In Memory of Russell Hollis and Tena E. Fuchs Hollis

Our Daddy and Mother, Russell Hollis and Tena E. Fuchs Hollis, are laid to rest in Hopewell Cemetery near Normangee Texas. Daddy died on the first day of Spring, March 21, 1981 (69 years, 7 months). He was buried just north of Tomball Texas. Shortly before her death at 89 years, 4 months, on February 1, 2007, Mother decided that she wanted to be buried here in Leon County, in the country that Daddy loved so much, a place they both agreed was as close to Heaven as you can get here on earth. She also made it clear that Daddy’s earthly remains be re-interred here in Leon County. All this is accomplished. We have just made the six-month anniversary of Mother’s death, and we are just short of what would have been Daddy’s 96th birthday (August 14, 1911) and Mother’s 90th birthday (September 9, 1917).


TENA ELIZABETH FUCHS HOLLIS, 1917 – 2007

Dear friends:

Our mother’s long earthly journey ended at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 1. In her last days she was surrounded by family and friends who bountifully shared their love and affection. My sisters Joan and Sue and I were blessed to be here with her in her country home at the end. She had lived here full time since 2002. During the day of February 1, and on the days preceding her death, many relatives and friends kept vigil with us. She was a truly strong woman, tough Texas German, though her body was so frail these last few years. With my oldest sister Joan as her companion, she continued to make trips between her home in Waller and the place here in the country. Until her last 10 days, we continued to share meals at the breakfast room table and in front of the TV in the evening. She loved home made potato soup, chili, enchiladas and fried cat fish. Although her hearing was greatly impaired, she still enjoyed “Law and Order”, “NCIS”, and most recently “Cowboy U”. Only in the last week would Mother agree to have a hospital bed. She died at peace, comforted by her Lutheran faith, which she had known all her life. She was old-fashioned in some ways, especially her love of family. She always had good advice, which she offered with reserve. Until she became too tired to do anything but sleep, she never lost her edge. Mother will be buried here from the Methodist Church, with the liturgy led by a Lutheran minister, the Methodist minister and Baptist hospice chaplain sharing in this celebration of her life. She is at rest now in the loving arms of our Lord and Savior. Thanks be to God. February 2, 2007


The following was written on February 21, 2005

The other day, my 87 ½ year-old mother commented smiling that her grandmother always told her she was the favorite of the grandchildren because Mother was the only one who had black hair. What people remember about their early life as they get older is the subject of study, I know. In Mother’s case, it pleases me to hear her talk about fond childhood memories because her own life has been a physical struggle for almost three years. Maybe she has set a Texas record for length of time on Hospice care. In July 2002, her cardiologist gave her six months because of the severity of her heart condition. Doctors can’t predict what faith can do, and besides, God has his own plans.

Our conversation that morning had begun at the breakfast table where she, my oldest sister, and I were having Cream of Wheat, even though Mother said she wasn’t hungry. She was having a tough morning, still on the mend from the nasty stomach virus that had been making the rounds. To get Mother onto a subject other than how bad she felt, I asked her to confirm that her grandmother had died on the first day of January, 1939. For some reason, that prompted Mother to remember how her grandmother had taught her to lay out fabric and pattern on the floor, and to sew.

Tena Elizabeth Fuchs Hollis is the product of German stock—on her mother’s side the Benfer family that landed at Galveston in 1866. My great-grandmother, Louisa Benfer, learned to walk during the crossing. The Benfer name is a familiar one in northwest Harris County. They are one of seven families listed on the historical marker for the Klein community, and one of the elementary schools in the district is named for my great-great grandparents. Mother is the truest product of Texas German stock—always a hard worker, strong family values and ties (sometimes to a fault), and proud. Her life for the last three years has made her dependent on her children. Maybe she’s a minor medical miracle in that her doctors told her in July of 2002 that she would live about six months with her heart condition. So they put her under the care of Hospice.

Mother’s great-grandson, the oldest of the great-grandchildren, got married this last weekend. Having spent too much time thinking about the advice that my oldest sister and I have given her about getting into the church—that she needed to allow herself to ride in the wheelchair that she never uses—she announced a couple of days before the wedding that she didn’t want to use the wheelchair. “Call it pride if you want to, but I don’t want to go to the wedding in a wheelchair.” She used a walker.

Mother has always loved talking about family. She has strong memories of her grandmother, Louisa Benfer Fuchs, who apparently spoke mostly German sprinkled with broken English. Mother recalls a time when her own mother had damaged Mother’s doll buggy in a moment of anger. Great-grandmother Louisa instructed Grandma to take the buggy down on Washington Avenue to be repaired by the blacksmith. We have a picture dated 1924 of mother sitting in a cart harnessed to a goat in front of the house on Sandman in Houston’s West End, where Mother’s family had relocated in the early part of the 20th century, and where the family was living at the time of the broken doll buggy incident.

Among the few historic family pictures we have are one of my great grandmother, my own grandmother, and some of her siblings as children—the brothers on horseback—in front of the house where my mother was also born—long before 1917, the year of Mother’s birth. Louisa and her husband Henry August Fuchs had built the home on Grant Road in the last decade of the 19th century. We even have a wonderful photograph of Louisa Benfer Fuchs laid out in her casket, interestingly, the first time she had been in a reclining position in many years because she had suffered for some time from rheumatoid arthritis. The setting is the living room of the Houston West End home of Mother’s Uncle Henry Fuchs. Louisa is buried in the historic Perry Cemetery, just down the way from the Grant Road home where much of the family’s early history was played out. Perry is also the final resting place of two of Louisa’s children, Lela Fuchs Goodwin and Willie Fuchs.

Recently, while I was exhibiting at an antiques market in Fayetteville, Providence caused me to cross paths with a Fuchs cousin I had never met. His father, who is 82, and my mother are first cousins, but oddly had not been around one another that either recalled. As a result of this meeting at Fayetteville, we got Mother and John Fuchs together, along with the children of each, for a short but wonderful family gathering one Sunday afternoon in late October. That afternoon ended with hugs all around and John commenting that Mother reminded him of his own sweet wife, who had died several years ago.

Mother’s family roots in Harris County range from Klein to Cypress to the Houston West End and back to what is now called 1960, where my sisters and I grew up on Old West Montgomery Road (Tomball Road, 149, now 249), a mile or so north of Jack Rabbit Road, just south of Cypress Creek. My sisters and I have a load of our own memories, including visits to Uncle Henry and Aunt Stella after they had moved to the country, and visits to our own grandmother, Lizzie Fuchs, after she returned to her roots on Grant Road in the early 1940s. There, she along with her son and daughter-in-law, ran a dairy on land inherited from great-grandmother Louisa. The far eastern edge of that land is now called Cypress Creek High School. Driving along Grant Road, it is impossible to tell where Grandma had built their ranch style frame home that shared a Norman Rockwell setting with a big red barn, cattle pens, a dairy barn and a pond.

Aside from Mother, her cousins from the Henry and Estella Fuchs family and cousins from the union of Theodore Fuchs and Rosa Mueschke are the oldest living Fuchs descendants who have a connection with their grandmother, Louisa Benfer Fuchs. In some ways it seems amazing that we still have with us family with a first-hand connection to the young girl who learned to walk while crossing the ocean from Westfalen to Galveston in 1866.