Orville Bullington

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Orville Bullington
Orville Bullington of TX.jpg
Born(1882-02-10)February 10, 1882
Indian Springs
Vernon County
Missouri, USA
DiedNovember 24, 1956(1956-11-24) (aged 74)
Wichita Falls
Wichita County, Texas
Resting place Sparkman-Hillcrest Memorial Park Cemetery in Dallas, Texas
Residence(1) Poolville, Parker County, Texas

(2) Munday, Knox County, Texas

(3) Wichita Falls, Texas
Alma mater Sam Houston State University
University of Texas Law School
Occupation Attorney; Educator
Political party Republican gubernatorial nominee in Texas, 1932
Spouse(s)Sadie Kell Bullington (married 1911-his death)
ChildrenWilliam Orville Bullington
Parent(s)William I. and Sarah Holmes Bullington

Orville Bullington (February 10, 1882 – November 24, 1956) was an attorney and businessman in Wichita Falls, Texas, who was the unsuccessful Republican gubernatorial nominee in 1932 against former Governor Miriam Wallace "Ma" Ferguson, who won the second of her two terms in the office.

Business Organization undertaking commercial, industrial, or professional activity

Business is the activity of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products. Simply put, it is "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit. It does not mean it is a company, a corporation, partnership, or have any such formal organization, but it can range from a street peddler to General Motors."

Wichita Falls, Texas City in Texas, United States

Wichita Falls is a city in and the county seat of Wichita County, Texas, United States. It is the principal city of the Wichita Falls Metropolitan Statistical Area, which encompasses all of Archer, Clay, and Wichita Counties. According to the 2010 census, it had a population of 104,553, making it the 38th-most populous city in Texas. In addition, its central business district is 5 miles (8 km) from Sheppard Air Force Base, which is home to the Air Force's largest technical training wing and the Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training program, the world's only multinationally staffed and managed flying training program chartered to produce combat pilots for both USAF and NATO.

Texas State of the United States of America

Texas is the second largest state in the United States by both area and population. Geographically located in the South Central region of the country, Texas shares borders with the U.S. states of Louisiana to the east, Arkansas to the northeast, Oklahoma to the north, New Mexico to the west, and the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas to the southwest, while the Gulf of Mexico is to the southeast.

Contents

Early years, education, family, military

Bullington was born in Indian Springs, northwest of Schell City in Vernon County in western Missouri, to William Isiac Bullington and the former Sarah Holmes, both natives of Tennessee. [1] He was reared in Poolville in Parker County west of Fort Worth and educated at a private school in Tennessee. [2] He enrolled at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, then a normal school, from which he graduated in 1901. [3] Bullington taught school for two years before he enrolled in 1903 at the University of Texas Law School in Austin. He completed the three-year curriculum in two years, was admitted to the Texas bar, and in 1906 established his law office in Munday in Knox County. He served a term as the Knox county attorney. [1]

Schell City, Missouri City in Missouri, United States

Schell City is a city in Vernon County, Missouri, United States. The population was 249 at the 2010 census.

Vernon County, Missouri County in the United States

Vernon County is a county located in the center of the western border of Missouri. As of the 2010 census, the population was 21,159. Its county seat is Nevada. The county was organized on February 27, 1855, considerably later than counties in the eastern part of the state. It was named for Colonel Miles Vernon (1786–1867), a state senator and veteran of the Battle of New Orleans. This was part of the large historic territory of the Osage Nation of Native Americans.

Missouri State of the United States of America

Missouri is a state in the Midwestern United States. With over six million residents, it is the 18th-most populous state of the Union. The largest urban areas are St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield, and Columbia; the capital is Jefferson City. The state is the 21st-most extensive in area. In the South are the Ozarks, a forested highland, providing timber, minerals, and recreation. The Missouri River, after which the state is named, flows through the center of the state into the Mississippi River, which makes up Missouri's eastern border.

In June 1909, Bullington moved to Wichita Falls, where he practiced law, first with partners Charles C. Huff and Joe H. Barwise, and later with T. R. "Dan" Boone and Leslie Humphrey (1884–1967), who served for a time as the district attorney for Clay County and was a long-time Democratic Party advocate. The Bullington firm is now known as Gibson Davenport Anderson. [4]

District attorney in the United States, represents the government in the prosecution of criminal offenses

In the United States, a district attorney (DA) is the chief prosecutor for a local government area, typically a county. The exact name of the office varies by state.

