Fighting Words: "My Name is Hogg."

         Ima’s paternal grandfather, Joseph Lewis Hogg, was a proud, no-nonsense man who once made his two older sons, Tom and John,  wear tall silk hats to school in East Texas. (Tom squashed his, and that was the end of that.) One day Joseph Lewis Hogg was riding his mule along a road in Wood County, and he saw a stranger on horseback coming his way. As the two riders neared each other, Joseph Lewis greeted the stranger and said, “My name is Hogg.” The other responded, and said, “My name is Pigues,” pronouncing it “Peeg” in the French manner. Joseph Lewis Hogg, in a fury, climbed off his mule and challenged Mr. Pigues to a fist-fight.

          Ima’s father was also “sensitive about his name and shape,” as Horace Chilton, Jim Hogg’s lifelong friend, recalled. One afternoon in Tyler, Texas, in 1870, when the rotund young newspaperman, James Stephen Hogg, was in his office setting type near an open window, a man passing by looked in and yelled,

“Piggie Piggie,’ ‘Sooey-Sooey’!” Hogg responded to this insult “with such language and gesture of his burly right arm that the mimicery was not repeated . . . .”

When Ima’s older brother, Will, started to school in Mineola, he "had many fights at school because the older boys teased him about his name." So said Rose Merriman, who remembered the Hogg family from her East Texas childhood.

         And a few years later Will would often come home with a bloody nose from defending, as Ima put it, “my good name.”