Tag: Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker Fund

Max and Minnie Voelcker left more than their farm behind

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Front Cover of "Last Farm Standing on Buttermilk Hill: Voelcker Roots Run Deep in Hardberger Park"

 

Never realized how much virtual travel it would take to get a book to press. Certainly, Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker could not have envisioned their story would do the amount of traveling it has done this summer; of course, they would be shocked to find their story told at all.   

Editor Lynnell Burkett of LBJ CommuniCo of San Antonio found our book designer, Amy Layton, in Sanger, Texas. The indexer (I never had given any thought at all to how indexes arrived in the back of books.), Sherrye S. Young, PhD, of RedLine Editorial Services worked from her home in White Bluff, Tennessee. I tracked down Char Miller in Delaware.  He read Last Farm Standing on Buttermilk Hill while relaxing on a beach, then wrote the blurb for the back of the book when back in Claremont, California, where he serves as director and W.M. Keck professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College.   Former Mayor Phil Hardberger docked his sailboat at some unknown port to email in his blurb.  And now Last Farm temporarily has moved to the offices of Four Color Print Group in Louisville, Kentucky, before its journey to somewhere in China.   

Back Cover of "Last Farm Standing on Buttermilk Hill"

 

 
And then we wait.  And wait.  While Max and Minnie were doing all of this virtual travel with the click of a send button, that is not how they will return.  Their journey back to San Antonio actually will be aboard a proverbial slow boat from China.  Their story will arrive, no longer in only a virtual state, at the end of October.   

As I packed up the pieces of paper and photographs documenting their lives that have encircled my desk for so long, I wondered what good the couple has accomplished posthumously since I completed writing the manuscript more than a year ago.   

The Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker Trust has announced their Scholar and Young Investigator Awards for 2010.  The Young Investigator Awards are designed to support young scientists conducting medical research to find cures for cancer, heart disease, arthritis, muscular dystrophy, retinitis and/or macular degeneration of the retina.  Recipients are provided $150,000 per year for three years ($450,000).  The Scholar Awards provide a one-time award of up to $500,000 to each recipient and are intended to foster development and productivity of outstanding, established scientists conducting medical research to find cures for the same diseases.   

Investigator Award recipient Alexander Bishop, PhD, of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA) is striving to determine cisplatin survival factors to augment ovarian cancer treatment.  UTHSCSA’s Doug E. Frantz, PhD, is working on the development of novel stem cell-based therapeutics to treat heart disease and cancer.  Lorena M. Havill, PhD, of the Southwest Foundation for Medical Research, is studying genetic contributions to knee osteoarthritis risk.  Sunil Sudarshan, MD, PhD, of UTHSCSA is delving into the metabolic links to renal cancer.  Scholar Award recipient Tyler J. Curiel, MD, MPH, also of UTHSCSA, is devoting his energies to the development of effective and tolerable age-specific tumor immunotherapy.  

Pretty amazing that the frugality of two former dairy farmers with little formal education is contributing so much to the advancement of medicine.  Makes me even more proud to have been privileged to get to know them, if only from the scraps and traces they left behind, and to preserve some remnant of their lives on paper.    

Bon voyage Max and Minnie, and, as I resume my other writing projects, I already miss your presence in my study.   

Note Added on September 15:  The Twig Book Shop, 200 East Grayson in the Pearl Brewery complex, will host a book-signing welcoming Max and Minnie back from China from 5 to 7 p.m. on Tuesday, November 16. 

November 17 Update:  Gifts with enduring ramifications….

Farmers Spared Towering Oaks from the Bulldozers of Urbanization

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After an aquifer-filling 24 hours, the clouds parted just in time for this morning’s opening ceremonies for Phil Hardberger Park. 

Former Mayor Hardberger does not take the responsibility of having the 300-acre park named in his honor lightly.  Since leaving office, he has assumed the presidency of the Phil Hardberger Park Conservancy; along with his wife Linda, donated $100,000 from their private foundation; found the conservancy a home in his former office space in the Milam Building; and, perhaps most importantly for the future of the park, installed the powerhouse behind several former mayors – Betty Sutherland – as the conservancy’s executive director.

Where’s the dogpark?
Bonnie Conner
Father David and Banks Smith
Pug Pining for Dogpark
Former Mayor Howard Peak, Mayor Julian Castro and Former Mayor Phil Hardberger
Marcie Ince and Parky
Anne “Parky” Alexander
Father David Garcia and Linda Hardberger
Former Mayor Howard Peak and Mayor Julian Castro

The opening provided a break from editing the edits in a book about the farmers, Max and Minnie Voelcker, who lived on the land now Hardberger Park.  Editor Lynnell Burkett and I agree about the placement of the oft-cursed comma (refer to earlier ‘ode’) surprisingly more frequently than that of the devilish colon.  

During this morning’s ceremonies, the former mayor said the parkland will endure for centuries to come, long after those who had anything to do with it are forgotten.  Already, Voelcker is far from being a household name, even for those living near the park. 

Although the Voelckers ran cattle on their land once dairy-farming became unprofitable for small operators; they always considered themselves farmers.  The stories of their farm and all the dairies that flourished in this part of San Antonio once known as Buttermilk Hill are endangered.  A May 14 editorial in the San Antonio Express-News provided evidence some of the few who know the Voelcker name now term the land’s historical usage as “ranch.”

While Max and Minnie were simple farmers, their legacy stands in the towering oak trees they carefully preserved and the foundation they endowed to support medical research of benefit to many, The Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker Fund.  But, having spent months and months with their papers and photos encircling my desk, I want others to know these stubborn farmers who so tenaciously clung to their land despite the immense pressures of urbanization.

So back to the edits.  Let’s get The Last Farm Standing on Buttermilk Hill on the press, before everyone forgets that “on this farm there was a cow.”

Last Farm Standing

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Barbara Kingsolver.  San Miguel de Allende.  What could top that? 

Heady following Barbara’s keynote address at the Writers Conference, my daughter Kate and I climbed the steep path by Juarez Park leading to the house we had rented on Chorro.  Checked my day’s email before shaking up a batch of margaritas, and the email from Banks Smith proved more exhilarating than her talk.  Banks reported that the board of the Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker Fund had voted to proceed with publishing the book I have written about Max and Minnie – The Last Farm Standing on Buttermilk Hill.  A portion of the couple’s former dairy farm is San Antonio’s newest park – Phil Hardberger Park.

So my first book (not counting the cookbook I edited in the 1980s, Savory Memories of San Antonio) should be in print by late summer.