Clay County, Texas County in the United States

Clay County is a county located in the U.S. state of Texas. As of the 2010 census, its population was 10,752. The county seat is Henrietta. The county was founded in 1857 and later organized in 1860. It is named in honor of Henry Clay, famous American statesman, Kentucky Senator and United States Secretary of State.

Democratic Party (United States) Major political party in the United States

The Democratic Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. Tracing its heritage back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's Democratic-Republican Party, the modern-day Democratic Party was founded around 1828 by supporters of Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest active political party.

Bullington enlisted as a private in the United States Army during World War I and was discharged as a lieutenant colonel from the 8th Infantry. [1]

A private is a soldier of the lowest military rank.

United States Army Land warfare branch of the United States Armed Forces

The United States Army (USA) is the land warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the seven uniformed services of the United States, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the United States Constitution. As the oldest and most senior branch of the U.S. military in order of precedence, the modern U.S. Army has its roots in the Continental Army, which was formed to fight the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783)—before the United States of America was established as a country. After the Revolutionary War, the Congress of the Confederation created the United States Army on 3 June 1784 to replace the disbanded Continental Army. The United States Army considers itself descended from the Continental Army, and dates its institutional inception from the origin of that armed force in 1775.

World War I 1914–1918 global war originating in Europe

World War I, also known as the First World War or the Great War, was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. Contemporaneously described as "the war to end all wars", it led to the mobilisation of more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, making it one of the largest wars in history. It is also one of the deadliest conflicts in history, with an estimated nine million combatants and seven million civilian deaths as a direct result of the war, while resulting genocides and the 1918 influenza pandemic caused another 50 to 100 million deaths worldwide.

On June 28, 1911, Bullington married the former Sadie Kell (1886-1960), daughter of railroad executive Frank Kell of Wichita Falls, and the couple had one son, William Orville Bullington (1923–1951). [5] The couple married at The Kell House in Wichita Falls, then in its second year of residence. Sadie's wedding gown is among the exhibits on display at the Kell House Museum. [6] In 1929, Bullington was named president of the Wichita Falls Chamber of Commerce. His business investments included petroleum and farm and ranch holdings in Wichita Falls and the Texas Panhandle. He was also affiliated with the American National Bank, Kemp Hotel Corporation (named for Joseph A. Kemp, Frank Kell's brother-in-law), and the Wichita Falls and Southern Railroad. [1]

Frank Kell Businessman from Wichita Falls, Texas

Franklin Marian "Frank" Kell, along with his brother-in-law Joseph A. Kemp, was one of the two principal entrepreneurs in the early development of Wichita Falls, Texas.

Petroleum naturally occurring flammable liquid

Petroleum is a naturally occurring, yellowish-black liquid found in geological formations beneath the Earth's surface. It is commonly refined into various types of fuels. Components of petroleum are separated using a technique called fractional distillation, i.e. separation of a liquid mixture into fractions differing in boiling point by means of distillation, typically using a fractionating column.

Texas Panhandle Region in Texas, United States

The Texas Panhandle is a region of the U.S. state of Texas consisting of the northernmost 26 counties in the state. The panhandle is a rectangular area bordered by New Mexico to the west and Oklahoma to the north and east. The Handbook of Texas defines the southern border of Swisher County as the southern boundary of the Texas Panhandle region.

In 1929, Bullington became partners with Frank P. Jackson and J. M. Gilliam in the first radio station in Waco, WJAD, which soon changed its named to WACO, now based on Burleson, Texas. [7]

Radio technology of using radio waves to carry information

Radio is the technology of signalling or communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmitter connected to an antenna which radiates the waves, and received by a radio receiver connected to another antenna. Radio is very widely used in modern technology, in radio communication, radar, radio navigation, remote control, remote sensing and other applications. In radio communication, used in radio and television broadcasting, cell phones, two-way radios, wireless networking and satellite communication among numerous other uses, radio waves are used to carry information across space from a transmitter to a receiver, by modulating the radio signal in the transmitter. In radar, used to locate and track objects like aircraft, ships, spacecraft and missiles, a beam of radio waves emitted by a radar transmitter reflects off the target object, and the reflected waves reveal the object's location. In radio navigation systems such as GPS and VOR, a mobile receiver receives radio signals from navigational radio beacons whose position is known, and by precisely measuring the arrival time of the radio waves the receiver can calculate its position on Earth. In wireless remote control devices like drones, garage door openers, and keyless entry systems, radio signals transmitted from a controller device control the actions of a remote device.

