LaRue's legacy: We’re never too old to learn new things

My paternal grandmother LaRue in 1929.

I recently wrote about my great-grandmother, Minnie Lea, and the legacy she gave me. I mentioned my paternal grandmother LaRue and how Great-Gramma Minnie Lea forgave her the egregious slight of my mother’s wedding.

I appreciated Vance Frost's comment: Your father’s mother looked at a saucer on a table and wrote off a whole family, that part is wild to me. And then Minnie Lea is literally waving a broom at a cousin who almost shoved a six-year-old into a horse trough and she calls him ornery. Not evil, ornery. Honestly those two moments are the same move just flipped, right, one woman sees a surface detail and that’s the whole verdict, the other one refuses to make it. The forgiveness thing, I don’t even think that’s what she was doing. Most people forgive meaning they stop being mad eventually. She just never filed the charge.

That stuck with me. It’s powerful to think that there was nothing to forgive because Minnie Lea Kelly never took offense. Her love for people—for people she deemed family—was simply that strong. I mentioned to my friend Gwen, “I wish I could learn not to take offense. But I’m probably too old to learn that lesson now.”

Gwen disagreed. She thought we can and should strive for character qualities like that. Imagining how much simpler life could be if I had never taken offense…

But then I got to thinking about my dad’s mother. Yes, she messed up big time when she refused to allow my mother’s family, even my mother’s mother, to attend her wedding. At the time of my parents’ wedding in August 1953, that paternal grandmother was living through a hell of her own.

She had married my grandfather the same month she graduated from high school. He not only cheated on her from that month on, but she spent twenty-five years—1930 through 1955—married to a man who abused her and her two sons physically and emotionally. They never knew what would set him off, what would make him go into a rage.

In 1948, she tried to start separating herself from him by earning her own money. If you or anyone in your family bought a custom-made fishing rod and reel from Oshman’s in Houston from 1948-1955, my grandmother made it for you.

But women’s rights being what they weren’t in 1955, the minute her divorce came through, she could not run that business. It had depended on her husband’s co-signature on the business license. She wasn’t worried. Her well-to-do brother in Boerne had promised her that if she would finally divorce that nogoodnik, he would give her $10,000—or $121,000 in today’s currency.

So she did. And he didn’t.

From 1948-1955, and beyond, Granny was not in a good place. And to her credit, when she asked forgiveness of my mother and her grandmother, she did not use that as excuse. She knew she had wronged my mother’s family. She owned that.

Her life did not instantly improve just because she divorced the nogoodnik. For one thing, he kept showing up on her doorstep asking her to take him back. Even though he had already married the woman who had been his mistress the last few years of their marriage.

Unlike Aunt WeeWee, who had a business school degree, my grandmother did not have a fallback. She knew she could no longer shop at Joske’s and Sakowitz. Next best thing, she took a job as a retail clerk at P.N. Hirsch. Not quite the same, but it barely paid her bills and got her an employee discount on nice clothes.

She worked that job for over fifteen years. A few years after her divorce, she and Aunt WeeWee realized they could save money if they were roommates. That arrangement proved beneficial for me and my sister. They weren’t just babysitters. They became our confidantes. Our co-conspirators.

In the mid-1960s, my father had an opportunity to work closely with the engineers of Houston Pipeline Company (HPL) on the computerization of the gas dispatch process. Digital of Boston had developed software for a system specifically for the natural gas industry. They’d just moved into the “mini-computer” space—half a floor instead of a whole—and HPL saw its potential.

My dad and HPL’s chief engineer spent almost a month in Boston, learning everything about the hardware and software. Tech support was prohibitively expensive, so HPL expected their employees to troubleshoot, not just run the software. My father was in training to be the power user, but by the end of the course, the Chief Engineer recommended he take over as project manager.

My grandmother was over the moon with pride. She told anyone who would listen about Johnny’s accomplishment. When HPL contracted him out to Shell, Texaco, Humble Oil, and other big companies to implement the same software for their gas dispatch departments, she simply could not stop bragging.

When Hermann Hospital posted a job opening around 1970 for admissions positions that required computer training, my 60-year-old grandmother did not hesitate to apply. Hermann “computerized” their admissions department. Hiring was contingent on learning the program.

