center for 12 children. The State of Texas paid $90 per month per child for her services. Sometimes, she'd even receive a little donation from parents.

"I still remember the happiest time as that first Christmas," she recalls. "My family had never gone in for Christmas trees, but for the children we got a tree. We had about 16 kids at the time. They had all drawn names and the children had packages. Everyone was together. There were no parents. Back then, they didn't visit. They'd just call."

Blind to deformities

About a year after its start, the home received its first hydrocephalic child—a baby with a 38-inch head. Over the years, there have been much worse. A tour of the Thomas home—particularly in its original location—was not a pretty sight. It has housed every sort of deformity at one time or another. Many came as results of child abuse and torture. As the home grew and the staff expanded, Thomas plowed everything into what had become her life's obsession.

She obtained a license for 50 children. She borrowed money to expand her home into a clinic with hospital beds, respirators, and medical equipment. She repaid the loan herself—$96,000 worth. Louisiana contracted to send its infant outcasts and paid $11.40 per day.

"I had never been around retarded children," recalls Jim Vaughn, administrator of Cresthaven Nursing Home in Austin. He visited the home in 1975 to help Thomas as a consultant.

"I was appalled. Here were all these bodies side by side in little cribs up and down the corridors. I told a partner I didn't want to get involved. But as you get acquainted with these kids you don't see the deformities. You see the bright eyes and the smiles of kids who cannot do anything for themselves. I had to help."

Her husband had died in 1964, and since then Thomas had bravely run the home alone.

"She totally dedicated her entire existence to caring for these kids," recalls Vaughn. "She was totally consumed. She put in 24 hours per day. And she poured everything she had into the place to keep it going. She lived month to month. It seemed like less than half of the people paid."

But bureaucracy discovered her in 1975 and responded with a telling blow that opened her doors to media attention. Acting on the report of some federal agency investigator, a federal judge in Louisiana ordered the state to remove its 33 children from the home. His reasoning? They weren't getting enough "educational stimulation."

Members of the local press descended on the home in droves, expecting to find an expose of cruelty. The federal ruling had made the place sound like a dilapidated halfway house for sick children run by someone greedy to squeeze a meager profit from public welfare funds. What they found instead was Gertrude Thomas inviting them to come inside and make suggestions as to how she could improve the level of "educational stimulation" among her patients.

"The highest IQ she has out there is 17," a Houston pediatrician chided the press.

As they toured the facility, the reporters quickly realized the ridiculousness of the federal ruling. They also gained respect for the woman who had surrendered her life to care for a family of children with members so fragile they were little more than vegetables.

"She provided health care and love for children who had no place else to go. Doctors had told them they would not live," says Vaughn.

With the Louisiana children headed home—many against the wishes of their parents—a major source of income dried up. Vaughn decided to pitch in and help. He wrestled with a way to get funding from a federally sponsored program for retarded children. But Thomas' expanded home would never pass muster as a medical facility under the required guidelines.

"Finally," he recalls, "we were fortunate. A parent was interested in perpetuating that facility. He made arrangements and contacts with people who owned a nursing home in south Houston."

The benefactor and his partners have avoided publicity about their role. What they did was buy a medical-nursing home and turn it over to Thomas and her staff. The new Thomas Home opened on May 1, 1978.

Patron saint

Besides a gleaming new structure, the new facility boasts a larger staff. Of 35 workers before, only two had been nurses. Now the Thomas Home has an in-house physician, a director of nurses, day and night supervisors, and all the other support troops needed to handle its patient load of 150. Gertrude Thomas is salaried for life and enjoys a status somewhere between director-emeritus and patron saint.

She comes to the facility every day from her home, still located in the original Thomas Home. When some of the children need more specialized emergency care, she helps drive them to Houston's Texas Medical Center where they can get some of the best treatment the world has to offer. She says she plans to live a lot longer and continue building her family. But for now, her memories serve as important lessons for all.

"I remember the night we moved after 28 years in our home. A lot of mental pressure was relieved. But it was hard to go in the old building. Everywhere I looked there was a baby bed," she sighs. "Even today, when it turns cold at night, I'll wake up and wonder if the kids are warm.

"I have brought many a child through some sickness only to think, 'Oh, my God, why did I catch him in time?' But next time, I always knew, I'd do the same thing."

She recalls the first two patients, the boys she raised as sons. Danny died in 1961 at the age of 11.

"He had a bad heart. He was sick for a couple of days and I took care of him at the house. Doctors wanted to put him in the hospital but he kept having massive convulsions. When the convulsions came they would scare him. What could they do at the hospital? I just took him to bed with me and that's where he died."

Her other "son," Tommy, proved more sturdy. He became her right-hand man at the old Thomas Home, "a good stool pigeon. He'd walk around and see a kid that was dirty and run and tell. He'd unload the dishwasher. He was a perfectionist about whatever he did."

But as he grew older, Tommy needed less confinement than the hospital atmosphere of the changing Thomas Home. At age 32, he's now living in a home in Beaumont for people capable of more active lives. When he moved, Thomas refused to go along: "I didn't want him to associate me with the place. He's happy now and he has friends. I'll visit and say, 'You want to go home with Mama?' and he'll say, 'No.' It doesn't make me feel bad. I know he's happy."

The faces of parents

She also recalls her last vacation: "I took one in 1963. My husband was dying with lung cancer. We went to Las Vegas."

But most of all, she says, she recalls the parents. At first glance, they could seem like a calloused bunch offering phone calls instead of visits, apathy instead of help. But most of the children with Thomas over the years couldn't have gone anywhere else. Not even the wealthy could have cared for some of the deformities she accepted.

"They never got too bad for me to take. Some of them didn't even look like human beings. In the last few years if I had a sick kid I'd take it to bed with me."

But facing the parents, particularly the fathers, remains among her hardest chores.

"The parents are the ones who touch me the most," she says. "More than once I've stood here sobbing with a father who has had to hold everyone else in the family up while making arrangements. He's been the rock of strength. Then, here, on the last step he suffers the final straw. He surrenders his child and it all pours out."

Many parents did come often to visit their kids despite their inability to do much more than just hold them. But that might be the most important contribution of all. For of all the different kinds of defects and wide varieties of children, Thomas says one common denominator prevailed among them all.

"Sometimes," she says, "the only response they understand is love. But they do understand that. Every one of them."

There's no doubt Gertrude Thomas has proven she's an adult who understands it, too.

