Yet
another salvo in the ongoing name controversy, a defense from an Ima fan who
knew her and family.
Governor Hogg’s daughter was,
unfortunately, called Ima by her mother, who had some sentimental attachment to
the name, and her parents never realized the disadvantage of it until she went
to school and the children began to make fun of it. But it would have been
untrue to the characteristics of her family to retreat under fire, so Miss Hogg
kept her name, and, in spite of all temptation, continues to keep it, and to
prove that there’s nothing in a name as a handicap to the right sort of person.
Her three brothers--none of whom has freak names, though the same class of wits
that invented “Ura” have endowed them with a choice collection--are all men of
mark in their communities and a credit to their father’s influence and
upbringing.
May I not in this
conjunction sign myself, as one of our most picturesque politicians always did,
Ellen Maury Slayden,
“of and for Texas.”
--Charlottesville,
Va., Nov.4, 1922.
Who
was she?
Ellen
Maury Slayden (1860–1926). was born at the Maury family home, Piedmont, in
Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1860; she received her education from tutors at
home. On June 12, 1883, she married James Luther
Slayden, a merchant and rancher in San
Antonio; they had no children. Mrs. Slayden served for a time in 1889 as
society editor of the San Antonio Express. Upon her husband's election
to Congress in 1896, they moved to Washington, where they maintained a
residence for the next twenty-one years. She continued her writing,
contributing to various magazines and newspapers, and was a tireless record
keeper and diarist. Her notebooks concerning observations of the social and
political life in Washington from 1897 to 1919 were left to her nephew F. Maury
Maverick. Maverick's widow, Terrell Webb,
with her second husband, Walter
Prescott Webb, had the journal
published in 1962 as Washington Wife. Ellen Slayden died in San Antonio
on April 20, 1926.
Accessed 5/5/14.
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