Joe, Grace, & Alvin (“Pat”) Samuels

In December 1928, Rabbi Ephraim Frisch of San Antonio’s Temple Bethel wrote to Home Superintendent Ed Lashman. Rabbi Frisch set forth the “special case” of three children whose father, Morris Samuels, had died after a long illness, leaving their mother, the former Tillie Weiner, who suffered from “pleurisy and heart trouble,” without any means of support.

In April 1929, the Home admitted the children: Joe (13), for whom the Home waived its maximum admission age of 12; Grace (10), and Alvin (6). 

Alvin, Grace, and Joe Samuels, n.d. From FindAGrave.com.

Joe lived in the Home until 1934, following his graduation from Isidore Newman School. 

He returned to his mother in Houston where he first took a job at the post office earning 65 cents an hour. He also began producing a radio series, “Oddities in the Mail.” During his military service in the U.S. Army Air Corps, he served in French West Africa, Italy, and Romania. He remained in the reserves for many years, retiring as a lieutenant colonel.

In 1944, he married Jeanne Franklin, with whom he later raised three children. Before years in the insurance industry, Joe and his younger brother, Alvin, opened a record and appliance shop, taking turns running the business and completing their college degrees. An unsuccessful bid in 1956 for a seat on Houston’s Independent School Board, tinged with the bitterness of antisemitism and anti-desegregation, did not deter Joe from speaking his mind on issues important to the Jewish community and beyond.

In 1973, Joe and Jeanne purchased the Jewish Herald-Voice, which by coincidence had been founded in 1908 by another Home alumnus, Edgar Goldberg. For the next 38 years, Joe used the paper, much like Goldberg before him, to advance Jewish and humanitarian causes, many times saving lives with pleas for blood and organ donations while raising funds to help the destitute, advocating for Israel, and generally championing the underdog and fighting injustices. And like Goldberg before him, Joe and Jeanne used the paper to promote the Home and its successor, the Jewish Children’s Regional Service, which continued to serve Jewish children in Houston and throughout the mid-South. 

Over the years, Joe and Jeanne regularly opened their home to  Home alumni reunions. To ensure that fellow “ex-Home kids” could find him, Joe listed his name in the Houston phone book as “Samuels, Joseph XHK.”

Joe died in 2011 at age 95 and was buried in Houston’s Emanu El Memorial Park. Referring to the Home, his career, and his well-earned reputation for good deeds, Joe’s grave bears the inscription, “From childhood in an institution, he, himself, became an institution.” Read Joe’s obituary in the Jewish Herald-Voice here. Read Texas House Resolution No. 485, “In Memory of Joseph W. Samuels” (March 14, 2011) here. 

During Grace’s time in the Home and at Isidore Newman School, she distinguished herself as a musician, winning one of three spots for alto clarinetists in Louisiana’s 1934 All-State High School Band. In 1935, before completing her last year at Newman’s high school, she returned to Houston to live with her mother and brother, Joe. She participated in Joe’s radio program about historical oddities, performing in a 1939 dramatization of the knighting by Queen Elizabeth of a subject known as “Uncorker of Ocean Bottles.”

In 1943, Grace enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps as an Aviation Cadet.

In 1944, Grace married David Jules Wagner, with whom she had two children. According to the 1950 census, she worked as a clerk in the family’s retail record and appliance store.

She died in 2005 and was buried in Houston’s Emanu El Memorial Park. 

Alvin, who was playfully dubbed “Pat” by his Newman classmates, remained in the Home until 1942. While still in Newman’s lower school, he made news with a classmate for their “delightful” portrayal as the Dish and Spoon who ran away together in a Mother Goose-themed operetta. By high school, however, he had turned his energies to sports, where he earned praise from Coach Ralph Harris as “a mighty fine all-around athlete with a lot of natural ability.” As reported in the Times-Picayune, Harris continued gushing about his star left halfback, “[Alvin’s] team spirit and willingness to obey orders has marked him as one of Newman’s greatest football products.”  Beyond football, Alvin also served as captain of the basketball team and was a sprinter on the track team. Alvin was discharged from the Home following his Newman graduation in 1942.

Pat Samuels went on to today’s Rice University on a basketball scholarship. Before graduating, he served in the Army Air Corps in World War II as a gunner on a B-26 bomber, which he said was sardonically known as the “widow maker” and “flying coffin.” After his discharge from the military, for which he received a campaign medal with two bronze stars and an air medal with five oak leaf clusters, he eventually earned his degree from the University of Houston while working with his brother Joe in their appliance business. He later became a manufacturer’s representative for many different lines of consumer electronics, including Atari and Nintendo.

Alvin’s 1946 marriage to the former Audrey Jean Gibbons, with whom he had two children, ended in divorce in 1981.

He remained close to his Newman classmates for much of his life, returning to New Orleans several times each year to have lunch together. He also remained dedicated to Rice football, and was honored in 2016 as the team’s biggest longtime fan: he had attended more than 325 home game since Rice Stadium opened in 1950, missing only four contests over 66 seasons.

Alvin “Pat” Samuels died in 2019 at the age of 97. 

In August 2003, JCRS Executive Director Ned Goldberg interviewed alumni brothers Joe and Alvin “Pat” Samuels about their time in the Home with their sister Grace. Among many topics discussed, Joe described their 1929 train ride from Houston to the Home (during which the train cars crossed the Mississippi River via barge), while Pat recalled taking part in some youthful mischief and the importance of his Newman education. Both brothers expressed their gratitude to the Home for the care they received.