Lost Treasure Tales

As a general assignments reporter for The Houston Post in the 1970s, I was always on the prowl for interesting stories. When I stumbled across a magazine about lost treasure stories and noticed it was published in nearby Conroe, Texas, I decided to write a newspaper article about the subject of lost treasures in Texas. Then, a few years later as a freelance writer, I revisited the idea and developed a larger piece that was published in the December 1983 issue of Muse Air Monthly.

The result was an article that is both a compilation of adventure yarns as well as the story of a publishing entrepreneur. A cursory review of the Internet indicates that all of these treasures likely remain lost. But, if anyone has updated information about any of them, please leave a comment. Now, here’s my article from 1983.

Tales of Hidden Treasure

John Latham built a publishing firm on rumors of gold, silver and other treasures hidden in the Southwest. Or, so the story goes.

From the air, the region looms lost and desolate, a no-man’s land in the northwestern corner of New Mexico pockmarked by mesas, arroyos and sagebrush.  It’s the kind of place no one would visit on purpose. And, for that very reason, the region has captured the undivided attention of one of the last colorful breeds of American adventurer: the treasure hunter.

Somewhere among Mother Nature’s collection of wind-sculpted architecture stands a 7,000-foot monument to enterprise and greed, the final resting place for what has been called the world’s greatest modern treasure. Buried atop one of those mesas is $17 million worth of gold, 17 tons of the precious substance divided neatly into bullion bars.

Or, so the story goes.

It’s lain there undisturbed more than 50 years, the legacy of a group of Depression-era profiteers who perished one by one before they could make their scheme pay off. They smuggled the bars out of Mexico in 1933 with the help of a Hollywood stunt pilot who flew the cargo to the mesa to be hidden. They wanted to gamble with the fluctuating price of gold and on their belief the US government would soon devalue the dollar. They had canvassed the Mexican countryside, quietly buying all the gold they could find at $25 per ounce. One of the conspirators operated a gold mine in Mexico and he, too, had hoarded the product of that enterprise. They had employed a dilapidated hacienda in Puebla to melt down their treasure and prepare it for transport into the states. All that had remained was for them to await a significant rise in the price of gold. Then, they’d sell to the United States and collect a fortune.

Or, so the story goes.

With passage in January, 1934, of the United States Gold Reserve Act, the price of gold shot to $35—up $14.34 from the price the syndicate had paid. They prepared to cash in. But one of their number convinced them to wait for even higher profits, predicting a devaluation of the dollar by 1943, as provided in the Gold Act. Greedily, the gang agreed. But they had failed to consider one provision of the law. It had established a grace period during which private owners of gold could surrender their holdings. When that grace period expired, the group suddenly found itself facing criminal penalties for sitting on their cache. In desperation, they searched the world for private buyers, an odyssey with all the dramatic trappings of the finest Hollywood script complete with forays into Nazi Germany. One conspirator died of a heart attack, while another was gored by a charging bull. Another died in a car crash. The American stunt pilot joined the Army Air Corps and took the secret location to his grave in a fiery crash during a bombing run in Germany. Finally, one survivor remained to collect on the scheme.

Or, so the story goes.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government had gotten wind of the scheme. The survivor, a Mexican businessman, hired a lawyer to negotiate. He offered the hoard to the U.S. government for $35 per ounce. The Treasury Dept. countered with a different plan: immunity from prosecution for Gold Act violations in exchange for all the gold. A federal grand jury in Los Angeles investigated the facts in 1952, making no recommendation to break the stalemate. And the surviving conspirator passed into anonymity about 1962, closely watched, yet apparently never having retrieved the cache.

Or, so the story goes.

“Yes,” says John Latham, a former publisher living in Conroe, Texas. “I think that if I had the time and inclination, that’s the one story I’d go after. It’s certainly the best-documented I’ve encountered.”

And Latham, 65, is one guy who should know. Fortunately—for him—he’s never been a treasure hunter himself. Instead, he found his pot of gold at the end of the publishing rainbow, investigating, writing, editing and reporting such tales for the 120,000-plus monthly readers of a trio of treasure-hunting magazines. The enterprise made him a millionaire in the later 1960s and early 1970s. It also made him an expert on the subject of treasure tales. Before the magazines were sold in 1979, Latham had chronicled more than 2,000 yarns about the bounty allegedly stashed in hidden corners of Texas and the Southwest.

Recognizing that a good story is always worth its weight in gold, Latham nonetheless insisted on evidence that an alleged treasure did indeed exist—plus indications that it remained as defined, “lost or buried wealth”—before he’d publish a story about it. Thus, he feels the Southwest’s most fabled lost treasure tale, that of “The Lost Dutchman Mine” in Arizona’s Superstition Mountains, is a fabrication. In contrast, his favorite is the legend of the Great Depression Gold Profit Hoard.

“I got a call from some airline pilot last year,” Latham chuckled recently, “and he said he thought he had spotted the mesa where that gold is buried. He promised to call me back but he never did.”

Treasure tales are as native to Texas as the longhorn and the armadillo. Geographically positioned to stand as the buffer between two former empires, a crossroads of wilderness and challenge, the Southwest probably serves as the resting ground for many a missing cache. And the stories generated by those who would search for such wealth occupy a significant place in the region’s literature.

Treasure tales usually fall into one of three categories:

·       Lost treasure—that which is truly lost; a mine whose location is forgotten or a valuable gem which was dropped during travel.

·       Buried treasure—that wealth which was illegally acquired and hidden without the culprit returning to claim it.

·       Sunken treasure—this refers to fortunes hidden by some natural disaster, as when a hurricane destroyed a fleet of galleons bound from the New World home to Spain, laden with riches.

The Southwest boasts a fortune in examples from all three groups. Latham never lacked a story. He had started in the business as a writer of western novels just after World War II. With a grubstake of $3,500 in the 1950s, Latham launched a magazine about the offshore drilling industry entitled Offshore. Twelve years later, he sold it for $350,000 and began looking for a new arena in publishing.

With no background in treasure hunting at all, Latham decided in 1966 that magazines about that subject might be worth a chance. And besides, he confesses, “I was fascinated by the subject.” He dropped a little classified ad in one edition of Writer’s Digest seeking solid treasure tales and then made a deal with a firm to help distribute the publication he planned to call True Treasure. Almost overnight he had enough stories to operate for several months. He pumped $60,000 into the venture before it started making a profit six months later. Soon, True Treasure had spawned a pair of sister publications—Treasure World and Treasure Trails.

