Tom Lea Month is made possible with the generous support of the
following companies, individuals and foundations.
Each has an enduring tie to El Paso—some spanning generations—
and each has a unique connection to the work of Tom Lea.
Federico and Guadalupe de la Vega
Betty Ruth Williams Wakefield Haley
City of El Paso Museums & Cultural Affairs Department (MCAD)
WELLS FARGO PRIVATE BANK
Wells Fargo’s connection to Tom Lea goes back to his family, in the person of his wife Sarah Lea. Sarah was the first woman in El Paso to serve on a bank board when she joined the board of directors of State National Bank of El Paso in 1974. During her tenure, State National Bank of El Paso, which eventually became Norwest Bank, El Paso, acquired a collection of Tom Lea art, including sketches and watercolors. When Norwest took the Wells Fargo name in 1998, the art became part of Wells Fargo’s historic collection and today the company is proud to be part of Tom Lea Month and to share the art with the community.
Wells Fargo’s presence in El Paso goes back to stagecoach days. Founded on March 18, 1852, by Henry Wells and William G. Fargo, Wells Fargo provided financial services, express transportation of gold and goods, and mail delivery to customers on the frontier. In 1858, Wells Fargo helped create the Overland Mail Company and the nation’s first cross-country stage line. Stagecoaches on this “Butterfield Line” carried mail and passengers across Texas on their three-week journey between Missouri and California. El Paso, then named Franklin, marked the halfway point in the stage journey. Overland coaches stopped at El Paso until 1861, when the line detoured to a more northerly route.
By 1880, railroads took over as transportation for many westerners. In the spring of 1881, steel rails reached El Paso, touching off a real estate and business boom. On April 1, Wells Fargo opened its first office in El Paso. By year’s end, El Paso was served by three railroads, and had added two national banks, three newspapers, and thousands of new residents.
In 1918, El Paso was one of Wells Fargo’s 1,000 express offices in the Lone Star State. That same year however, the federal government took over the nation’s express business as a wartime measure, and Wells Fargo went from having 10,000 offices nationwide to having one: its bank in San Francisco.
Wells Fargo returned to El Paso in 1998, when it joined with Norwest Corporation. Its border banking heritage dates back further, to State National Bank of El Paso, which opened in 1881 in the first brick building in town, with two employees and $55,000 in assets. State National shared a correspondent relationship with Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco, providing reciprocal services in the handling of bank business and customer needs in their respective locations.
In 1995, State National became part of Norwest Corporation. Three years later, when Norwest became Wells Fargo, so did State National. Its legacy is now Wells Fargo’s own.
EL PASO ELECTRIC
El Paso Electric Company’s connection to the El Paso region is obvious, electric, and long-standing. The connection began in 1901 as the El Paso Electric Railway Company provided El Pasoans transportation via mule-drawn streetcars. (“Might some of you remember Mandy, the Mule?” wonders Henry Quintana, the present-day company manager of public relations.) A year later, electric streetcars replaced mule-power, and by 1925, the company’s core business had evolved to producing and distributing electricity, its current function, serving about 372,000 customers over a 10,000 square mile area of west Texas and southern New Mexico.
The company’s connection with Tom Lea and his art may not be so obvious, but is electric, as well as long-standing. In the 1940’s, E.H. Will, Lea’s close friend, ran El Paso Electric. Lea gifted him with one of the original studies for the artist’s now-famous mural Pass of the North in the old Federal Courthouse. Lea inscribed the back of the drawing (now in the El Paso Museum of Art’s collections), “To the El Paso Electric Company and E.H. Will. Tom Lea, April, 1943.” Under Gary Hedrick’s leadership, El Paso Electric funded the Museum’s conservation work on the piece, completed in 2005.
When El Paso Electric first built what’s become an El Paso icon — the Star on the Mountain — Tom Lea composed a poetic essay entitled Old Mount Franklin, which he read first on the radio in 1951, then over the years on Channel 9 KTSM-TV. His yearly reading greeted the star’s lighting and was sponsored by the El Paso Electric Company. Said Lea, “…the annual ceremony [was] an affectionate salute repeated each year, spoken in a December dusk when a star is lighted on a mountainside…[at] the Pass of the North”.
The company paid for re-publishing Lea’s booklet The Twelve Travelers, during Renaissance 400, a project sponsored by EPEC and its then-leader Evern Wall. Says Adair Margo, TLI founder, “El Paso Electric Company has always seemed to tap into Lea’s talents to help El Pasoans remember our heritage.”
