Out of Bounds
The Bounds family headstone in Dallas’s Oakland Cemetery tells a sad story: The small family — a mere trio at a time when families ran large — all died young.
Margaret May, Texas-born on Valentine’s Day 1875, was visiting her brother in Port Arthur when, at 48, she had a stroke. Nine years later, her husband, Hiram, a Dallas optometrist, drowned in an Oak Cliff lake. He was 57.
And, in 1937, the couple’s only child, Virginia Mae, then 26 with a new job in Chicago, fell ill after returning from a visit to Dallas, according to a news story. A family member’s funeral keepsake says she died of bronchial pneumonia.
What makes Virginia’s death different from her parents’ is that she left behind not only a spouse, but also two children, according to a Dallas Morning News account.
There’s much more to her story than that.
Most of the girls in the 1925 South Oak Cliff High School yearbook have the same flapper style — bobbed hair and fashionably thinned eyebrows — that Virginia sported in her class photo. She was scheduled to graduate in January 1929.
It’s unlikely Virginia still had high school in mind by then. In 1926, she had married Loehr “Bob” Harmon, and in August 1927, their daughter, Jeanne, was born. The new mother was 16 years old. Virginia subsequently lost a second child, born prematurely in 1928.
Jeanne wasn’t yet two when her parents divorced in 1929. Her paternal grandmother opened her home in Topeka, Kansas to the little girl, who grew up to study economics at Washburn College. After returning to Texas, she married Chester Noblett of Fort Worth in 1943; they raised three children. The 1950 census reveals that Jeanne worked as a model in a retail clothing store. When Chester died in 1997, the couple had been married 54 years. Jeanne lived until 2012.
Virginia did not share her daughter’s good fortune in finding and keeping a compatible spouse, but in 1930, she gave it another try. At 19, Virginia became Mrs. John R. Laughlin.
She and Laughlin, 25, rented a house on Swiss Avenue in Dallas for $43 a month; neither listed an occupation. The couple’s boarder, a widowed hat maker, may have added a little to the newlyweds’ income. The marriage didn’t last. Laughlin ultimately went to medical school and established a practice of many years in southeast Texas.
Twice divorced at age 25, Virginia next exchanged wedding vows with Blaine Short in April 1935. Interestingly, the marriage document identifies the bride as “Miss Virginia Bounds,” ignoring the two husbands who preceded Short.
Blaine had been living with his father in Lenoir City, Tennessee, when at 15, he was orphaned. It was 1931; his mother had died eight years earlier. Fortunately for the teenager, he had a big brother in Dallas, then living at the Dallas Athletic Club and managing the Melba Theatre on Elm Street.
By 1934, Paul Short was managing the Majestic, a movie theatre that had recently left behind its vaudeville days, when the likes of Houdini, Mae West and Bob Hope appeared there. Short’s innovation was to offer stage bands, including those of Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington.*
Short was in a position not only to give his younger brother a home in Dallas, but to send him to school and model a vocation. Census data show that Blaine graduated from high school and found work as a film booker in the motion picture industry.
Did Blaine’s big brother also introduce him to Virginia? Or, did the 20-year-old find a bride without fraternal aid? On April 2, 1935, Blaine and Virginia, 24, were married by the Rev. Henry May at 2711 Throckmorton Street.
Two years and two months later, Virginia was dead. She was 26 years old.
The Dallas Morning News reported that she died “after an illness of several days.” Her survivors included “husband Blaine Short, two children, her aunt Mrs. (Ruby) Cochran, and an uncle, Grover Furlow.” That Virginia had been living with her aunt in Dallas “until a short time ago when she accepted a position in Chicago” suggests she and Blaine had separated.
Some of the newspaper’s “facts” are questionable, suggesting the reporter’s source was unreliable. Virginia was said to have graduated from Adamson High School. Were the “two children” she left behind Jeanne and the stillborn baby? As for what killed her: It was neither an “illness of several days” nor bronchial pneumonia.
On June 24, 1937, Virginia died from an overdose of a barbiturate, Amytal, a sleep-producing agent prescribed for anxiety and sleep disorders, or used as a surgical anesthesia. The Cook County inquest could not determine whether the overdose was accidental, homicidal, or suicidal, according to her death certificate and an article in the Chicago Tribune.
Aunt Ruby brought Virginia’s body home to Dallas to be buried next to her mother in Oakland Cemetery. Four years earlier, her father had taken his place next to his wife, on his own terms.
On Sunday, December 3, 1933, Hiram Bounds walked a short distance from his apartment in northern Oak Cliff, removed his coat, placed it on the shore of Lake Cliff and entered the water.
A passerby discovered the coat; he alerted officials after finding a note in the retired optometrist’s pocket that said “full particulars” were in a second note in his apartment. Addressed to family and friends, the note made reference to ill health.
On Monday, December 4, firemen dragged the lake and found Hiram Bounds’ body. According to the death certificate, cause of death was suicide by drowning. He was 57 years old.
Three and a half years later, Virginia joined her parents. Mother, father and daughter were reunited in a plot in Oakland Cemetery’s section 7, lot 16, graves 3, 4, and 5.
- NOTES: During World War II, Paul Short served on the War Promotion board as coordinator of motion pictures, which apparently led him to Hollywood, where he joined Paramount Pictures and became an executive assistant to David O. Selznick.
