Floyd D. Culbertson, Jr.

Floyd Douglas Culbertson, Jr.
Mayor of Minden, Webster Parish Louisiana, USA
In office July 1940 – November 1942
Preceded by	David William Thomas
Succeeded by	John Calhoun Brown, Mayor Pro-tem
Personal details
Born	(1908-04-15)April 15, 1908 Minden, Webster Parish Louisiana, USA
Died	April 28, 1989(1989-04-28) (aged 81) Tulsa, Oklahoma
Resting place	Memorial Park Cemetery in Tulsa
Nationality	American
Political party	Democratic Party
Spouse(s)	(1) Gladys Day Culbertson (married 1933, divorced) (2) Violet McMurty Culbertson (married 1952, presumed divorced) (3) Evelyn H. Johnson Davis Culbertson (married at his death)
Relations	William G. Stewart (great-uncle by marriage) John Sidney Killen (great-grandfather)
Children	From second marriage: Douglas Floyd Culbertson Three stepsons from third marriage: Bryan Wilson Davis Allan R. Davis Darrell Wayne Davis
Parents	Floyd Culbertson, Sr., and Mary Leana Alford Culbertson
Alma mater	Minden High School Undergraduate institution missing Dedman School of Law at Southern Methodist University
Occupation	Attorney
Military service
Branch/service	United States Army
Rank	Captain
Battles/wars	Stateside service in World War II

Floyd Douglas Culbertson, Jr. (April 15, 1908 – April 28, 1989), was a lawyer in Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma, who from 1940 to 1942 was the mayor of his native Minden, a small city in Webster Parish in northwestern Louisiana. He resigned early in his second term to enter the United States Army with stateside service in World War II.

Background

Culbertson was descended from a prominent family in Webster Parish. His paternal great-grandfather was pioneer farmer Green Culbertson (1801-1886), a South Carolina native who after farming in Georgia and Alabama came in 1851 to Claiborne Parish, from which Webster Parish was created in 1871. He began purchasing land for the Culbertson-Stewart farm north of Minden and was the postmaster at the defunct community of Flat Lick near the Pine Grove Community. By the time of the 1880 census, Green Culbertson was living in Milam County in east central Texas, where he died six years later at the unincorporated community of Davilla at age of eighty-five. Green Culbertson is interred at Davilla Cemetery.

Culbertson's father, Floyd, Sr. (1879-1958), one of four children of William Patton Culbertson (1842-1882) and the former Louisa Parrot Killen (1850-1947), was living on a farm near Minden in 1894 at the age of fifteen. His father had died when Floyd, Sr., was a small boy. Floyd, Sr., is mentioned in the publication, The Southern Cultivator and Industrial Journal. His mother, the former Mary Leana "Mollie" Alford (1887-1977), was a native of Cherry Ridge in Union Parish in North Louisiana, Louisa's Culbertson's brother-in-law and hence Floyd, Jr.'s great-uncle by marriage was William G. Stewart, a president of the Webster Parish School Board for whom the defunct William G. Stewart Elementary School in Minden was named. Floyd, Jr., was a great-grandson of farmer and cattleman John Sidney Killen, a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives for Claiborne Parish in 1871.

Roy Samuel Culbertson, Sr. (1911-1996), a younger brother of Floyd, Jr., was born not in Minden but in Elk City in Beckham County in western Oklahoma, three years after the birth of Floyd, Jr., and four years after Oklahoma statehood. It is unknown how long Floyd, Sr. and Mary Culbertson resided in Oklahoma before they returned to Minden.

Culbertson graduated from Minden High School at the time when there were eleven grades. He is listed as a sophomore in the 1925 Minden High School yearbook, The Grig.

In 1933, Culbertson married Gladys Day (1907-1995), daughter of William Hartwell Day, Sr. (1884-1959) and Minnie W. Day (1888-1964) of Gibsland east of Minden in Bienville Parish. They wed in Lafayette County in southwestern Arkansas. For many years Gladys Culbertson was a music teacher in the Webster Parish schools. The marriage had ended before 1940 because Culbertson was listed in the census that year as a single 31-year-old lodger in Minden; he turned 32 two weeks after the tabulation of the census.