J. P. & MARY JON BRYAN
J.P. Bryan was told early in life to serve those things that serve your interest and not your self-interest. This sixth-generation Texan’s interests range wider than Texas — from art history (his undergraduate major at UT-Austin, where he started a rare-book store and The Pemberton Press); to UT-Austin Law School (“I couldn’t see how I’d support my family with an art history degree!”); to banking with JP Morgan and later E.F. Hutton, with a specialty in oil and gas financing; and finally to his 1981 formation and eventual ownership of Torch Energy, which has bought over $3 billion in producing oil and gas properties, sponsored six public companies and numerous private enterprises. That got him named 1995 Entrepreneur of the Year.
In 1995, he took over the reins of Gulf Canada’s sagging fortunes and utterly transformed them over a period of three years, earning him Canadian Oil and Gas Producer of the Year in 1996.
Early on, he dedicated himself to balance in life — of building successful business enterprises and using his time and resources for historical preservation and restoration. He and Mary Jon, his wife, purchased the Gage Hotel (a Henry Trost design, as was Tom Lea’s boyhood home) and began its restoration; they also oversee ongoing restorations of structures on their ranches and of original grasslands, the latter resulting in awards for grassland improvement. They initiated the Torch Collection, now the largest private collection of Texana — over 10,000 items, mostly housed in Houston — that offer visitors a rare view into the history of the West.
JP and Mary Jon are the Tom Lea Endowment’s first Cabeza de Vaca ($100,000) member/donors, and JP is chair-elect of the Tom Lea Institute board of directors. JP’s father, once president of the Texas State Historical Association, knew and corresponded with Tom Lea. Now his son’s passionate service to wide-ranging interests continues and expands that connection.
BILL & ANN KIELY
Water centers the life-trajectory of El Paso native William “Bill” Kiely, a life he says has been “pretty exciting and sometimes bizarre” — from a Chihuahuan desert childhood playing in cold, clear irrigation well water on his parents’ Vinton farm to earning an engineering degree from Texas Western College, the university on the Rio Grande (now UTEP – where, in 2000, he was named Distinguished Alumnus) to soldiering in Viet Nam’s rice paddies to developing deep-water submersibles with a Washington, D.C., company to launching his two-man start-up (SOFEC) that developed off-shore terminals for deep-water transfer of oil into and off supertankers to retiring to Texas Hill Country — now in drought!
Starting SOFEC, he and Ann invested most everything they had, including money for health insurance. Ann, also a TWC grad — they married just after his graduation — wondered how they’d pay for doctors. Over a planning dinner, she reminded him that they now had two children. Bill said he finally came up with the perfect solution: “We just won’t get sick!”
“As the company grew, I traveled the world,” he notes. And under its oceans. His first working dives bottomed out at 120 feet. By the time the company had grown worldwide, divers were descending 1,000 feet.
Tom Lea’s art flows through Bill’s life as centrally as water. Bill’s first contact with Tom’s work came as a youngster, when he’d hang out near the murals in the El Paso Library while his mother did her downtown shopping. “I was also fond of viewing Tom’s Western Sketches mounted on the walls of the State National Bank lobby and, of course, the great mural at the Federal Building,” he says. “I knew even then there was something special about them.”
Years later, just returned from Viet Nam, “a bold young soldier — and total stranger” knocked on Tom and Sarah’s door. “I asked a hero from my youth if he would have a print I could purchase to take with me to my new life in D.C. I spent an hour in his studio talking with him, quietly observing him at work. Before I left, Tom graciously presented me with a small signed print of Ranger Escort West of the Pecos. That print proudly hangs on the wall of our bedroom today.” (The original, commissioned in 1965 for then-Texas Governor John Connally, hangs in the Texas Capitol.)
Thirty years later, the Kielys (along with UTEP and the Robert Kleberg, Jr. and Helen C. Kleberg Foundation) funded the publication of Adair Margo’s Tom Lea: An Oral History. Not long after, Bill and Ann acquired their first original piece, A Quiet Place, which they eventually loaned to U.S. Ambassador Pamela Willeford — a founding board member of the Tom Lea Foundation — for the American Embassy in Switzerland.
Says Bill, “While Tom and Sarah did not remember that brash young soldier at their door 30 years previous, over the next few years, we developed a truly wonderful and strong friendship. They visited us in Spicewood with the Margos and gifted us with a working sketch of The Comancheros, which they had taken from their own wall to bring us.” Adds Ann, “When Tom saw so many of his works on our walls, he teared up, said it was like seeing old friends.”