They all offered a similar format. Articles carried a western flavor and enough authentication to at least demonstrate some credibility. Besides attracting readers from a previously untapped mother lode of interest, the magazines proved a hit with advertisers from a long-neglected industry. While a colorful parade of prospectors and profiteers marched through the editorial columns, an equally intriguing gang of pitchmen stood their ground along the edges, hawking everything from books and maps to metal detectors and coin collections. And the magazines’ classified sections served as a networking device to unite the far-flung empire of treasure hunters which apparently dots the landscape of the Southwest.

Noting that metal detector manufacturers measure annual sales in the millions, Latham says the audience for treasure stories is considerable. The folks who buy all those devices routinely employ them to scour pastures of deserted farms once owned by crusty old men who reportedly distrusted banks and responded by burying their money. Items of value are lost every day and there’s a whole industry out there dedicated to finding them. But these same weekend fortune hunters also liked to read about the real glamour yarns served up monthly by Latham and his correspondents.

Many treasure hunters cultivate an image of failure and poverty.

The real buried treasures, those worth the time and effort to locate, would probably never be reported in magazines. Once a treasure is converted into money, the government tags it as fair game for tax collection. So, many treasure hunters actively cultivate an image of failure. Occasionally, some of these mysterious adventurers wandered by Latham’s Conroe offices to flash a few old coins and brag about digging in some old barnyard. Usually they refused to even give their names. No matter, Latham stalked larger game.

The magazines hit their peak in the early 1970s. But growing competition, complex distribution problems and rising costs forced a sale of the publications in 1979 from their small operation in Conroe to National Reporter Publications in Bixby, Oklahoma.

The new owners dramatically changed the format of the consolidated magazine dubbed Lost Treasure, says Managing Editor Andre Hinds. Its focus now centers on a “how-to” for treasure hunting hobbyists, but it still sells well—65,000 issues per month to make it the nation’s top-selling treasure magazine.

“And we still get at least one letter a month,” grins Hinds, “asking about Long John Latham.”

With his profits, Latham has bought a series of campgrounds scattered about the treasure-hunting regions covered for a decade in articles he edited. While the magazines may be gone, the stories will never die. And the elements of a good treasure tale remain universal

“You know,” Latham philosophizes, “it’s really not the money. For these people, it’s the high adventure in the search for a mystery. I learned early I had to be careful. I started out telling people they were wasting their time looking for the Lost Dutchman Mine. What makes one tale more popular than another is not so much the money but the way it was lost.”

Latham recalls three other favorite treasure yarns from his years as the Southwest’s guardian for such stories. They all contain the common thread of men who gambled their entire existences for fabulous riches, only to lose. Motivated by the same desires which affect us all—greed, love or power—those men have left a legacy in the form of a promise. Great wealth may yet lie hidden awaiting only the tenacity of tome modern investigator.

Ben Sublett’s Lost Mine

According to the Apache chief Geronimo, the world’s richest gold mine lay hidden in the Guadalupe Mountains, which form the border between Texas and New Mexico. Nuggets from the hidden mine allegedly helped fuel Indian war chests in the 19^th Century and their allure even attracted a scouting expedition from one famous treasure-hunting hobbyist, General Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur. The legend also interested an old “jackleg mineral man named Ben Sublett. His obsession with the search kept his family impoverished and made him the laughing stock of Odessa. But the laughter stopped one night when he hitched his creaky old wagon outside a saloon and started buying drinks for the house with a supply of gold nuggets from a buckskin bag.

His wife had supported his treasure-hunting habit by washing clothes. And he had done odd jobs when time allowed. All that changed dramatically after that night. Whenever Sublett needed money, he just disappeared into the mountains and returned with more nuggets. This routine naturally made him the center of attention. Although many tried to trail him to his cache, he always managed to vanish at the last moment, emerging almost from the rocks with another installment of his unique salary, the payroll from years of searching.

He even refused to share the secret with his son Ross, who died in 1953. While Sublett himself lingered on his death bed in 1892, his son-in-law begged for the secret. The crusty old adventurer snapped: “Go out and look for it like I did.” Two of Latham’s correspondents speculated in articles that a Sublett confidante named Abijah Long may have hung around the death bed long enough to learn about the mine.

One of those writers found a witness who claimed to have seen Long carry a strongbox out of a canyon in the Guadalupes about 1916. And, Wells Fargo investigators even tracked Long to a ranch in Oregon where he admitted finding a gold-filled box in a Pine Canyon cave. But the question remains: Was this the secret stash of old Ben Sublett? Pine Canyon was a stop on the Butterfield Stage Route, so perhaps Long found a hidden treasure of his own. Sublett’s treasure may still be hidden in another canyon, waiting just as he described for some fortunate successor: “on the floor of a cave and all you have to do is pick it up.”

Maximilian’s Royal Treasury

Politics, as the old cliché explains, make strange bedfellows. In the case of Emperor Maximilian’s downfall from the Mexican throne in 1867, it also made for the creation of a fabulous treasure legend as ambassadors, outlaws, marauding Comanches, Confederate soldiers and Mother Nature herself battled one another to wipe out any trace of the emperor’s fortune, still allegedly hidden somewhere near Castle Gap, Texas. But death has followed all who touched it.

The intrigue began in 1867, when Maximilian realized his short-lived French empire in Mexico was crumbling. He summoned a trusted Austrian aide to spirit his gold and silver treasure from the country overland into Texas, where it could be reclaimed after an escape. In northern Mexico, the aide hired some bodyguards to escort the wagons through Indian country. They turned out to be renegade Confederate soldiers from Missouri who just didn’t believe the Austrian’s explanation that his wagons held barrels of flour.

As soon as the wagons crossed into Texas, the bodyguards attacked the Austrian and his cohorts, cut their throats and seized control of the treasure. They hid it in the sandy flats and rock hills which now make up Pecos and Crane counties in southwest Texas and then set out for San Antonio to find a buyer. One of the group fell ill on the trip and stayed behind at Fort Concho. Recovering and traveling on, he encountered the bodies of his comrades where Comanches had killed and scalped them. He decided to flee to Missouri and enlist the aid of outlaws there.

Mistaken for a horse thief in Denton, he lay suffering in a jail cell, stricken again with the malady that sidelined him before. He shared his secret with a doctor and a lawyer who visited his cell. They immediately left for the Pecos country to dig for treasure. They arrived to find, however, that summer heat and sandstorms had battered the region, disfiguring landmarks described by the outlaw who was still languishing in the Denton cell. The only metal they found came from remnants of the treasure wagons burned by the Confederate renegades.

