San Antonio's a great town to live in, but dying here is not so bad either (one must assume). A number of famous people have chosen San Antonio as a place to croak. The most famous would probably be the trio of Davy Crockett, William Travis and Jim Bowie who gave up the ghost on March 6, 1836 along with a few hundred friends and enemies. But there are others.
The observance of Labor Day this week brings to mind one of the most famous labor leaders of all time, Samuel Gompers. Gompers started the modern labor movement by founding the American Federation of Labor in the late 1800s, then serving as its leader for more than 40 years. In December of 1924 Gompers was at a two nation labor get-together in Mexico City, but the altitude aggravated an already-existing heart problem. In those days, the fastest travel was by train and the nearest big U.S. hospitals were in San Antonio, so he was brought here where he died of heart failure on December 13. Gompers, hardly known today, was involved in the creation of a lot of what we take for granted - an eight-hour workday, the U.S. Department of Labor, and even the Labor Day Holiday. Although he is buried in New York State, there's a statue of him - supported by laborers - downtown on Market Street. The statue itself became the center of controversy when it was dedicated two decades ago, with critics saying it didn't look like Gompers, and besides, it was simply ugly. Mr. Gompers was unavailable for comment.
Richard Avedon, on the other hand, focused on beauty. Avedon (pronounced avva-DON) was one of the top fashion photographers of the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s - you get the idea. More than any other photographer, he introduced the idea of movement and emotion to fashion photography, which before him had been static and predictable. He was so revolutionary that Fred Astaire played a version of him (as "Dick Avery") in the 1957 movie "Funny Face," though it's unlikely Richard could dance that well. Avedon was not a one-trick pony; he also was a journalistic photographer, and it was a project for the New Yorker magazine that brought him to San Antonio in September of 2004, photographing wounded soldiers at Brooke Army Medical Center. It was there that Avedon, then 81, suffered a brain hemorrhage. He was hospitalized immediately and given the best treatment, but died here October 1, 2004.
San Antonio has had its share of movie stars - Tommy Lee Jones has a home in Terrell Hills, "E.T." star Henry Thomas, Carol Burnett and Joan Crawford were born here - but I can only confirm the death of one movie star here, and that one takes a lot of remembering. Pola Negri was born in Poland in the 1890s, but World War One sent her to the U.S. where she became one of the queens of silent pictures, playing the bad girl - the "vamp" - in many movies. However, the advent of sound revealed her thick foreign accent, limiting her roles. She became a U.S. citizen in 1951 and retired to San Antonio where she lived (I was told) in a Spanish-style mansion on Devine Road until her death at age 93 on August 1, 1987.
Finally, the big one, and claiming his death in San Antonio involves a technicality. Lyndon Baines Johnson was a native of the Hill Country who became the 36th president of the United States. After his five years in that office, he retired to his ranch in Stonewall, between Johnson City (named for an ancestor) and Fredericksburg. LBJ's public image took a pounding due to the Vietnam War and that may have played a role in his suffering several heart attacks. The third heart attack, on January 22, 1973, was the last, and as the San Antonio Light noted, he "was flown to Brooke General Hospital in San Antonio where he was pronounced dead on arrival by Doctor George McGranahan." It was likely that Johnson actually died before getting here, but since an M.D. is usually needed to pronounce someone dead, we can technically say that he died in San Antonio. Johnson passed away a few weeks after former President Harry Truman died, which left the country with no living ex-presidents from January of 1973 until Richard Nixon resigned in August of 1974.
No doubt there are other famous or infamous people who died in San Antonio in the past 291 years; I'll be happy to hear about them from you.
Image of Samuel Gompers from San Antonio Express, December 14, 1924. Pola Negri ad from Logansport (IN) Press, May 13, 1923. Lyndon Johnson on the front page of the San Antonio Light, January 23, 1973. Note the flag at half-staff on the paper's banner.