The Kielys helped purchase Tom’s World War II sketchbook as a gift to the El Paso Museum of Art’s Permanent Collection, and they recently made a grant for an exhibit of Tom Lea’s work opening in 2013 at the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas.
FEDERICO and GUADALUPE DE LA VEGA
Maybe it began with Federico de la Vega’s father, who in 1914 emigrated from Spain, alone at 14 years of age, to find his place in Mexico, then bring his parents and siblings to join him. But “empowerment” for those who need it is exactly what Guadalupe and Federico de la Vega’s dreams and accomplishments have been for their fellow Juarenses.
Both reared in Mexico — Federico in Cd. Juárez, where his father sold and distributed Carta Blanca beer, Guadalupe in Monterrey — their passion for empowering the lives of Juarenses has taken them all over the world and into multiple layers of development and activism, from building and heading professional sports leagues to founding hospitals and universities to helping create the first maquiladoras to developing micro-business loan programs for poverty-stricken women to supporting museums and public art to … the list goes on.
When Federico was hyper-busy founding — and fighting for — his enduring young man’s dream of creating first university in Cd. Juárez (Instituto Tecnológico Regional), Guadalupe decided to empower her children using the same tactic strikers in the streets were using. So, one evening Federico returned home at dusk to see sign-bearing marchers in front of his house. “I wondered if protesters had taken over my home,” he says, until he drew close enough to recognize his own children, hoisting signs that read, “WE NEED A FATHER.” (The de la Vegas raised three children, now have six grandchildren — “and time to enjoy them all,” says a smiling Guadalupe.)
Born in El Paso and initially educated in the U.S. — at Morehead and El Paso High, then Culver Military Academy and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) — Federico completed his chemical engineering studies at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores in Monterrey. When he and a friend decided to crash a party, fate stepped in: it was as an uninvited “guest” that he met Guadalupe Arizpe.
The two negotiate the borders around them with that same ease. Says Federico, “I’m a man of both sides. I’m Anglo in the US, and Mexican in Mexico.” (His mother, from Ft. Worth, spoke no Spanish; his father spoke no English. They’d met when she visited El Paso.)
When invited to attend a workshop on women and economics, held at the Rockefellers’ retreat in the Italian Alps and preceding a world conference on the subject, Guadalupe found herself seated next to the U.S. representative, former Texas Governor Ann Richards. As Guadalupe objected to something a U.S. economist was opining, Ann nudged her. “You can’t say that!” “Yes, I can,” retorted Guadalupe. “You see, you’re a politician; I’m an activist!”
That activism has made both Guadalupe and Federico frontera leaders. The two helped found FEMAP, born out of a 1973 social movement to empower women in the control of their reproductive lives, and which now includes hospitals and a school of nursing. Guadalupe daily participates in FEMAP, and was recently awarded Cd. Juárez’ highest honor, the Fray García de San Francisco award, as well as CNN’s 2010 Hero Award (second out of 10,000 nominees). Federico headed the Cámara Nacional de Comercio de Ciudad Juárez (Chamber of Commerce), setting up what became the model for economic development between the U.S. and Mexico. Newly 80, he is active owner/CEO of six Juárez businesses: Almacenes Distribuidores de la Frontera Norte S.A. de C.V., Carta Blanca de Ciudad Juárez S.A. de C.V., Altec Purificación S.A., Electrotec S.A., Comercialiadora de Insumos para la Maquila S.A., and Refrigeradora Carta Blanca S.A. And he founded the former American Bank of Commerce in El Paso.
Federico says his first introduction to Tom Lea came through then-El Paso Mayor Fred Hervey, who also became a strong supporter of FEMAP. Guadalupe says her introduction to Lea’s work came from TLI founder – and FEMAP Foundation founder — Adair Margo, who walked her through the El Paso Museum of Art’s Tom Lea Gallery. “She showed me the cowboys, but when she got to the portrait of Sarah …” Guadalupe (whose Arabic-based name means “river of light”) almost gasps. “Such translucence I saw! Such beauty!”
Reflections, everywhere.
HUNT FAMILY FOUNDATION
In 1987, Woody and his wife, Gayle Hunt, established the Hunt Family Foundation supporting charities and initiatives that focus on El Paso and the surrounding region. The Hunt Family Foundation is committed to community involvement, from providing jobs to building a regional art collection (including work by Tom Lea) to supporting organizations that improve and elevate the community through healthcare, education, arts, local heritage, quality-of-life initiatives and regional economic development.