Steinheimer’s Millions

The same emotion which once launched a thousand ships served as the driving force behind the lost treasure of Karl Steinheimer: Love. This German-born adventurer and pirate risked his life and fortune—30 jackloads of silver—to travel across Texas in 1839 toward a rendezvous in St. Louis with a long-lost love. Like the others, he lost, and his treasure reportedly lies buried somewhere near Bell County.

Born in 1793, Steinheimer had run off to sea as a youngster and joined pirates running slaves out of Galveston. When the Lafitte brothers seized control of activities there in 1817, he returned to a life as a bachelor miner in Mexico, living peacefully and growing prosperous for the next 20 years. During all that time, he secretly carried a torch for a sweetheart in St. Louis. It took the Texas Revolution to fan the flames into action.

Despite their defeat in that war, the Mexicans harbored dreams of reclaiming the territory. History books have recounted a number of ill-fated expeditions dispatched to those ends. In 1839, Steinheimer was offered a chance to join one of them, commanded by Manuel Flores. Seeing his youth slip away and still dreaming of his lost love, Steinheimer viewed the invitation as an opportunity to cash in his wealth and finally claim the woman he loved.

The Flores expedition had been designed to stir trouble between the Indians and the Texans guarding the frontiers of the young nation. Besides a small force of 25 men, weapons and ammunition, Flores carried Steinheimer and 10 mules loaded with boxes of silver. Somehow this expedition marched 300 miles around Texas before a surveying party spotted them between San Antonio and Seguin. The surveyors were murdered and within days a detachment of Texas Rangers rode in hot pursuit of Flores.

History records that the chase ended on a high bluff over the North San Gabriel River, where Flores and two of his henchmen were killed. The Rangers discovered documents outlining the expedition’s purpose, Flores’s passport, 114 horses and mules, 300 pounds of powder and other baggage. But they recorded no recovery of mules laden with Steinheimer’s millions.

Steinheimer, however, had managed to escape during the two-day chase. He was discovered dying alongside a trail near present-day Marlin, victim of a shootout with Indians. With his last breaths, Steinheimer shared his tale with a band of travelers. He surrendered some coins and told of burying his fortune at the conflux of three streams 60 feet from an oak tree into which he had hammered a large brass spike. In return for his information, he begged a favor. He asked them to a post a letter to his sweetheart in St. Louis.

In the true tradition of the West, they kept their word. A year later a woman showed up in Bell County from St. Louis and began poking around the hills, one of the first to begin seeking Steinheimer’s millions.

Love, politics and greed—they all play a role in the legends of treasure. Latham is still smug about managing to ignore the lure which could have tempted him daily while editing such tales. He insists joining the search is not worth his time.

But ask about that 17-ton cache of gold in New Mexico and catch him in a weak moment: “How could you find it? You’ve got a plan, don’t you?”

“Well,” he grins and stares into space. “The first thing I’d do is hire an airplane to fly over the place and see if I could spot the mesa where they hacked out a landing strip. Then I’d…”

But then, his voice trails off to laughter.

Psychology of Heroism

We toss around the word “hero” a little too freely, I believe, but that’s still OK.

I‘ve always reserved the accolade for a narrower group of people, as explained in this feature article I wrote for publication in the February 1986 edition of Southwest Airlines’ Spirit Magazine. In my research, I interviewed and profiled five different people who had won acclaim for the rescue of strangers at great risk to themselves. I also reviewed academic papers on what’s called “The Heroic Act” to provide some psychological context to their adventures.

In my research, I relied heavily on information from the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, a group founded in 1904 for recognition of heroics from a coal mining disaster. For more information about the Carnegie Hero Fund and its awards, visit the website.

Although these exploits occurred more than three decades ago, I believe the psychology and motivations boast universal elements relevant today. I made a cursory effort to locate the five people profiled here, but found no clues for additional interview opportunities. If anyone reading this blog has updated information about any of them, I’d encourage you to provide that with a comment.

These Southwesterners risked their lives for strangers. Why? What makes a hero?

For eighteen-year-old Kim Carnes, the nightmare began with the bloodcurdling realization that might accompany any young urban female’s solitary late-night trek to a grocery. As she entered the store at about 1:30 a.m., she noticed a suspicious man sitting in his car on the lot, perched like an owl awaiting prey. Emerging moments later with a container of ice cream, she hustled past his car, which now sat empty where it had been parked. She climbed behind the wheel of her car, placed the key in the ignition and glanced from habit into the rearview mirror. Her heart stopped when she saw his face returning her glance.

He seized control, pushing her onto the passenger seat and crawling behind the wheel. Frozen in terror, she watched him start the car and felt it begin to race across the parking lot. Her mind slowly started playing out her fears, predicting the immediate future, and almost involuntarily she began to whimper like a pup being dragged to a whipping. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and wished for someone to help her.

Just then she was shaken back to the moment by the roar of a motorcycle pulling alongside her car. She heard a grinding crash as metal and rubber smashed to the blacktop. A man was actually climbing through her opened sunroof, clawing for a hold as the car picked up speed. Suddenly he dropped into the driver’s seat, wedging himself between the wheel and her assailant. The car swerved while fists rained down on the kidnapper’s face in a pounding so violent it would snap the seat from the hinges.

As quickly as the adventure began it had ended. Her car slammed to a stop in a ditch. Soon the parking lot filled with police cars, their lights flashing and their radios barking in the night. Her assailant lay on the blacktop, hands cuffed behind his back. Only later did she learn that he worked as a butcher. She could only imagine the horror that had been prevented by the hero who raced into her life on a Suzuki 750.

Kim Carnes’ adventure occurred four-and-a-half years ago one summer night in Houston, but it could have happened anytime, anywhere in metropolitan America. Indeed, on that same night—July 2, 1981—similar nightmares undoubtedly haunted many other young women who were wishing for their own hero. It would be hard to convince Kim Carnes that the term hero is an obsolete part of our vocabulary. For her, hero means a young man named Jim Dickson.

Later dubbed “Superman III” for his parking lot rescue, Dickson, then 25, won acclaim for his exploit. He recreated the acrobatics for That’s Incredible and the National Enquirer. He appeared on talk shows as a crime-fighting expert, accepted a call from Ronald Reagan and even tossed out the first pitch at an Astros game. And then he blended back into the ranks of the nameless, his moment in the spotlight coming to an end.