Not only did she ace the training, but they made her the supervisor for twenty- and thirtysomethings who were struggling. The thought never crossed her mind that she was too old to learn how to use a computer.

I would not write this post if the story ended there.

Hermann is one of Houston’s charity hospitals. Not the Memorial Hermann conglomerate that now dominates Houston’s medical scene. No, the old Hermann Hospital on the border between Texas Medical Center and Hermann Park. (The Wikipedia article on the history of Hermann Hospital is woefully inadequate!) Like Ben Taub, it wasn’t just a charity hospital. But if you didn’t have money and you lived in Houston, you’d likely end up at Jefferson Davis, Ben Taub, or Hermann.

Where ten years before, Hermann Hospital’s want ads specified “white women 35-50,” by 1970 they had “liberalized” their hiring requirements. Not only did they accept my grandmother. Her fellow applicants and soon-to-be coworkers were yes, white. But also Black and Hispanic. She thrived on their company. See photo! Her retirement party in 1977. She's the 65-year-old white woman wearing a corsage.

Once they were proficient on the computer system, the real work began. My grandmother may have thought she was done learning once training sessions ended. Was she ever in for a surprise!

Because yes, Granny loved clothes. The Sachs family had never had millions of dollars, so never wealthy in the River Oaks, snobby sense of the word. But they had lived comfortably. Great-Grandpa Sachs had invested wisely and taught his children the basics of finance as well.

Being well-dressed was part of that package. Cut mattered. Stitching mattered. Better a classic ensemble than a faddish trend. If you bought off the shelf, you had it tailored. Not just my grandmother, but her sisters too, lived by those maxims. The Sachs girls wore pants in the days when pants were scandalous, but their pants were neatly hemmed with ironed creases. And starched white shirts tucked in just so.

Therefore the first time a woman sat across from my grandmother wearing a designer label and carrying a Chloé crêpe de Chine purse, Granny started to reject the application for “charity care.” She recognized the cost of the woman’s outfit, knowing the tags at Sakowitz would total hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. Granny knew clothes!

One of her younger colleagues soundlessly pointed my grandmother to the woman’s full application. She worked as a domestic. For a family… oh, River Oaks!

When Granny understood that the woman across from her was wearing and carrying cast-offs from her employer, from a woman who was not paying her “domestics” a living wage, from a woman for whom a $1000 purse was rubbish, my grandmother became enraged. Most of the anger was pointed directly at herself, for having lived sixty years making assumptions about people for what they were wearing.

She did not keep that lesson to herself. She made sure my sister and me both “got it.” We were in high school by then. She didn’t want us making her mistake.

Granny also corrected judgmental types who ranted about those “people on welfare who sure could afford designer clothing and nice things, yet take money out of the pockets of working class people!” She never hesitated to give them a piece of her mind, to let them know that “those people” were not only precious in God’s sight, but in hers as well. I loved her righteous anger. She held nothing back.

That lesson was nothing compared to the earth-shattering experience she went through one of those fine days at Hermann Hospital. A day that shook her to her core.

She and her sisters were perfect products of the first three decades of twentieth-century Houston. That Houston was liberal, except when it wasn’t. Tolerant, except when it hated. Still, compared to Houston in 2026, it likely felt downright socialist. Especially with the father they had, who read Torah, the Koran, and the Christian Bible. A father who firmly believed in the League of Nations, civil rights, and the promise all that held.

Despite sentiments surrounding them as they grew up, they could even rationalize “the gays” in a city that abhorred men who built tall fences around their domiciles to prevent spying by irrational neighbors. While Granny and Aunt WeeWee would probably be deemed bigoted by today’s standards, for the era they lived, they were outliers. They resided in the Montrose district, long known for its friendliness to Houston’s gay community. To Granny and Aunt WeeWee, they were neighbors, period. Didn’t understand the “lifestyle,” but no big deal.

That same “live and let live” did not, however, apply to the trans community. For the Sachs sisters, God made men and women. Finito! Trans people were aberrations, unnatural. At least gay men were still men, so the logic went. And they solely meant trans people. Drag queens were fine.

