In Memorium: Don Yarborough

by: Phillip Martin, Progress Texas

Wed Sep 23, 2009 at 02:28 PM CDT

Democrat Don Yarborough died in his sleep today. Yarborough ran for Governor of Texas in the 1960's -- from an obitiuary his family provided (via Quorum Report):

Donald Howard Yarborough, who ran for Governor of Texas three times and helped mobilize the progressive Democratic movement in Texas against the conservative big-oil factions that had so long dominated the state, died peacefully in his sleep today at his home in Houston.

Don was born in New Orleans on Dec. 15, 1925. Don’s father was the president of a bank in New Orleans that went bust in the Great Depression, so Don was sent to spend part of his boyhood living with an aunt in Mississippi, where he helped pick cotton and worked in the fields of his family’s farm with the laborers, which contributed to his lifelong compassion for the underprivileged and disempowered. His father eventually got a job with the government and moved the family to Washington, D.C, where they lived near the zoo on Macomb Avenue in Woodley Park. His family also lived with relatives in Coral Gables, Fla., during the years after the Depression. The family eventually moved to Houston when Don was 12, and upon graduating from San Jacinto High School at 17, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, entering officer’s training school and becoming, at the age of 19, one of the youngest Company Commanders in the history of the Marines. He served one year in China at the close of World War II. Afterward, Don entered the University of Texas, where he belonged to Kappa Alpha fraternity and worked part-time to supplement the money he received under the G.I. Bill. He earned his law degree in 1950.

Our thoughts and prayers are with his family.