Dickson is hardly unique. Contrary to popular laments, the hero maintains a strong presence in American culture. In 1982 alone—the year after Dickson’s dramatic feat—the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission recognized 97 individuals for similarly daring acts of rescue. And Dickson was not even among them.

Sure, the Information Age has neutralized the hero’s impact. Picture Davy Crockett’s image if we’d had network television and Mike Wallace to dissect his financial dealings in the days of the Texas Revolution. Nonetheless, heroes continue to capture our hearts with their sacrifice and our imaginations with their adventures. But questions remain.

Who are these people and what becomes of them? Do they share a common trait, a characteristic powerful enough to motivate them to action where others might cower in silence? How do they handle the fleeting fame, with its often blinding momentary glare and its unavoidably short span of attention? What message is stamped on their psyches, what changes wrought on the reflections they see in the mirror? And what can we learn about ourselves from understanding the answers those questions inspire?

We can find plenty of heroes right here in the Southwest to help find the answers. Too many times we’ve let them shrug their shoulders and retreat with the humble façade that ranks as one common mask among these folks who often react out of shyness itself. Before meeting a few of our regional heroes, however, academics can offer their results on the subject.

Who’s a hero? To a suffering cancer patient, the hospital volunteer is no less a hero than the firefighter who pulls a child from a burning building. But neither has performed what academics label “The Heroic Act.” The candy striper hasn’t risked her life and the firefighter gets paid to be a hero. For behavioral scientists, the heroic act has narrow boundaries. The person rescued must be a stranger. And the hero must risk the ultimate sacrifice, acting not for money but from some mysterious well of humanitarianism.

“What is it, we ask, which is missing or which has failed in most people that they seem to look on anesthetically—awake, possibly annoyed, but without agony—at the destruction done to others?” asked Jack Markowitz in his 1973 book A Walk on the Crust of Hell. Determined to find the answer, Markowitz tracked the personal stories of numerous Carnegie medalists and reviewed the research of scientists. He discovered some common traits and some plausible explanations.

One enlightening experiment from the sixties resulted in the term diffusion of responsibility and a formula for situations that might prompt a heroic act. Researchers placed 72 volunteer subjects in a laboratory of isolated offices with orders to await further instructions. Some subjects were gathered in groups of six, some were paired, and others sat alone. Suddenly a voice on the intercom begged for help—a researcher feigning crisis so the experimenters could observe their subjects’ reactions. Of the students seated alone, 85 percent moved in less than a minute to offer help. But volunteers in groups of six listened an average of 166 seconds while the alleged victim babbled for help—and then only 31 percent moved to the rescue.

The conclusions? The more bystanders there are to an emergency, the slower anyone will move to help. Witnesses who are standing alone realize they’ll later have only themselves to blame for inaction. As a group, however, they can share that guilt. The researchers noted that all their subjects suffered sweaty palms and asked anxious questions about the victim’s condition. The subjects who failed to help did not lack concern. They were merely undecided, locked between two alternatives and unable to act.

Decisiveness seems to play a key role, and the University of Pittsburgh’s Martin Greenburg has noted that the decision-making process involved a quick review of options with consequences. The hero is a quick thinker who can balance the cost of inaction against the risk of getting involved. The person with a high sense of self-esteem would instinctively realize that the guilt for inaction could prove a burden for life.

But decisiveness alone does not explain the personality traits that produce a hero. At the University of Southern California, researchers analyzed the personalities of 27 immigrants who had helped European Jews pursued by the Nazis during World War II. They pinpointed three specific characteristics displayed by all. Each had a spirit of adventure. Each admitted an intense identification with one or both parents as a model of moral conduct. And they all confessed a sense of being “socially marginal,” seeing themselves as people who had never really fit with their peers.

Records indicate that the so-called socially marginal account for a fair share of heroic acts. Immigrants, minorities, the very poor and even convicts have learned that a daring rescue can be one way to win acceptance or prove their loyalty. That image of the hero as a brooding loner appears to have much basis in fact.

Other studies have discovered a correlation between good deeds and good fortune. Researchers planted change in a public telephone booth, let a subject find it and then staged a “victim” dropping books on the sidewalk outside. Their subjects proved more willing to help after retrieving the coins than before.

There has also been evidence that rescuers experience great feelings of power. Some have reported feeling the strength of 10 during a heroic act. Perhaps it’s a motivating factor—some need to demonstrate pride and control.

Of what are heroes made? Undoubtedly every hero has one of more the ingredients mentioned above. But it’s equally certain they boast some more intangible assets. After observing the heroic act in more than 2,300 documented cases, the late Thomas S. Arbuthnot, president of the Carnegie Hero Fund, threw up his arms in 1935 to offer his view: “The commission is forced to the conclusion that it is not the individual altogether but the inspired moment that accounts for the deed. Perhaps all of us are eligible for acts of heroism if the spark comes at the right time to set aglow the impulse. Heroism is not made; some tragedy finds it out. Like gold, it is uncovered.”

Here’s a look at five regional individuals who uncovered that spark and learned they had the ingredients to create a hero.

Jim Dickson: Superman on a Suzuki

Although he hasn’t received the Carnegie Medal, Jim Dickson is one of the most heralded Texas heroes of recent memory. His acrobatics in the rescue of Kim Carnes have been re-created on That’s Incredible and in the National Enquirer. A former all-state defensive end who can bench press 380 pounds, Dickson stands six-foot-two, weighs 205 pounds and ran the 100-yard dash in 10 seconds as a prep athlete. He’s hardly the kind of guy you’d want standing around when you decide to do something mean and violent.

While formidable, Dickson’s physical qualifications for a heroic act pale compared to the emotional background he brought to the moment. Born March 8, 1956, in Beaumont, Dickson developed a spirit of alienation at age 14 when his parents divorced. Recalling that event as the “end of the world,” Dickson ran away to live with a neighbor. Son of a wealthy architect, he never wanted for anything except a normal home. He vented his teen rage on the football field and later in bars where he became an accomplished fighter. With a tone of self-confidence rather than boastfulness, he says: “I’ve never started a fight and I’ve never lost one, either.”

Dickson graduated from a military academy in Bryan and attended college in Oklahoma on a football scholarship. He transferred to Lamar University in Beaumont, then dropped out to sell insurance, moving to Houston in 1979 as a salesman for elementary school fundraising projects.

