Helen Potter Harper

Helen was born to Florence Collier Potter and Claude Lee Potter Sr. in a rooming house on Chenevert Street (2 blocks from the Minute Maid Baseball stadium) in Houston, Texas, on December 10th, 1913.

In 1916, the small family moved to Beaumont where she soon welcomed a brother, Claude Lee Potter Jr.

In 1920, they moved back to Houston where her youngest brother, Ralph Adrian Potter, was born.

In 1922, they moved back to Beaumont. Some time around 1924 they moved to Galveston for a year, and then back to Beaumont.

Helen’s great uncle John Happ had a dairy on Collier’s Ferry Road (Pine Street) near the Neches River. When she was 14 and 15 she sometimes earned spending money by driving his milk truck to deliver milk to stores in town

She attended Beaumont High School where she bowled and played golf with Babe Zaharias Didrikson. She graduated in 1930 (?) and then went to business school at Chenier Business College on Orleans Street.

She was married in Beaumont to Thomas Paul Harper in The First Christian Church on Magnolia Avenue in June 1933. They shared an apartment with some high school friends until Paul got a job at the Texaco Refinery and they moved to Port Neches. They rented a one bedroom house with an outside privy until they saved enough money to buy their first 2-bedroom house on Marion Street. (FIRST HOUSE)

On August 25, 1935, along came her first child, Carleen Harper. Then on September 20, 1937, along came her second, Glen Marvin Harper.

In the summer of 1939, Claude Lee Junior was attending the University of Texas in Austin. He was majoring in Spanish and Mexican History and wanted to go to Mexico.

He asked Helen and Paul to go with him to share expenses, so with a car trip to Mexico City, they made their first trip of many they would share and enjoy over the next 56 years.

Helen and Paul would ultimately travel to all 50 states, all but 2 provinces of Canada, many of the Northern and Eastern states of Mexico, and several Caribbean islands.

In 1941, Paul quit Texaco and they moved back to Beaumont where he had gotten a better job with Santa Fe. They moved into a one bedroom apartment in one side of Helen’s Grandmother’s house, just next door to her mother. The large two story house was lived in by her Grandmother, Mary Happ Collier, Grandfather Hugh Robert Collier, and Great Uncle H.R. Collier Jr. H.R Senior had built the house at 2830 Magnolia in 1899 and 1900, and as time went by he subsequently built a smaller house on the north side for their daughter Florence and family. He then built an identical small  house on the south side for their daughter Geneva Collier Gonzales and family. Since there were ladies available to watch Carleen and Glen when they got home from school, Helen went to work as a legal secretary for a judge on Pearl Street.

In early 1944 Paul was transferred to Temple, Texas where they lived for a year until the end of the war. There they bought a two bedroom house at 606 North 6th Street. (SECOND HOUSE) She convinced him to go to college, so they moved to El Paso where he attended Texas College of Mines (now UTEP). At the time of the move many veterans returning from the war had caused a serious shortage of housing so they lived in a cheap motel for a few weeks until they found a garage (one car, dirt floor) to live in. The flat roof leaked and during their few weeks there El Paso had more rain than they usually had in 2 years. Bathroom facilities were in the main house, and there was a one burner electric hot plate for cooking. Helen’s diligent searching finally yielded a small one bedroom house for rent at 2207 Silver Street. The street was rock, and the house was next to last from the end of the street, where there was an arroyo and then the Franklin Mountains rose abruptly on the north to block the surprisingly cold winter winds. She was always amazed at the need to have only one strand of clothes line. Even Paul’s and Glen’s jeans would dry at one end of the line by the time she finished hanging clothes to the other end. This was so radically different from East Texas where clothes would usually take a full day to dry, and sometimes hung on the line damp until they mildewed.

While Paul took a full load at school and worked 40 hours a week in the lab at the small Texaco refinery there, Helen found a job as secretary at the El Paso Herald-Tribune. After a year she landed a job as a secretary at the FBI. The family sometimes took picnic lunches on weekends and visited sites where Paul had gone on Geology class field trips. Helen and Glen became fascinated by the desert environment, and especially the rocks and fossils.

After 2 years in El Paso, Paul transferred to The University of Texas in Austin. Helen landed a job as secretary with the Internal Revenue while he went to school and worked several part-time jobs.

After he graduated in 1949, they moved to Houston where he worked for the Texas State Welfare Department and she once again found employment with the FBI.