The Hunt family has been involved with El Paso for generations, ever since M.L. Hunt (Woody’s grandfather) arrived from the Cimarron/Raton area of New Mexico, where his Midwestern family had settled via covered wagon and the Santa Fe Trail.
By 1955, M.L.’s two Mission Valley-raised sons, Jack (Woody’s father) and Kelly, had bought M.L.’s interest in his Hunt Sales Company. Hunt Sales Company was a lumber, hardware, and building materials retail business. It would soon add the construction component. The brothers incorporated as Hunt Sales, Inc., and construction fueled Hunt business successes and expansion. Today, known as Hunt Companies, Inc., it is a leading national real estate services company, with Chairman and CEO W.L. “Woody” Hunt at the helm.
FRANCES RODERICK AXELSON
Frances Roderick Axelson says her father, Dorrance Roderick, exclaimed, “You majored in weekends!” when he learned of her travel during college.
That love of travel helped make her the second generation of Rodericks to relish Tom Lea’s company and art. She, Sarah (Tom’s wife), and Tom explored together, she said, “in the ’80s and ’90s, to the Russian Baltic, to Singapore, Bali, Indonesia — even made the original Royal Scotsman train’s last trip from London to north Scotland.”
She grew up with Tom Lea murals in the Roderick family’s basement recreation room … there because her father offered the young-and-struggling artist the job of “painting my rec room” — a kindness Tom Lea never forgot. Frances says that home, now under different ownership, still boasts the murals of “various Mexican characters in hats” that a youthful Lea painted directly onto plastered stone walls.
Dorrance Roderick, who was publisher of the El Paso Times and president of the Newspaper Printing Corp from 1929 to 1975, formally commissioned Lea’s The Arrival of the First Train to El Paso for the El Paso Times’ 75th anniversary in 1956.
The Dorrance and Olga Roderick Foundation is now part of The El Paso Community Foundation.
BETTY RUTH WILLIAMS WAKEFIELD HALEY
It’s all in the family.
Rev. Joseph Franklin Williams — Betty Ruth Williams Wakefield Haley’s grandfather and Adair Wakefield Margo’s great-grandfather — was the fifth minister of El Paso’s First Baptist Church and the first to die in office. Rev. Williams had baptized Tom Lea, and later, when the reverend died, Tom’s mother, Zola Utt Lea, who played the piano at the church, took young Tom to the mortuary. Tom later said that when he saw Rev. Williams lying there, “I thought that is how God must look.”
Betty Ruth’s mother, Lillie Adair Staten, attended El Paso High School with Tom. When Lillie married John D. Williams, the couple remained friends with Tom and Sarah Lea. One of Tom’s high school memories was of his mother asking him, “Is it true that Johnny Williams was in Juarez last night?”
Generations of El Paso parents have asked similar questions.
Betty Ruth, who survived both her husbands, founded The Wakefield Family Foundation when her first husband, C.W. “Wake” Wakefield, died. Wake had taken over JDW Insurance when his father-in-law died. Later, Adair’s husband, Dee Margo, took over from his father-in-law, and now Adair and Dee’s son Don is associated with the company that made possible The Wakefield Family Foundation. The Foundation helps support many El Paso not-for-profit groups. It recently presented the El Paso Museum of Art with the El Paso High School yearbook in which Betty Ruth’s mother and Tom Lea appear, and where young Tom honed his skills as its illustrator.
“Caring about the community is a family tradition,” says Betty Ruth. Adair carries on that tradition as founder/director of the Tom Lea Institute, bringing to wider historical and artistic appreciation the talents of Tom Lea, whom Robert Caro, Pulitzer-winning biographer of Lyndon B. Johnson, calls “an unsung genius of our time who made it purely on the quality of his work.”
HENRY & PAT TAYLOR
According to Henry and Pat Taylor’s daughter, Lisa Taylor, “WWII and art” cemented the friendship of her parents with Tom and Sarah Lea.
And great friendship with Wylie T. Banes, formed while both were serving in the Armed Forces during WWII, brought veteran Henry Taylor to El Paso to join the Banes Corporation, specializing in metal building. In 1972, Henry was named president and chairman of the corporation’s board. Eventually, he built Henry Taylor Investments in real estate. He told Lisa, “I'd envision something, will it to happen, and it did.”