Waco, Texas City in Texas, United States

Waco is a city in central Texas and is the county seat of McLennan County, Texas, United States. It is situated along the Brazos River and I-35, halfway between Dallas and Austin. The city had a 2010 population of 124,805, making it the 22nd-most populous city in the state. The 2017 US Census population estimate is 136,436 The Waco Metropolitan Statistical Area consists of McLennan and Falls Counties, which had a 2010 population of 234,906. Falls County was added to the Waco MSA in 2013. The 2018 US Census population estimate for the Waco MSA is 271,942.

Burleson, Texas City in Texas, United States

Burleson is a city in Johnson and Tarrant counties in the U.S. state of Texas. It is a suburb of Fort Worth. As of the 2010 census it had a population of 36,690, and in 2017 it had an estimated population of 46,145.

Republican politics

Originally a Democrat, Bullington switched parties in 1918. In 1922, he and his father-in-law, Frank Kell, supported the Independent write-in campaign for the United States Senate waged by George Peddy, a Democratic former member of the Texas House of Representatives who unsuccessfully challenged Democratic senatorial nominee Earle Bradford Mayfield, a member of the Texas Railroad Commission. [8]

As the Republican gubernatorial nominee in 1932, Bullington polled the largest popular vote for a Republican gubernatorial in Texas up until that time [1] though his final percent was three points below that received in 1924 by George C. Butte of Austin in his race against Miriam Ferguson, [9] when Ferguson won her first term as governor. Bullington stressed the corrupt practices from the earlier Ferguson administration, including that of her husband, James E. Ferguson (service: 1915-1917). He received 322,589 votes (38.1 percent) to Ferguson's 521,395 (61.6 percent). [10] Bullington polled more than three times the votes of his ticket-mate, U.S. President Herbert Hoover, who though he had won Texas in 1928, procured only 97,959 ballots (11.4 percent) in 1932.

In 1936, Bullington charged that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was being managed by communists. Bullington was a delegate to eight Republican national conventions from 1928 to 1956 and a member of the Texas Republican Executive Committee from 1947 to 1952. He was the party's state chairman from 1951 to 1952. He was a delegate for Texas at the 1948 Republican National Convention, which met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At that convention, Bullington led a protest demanding that a spokesman from the Deep South be involved in the drafting of the civil rights plank of the GOP platform. As a result of his protest, Bullington and three other southerners were named to the platform committee. [1]

At the 1952 Republican National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, Bullington supported U.S. Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio for the presidential nomination against the native-born Texan, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bullington sought to impose a loyalty pledge for participants in the 1952 Texas Republican precinct, county, and state conventions. Later in the year, Bullington was among several men accused of having engaged in unfair practices to derail Eisenhower's nomination. Bullington wavered in his support for Taft, and, as the state GOP chairman in 1952, publicly confessed that his own faction had been unfair to the Eisenhower Republicans in delegate selection. [1] The Texas delegation, after a bitterly divided state convention in Mineral Wells, finally voted thirty-three for Eisenhower and five for Taft though the latter forces claimed that Democrats had provided Eisenhower's margin by packing the early precinct conventions. [11]

Active UT regent

In January 1941, Texas Democratic Governor W. Lee O'Daniel, a former Republican residing in Kansas, appointed Bullington a regent of the University of Texas at Austin, a position that he held until March 1947. [12] Bullington and several other O'Daniel appointees sought to slash UT funding, remove alleged communists from the university, and restrict the instruction of certain subjects. [1]

When UT president Homer Rainey, later an unsuccessful 1946 Democratic gubernatorial candidate, denounced the interference, the regents dismissed Rainey. [1] Bullington produced what he considered "conclusive evidence" of Rainey's "incompetence." [13] Bullington said that Rainey had "discovered a nest of homosexuals in the faculty as early as September 1943. He did not disclose it to any member of the board until eight months later, despite the rules requiring immediate reporting of such conditions.... We felt that he was not handling [the matter] vigorously enough and decided to take it over for ourselves." [13]

In 1944, Bullington had erroneously predicted that no minority students would attend UT so long as the existing regents remained on board: "There is not the slightest danger of any Negro attending the University of Texas, regardless of what Franklin D., Eleanor, or the Supreme Court says, so long as you have a Board of Regents with as much intestinal fortitude as the present one has." [14] In 1950, Heman Sweatt became the first African American to attend the UT law school. He described the racial atmosphere at UT as "terrifying. I think I was in the law school five minutes before I was pulled out of a registration line and cussed out. While in the law school, I had threats against my life. The first Friday in school, there was a Ku Klux Klan demonstration on campus. [14]

Death and legacy

Bullington Street is located in a residential section of Wichita Falls, Texas, off U.S. Route 82 and U.S. Route 277. Bullington Street, Wichita Falls, TX IMG 6939.JPG
Bullington Street is located in a residential section of Wichita Falls, Texas, off U.S. Route 82 and U.S. Route 277.