Until my grandmother took that job at Hermann Hospital. And a family sat across from her with an infant who was, in the language of Granny’s youth, hermaphrodite. And in today’s terminology, intersex. Or perhaps something different entirely. We understand so little.

Their doctor had asked the parents to choose a sex for their baby. Granny processed the paperwork for the operation. Keep in mind, in the 1970s, I doubt anyone differentiated between sex and gender. Klinefelter syndrome had been discovered in the late 1940s. Turner syndrome in the late 1930s. The ‘solution’ was always, but always, choose a sex. But XXY or XXXYY or the other many, many variants?

I thought of Granny when I read an excellent firsthand account from J. Ben Morton, who had always thought he was male. Until at age 32, he took a DNA test for a family-tree site that revealed he’s “XX testicular DSD.” Raised Southern Baptist, believing that God created XX and XY only. He wrote:

Prior to my DNA test, I never regarded sex as a gray area. Growing up, my Southern Baptist church didn’t teach me about this level of diversity in God’s creation. It was all Adam and Eve, and avoiding the age of dinosaurs. My references during puberty included the encyclopedias on our basement bookshelves and the Sears catalogs’ underwear sections. It was always men or women — separate, with no overlap. I had no questions until I was given a reason to question my own identity.

It’s critical to note that Morton’s experience has made him an evangelist not only on behalf of intersex individuals, but also transgender, as well as anyone in the LGBTQIA+ “spectrum.” And a vocal opponent of the Southern Baptist Convention.

This intrepid grandmother of mine did not live long enough to learn about the difference between sex and gender. To learn about babies born with female DNA and male genitalia. To learn that there’s far more to who we are than the genitalia we’re born with or the invisible but powerful DNA and hormones in our bodies.

We’ve loosely known about DNA since the 1920s. I would posit that even now, we’re clueless as to its full impact on our physical and emotional Being.

This intrepid grandmother of mine may not have lived to learn what we know now. But she used her time at Hermann Hospital to learn what she could. And her son, my father, being the curious intellectual he always was, joined her in that pursuit of knowledge. At a time when talking about this “knowledge” could get a body branded as a pinko Communist. At least in Texas.

They never fully comprehended the science and medicine we now understand.

But the truth that both grandmother and father grasped was this: Until we can affirm that we’ve exhausted the store of science and know everything there is to know—about our bodies, about the earth, about space, about medicine, about chemistry, about biology—until we can positively affirm that there is nothing left to learn, we should sit down and shut up. Or keep learning. But not sermonize or legislate.

And if you thought my grandmother was outspoken in her protests of unwarranted judgment of “domestics” wearing designer clothing, you should have heard her when people got high and mighty about God making only males and females. Because her reprimand always ended with, “I have seen it with my own eyes.”

I hate to think what people will say about us in fifty years. We’ll sound as stupid as that doctor calling a baby “hermaphrodite” and demanding that the parents choose a sex.

Oh, and my father was over the moon with pride. He told anyone who would listen about his mother’s accomplishment, that she had learned computers at 60! He simply would not stop bragging.

My grandmother: LaRue Heap nee Sachs. Oh what a woman she was!

Comment worth keeping

We all have our biases/prejudices/entrenched attitudes. Wise people make an effort to recognize and challenge them. Like your grandma who learned about those new-fangled computers at 60, this isn’t about age. It’s about the willingness to open our minds and hearts.

--Gwen Miertschin, April 7, 2026.

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Image credits: Top photo--LaRue Sachs in Llano, Texas, 1929. Photo 1929 by John Heap, Sr. Photo derivative © 2002 Denise Elaine Heap. Middle photo--Granny's retirement party. Photo © 1977 John Heap. Bottom photo--LaRue Sachs, in the back yard of the old brownstone on West Dallas, Houston, Texas. Photo 1929 by John Heap, Sr. Photo derivative © 2002 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact me for permission to use any of these photographs.

No part of this post may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the copyright holder, except for the “fair use” of quotations that are properly cited and credited, including identification of the translator if applicable. No part of this post may be included in any Large Language Model without proper licensing from the copyright holder, Denise Elaine Heap.