Family matters

March 27, 2020

Who in the world was Monk Reese?

Among the letters in Lt. William Cherry’s wooden box in Fort Delaware prison lay one from Montreal — an unsigned letter but in a familiar hand. We know who wrote it because the writing matched later letters from a “Monk Reese.” Here is the letter: Montreal, Canada July 12th, 1864[envelope postmarked New York} Lt. W. B. [sic] CherryFort Delaware Dear Billy I have just received a dispatch [sic] from Mr. Parsons of New York stating that: “Lt W C Cherry is a prisoner of war at Fort Delaware & wants to hear from you.” I feel glad & sorry both. Glad that an opportunity has presented itself so that I…

November 27, 2019

St. Louis by Train in 1921

Years ago, I began to collect family papers and photographs – and as my late friend Professor Andrew Muir used to say, “impedimenta” — — some of which go back to the 19th century. I have published some of the letters kept by Colonel Cherry. In 1973, as we were closing the grandparents’ house, I found his 19th-century correspondence in a small box in a bookcase in the living room of 2221 Lipscomb, the Pannills’ red stone house in Fort Worth. Lt. Cherry seems to have assembled the box with pegs at the Union prison at Fort Delaware. Perhaps the jailers did not allow the Confederate prisoners nails. I also…

November 29, 2018

A belated memory of Kent Demaret

Kent Demaret, aged 72, the retired Houston correspondent for Life and People magazines, died in Houston on March 16, 2007. The old Houston Press — Houston’s third daily newspaper until 1964 — hired me as a cub reporter in the spring of 1962 and assigned me to the police beat. The city editor was Jack Mohler (who became city editor of The Chronicle in 1964 after The Press folded). But my real boss was Kent Demaret, the assistant city editor. The Press published from a two-story building, now demolished, south of downtown Houston at Rusk and Chartres. The building sat across U. S. 59 from what is now the George…

November 11, 2018

Armistice Day 2018

This blog went dark for most of 2018, but the centennial of Armistice Day deserves a remembrance. Two Pannill brothers died in the final months of World War I. Pfc. George Edmond Pannill, born in 1896 at “Claremont” in Martinsville, Virginia, was killed in action near Soissons about 10 a.m. on July 18, 1918. He lived about two minutes. That same day, his brother, Pfc. Jeb Stuart Pannill, born in 1897, fighting in the same unit and battle, suffered a wound through the chest. His parents must have named him after our great cousin. Stuart wrote home that his brother had been slightly wounded. He said he “hoped to be…