Bullington died in Wichita Falls at the age of seventy-four. [1] He, his wife, and son are entombed at Hillcrest Mausoleum in Dallas, Texas. The Kells are interred at Riverside Cemetery in Wichita Falls.

Active in the UT B-Hall Association, Bullington was also a board member of the UT Ex-Students' Association for twenty years and its president from 1921-1923. [15] He helped to establish the Barker History Center at UT. During his tenure, regent Lula Kemp Kell (1867–1957), Bullington's mother-in-law, presented to UT the Frank Kell Collection of Texana and Western Books. Bullington added some of his own books as a part of the original endowment to maintain the collection. [16] Bullington was a patron of the Texas State Historical Association. From 1928 to 1932, he was the president of the Sam Houston State Ex-Students' Association. [1]

One of Bullington's cousins, Lou Bullington Tower (1920–2001), a California native, was the first wife of Republican U.S. Senator John G. Tower of Texas. [17] Bullington's father-in-law, Frank Kell, was the maternal grandfather and namesake of Frank Kell Cahoon of Midland, the only Republican member of the Texas House in 1965, [18] following the landslide defeat of Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona by Texan Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 presidential election.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 "The Handbook of Texas on-line: Orville Bullington". tshaonline.org. Retrieved June 11, 2010.
  2. ↑ "University of Texas-Arlington Library, Special Collections". webcache.googleusercontent.com. Retrieved June 11, 2010.
  3. ↑ "Art in the Newton Gresham Library" (PDF). library.shsu.edu. Retrieved June 11, 2010.
  4. ↑ "Barbara A. Gibson, "Our History: Gibson Davenport Anderson"". ghrdlaw.com. Retrieved June 11, 2010.
  5. ↑ "Death certificate, William Orville Bullington". pilot.familysearch.org. Archived from the original on November 24, 2010. Retrieved June 12, 2010.
  6. ↑ "Kell House Museum". mail-archive.com. Retrieved June 11, 2010.
  7. ↑ "First Waco radio station was Jackson's hobby". Waco Tribune-Herald , October 30, 1949. Retrieved June 11, 2010.
  8. ↑ Norman D. Brown (1984). Hood, Bonnet, and Little Brown Jug: Texas Politics, 1921-1928. Texas A&M University Southwestern Studies. p. 122. ISBN   0-89096-157-3 . Retrieved April 16, 2013.
  9. ↑ "Elections of Texas Governors, 1845–2010" (PDF). texasalmanac.com. Retrieved July 4, 2018.
  10. ↑ Congressional Quarterly Press's Guide to U.S. Elections, Washington, D.C., 2005, pp. 1531
  11. ↑ "National Affairs: Steamroller in Texas". Time magazine, June 9, 1952. June 9, 1952. Retrieved June 11, 2010.
  12. ↑ "Former Regents, the University of Texas System". utsystem.edu. Retrieved June 11, 2010.
  13. 1 2 "Education in the Lone Star State". Time magazine , November 13, 1946. November 27, 1944. Retrieved June 11, 2010.
  14. 1 2 "Minority Enrollment at UT-Austin: The Hopwood Ruling and Its Aftermath". txtell.lib.utexas.edu. Retrieved June 11, 2010.
  15. ↑ The Alcalde April 1968. books.google.com. Retrieved June 11, 2010.
  16. ↑ "H. Bailey Carroll, Texas Collection". jstor.org. Retrieved June 11, 2010.
  17. ↑ "Lyndon Baines Johnson Library Oral History Collection, 1971" (PDF). lbjlib.utexas.edu. Archived from the original (PDF) on June 12, 2010. Retrieved June 11, 2010.
  18. ↑ "Jessica Langdon, "A Man Called 'Fairabee': Former Wichita Falls lawyer, legislator known as man of respect"". Wichita Falls Times Record News , November 3, 2007. Retrieved December 5, 2009.
Party political offices
Preceded by
William E. Talbot		 Republican gubernatorial nominee in Texas

Orville Bullington
1932

Succeeded by
D. E. Waggoner
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