{"id":68,"date":"2013-07-19T07:45:24","date_gmt":"2013-07-19T12:45:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeandlibertyautos.wordpress.com\/?p=68"},"modified":"2013-07-19T07:45:24","modified_gmt":"2013-07-19T12:45:24","slug":"the-legends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.libertyautohouston.com\/blog\/the-legends\/","title":{"rendered":"The Legends"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

T.H. is on the left, and Elmo is on the right.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I am the descendant of legends.\u00a0 Yes, I know that is a bold statement, but nonetheless a true one.\u00a0 I\u2019m the 3rd<\/sup> generation of used car dealers.\u00a0 My dad\u2019s a car dealer; his dad\u2019s a car dealer; his uncle, my grandfather\u2019s brother, is a car dealer.\u00a0 Yet, go back one more generation, and my great-grandfather was a Baptist preacher.\u00a0 To go from clergy to car dealers, now that must be the work of legends.<\/p>\n

My grandfather is Elmo Baker, and his older brother is T. H. Baker, the sons of a preacher.\u00a0 As preacher\u2019s kids are wont to do, they gravitated toward the wild side.\u00a0 They both loved ladies and making money.<\/p>\n

Elmo is the type of man who wears a diamond-encrusted watch in the shape of Texas. He runs a veritable financial empire from a trailer office. He’s one of the nicest men you’ll ever meet, but he’ll never remember your name. He’s generous, but he doesn’t know when your birthday is. He’s a business genius, but he never stepped foot in any kind of institute of higher education.<\/p>\n

For many years, Elmo lived in an undisclosed location, so that if anyone wanted to visit him, it had to be at his car lot.\u00a0 A little more than five years ago, his residence became public knowledge, because his health\u00a0<\/span>isn’t<\/span>\u00a0what it used to be. A few years ago, he had a heart attack, not his first or last. \u00a0As the paramedics were loading him into the ambulance, he insisted that they let him call his broker about a stock he wanted to sell. \u00a0Lying in his hospital bed, he told my little brother to take a look at the big ring his girlfriend Betty was wearing, and then said, \u201cMost people look at an old man with a young girlfriend and think he might be rich.\u00a0 I want them to KNOW I\u2019m rich.\u201d\u00a0 Elmo and my grandma Mom Joy divorced over 40 years ago, yet she is still hopelessly in love with him.\u00a0 That\u2019s the kind of charm Elmo possesses.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

T. H., short for Thomas Houston, similar in stature and character to his younger brother, ran away from home as a young teenager. He made it to San Antonio, where he got a job as a dishwasher at Kelly Air Force Base.\u00a0 As a wily 16 year old, he married a beautiful 21 year old woman named Dorothy.\u00a0\u00a0 She was not aware of his age, since T. H. was not forthcoming with that information.\u00a0 That marriage lasted long enough for them to have like 2 or 3 kids.\u00a0 T. H. has a total of 11 children from 4 different women, most of them his wives and then some of those kids are adopted.\u00a0 It gets confusing.\u00a0 Anyway, he was a man with great ambition, and dishwashing wasn\u2019t going to cut it.<\/p>\n

He took a job selling pick-ups at Don Benson Chevrolet.\u00a0 Clearly he was a man of great charm and charisma.\u00a0 How many 16 year old boys could get a 21 year old woman to marry him, after all?\u00a0 His \u201cpeople skills\u201d only improved with age, not to mention he was a relentlessly hard worker. \u00a0Year after year, T. H. sold the most Chevrolet pick-up trucks of all the Chevrolet dealerships in the entire nation.\u00a0 After earning this reward multiple years in a row, in his opinion, he deserved a raise.<\/p>\n

T. H. went into Don Benson\u2019s office and told him that since he\u2019d worked so hard and been recognized for selling the most Chevy trucks in the nation, he should get a pay increase.\u00a0 Don Benson was not of the same mind, telling T. H. that he hadn\u2019t sold anything!\u00a0 Don Benson, the owner, had sold all of those trucks, and T. H. wasn\u2019t getting any kind of a raise.\u00a0 T. H. told his boss that if he didn\u2019t get that raise, he would put in a used car lot right across the street from Don Benson Chevrolet.\u00a0 Don Benson told him to go right ahead.<\/p>\n

Elmo had recently returned to Texas after being in the Army for the Korean War.\u00a0 Fortunately, Elmo had won some amount of money playing poker in Japan.\u00a0 T. H. called up his little brother and told him to get down to San Antonio.\u00a0 They were opening a used car lot.<\/p>\n

The brothers opened that first lot and haven\u2019t stopped since.\u00a0 T. H. got into horse racing and bought a ranch. \u00a0He owns 500 of the most beautiful acres in Texas, yet he lives in a trailer parked in the middle of it.\u00a0 Aside from the car business, he made a killing racing quarter horses all over Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico, and Mexico.\u00a0 For years and years, he\u2019d have a great big Easter party on his ranch.\u00a0 There\u2019d be an Easter egg hunt for the kids in the grassy field in the center of the practice racetrack.\u00a0 There was also an egg hunt for the adults.\u00a0 T. H. would get up very early Easter Sunday morning and hide plastic eggs over several acres of the ranch.\u00a0 He\u2019d hide them in the Spanish moss hanging from trees, in snake holes, hollow logs, just about anywhere. \u00a0This hunt was serious, the kind of serious that starts family feuds.\u00a0 \u00a0What made the Easter egg hunt so cutthroat was that T. H. put money in the eggs.\u00a0 Well, he did at first, but then not all the eggs would get found, and there\u2019d be hundreds of dollars lost in a pasture.\u00a0 He refined his technique after a few years and would write a dollar value on a scrap of paper and put that in the egg.\u00a0 There was one $50 egg, but there were many $20, $10, and $5 eggs.\u00a0 Dozens of adults would be running wild for hours looking for those eggs, which would result in bitter disputes and malicious quarrels.\u00a0 The egg hunt was also dangerous because there were snakes, stinging insects, and poisonous plants out there.\u00a0 Nonetheless, it was T.H.\u2019s favorite yearly event.\u00a0 He also struck oil on his ranch.\u00a0 See, I told you he\u2019s a legend.<\/p>\n

After T.H.\u2019s lot was up and running in San Antonio, Elmo returned to Houston and opened his own dealership.\u00a0 Elmo\u2019s kept the car business going all these decades, with multiple stints in apartment building, house building, and neighborhood development.\u00a0 His favorite topic of conversation these days is the Stock Market.\u00a0 He keeps his portfolio jotted down on a piece of paper, which is folded and tucked into his shirt pocket so that at any moment he can examine and discuss it. \u00a0Even after having a couple of heart attacks and being over 80 years old, he still goes to the lot on a daily basis. After all, a legend would never retire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am the descendant of legends.\u00a0 Yes, I know that is a bold statement, but nonetheless a true one.\u00a0 I\u2019m the 3rd generation of used car dealers.\u00a0 My dad\u2019s a car dealer; his dad\u2019s a car dealer; his uncle, my grandfather\u2019s brother, is a car dealer.\u00a0 Yet, go back one more generation, and my great-grandfather […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":420,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n