In memory of Ima’s good friend, Lee Pryor (1926-2015)

    I treasure this photo. Ima gave it to Lee when she was in her 90s, and began to call herself  “Imogene.” Lee, who helped me with my early Ima research, loaned it to me to reproduce. I’ve used it in my two Hogg books.

“To Lee Pryor

From Imogene with love”

     Ima and Lee were great friends, travelling and attending concerts and plays together. He had planned to meet her in London for a round of theater-going in the summer of 1975. Instead, he met her in the hospital, where she was awaiting surgery on her hip. She died a few days later, at age of 93.

     Dr. William Lee Pryor died in Houston, July 14, 2015, at age 88.

Ima in a major motion picture?

         Ima Hogg’s mysterious doings in Germany are the subject of a full-length film proposed in 2013 and yet to be produced--for lack of funding. According to a recent IN TOWN column by Carole Keeney Harrington, this “lack of [financial] support” by Houston powers-that-be is in part because the film, a period piece called the “The Empress of Texas” contains the story of Ima and her German lover, who was killed in World War I. Apparently nobody wants to have Ima’s reputation sullied by a story of an illicit love affair--true or not.

        

         For more about this film, see its website:

http://www.empressoftexasfilm.com/

         For the research the love story is based on, see IMA HOGG: THE GOVERNOR’S DAUGHTER, pp. 53-54, 59.

         

What did Ima do in Berlin in 1908?

       Ima Hogg was away from Houston from June 1907 to October 1908: about sixteen months. From June  22, 1907 until February 29, 1908, she wrote almost every day in her diaries--and then she stopped.  Her diaries hold clues--or do they?

       In her notebook-like  “Travel Diary” she described everything she saw, in minute detail: paintings, architecture, cathedrals, museums, mountains, lakes, and made notes about the history and geography.  She was an ideal tourist. She collected picture postcards as she traveled, but alas, did not write on them or mail them. In the Hogg papers in Austin are 3 folders of her postcards from Europe, 1907, all just as she bought them.

       From November 1, 1907 to sometime in October 1908, she lived with a family who lived at this address, 22 Mommsen Strasse, Charlottenberg, Berlin. This is a recent photograph. The house that Ima knew may have looked quite different. 

  

     

       On January 1, 1908, while living here, Ima began another diary in a small  leatherbound volume with a lock. But it ends abruptly on the last day of February.

       Why?

IMA WISHING YOU A HAPPY 4TH OF JULY

Today's the 4th! Enjoy!

Ima's an audio book, for listening anywhere!

[Look for her on Amazon.com]