Oakland Cemetery Chronicles/Edward Lee Brewer
Edward Lee Brewer (1949–1997)
When a convertible spun broadside into the path of an oncoming car just after midnight December 20, 1951, Edward Garfield Brewer, 25, and his wife, Dora Belle Wynn, 20, met their end. The collision at Berwick and Corinth in south Dallas injured two others, but the Brewers suffered grievous head injuries and arrived DOA at Parkland Hospital.
Born in Mabank, Brewer had served in the Army during World War II and, at the time of his death, he was employed as a mechanic at C. S. Hamilton Motor Company. He and Dora married in Rockwall in 1946 and moved into Mustang Village, the Oak Cliff housing development built for war workers that subsequently housed returning veterans during the post-war housing shortage.
Dora was born in Sulphur Springs, but like her husband, she had moved to Dallas as a child. A bride at 15, she was the mother of three children. The Brewers’ death, five days before Christmas, orphaned Vickie Evelyn, age 4; Edward Lee, 2; and Lawrence Gene, 9 months.
According to a descendant, grandmother Lettie Brewer raised her dead son’s children. Nearly 50 years old and the mother of five, Lettie still had teenagers at home when the three preschoolers came to live with her and husband Joseph Edward, a 57-year-old veteran of World War I.
It couldn’t have been easy. Not only were Joe and Lettie at the age to set aside child rearing, they may have been struggling financially. Joe’s usual line of work was farming, according to the 1940 census, but that year, he was unable to work and without income. The couple was living in Dallas, where Lettie put in 20 hours a week as a labeler in a pickle manufacturing company.
By 1942, Lettie had found a new job, in a downtown photography studio, and Joe had taken on less arduous work than farming. Five years later, the family was living in Oak Cliff, and Joe had a position as a guard at the Santa Fe Building adjacent to the Earle Cabell Federal Building. After Joe suffered a fatal stroke in 1957, his death certificate identified him as a “retired federal guard.” Lettie buried her husband in Oakland Cemetery, adjacent to the son they had lost six years earlier.
At some point, Lettie and the three grandchildren moved to the small community of Mabank, 50 miles southeast of Dallas, where son Edward Garfield had been born in 1926. In 1960, his three children — Vickie, 13; Eddie, 11; and Larry, 9 — were attending Mabank public schools. Eddie, as he was identified in his yearbook photo, was then in the fourth grade.
Eddie’s photo appears in Mabank school yearbooks through the 8th grade. After that, his path is muddy. Records show he married and divorced twice. Two sons were born of the first marriage. It’s not clear how he made his living, but Edward apparently remained in the Dallas area. Directories show he lived in Garland and in Royse City in the 1990s.
Of the three Brewer siblings orphaned that December night in 1951, Edward’s older sister, Vickie, is the only survivor. Younger brother Larry died in 2018.
Edward Lee died March 12, 1997 of what a family member recalls was a heart attack. He was 46 years and six months old. His body was cremated, and according to a note on his interment card, his ashes were placed in the center of his mother’s grave. His marker sits adjacent to his parents’ paired stone in Oakland Cemetery.