In 1950 he went to work for Transco in the Cleveland, Texas area buying rights-of-way for their first big pipeline from Texas to the East Coast. Helen worked for Macobar Drilling Mud Company and the kids were parked for a year with their Grandmother Potter in Beaumont.

In 1951, Paul went to work for Stanolind (Amoco) and was promptly transferred in September to Levelland for a year’s on-the-job field training. While there Helen worked at the nearby Reese Air Force Base located on the West side of Lubbock. She has some hair raising tales to tell about car pooling with several Air Force pilots who lived in our area because it was cheaper than Lubbock. They apparently tried to set new speed records every morning for the 30 miles to the Base.

Helen was never comfortable in the plains due to the incessant wind and frequent dust storms. She took everything out of the refrigerator every Saturday to wipe out the weeks accumulation of dust/sand, and had to wipe down all the bottles etc. as they were returned. She cried with joy when Paul was transferred back to Houston in September of 1952, where they lived in a two bedroom upstairs duplex. In 1953 they bought a 3 bedroom 1 bath house at 5555 Aspen in Bellaire, Texas. (THIRD HOUSE)

There she landed a job as executive secretary at Fish Pipeline Company. After a year she went to work as office manager for her brother Claude Lee. He was area rep for Allegheny-Ludlum Stainless Steel. He had gotten his MBA from Harvard after resigning from the navy in 1945. He had been a pilot instructor at Corpus Christi and Pensacola during the war. In the late 40s While Claude Lee was attending Harvard, Helen took her first plane ride and went up to visit him. He took her on a short trip in the east where she was especially captivated by The White Mountains and The Green Mountains.

Her youngest brother Ralph had been in the army until 1945. Then he married his high school sweetheart and went to school at UT Austin. He graduated in the first class they offered in Ceramic Engineering in 1949 and went to work for the Atomic Energy Commission in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

After Claude Lee was transferred to Dallas, Helen once again found work as a secretary for the FBI in Houston.

Carleen graduated from San Jacinto High School in Houston in 1953. She married an Air force pilot, William Weischedel, in 1955 and moved with him when he was sent to Rhine Main Base in Germany. Glen graduated from Kinkaid High School in Houston in 1955. He went to school at UT Austin for a year, then back to The University of Houston. He met a svelte beautiful Czech girl, Barbara Marie Venglar, while he worked as a draftsman at Amoco, and they were married in October of 1958.

Meanwhile, Paul had been transferred in early 1956 to Casper, Wyoming. Between September 1952 and March 1956 Helen had filled her evenings, while he was traveling on his job, by taking classes in ceramics and mosaics and crewelwork. In Wyoming she once again found herself in an environment of ceaseless wind, but this was exacerbated by the blowing sand and snow. They lived in an apartment until a new two bedroom house became available in a new subdivision. They bought this house (FOURTH HOUSE) on North Sun Drive and had to learn all over about being homeowners. Since both were raised in Southeast Texas, they never really got to where they enjoyed the winter. The ground freeze line in Casper is six feet – any place else they had lived the freeze line was about two inches. Their first year there the temperature got down to a record 40 below zero and the wind hardly ever stopped. The wind was so bad that the front screen door was torn off the hinges (twice) and landed in the yard. They then learned to hold on when they opened it.

Paul was still traveling so Helen got a job at the local Corps of Engineers office. Whenever they went out to lunch, the ladies sometimes had to link arms to prevent being blown off their feet by the wind. She took French in Casper College and enjoyed outings with the local rock hound club. They spent most of their time looking for moss agate and Wyoming jade. After she had a close encounter with a rattle snake on one outing she bought some taller boots.

They had a lot of visitors from the South, so they acted as guides and made frequent trips to Yellowstone, Devils Tower, The Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Rafting on the Green River, Jackson Hole, etc. They both loved to travel, and since both had a lot of vacation time, they traveled on into Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Utah, and other nearby states. They made several trips to Las Vegas to visit her uncle Joe Potter who owned a small motel there. Neither ever gambled but liked to go to the shows and visit Boulder Dam and visit touristy sites in Southern Arizona and Nevada.

In 1963 they were both tired of the weather and the office politics, so Paul resigned and they moved to Albuquerque where he started working on his masters degree. Helen transferred and continued working for the Corps.