“It was the main thing that ever happened to me,” recalls Dickson of his rescue. In recounting the event he speaks of himself in the third person, as if he were not really in control but were instead just watching. It was unusual for Dickson to have been on hand in the first place. Moonlighting as a nightclub bouncer, Dickson had left work early because his girlfriend became ill. Instead of visiting Denny’s for coffee—their normal routine—they decided to stop at the grocery and fix something at home: “Something else was controlling this thing.”

Anger played only a small role in his reaction. He recalls feeling great waves of sympathy for Carnes: “I always told myself I’d look out for Number One, but I could see something was going on. My sister was raped about eight years ago. It was pretty violent. And that was going through my mind. It helped me to focus on the girl.”

While the police told Dickson he’d hear no more about the incident, his phone started ringing the next day. Local news accounts catapulted him into the national limelight, and, he admits, the attention went to his head. He entertained dreams of a movie career. Then, about six months later, he realized his moment had passed.

“People just quit calling and they didn’t get excited about it. I felt like a has-been,” says Dickson, who compares the subsequent depression with his blues about totaling a car. But his case of postpartum didn’t last. Successfully running his own fund-raising projects business from a condo in Southwest Houston, Dickson today credits his adventure with a lasting impact.

"I read” stories about heroes and I feel like a comrade,” he says. “I know what they went through. I was able to do this because I had the athletic ability and wasn’t afraid of physical confrontation. But when I look in the mirror, I see a man who is now able to go through life with all the confidence in the world. I guess I’m just not able to be ashamed of anything I’ve ever done in my life. I feel like I’m good enough to be in anyone’s presence.”

Gary Lane Parker: The Texas Wild Man

To bystanders at Stillhouse Hollow Reservoir, the scene must have looked as if someone had stolen the script from an old silent film. It was Easter Sunday, 1978, and a bizarre tragedy was unfolding. About 250 yards off the lake’s northwest shore, a 16-foot fiberglass ski boat was spinning wildly in a clockwise circle, the steering wheel locked and its driver drowned beneath the water’s surface. Still aboard sat a 16-month-old child. His mother and infant brother had been pulled from the lake by onlookers who were trying to lasso the boat’s propellers and save the child. Realizing the futility of their attempts, they threw up their hands and began wondering aloud how long it would be before the boat would claim another victim. That’s when a 25-year-old Killeen auto mechanic stepped forward.

“You’re crazy,” yelled someone in the crowd as Gary Lane Parker explained his plan to a boat owner named John Runyan. Parker wanted Runyan to act as a “chauffeur,” roaring out to the ski boat in his craft, drawing close and allowing Parker to leap on board. One misstep could easily send Parker into the runaway propellers or wreck both boats. But Runyan agreed to try. After watching the runaway for several minutes to chart its circular course, they set out with Parker perched on the bow.

With both boats shooting across the water at 40 miles an hour, Parker leaped the eight-foot chasm that separated him from the bawling child. He grabbed hold, slipped for a moment, then hoisted himself on board to kill the ignition.

To those on shore watching this deep-water rodeo, Parker’s heroics must have seemed an incredible act of courage. Indeed, it proved impressive enough to bring Parker the coveted Carnegie Hero medal and a whole parade of local honors. But any review of Parker’s background will reveal a man ideally prepared for the death defiance at Stillhouse Hollow Reservoir.

Born June 8, 1952, in Temple, he was an only child who excelled at the high jump and pole vault as a junior high athlete. Parker practiced his leaping at home hurdling barbed-wire fences for fun until he discovered a more exciting outlet for those energies: the motocross. He spent two years racing professionally and once finished tenth in an event at the Astrodome. Parker says he earned his circuit nickname—“Wild Man from Texas”—with his motocross style: “I liked to ride fast and out of control.”

He recalls feeling so confident and powerful in his rescue attempt that his only concern centered on Runyan: “I didn’t even know him. But I knew I could get in that boat. There was just no doubt in my mind. I had the aggressiveness to go for it. It was like racing cycles or pole vaulting.”

Physical ability is one thing, motivation another. Parker had both. He recalled his grandfather in Central Texas teaching him about animals: “He was always catching some bobcat and putting it in a pen if it had been hurt. I was brought up to respect elders and open the door for ladies.”

Now divorced and employed as an electronics mechanic at Fort Hood, the six-foot-two Parker says the heroic act has left a positive mark on him, too.

“It made me more sure of myself,” says Parker. “I was given an opportunity and I proved myself. Not everyone gets that chance.”

Deborah Gloston: An American Tragedy

Of all recent tales of regional heroism, the most touching might belong to Galveston’s Deborah Gloston. She comes the closest in showing how far a person can go to rescue another.

In 1980 she prevented three small children from an ugly death beneath the grinding wheels of a runaway car, taking the blow herself. Disabled from the injuries, the 35-year-old woman lives with her own children down the block from the family that counts her as a savior. In 1982, she became a recipient of the Carnegie Medal for heroism.

“I couldn’t stand the thought of nobody (sic) getting hurt, especially my kids,” she says, apologizing for small gaps in her memory. “When they told me I got hit by a car keeping three kids from being killed, I felt good. I’m still thanking God for giving me my life back.”

Gloston’s ordeal began at about 3:00 p.m. December 2, 1980, when she reported for duty at the Galveston grade school where she earned $82.50 every two weeks as a crossing guard. Juan Cantu watched that afternoon as Gloston led his son and two other children across an intersection. A pickup truck collided with an auto and it zipped out of control.

“The crossing guard was standing on the corner of the sidewalk and had one of three children by the hand,” recalled Cantu. “When she saw that the car was going to hit them, she pushed the kids to one side and then she got hit by the car. I have no doubt if she wouldn’t have shoved the children out of the way, my son would have been killed. I’ll never forget what that woman did. Never.”

Her skull fractured and her power of speech temporarily lost, Gloston lay unconscious for three weeks. The school district admitted she had no coverage under its employee insurance plan, but the community rallied to her aid. Well-wishers established a relief fund to help pay the $70,000 medical bills, and the National Enquirer generated more donations. A lawsuit from the wreck failed to help because the driver at fault was employed by a company going bankrupt. A small settlement, donations and disability now pay her bills. On paper, she’s come out even. But physically it appears she’ll be burdened the rest of her life.

Nevertheless, she voices no anger and very little fear. Her voice reflects a certain air of confidence that could be born only of the knowledge that she had passed a special kind of test.

“I guess,” she says in explanation, “it was just my love for people. Especially kids. They’re so innocent. I’d do it again.”

Tommie McClure: No Mercy for the Bullies

When Dallas wrecker driver Tommie McClure was growing up in Marshall, an uncle devised a way to make him tougher than the other kids.

