Roger S. Hanks

Remembrance/In Memoriam

In Memory of Roger S. Hanks Jul. 18, 1921- Mar. 13, 1999 I've really gotten to know my father, Roger Hanks, a lot since his death ten years ago. It began with his funeral and got better a few weeks later when we invited his buddies to our house for an old-fashioned wake. We recorded that evening of memories, and my wife, Alison, transcribed it for us. One protégé remembered how Roger had guaranteed the mortgage for his first house. Another remembered how it was Roger's practice to set up the deal for each newcomer to the firm and let him earn the commission, pretending not to know what had actually happened. When I got involved with Dripping Springs, I heard a lot of good stories about how Roger had been a positive influence in the community, and that made me very proud to be his son. It's hard to believe that Roger has not been with us for ten years now. I think we all miss him. He died on March 13, 1999, while watching an exciting UT basketball game on television. Several years earlier he had suffered a heart attack, so he was "on borrowed time." When I asked him during those last years what he thought about heaven, he said he had been living it everyday of his life. He was Pollyanna--he could find the silver lining in everything that happened. He would not have found his own death a sad event or something to dread, just another adventure. At the wake, there were also some stories about Roger that involved driving. For example, he felt he could sleep while driving long distances as long as he kept one eye open. Out in Dripping Springs, Roger loved to swing across the road to pick up litter from his open car door while the car was still moving. As a boy, I remember riding in terror of his driving, until I finally came to believe that it always seemed to work out--after that, I just relaxed and trusted him. I felt that way about him on multiple levels. His father, an Air Force pilot, was briefly stationed in Austin. He met Mayor Hancock's daughter and married her. So, my future grandmother and grandfather moved to the East Coast and Roger grew up there. Roger went off to fancy boarding schools beginning in the first grade. He gleefully recalled taking the train into Boston from his elementary school to buy candy, which he could sell to his wealthy peers for a profit. He loved sailing and proudly told the story of being blown out to sea beyond the sight of land, finally making it back to the coast twenty miles from home. He was thrown out of one school for throwing knives. During these tumultuous years, his parents divorced. He moved with his father to Nevada for awhile so his father could arrange to marry his second wife, the daughter of Sigmund Freud's partner. While in Nevada, he broke his leg in four places while riding a horse but "it didn't hurt." By that time in his life, I guess, Roger had decided that nothing was going to hurt enough to inhibit life's enjoyment, and he morphed into the Pollyanna that we knew in Austin. After Roger's freshman year at Williams College, he rejected his East Coast heritage and came back to Texas and set out to be a self-made man. He graduated from Univ. of Texas with an Economics degree. His first real estate job was selling houses for Patterson and Jones. He was the first full-time commercial real estate broker in Austin, President of the Austin Board of Realtors, and a mentor to many of the leaders of the real estate community today. He preferred to buy and sell property on a handshake. He refused to ignore the civil rights guaranteed in the Fair Housing Act despite local opposition. He was intense and ambitious, a good example of his generation--the Great Generation. I wish my father were around today to see how everything is turning out. He would be very proud of his grandchildren--Ian, Roger, and Louise. Ian and Roger both live in Hangzhou, China at the moment and Louise is going to do big things when she graduates in May. He'd be happy to know that Lucy, my mother, is healthy and secure. He would be curious about what I've learned traveling to Vietnam and China. One thing I could tell him about is their idea of ancestor veneration--remembering one's forbearers on their death-anniversary day. It's a powerful tradition. Whit Hanks