In 1965 Paul got a job with The National Labor Relations Board and so they moved to Atlanta, Georgia where they lived in an apartment while they built a house in suburban Chamblee (FIFTH HOUSE). Helen transferred and continued working for the Corps. His new job involved travel in Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina. By then Helen had so much time in with the Government she had a lot of annual leave so she sometimes took off and went with him. They also took some long weekends and went to some of the Government owned R & R facilities in the area. While in Atlanta they took trips to Hawaii and Acapulco, and also drove to Key West several times with stops at Cape Kennedy and The Okefenokee Swamp. She thought this was a special stop since she was a long-time Pogo fan.

She had advanced in grade in the civil service system and was assigned as Special Aide to the general-in-charge of the South Atlantic region of the Corps. This encompasses the southeastern U.S, Central America, Bahamas, and the Caribbean. She wrote the monthly news letter and many of the general’s speeches. She sometimes went with them when they were flying in empty MATS planes to deliver speeches in Puerto Rico and other Atlantic and Caribbean islands.

In 1970 they bought a beautiful large lot on Mount Oglethorpe in the Bent Tree Development in North Georgia. They had intended to build a retirement home there but by the time they felt they could afford it, they both had decided they couldn’t stand being snowed in for weeks up there, and also felt they wouldn’t be able to drive on the steep winding roads when they were covered with ice and snow.

Somewhere along the way in Wyoming Helen had learned to make wool braided rugs which she continued on a casual basis until into her early eighties.

She retired in 1975 and pursued her hobbies and crafts. Primarily she then had time to work on the genealogy of the Harpers and Potters. She had started taking notes and questioning her Grandmother Mary Collier while she was still in junior high in Beaumont. She gathered data throughout the years and had spent many lunch hours at the nearby U.S. Census Center in Atlanta. She now had the time to start compiling the data into a cohesive family history.

Her younger brother Claude Lee Potter Jr. had died in Dallas of a heart attack in 1972(?). Helen had become very good friends with his wife Muriel Frybarger and they kept in close contact. In 1976 Muriel called and asked her to join her in a four week trip to India. Balou, a former roommate of Claude’s from U.T. Austin (1939) was an owner of a factory in Bangalore. He and his wife had often invited Claude and Muriel to visit but they never made it. He continued to invite Muriel, so one day she decided “Why not?” Helen said yes so away they went. They were personally guided and escorted around much of India and enjoyed such famous sights as the Taj Mahal, Buddhist temples in Calcutta, and views of the Himalayas.

Her youngest brother Ralph Adrian Potter went to U.T. Austin after the Second World War, graduated in 1949(?), and moved with his wife Elaine (nee Galliano) to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He died in Norfolk, Virginia (circa 1985?).

Paul retired in 1978, so they moved to East Texas. They settled in Wildwood, a quasi retirement community north of Kountze. There they would be close to his ancestral home and they would also be near her mother (in assisted living in Beaumont). They bought 3 lots and built a 3-bedroom, 2-bath house. (SIXTH HOUSE). They bought a small motor home and traveled extensively. At one time she taught mosaics for a while at a nearby seminary. She continued to diligently work on her geneology notes.

Helen’s mother died in April 1994 in Beaumont at the age of 101.

In the late summer of 1994 Helen went on a tour of Alaska with an Elderhostel group. Paul opted not to go due to declining health.

Paul died in August of 1995, and was buried in the Potter family plot in Magnolia Cemetery in Beaumont. After Helen had taken care of the estate business, she called her son Glen in Houston and asked him to accompany her to Kerrville to look for a house. She had always wanted to live in the hill country, so they found her a roomy new patio home in 1996 with 3 bedrooms and 2 baths and lots of windows and high ceilings (SEVENTH HOUSE). Glen took some vacation time and helped the movers pack and load the moving van and then went to Kerrville to help unload. During that day the driver told Glen “Mr. Harper, I’ve been driving these big rigs for nearly 30 years and I have never moved this much stuff for one person”.

She fell and broke her foot in 2005, so she decided to sell her car and house and move into a 2-room apartment in an assisted living facility there in Kerrville. After several years there she decided she would like to move to San Antonio to be closer to her son Glen and his wife Barbara, who had moved there in August of 2006 after both had retired in Houston in early 2002.

She relocated to a nice 2-room assisted living facility in San Antonio in the spring of 2007. Her health had begun to deteriorate after her mobility was impaired from breaking her foot in Kerrville, and continued to worsen as the years went by.

Her daughter, Carleen Harper Pope, died in Minneapolis, MN on October 30, 2008. Carleen’s husband Cliff Pope had died just 3 months previous to that on August 05, 2008. Cliff was cremated and his ashes spread in Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis. Carleen was cremated and her ashes are in the mausoleum at Holy Cross cemetery in San Antonio.