“I always had to fight back,” recalls the 38-year-old McClure. “I don’t guess I ever had any fear. But I lived with my grandparents and I had an uncle who was kind of crazy. He’d get other kids to jump on me when I was little just to make me fight back. I didn’t like to hurt anybody. He was just doing it to make me tough.”

That the strategy worked became apparent in October 1981 when McClure and his partner paused at a service station during a night of repossessing autos. A woman in her fifties leaped from another car, hysterically crying for help. The man in the car pulled her back inside and roared off.

“Angry?” asks McClure in puzzlement about his emotion at the moment. “You bet I was angry. I was mad about someone who would take advantage of a person like that. I just wanted to tear his head off. It reminded me of the time some bullies started throwing rocks at me and some other kids. I met one of them halfway down the hill and whipped him good.”

This time he tore down the highway in his wrecker, joining a chase that reached speeds beyond 100 miles per hour. He curbed the fleeing car and watched the driver lock the doors. Grabbing a hydraulic jack, McClure pounded on the windows until the man agreed to surrender. He wired the man’s hands with electric cord, loaded him onto the wrecker and hoisted the car for a tow. He learned that the woman had been raped and the car belonged to her.

It should come as no surprise that McClure has been making his own way for quite some time. He dropped out of school and left home at age 15, landing work as a laborer.

“I’ve had lots of fights,” says McClure. “But I’ve never been a bully. I always took up for the little ones. I just don’t like bigger people jumping on the little ones.”

Melody Richardson: Mom to the Rescue

When two men staged a traffic accident last February, intentionally ramming a car on a street in Houston’s West University Place, they expected to have an easy time robbing and beating the 70-year-old woman who was driving it. Under the guise of exchanging insurance information, they grabbed her and pulled her into their car to drive away. But they hadn’t counted on a neighborhood homemaker foiling their plans. In fact, Melody Richardson would have seemed to anyone an unlikely candidate for the heroic act that afternoon, burdened as she was with the presence of her 11-year-old son and three-year-old daughter.

“I felt morally obligated,” says the 36-year-old banker’s wife of her reaction upon witnessing the incident. She figured the assailants had guns. While her son, Bryan, urged her forward, Richardson stepped on the gas and began honking her horn. She trailed the fleeing auto as it sped through the affluent residential suburbs south of Houston’s bustling downtown.

“I guess I’m just a fast thinker,” she says. “One of them kept looking back at me. But I thought, if I just keep chasing them and honking, someone will have to come.”

Someone finally did—a Southside Place police officer, who was forced to shoot one of the men in the head after he tried hitting the officer with the door of the car. The pair were stripped on their pistols and taken to jail. The victim offered a tearful thanks to her rescuer.

Richardson, like her heroic counterparts, admits a strong moral identification with a parent, in this case, her father: “I thought he was perfect.” An Oklahoma native, she was the only daughter among four children born to the factory manager. She describes herself as an independent thinker who often sets herself apart from any one particular group. And she acknowledges an adventuresome spirit, saying, “I like adventures at lot. I’m really curious about a lot of things.”

She maintains a relationship with the woman she saved. And she enjoys being part of a subculture that will continue to offer for many of us an example by which to live. How could she place herself and her children in danger to save a stranger? Her simple answer is an explanation for them all:

“Something horrible might have happened if I hadn’t.”

Calling Dr. Joe, Forensics Pioneer

 As a courts and police reporter in the 1970s for The Houston Post, I had the opportunity to write often about one of Texas’ most legendary characters in Dr. Joseph Jachimczyk, who served as Harris County Medical Examiner from 1957 until his retirement in 1995.

Creating Houston’s office from scratch during the salad days of national forensic pathology, Dr. Joe (much easier to spell or pronounce than Jachimczyk) also ranked among the city’s most colorful characters. His frequent court appearances always combined scholarly input with amusing interrogation, particularly whenever aggressive attorneys sought to discredit his findings. Dressed in his signature bow tie and white shoes, Dr. Joe was always capable of sharing a laugh one moment while destroying an accusation the next.

Among my most memorable experiences as a journalist in Houston includes a Dr. Joe autopsy I attended about 1981, as part of research on him as the subject for a magazine feature story. He often allowed journalists to attend autopsies as a way of sharing information about his intriguing profession. And he always began his work with the admonition: “This is not a living person. It cannot feel any pain. Please be comfortable while we learn what this body might have to tell us about the person’s death.”

Dr. Joe died September 7, 2004, at his Houston home from complications of Parkinson’s Disease.

While reporting the monumental highlights of his career, the doctor’s Hearst News Corporation obituary pulled no punches in citing his most controversial case. Noting that Dr. Joe was “not infallible,” the obit cited the 1979 triple slaying in which he ruled that Houston socialite Diana Wanstrath shot her husband and son before killing herself, dubbing it a murder-suicide. A grand jury ultimately reversed that ruling, and three men were sentenced to death for their roles in the triple homicide, memorialized in one of the most interesting true crime books ever written, The Cop Who Wouldn’t Quit—by my former Houston Post colleague Rick Nelson.

It troubled Dr. Joe to apologize for that conclusion, which he always explained as an honest mistake. But he also always fumed when talking about that case and the HPD detective who solved it, Johnny Bonds. In conversations, Dr. Joe always referred sarcastically to Bonds as “Captain America.”

When Dr. Joe retired in 1995, I wrote this article about him, published September 18, 1995, in The National Law Journal.

He Tamed Texas’ Wild Forensics Frontier

The numbers alone are staggering: 250,000 death investigations and more than 125,000 autopsies. But they represent the legacy of a man who serves as this region’s bridge between the dark ages of law enforcement’s past and the modern world of forensics. With a last name too difficult for most to pronounce, he’s been known around Houston since 1957 as simply “Dr. Joe.”

Officially, he was Dr. Joseph A. Jachimczyk. Harris County Medical Examiner, the county’s highest-paid employee. His September 1 retirement concluded an important era in Texas legal history.

In terms of national longevity as a medical examiner, Dr. Jachimczyk, 71, ranked second only to Miami’s Joe Davis, who started his ME career there about a year before Dr. Jachimczyk came to Houston. With Dr. Davis set to retire in January, Dr. Jachimczyk’s departure is the first step of a double loss to the country’s legal medicine community.

“They both have been giants,” said Dr. Boyd Stephens, the chief ME in San Francisco and president of the National Association of Medical Examiners. “They did pioneering work in many areas and trained a lot of people…it’s hard to imagine how communities can find someone to match them.”

