Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. In this Winter 1997 Classic article, Ray Hankamer Jr. recalls the life, legacy, and “joyful noise” of his grandfather Earl Hankamer–the namesake of Baylor’s Hankamer School of Business.
Earl C. Hankamer paid his own way to Baylor Academy in the first decade of this century with a paper route thrown from horseback. By saving his profits from delivering the Beaumont Enterprise and the Houston Post to the oil boomtown of Sour Lake, Texas, and surrounding environs, my grandfather became the only one of six brothers and sisters to complete college. He twice saw men shot in the back in the rough dives where he had to deliver papers. As he remembered it, at that time Sour Lake had 400 saloons and two churches.
After dropping out of school more than once to accumulate money, he graduated. Many years later, when a combination of good luck and solid business sense brought him wealth, Earl Hankamer remembered Baylor and credited his time spent there with giving him the savvy to make money and to hold on to it.
Unlike many oil men, my grandfather had the sense to quit while he was ahead. Owner of a modest family dry goods store until the age of forty, Granddad Earl might have never been able to make his name a part of Baylor tradition had not oil been found for a second time in the trade area of his store in the east Texas community of Sour Lake, near Beaumont. By offering his services as a land man to the major oil companies who needed someone trusted by the local farmers to acquire leases. Earl Hankamer got his start in the oil business.
Soon he was exploring for oil and gas on his own account, and he found enough to become more than comfortable financially.
His early partners cut each other in unselfishly on promising prospects, and then trusted each other without question. Sometimes they billed each other for dry holes quickly drilled, or sent each other checks for wells that had succeeded, even when news of the particular deal had not been made available to the partner beforehand.
Once financially secure, my grandfather moved to Houston, and while keeping his hand in the oil business in a modest and ongoing way, began an involvement with two loves that were to monopolize his time for the rest of his life: Baylor University and the Texas Medical Center in Houston.
As a boy, I was told by my grandfather that the board members of the Texas Medical Center, blessed with a large tract of land, knew from the start they would never have a world class medical center without a medical school to serve as a magnet for the finest physicians, professors, and medical research.
Having “green blood” in his veins, Earl Hankamer began politicking to get Baylor Medical School to move from Dallas to Houston. He knew the school could be the centerpiece for a great medical complex. Knowing his dedication, I am sure he was overjoyed one evening when a convoy of trucks arrived from Dallas to the temporary Baylor Med location in an old leased Sears warehouse on the former Buffalo Drive near downtown Houston. My grandfather and other well-wishers greeting the arrival had a hearty laugh when the lid fell off a container of liquid which contained cadavers used to train students; the laborers carrying the containers dropped them to the ground when they saw what they were carrying and fled the warehouse, never to return.
To help finance the permanent home of the school. Earl Hankamer decided to call on Hugh Roy Cullen, a wealthy oilman who was somewhat older than my grandfather. Mr. Cullen explained at first that he was “tapped out” by giving philanthropic gifts to the recently established University of Houston, which was his pride and joy. The University of Houston had generously named a building after the wealthy Mr. Cullen.
“When a combination of good luck and solid business sense brought him wealth, Earl Hankamer remembered Baylor and credited his time there with giving him the savvy to make money and to hold on to it.”
Temporarily stymied in his fundraising efforts for Baylor Med, my grandfather waited until he met Mr. Cullen accompanied by his wife, at which time Granddad coyly suggested it might be time to fund a building for Baylor Medical School that would carry the name of Mrs. Cullen. Shortly thereafter Mr. Cullen made the contribution that was key to establishing Baylor as the first medical school in the Texas Medical Center, which has become one of the most highly regarded medical research centers in the world.
From the time I was ten or eleven, Granddad would let me drive part of the way to Waco with him right by my side in his big Cadilac to see the Bears play football. On those trips he would tell me stories of his youth, as the son of a German immigrant father and a French Huguenot mother, and their life on the northern edge of Galveston Bay, where his father operated a commercial sailboat which carried freight and passengers. Passing travelers were always welcome in the Hankamer family home near Anahuac, where a warm dinner and a spare bedroom were eagerly traded to strangers in return for the latest news from Beaumont, Houston, and the outside world.
As a young buyer/owner of a family mercantile store, my granddad went by train to market twice a year in New York. Once, while standing in line to purchase a ticket to a silent movie, he felt a strong bump from a person behind him in line, and when he reached back his wallet was gone from his hip pocket. Alone and stranded with no money, Earl Hankamer suppressed with great difficulty the urge to accuse the man nearest him, but when he returned to his hotel room, he found his missing wallet where it had slipped and fallen behind the dresser.
After years of these buying trips to the apparel markets for his tiny store, Granddad noticed that buyers with whom he was friendly from the big Texas department stores were scheduling their buying trips to coincide with his. Following along with him, they bought huge quantities of the small lots he purchased, flattering by imitation his solid sense of style and timing.
While involved with Baylor Medical School, my grandfather also helped make come true the dreams of Joseph and Mary Armstrong by leading the design and fund-raising effort for the Browning Library, which is now a worldwide attraction on the Waco campus.
Years later, I had the privilege of being mentored by the warm and caring elderly Mrs. Armstrong, as I helped her sort and catalog personal mementos from the thirty-four world tours she and her professor husband conducted to earn funds to purchase Browning manuscripts and artifacts tor the library and museum they hoped some day to build.
One cold day in Waco in 1952, several members of our family accompanied my grandparents to Waco, where Granddad was to turn the first shovel of dirt in the construction of a School of Business for Baylor. He had made the building possible by a gift of oil holdings to the university, earmarked for a business school. I still have the cover of The Baylor Line which shows some of us grandchildren in the background, smiling and clenching our fists, partly out of excitement and partly from the cold!
The Hankamer School of Business has grown substantially in enrollment and in physical size since the groundbreaking that chilly day in 1952, but the proudest moment in the history of the school for me took place in early August of 1996 when my daughter Gabrielle Vinson Hankamer walked across the stage to receive her MBA degree from the school that her great grandfather had first visualized and helped to make a reality almost forty-four years earlier.
As Granddad got older, he still liked to go to church on Sunday and belt out the old standard hymns. The only problem for those sitting around him was that Earl Hankamer couldn’t carry a tune. One day as he sat at his regular place on his regular pew, one of his long-time friends leaned forward and said smilingly in a loud stage whisper, “Aw, shut up Earl—you can’t sing!” A nearby churchgoer, also a long-time friend, stubbornly retorted—all in the middle of the hymn—“Earl isn’t singing, he’s just makin’ a joyful noise!”
And that summarizes for me the life of a man who performed countless philanthropies throughout his life, some recognized, and many more anonymous. By his words and actions, Earl Hankamer made “a joyful noise.”
Ray Hankamer Jr. attended Baylor, the University of Texas, the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and the Goethe Institut in Bavaria. He is the father of a daughter and two sons, and is married to the former Lisa Wooten of Oxford, Miss. He is a hotel industry executive in Houston.