“Face-to-face contact was how my parents networked and made deals,” said Lisa. They entertained at home – one they designed specifically for that purpose (and where she now lives), hosting as many as 400 business contacts at dressy receptions. Pat was the one, Henry claimed, who “could create an entertaining environment that promoted friendship and good business deals in one.” She served on the Banes Corporation board. Lisa says that in the early 1970’s, the El Paso Times listed her mother as one of El Paso’s top five women in business - “and her wardrobe reflected that life”, noted Lisa. Who held the #1 spot? Sarah Lea, who sat on State National Bank’s board (now Wells Fargo), along with Henry Taylor.
Pat and Henry decided to collect historical art. As a veteran, Henry was moved by Lea’s eye-witness WWII drawings. Their Taylor Collection includes a significant Tom Lea assembly - one shared publicly for the first time during Tom Lea Month 2010, resulting in placement of pieces in the El Paso Museum of History and the El Paso Museum of Art. During Tom Lea Month 2011, their Lea piece, “The Arrival of the First Train in El Paso,” will be unveiled in the History Museum's Transportation Gallery as part of its permanent exhibit. Lisa honors her parents’ wish to share the artwork through museums and acknowledges the hard work of her family, Gene Rook (Executor), and Adair Margo (TLI founder) that insures its continued sharing with the wider world.
The extensive Taylor Collection also includes works Lea created relating to the Mexican Revolution and his writing of The Brave Bulls.
WESTERN REFINING
For many El Pasoans, the refineries off Trowbridge are a familiar part of the El Paso landscape. What many do not realize is how long the refineries have been an integral part of the El Paso community. The first refinery was built in 1928 by Standard Oil of California; the other was constructed in 1931 by the Texas Company, which later became known as Texaco.
When these refineries were first built, they were a great distance from the center of the bustling El Paso community. But through the years, the refineries and the city grew together and today they stand as integral components of a thriving modern city.
Today, Western Refining is a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange and provides El Paso and the Southwest with the fuel that drives the growth of the region.
Western Refining strives to be a leader in the energy industry, as well as in the civic and charitable interests important to its communities. Western takes great pride in the fact that its employees volunteer in community services to help those less fortunate, and that the company itself is actively involved in issues such as health, the arts, education, economic development, and family.
Western Refining supports many causes and organizations including the United Way, Special Olympics, American Cancer Society, Boys and Girls Clubs, and the American Heart Association. It sponsors an annual “Neighborhood Health Fair” at the El Paso refinery, providing medical tests and inoculations for families in the neighborhood. It also sponsors the annual Sun Bowl Western Refining College All-America Golf Classic at the El Paso Country Club and supports higher education with scholarships and donations.
Western Refining’s founders have made investments to the city, including the Texas Tech University Paul L. Foster School of Medicine and the Foster Stevens Basketball Complex on the UTEP campus.
HUMANITIES TEXAS
Humanities Texas (HT), the Texas affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), advances heritage, culture, and education —“goals the Tom Lea Institute shares,” notes Tom Lea Institute Founder/Director Adair Margo. Humanities Texas takes exhibitions on history, literature, and art to Texas schools, libraries, and museums including the Centennial Museum at UTEP, the El Paso Museum of Archaeology, the El Paso Museum of History, and the Special Collections Department of the UTEP Library.
Adds Michael Gillette, HT executive director, “And we’ll soon add to our inventory a new exhibition on the life and art of Tom Lea — a collaboration with the Tom Lea Institute.”
Partnering with leading universities, Humanities Texas also hosts professional development institutes to aid Texas classroom teachers. UTEP has been the site of four of these programs. HT also recognizes excellence in classroom teaching: Maggie Moody, a Riverside Middle School teacher, won the Outstanding Teaching Award in 2010. Recipients of HT grants for public programming include the El Paso Museum of History, El Paso Community College, UTEP, Victory Warriors Drill Dance and After-School Academy, Sin Fronteras Organizing Project, El Paso County Historical Commission, La Mujer Obrera, and the Tom Lea Institute.
“The synergy between El Pasoans and Humanities Texas is one that benefits both with great programs and creative leadership,” says Tania Schwartz, Tom Lea Institute Board member, “and it’s one that will bear fruit for years to come. We El Pasoans are grateful.”
City of El Paso Museums & Cultural Affairs Department
The City of El Paso Museums & Cultural Affairs Department (MCAD) has a broad vision to assist in developing a world-class arts community in El Paso. MCAD’s Cultural Funding Program annually grants out close to a quarter of the department’s budget to local artists and El Paso arts and culture non-profit organizations in a competitive, community-driven process. “MCAD’s generous Project Support Program grant,” says Tania Schwartz, TLI board member, “is helping us make the fifth annual Tom Lea Month even more educational - and fun - for El Pasoans, visitors, and tourists.”