One of the first MEs to combine a law degree with his medical credentials, Dr. Jachimczyk also holds a degree in theology. His value to Houston and Harris County law enforcement is evident in his paycheck. Earning $150,000 per year at the end of his reign, he ranked for decades as the county’s highest-paid official, eclipsing the district attorney and the sheriff.

But Dr. Jachimczyk hasn’t been of value only to the prosecutors. It’s hard to find defense attorneys with a complaint against him, either. And Dr. Joe believes that one of the finest compliments he could have.

“His office has always felt it is separate and apart from law enforcement and he has succeeded in that effort,” said Stanley G. Schneider, of Houston’s Schneider & McKinney.

“What scares me now is that the search for a successor may become political,” Mr. Schneider added.

From his outpost on Houston’s bank of the River Styx, Dr. Joe has presided over more than his share of famous deaths. He figured prominently in the investigations, detailed in the best seller Blood and Money, concerning the deaths of Joan Robinson Hill and her husband Dr. John Hill. His office fielded the nation’s first serious mass murder case in 1973, dealing with a body county of 27, and literally wrote the book on how to handle such situations. When Howard Hughes flew home to Houston to die in 1976, Dr. Jachimczyk was there to welcome the billionaire to his morgue.

Texas law gives the medical examiner complete control of a body from the moment it drops until transfer to a funeral home, and Dr. Jachimczyk has been aggressive in his exercise of that power. While he didn’t demand a public autopsy of every death, of course, he did insist on calling the shots. All potential murder cases and VIP deaths came to his table.

To fully appreciate Dr. Jachimczyk’s impact on Texas law enforcement requires a look at the situation just before his arrival. In the early 1950s, elected justices of the peace still had the authority to make official rulings on deaths, and they often found themselves at odds with police, attorneys, families and even themselves—indeed, mistakes were common.

As usual with Texas, one prominent scandal prompted a change that would figure in Dr. Jachimczyk’s recruitment. The scandal arose when a dead baby lay on a San Antonio street for 12 hours while two JPs argued over jurisdiction.

A loud public outcry sparked the Legislature to consider a change. Hearings produced incredible tales from police detectives. One told of a drunken JP who came to a funeral home, squinted as a corpse and declared death by heart attack. Later, during funeral preparations, embalmers found knife wounds in the victim’s back.

So in 1955, Texas established it medical examiner system, giving several metropolitan counties the authority to establish legal medicine departments. Houston became the first when, in January 1956, county commissioners appointed a prominent Houston physician named Jared Clarke to create an office there.

A qualified physician, Dr. Clarke nevertheless knew he needed a special assistant to make the office really fulfill its expectations. Traditionally introverted, pathologists had been known for their study of diseases. But the blossoming field of forensic pathology had created a new breed who combined medicine with law and preferred reading Sherlock Holmes to medical texts. Dr. Clarke wanted one of this breed to assist him, and he found one at Harvard University in Dr. Jachimczyk.

The eldest son of parents who had emigrated from Poland during World War I, Dr. Jachimczyk had grown up in Connecticut, where the family ran an ice business. Born September 15, 1923, he helped drive the ice wagon as a youth and served as an altar boy at funerals. As a soldier in World War II, he saw no action. But the GI Bill enabled him to attend college, and he emerged from the University of Tennessee in 1948 with a medical degree. Determined to become a “hotshot” surgeon, he returned to the Northeast for his resident training.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the operating room. He took a course in pathology, and he found himself fascinated with its world of microscopes and cadavers, which he never escaped. By 1956, he had entrenched himself at Harvard’s department of legal medicine and was nearing completion of his law degree at Boston College when Houston called.

Two of Dr. Jachimczyk’s colleagues already had rejected an offer from Dr. Clarke in Houston after touring the primitive facilities established for the new office in the basement of the county’s hospital for indigents. But fierce New England snowstorms prompted Dr. Jachimczyk to take the trip south. He quickly realized the excitement of building a department from the ground up, and he accepted the job.

Before he died a few years ago, veteran Harris County Commissioner E.A. “Squatty” Lyons compared the hiring of Dr. Jachimczyk with the commission’s decision to create the hospital and flood control districts—infrastructures vital to the area.

But Mr. Lyons and his fellow commissioners were not so sure in 1957 when the brash 33-year-old showed up—sporting medical and legal degrees plus a name they couldn’t pronounce—and asked them for $90,000 to modernize the morgue facilities. Commissioners balked until Dr. Joe teamed with a famous Texas Ranger to solve a baffling case and showed them the value of his work.

The Ranger, John Kleavenhagen, was investigating the death of a young veteran in Madisonville, about 100 miles north of Houston. A Veterans Administration doctor had performed an autopsy and had blamed the death on stomach flu. But the Ranger heard that a genuine forensic pathologist had arrived, and he asked Dr. Jachimczyk to review the case. So Dr. Joe called the VA pathologist and asked if he could see some tissue or the slides.

“I got one thing even better,” replied Dr. Ethel Erickson, who would eventually become one of Dr. Jachimczyk’s assistants.

“What do you mean?” Dr. Jachimczyk recalls asking. “You got some frozen blood?”

“No,” she replied, “I’ve got a frozen liver.”

Because her superior at the VA had been studying liver diseases, he had instructed all pathologists to save specimens. With near ghoulish delight, Dr. Jachimczyk collected the organ, thawed it out and ran tests. His investigation produced the state’s first proven case of arsenic poisoning. Confronted with Dr. Jachimczyk’s report, the once-grieving widow confessed she’d been spiking her late husband’s lunches with weed killer.

A dead ringer for the late comedian Sam Levinson, Dr. Jachimczyk—responding to a newspaper reporter—once even selected Mr. Levinson as the actor most likely to portray the doctor in any movies about his life. Although Hollywood hasn’t called—yet—Dr. Jachimczyk received his greatest honor about 10 years ago when the county built a $5 million forensic center and named it after him.

Looking forward to the future, Dr. Jachimczyk predicts such things as bloodless autopsies done by magnetic resonance imaging. As for himself, he’ll be teaching at the University of Texas Medical School as the nation’s first endowed professor of forensic pathology.

Dr. Jachimczyk doesn’t hesitate when asked about the most important thing he’s learned from a life studying the carnage of the human race.

“A belief in the hereafter,” he said. “There’s so much injustice down here that there has to be justice somewhere.”