Professor H. L. Bray
Personal
Lorna
Jean Bray (1939-2023)
My mother was born Lorna Jean Lewis on October 27, 1939 in Edcouch,
Texas, the second of five children, to Lorena Mae Lewis (maiden name
Mullen) and Clark Preston Lewis. Her dad was the local electrician
in this agricultural community in South Texas, and her mom took care
of the children. With no air conditioning, her dad constructed a
concrete above ground pool for his kids to "beat the heat." As a
young person, she liked art and music and did well in school. In
high school, she wondered why none of the boys would ask her on a
date, until she found out that her older brother Arland who played
center on the football team had told everyone that they would have
to get his permission first. After a couple of years of college at
Pan American University in Edinburg, she took a job with Delta
Airlines in Dallas, and then Houston where she met my dad, and then
San Francisco after that, working in their scheduling department.
This job allowed her to travel for free. Later in her career she
worked at the NASA office and booked flights for many of the famous
astronauts in the 1960's.
My parents met through friends - my mom's coworker and roommate was
dating a friend of my dad's. They hit it off immediately. My mom was
impressed with my dad's sense of humor, self-confidence, and
down-to-earth style. My dad, the second Hubert Bray (both his dad
and his son - me - have the same first and last name), felt like he
had won the lottery and was just making sure he didn't mess it up.
When my dad got a great job opportunity programming computers for
Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in San Francisco, my mom
followed him out there where they got married at the courthouse in
Palo Alto, California in 1963. They later returned to Houston for
most of their nearly 60 years of marriage. After my dad introduced
his wife to his parents, my dad's mom took him aside and said,
"Hubert, I just don't know how you did it!" in a playful and yet
sincere way. My mom was extremely personable and likeable to
everyone. On numerous occasions throughout my childhood especially,
people would come up to me and say, "Hugh, I just met your mom - she
is so nice!" Certainly from my perspective as her son, she was one
of the kindest and most thoughtful people I've ever known.
My mom was also very intelligent, but in an understated way where no
one would suspect it. When we took a home IQ test when I was a kid,
she scored 142, beating my dad by a few points, even though he was a
computer programmer at NASA who knew calculus and computer science
quite well. My mom was a great example of how living a simple,
honest, and hard-working life relentlessly working towards your
goals is the secret to achieving your personal definition of
success. My mom did not opt for a big career, but instead focused on
being the best mom she could be to her two sons, Hugh (me) and
Clark. She supervised my education for as long as she could, up
until her math knowledge was not quite adequate, when she got my dad
to take over. If I had a project due in school, she was my implicit
collaborator - not to do the work for me - but to make sure I had
all of the supplies and support I needed to succeed. Great examples
of this were science fair projects that I did every year from the
6th grade to the 12th grade. My project was always the most
impressively constructed and artistically presented. Again, I did
the work, but she was always there supervising and making sure I
used the power drill safely and successfully. This culminated in the
10th grade when I did a science fair project entitled "It All Adds
Up" (a name she suggested) where I presented 6 different ways I had
independently found to add up the kth powers of the first N positive
integers. This was before the internet where you'd probably just
google how to do this. That project won one of the four grand awards
in the Science and Engineering Fair of Houston, which earned my
project a spot at the International Science and Engineering Fair,
placing 2nd in the mathematics category in 1986. This was
tremendously encouraging for a 15 year old, and probably influenced
my future choice of career. In retrospect, of course, my mom was my
ace in the hole - my secret weapon - who made absolutely certain
that there were not any impediments to her kids achieving their full
potential, in whatever area suited them best. And yet somehow I
never felt pushed by her in any way. She was happy when we
succeeded, and loved us just as much when we did not.
My mom also did a lot of volunteer work in the schools that Clark
and I attended, especially our elementary school Parker Elementary,
including for decades after we left the school. In addition to
teaching an algebra class at least one year, and art classes other
years, she focused on the artwork and set design of school plays,
which she really enjoyed. One year she won the Volunteer of the Year
Award from the Houston Independent School District. Even more
broadly, she took an interest in people, including kids she
interacted with at Parker, and was always an encouraging voice for
whoever needed it.
The pictures below give a glimpse of her life - the fun parts, at
least, when everyone is dressed up at parties or on vacation. Of
course the hard work behind the scenes is not shown. If you see a
picnic where everyone is laughing while eating watermelon, you can
be confident that my mom was the one who went shopping for the food,
got the paper plates and napkins, put everything in an ice chest to
keep it cold, and made sure that everyone had a delightful time
eating watermelon by the creek in front of the cabin in Colorado
that my dad's parents had bought decades earlier, and had fixed up
over the years. As a child we visited that cabin in Eldora, Colorado
every summer for 2 or 3 weeks, getting there and back via a two day
car ride.
My mom passed away peacefully on May 12, 2023, six months after
suffering a stroke on November 13, 2022. Her husband Hubert, with
the help of some incredible nurses, took the best possible care of
her at home during that time, holding her hand and comforting her
all day every day, like a scene from the movie "The Notebook,"
though neither of them ever saw that movie. She is survived by her
brothers Arland and Larry and their wives Grace and Ruby, her sister
Edna, her husband Hubert, her two sons Hubert and Clark and their
wives Heidi and Holly, and her seven grandchildren William, Emily,
Andrew, Jonathan, Caroline, Benjamin, and Avery.
I recently ran across the saying, "Enjoy the little things, for one
day you may look back and realize they were the big things." My mom
personified that wisdom.
Hubert Lewis Bray
May 15, 2023
