CATHERINE JANE MERCHANT

June 26, 1919 - June 22, 2022

A longtime member of the Houston Grand Opera Board of Trustees has died. First appointed to the Board by HOO founder Elva Lobit in 1960, Catherine Jane Merchant held Board membership to this day, honored by the position of Life Trustee. She was born on the 26th of June 1919, in Sour Lake, Texas, in Hardin County, and passed away in Houston on Wednesday, the 22nd of June 2022. She was 102 years of age.

Music was the center point of interest and pleasure throughout Catherine’s life. Her mother’s windup Victrola introduced her to the wonders of classical singing. She would listen to recordings of tenor Caruso and soprano Galli-Curci, which were familiar sounds throughout the house daily. As a child, her imagination was so vivid that she thought the singers and musicians were really inside the box, and did not want to tire them out by repeating the songs.

This keen interest and curiosity eventually led Catherine backstage at the opera as a volunteer worker on the HGO properties committee in 1958 and then to the extraordinary summer of 1959 when she was accepted by Glyndebourne Opera in England as an official backstage and rehearsal observer. To finish that study in opera production, she went to Bayreuth Opera in Germany to join Friedland Wagner’s German opera workshop. “Freedom of the hall” was afforded to the workshop members to attend most rehearsals of the Wagner brothers. Being close up to the great singers including George London, Leonie Rysanek, Regine Crespin and Elizabeth Soderstrom while in rehearsal made a dramatic impression.

After returning to Houston, Catherine was asked to join Arkansas Opera as stage manager in 1961. Later she produced three operas for the organization. She worked as stage manager for Kansas Lyric Opera, Memphis Opera and Shreveport Opera She found time to further her training by attending three Boris Goldovsky opera workshops, and by spending two summer sessions with the Aspen Opera Studio as assistant to the director. These experiences resulted in many stories of backstage adventures and mishaps, all of which Catherine took relish in telling... the funnier the better.

Her formal education ranged from the convent schools in San Antonio and Jefferson High to the Texas State College for Women (now Texas Women’s University), where in 1942, she earned a BS in Music, Voice and Instruments, playing bassoon in the college symphony.

During her Houston years she served the fine arts community by raising funds for the Houston Symphony and holding membership on the Board of Directors of Houston Grand Opera, National Opera Association, the first J. S. Bach Society, Young Audiences, and the first Stages, Inc.

In addition to her lifelong passion for music and the arts, Catherine possessed a zeal for collecting books. Her love of books was inspired by her sister Maxine, who read to her constantly. This love led to a rare and wondrous collection of 250 American novels and poetry, including many signed first editions by authors including Hemingway and Faulkner. Cather and Millay, which was donated to her alma mater,

Texas Women’s University, on the opening day of the new library. The “Catherine Jane Merchant Reading Room” was established in her honor. In 1997, a volume entitled “Dear Miss Merchant” was published by TWU, which contains the edited correspondence between Catherine and the Drake Brothers of New York detailing her interest and acquisitions, and a catalogue of the donated books with descriptions. In the forward of the volume, Professor Mary Evelyn Blagg Huey, President Emerita of TWU states, “There can only be admiration of her care for perfection that dealers in rare books came to define as ‘Merchant Quality’. To ponder the determination with which Miss Merchant pursued her dreams of creating a fine collection of first editions is a joy and inspiration.”

Catherine was predeceased by her father, cattleman William W. “Tip” Merchant; mother, Marion; brother, James; and sister, Maxine. She is survived by cousins, Michael Gerner and his wife Kristina, John F. Gerner, Mrs. Ambrose “Jan” Gerner, Jr., all of Richmond, Texas, Jan Bogue and husband Ron of Alvarado, Texas, and Jo Ann C. Brown of Jonesboro, Georgia.

Friends are cordially invited to a visitation with the family from five o’clock in the afternoon until seven o’clock in the evening on Tuesday, the 5th of July 2022, in the Jasek Chapel of Geo H. Lewis & Sons, 1010 Bering Drive in Houston, where the recitation of the holy rosary will commence at five o’clock.

A Mass of Christian Burial is to be offered at half-past nine o’clock in the morning at Holy Rosary Catholic Church, 3617 Milam Street in Houston.

The Rite of Committal is to follow in her hometown of Sour Lake in the historic Stephen Jackson Family Cemetery. She will be near the grave of her greatgrandfather, pioneer Stephen Jackson, who was a soldier in Sam Houston’s army in 1836. The Township of Sour Lake was established on Jackson’s 1835 Mexican land grant. Catherine was a proud member of The Daughters of the Republic of Texas.

Please visit Catherine’s online memorial tribute at GeoHLewis.com where fond memories and words of comfort and condolence may be shared electronically with her family