ROBERT HAROLD HENDRY
1935-2020
ROBERT HAROLD HENDRY, 84, teed off of earth’s fairway on September 14, 2020, a gallery of tearful loved ones assembled around his bedside, holding his hands and kissing his cheeks as he took his final breath to the tune of Glenn Campbell’s “Galveston.”
Bob, Bobby, Bobbers, or as he preferred introducing himself to the good Christian ladies at his last residence, Boob, was born to John and Lois Hendry in Nanchung, China, on the 9th of November, 1935, weighing less than four pounds. He lived for his first three months in a homemade incubator in order to thrive, and thrive abundantly he did.
Bobby’s grandfather John Littleberry Hendry (1886 graduate of Emory College) was a Methodist minister in the Houston Heights before departing with his wife
Alice Sedgwick in 1888 on a mission to China where their four children would be born and where they would live for 39 years. Bobby’s father John Littleberry Hendry Jr. worked as Administrator to the Methodist Hospital in Foochow, Fukien, and for the Red Cross in Shanghai, traveling during the Second Sino Japanese War and the beginning of World
War II throughout Asia to Calcutta (Kolkata), Bombay (Mumbai), Karachi, Ceylon (Colombo), Bangkok and Laos. Following that service, he created the import and export business, Hendry & Co., in New York, NY.
Bobby’s parents met in Shanghai where his mother Lois Sells Hendry (graduate of Nyack College, New York) was working at the Door of Hope Mission, giving shelter and school to young women and girls who had been abandoned or were otherwise vulnerable to prostitution and indentured servitude. In 1940, when the U.S. Consulate directed all women and children to evacuate immediately, Bobby boarded the President Coolidge with his mother and four siblings and set sail for San Francisco.
Patriated to the U.S., Bobby later attended Northfield Mount Herman preparatory school in Massachusetts and The University of North Carolina where he played soccer for the Tarheels. Following graduation, Bobby served three years in the U.S. Army and one in the Army National Guard, where he went by the sobriquet “Lil General” for his talent as an Army typist to command innocuous operations beyond his rank.
After his time in the military, Bobby began a rewarding career in finance. He was a member of the former NASD, trading securities on NASDAQ for over 45 years and retired from the illustrious Houston energy services investment banking firm of Simmons & Company International, and he served at least one term as president of the NASD Dallas chapter. He also found romantic love through work in Dallas, meeting Mary Louis Tigert, his wife of 46 years.
Bobby’s “Sunday services” in his adult years were spent swinging a golf club on verdant silky grass with a number of special congregants over the decades, his strong spiritual heritage exemplified in his kind, humorous, and loving manner. Bobby was humble and honest, a devoted husband, not prone to judgment or criticism, and he never harmed another, apart from the time he launched an aberrant pine cone bobbing in the ocean at one of his daughters on a family vacation, a visceral memory that has apparently not yet been forgotten.
Always simpatico and ever peaceful, anyone who knew Bobby loved him. Classic country and big band music were his afternoon jam lounging by the pool with a cold Bud Light, or “Bob Light,” after a round of golf and a visit to Pop’s Ice House or Molly’s, where a plaque exists on the wall noting his hole-in-one. Even through losing his house of 30 years in the aftermath of Hurricane
Harvey, Bobby never lost his bright outlook on life, and we feel certain that where he rests today there are Bob Lights aplenty, bowlfuls of Blue Bell ice cream, and only blue skies.
In passing, Bobby is preceded by his wife Mary Louis Hendry and sisters Margaret Hendry Dobson, Janet Hendry Brown, and Martha “Patsy” Hendry McCartney. He is survived by brother John L. Hendry III and sister-in-law Rose Marie Hendry; daughters Leslie K. Hendry and Wendy C. Hopkins; sons-in-law Steve Lawrence and Guy Hopkins Jr.; stepsons Johnny Robert Cook, Paul Wayne Cook, and Charles Anthony Cook; grandchildren Brittany Hopkins Pratt (husband Jonathan Pratt), Morgan Hopkins, and Ella Hopkins; great-grandchildren Madilyn Pratt and Henley Pratt, and his loyal cat Chin Chin. In lieu of flowers, please send a donation to wagstowhiskerstx.com. Bobby will be cremated.