D. J. Woodward

Charles Tips’ father-in-law, and the man who gave him the label he carried for life. Named officer of the Three Rivers Glass Company during its mechanized, organized-management era — the company’s first vice president shortly after the 1925 mechanization, per Michael David Smith’s 1989 book.

Who he was

David J. Woodward of San Antonio was Tips’ father-in-law — the father of Hazel Woodward, the San Antonio debutante Tips courted over the telephone line he built to Oakville and married on December 23, 1915. Tips’ memoir names him directly: “My future father-in-law, David J. Woodward, of San Antonio” [ev-0075].

Woodward’s own standing was financial: Tips’ memoir records him as “one of the Directors of the Federal Land Bank” at Houston [ev-0075], established under the same Wilson-era statute that Tips worked with when he organized the Three Rivers National Farm Loan Association and later the Joint Stock Land Banks. A Federal Land Bank director in the family is a plausible route to a vice presidency in a capital-hungry manufacturing venture, and it removes the oddity from Smith’s single sentence.

”The last Texas Empresario”

The phrase this whole history is organized around was Woodward’s, not Tips’. Tips records the exchange directly in his memoir [ev-0075]:

“In discussing my development work in Live Oak County with my father-in-law, Dave Woodward, several years after I was married, I told him that according to the definition used in the days when Texas was first being settled with American colonists, I had qualified as an Empresario by settling more than 100 families in Live Oak County, in and around the town of Three Rivers. Mr. Woodward said, ‘Son, you entered the colonization business just as the sun was setting on the land business in Texas. This State will have to depend on industry and commerce for its growth. You are the last Texas Empresario.’”

The vice presidency

Only appears in Smith’s book, in one sentence: “Shortly after, D. J. Woodward assumed the position as the first vice-president of the Three Rivers Glass Company, and the operation began to function in a modern organized manner.” [ev-0039] No other source in this collection mentions him in connection with the glass company. Note the tension with the April 6, 1922 Manufacturers Record incorporation notice, which already lists A. H. Morton as vice president — either Smith’s “first vice-president” is loose phrasing, or the office had lapsed before Woodward assumed it.

The memoir does not mention Woodward in connection with the glass company at all — it names him only as Tips’ father-in-law and a Federal Land Bank director. So the vice presidency itself remains single-source in Smith; what the memoir adds is the identity and the relationship that make it intelligible.

See Also

• A. H. Morton — listed as vice president in the April 1922 incorporation notice, in tension with Smith’s “first vice-president” claim for Woodward
• Henderson Coquat — rated Woodward a philosopher on the order of Socrates and Epictetus