Career

Culbertson's undergraduate college is unknown. He graduated c. 1937 from the Dedman School of Law at Southern Methodist University near Dallas in University Park, Texas. He was admitted in 1937 to the practice of law in Minden in the office of Clifford Hayes.

In the 1940 Democratic primary election for mayor, Culbertson unseated Mayor David William Thomas, who was seeking a third consecutive two-year term. Thomas finished third in the balloting. In 1942, Thomas unsuccessfully challenged Culbertson for re-election. Mayoral terms, then for two years, were expanded to four in 1954. Soon after his reelection, Culbertson ran unsuccessfully in the 1942 primary for district attorney of the 26th Judicial District held on September 22, 1942. The position was decided in a runoff in which Arthur M. Wallace defeated Minden attorney Graydon K. Kitchens, Sr., a former law partner of future Governor Robert F. Kennon and later a Kennon appointee to the Louisiana Tax Commission. Kennon himself had served as mayor of Minden from 1926 to 1928.

In November 1942, in a surprising turn of events, Culbertson resigned as mayor to enter the United States Army National Guard. as a first lieutenant and then captain. His initial training was at Camp Wallace in Galveston County, Texas, adjacent to the Hitchcock Naval Air Station. His secretary, Zenobia Camp West (1919-2008), who later became a registered nurse, left as well to work with Edwin Richardson, the former Webster Parish school superintendent and past president of Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, in a program to find housing for workers flooding into Minden to take jobs at the Louisiana Army Ammunition Plant, a since defunct munitions factory which was opened early in the war during the last few months that Culbertson was still the mayor.John Calhoun Brown, a member of the Minden City Council, served as mayor pro tem for the remainder of Culbertson’s term until the spring of 1944, when J. Frank Colbert, a former member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, was elected to the position. Culbertson spent most of his military service in the Brooklyn borough of New York City before he re-opened his law office in Minden in December 1946.

In 1947, Culbertson joined Minden businessman Larkin L. Greer (1902–1991) and future State Representative E. D. Gleason as co-chairmen of the Webster Parish "Kennon Club" to support Judge Robert Kennon for governor. Kennon, however, was eliminated in the Democratic primary early in 1948. Former Governor Earl Kemp Long defeated in a runoff election former Governor Sam Houston Jones. In 1940, Jones had unseated Long, who held the office for the preceding year. Instead, Kennon rebounded to win his single term as governor in 1952.

Except for the years he was in the military, Culbertson headed the Red Cross in Webster Parish from 1938 to 1948, when Minden businessman Willard Roberts (1899-1994) assumed those duties.

In 1950, Culbertson and his erstwhile political opponent, former Mayor David William Thomas, were opposing lawyers in a legal dispute over a $196 debt deemed collectible to the plaintiff by City Judge R. Harmon Drew, Sr. The case was appealed unsuccessfully to the Louisiana Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit in Shreveport.

On March 8, 1952, Culbertson was admitted to the practice of law in Texas with a work address in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Family and death

Upon the death of Culbertson's father, the newspaper obituary lists Floyd Culbertson, Jr., as a 1958 resident of Fort Worth, Texas. The obituary names Culbertson's four siblings: John Grier Culbertson (1905–1977), then of Arlington, Texas, Roy Culbertson, then of Minden, James Edward "Jim" Culbertson of Dallas, and Mrs. George E. Reynolds of Fayetteville, North Carolina. When his mother, Mary, died at the age of ninety on September 19, 1977, Culbertson was listed in her obituary as a resident of Keller in suburban Tarrant County, Texas. His sister was listed as Mary G. Reynolds of Shreveport. His brother Roy was a resident of Colleyville in Tarrant County. His brother Jim still resided in Dallas. Douglas, Sr., and Mary Alford Culbertson are interred at Gardens of Memory Cemetery in Minden.

Long after his divorce from Gladys Day, Culbertson married in 1952 the former Violet McMurty (1921-1970), a native of Tulsa, where he was living at the time. Their son, Douglas Floyd Culbertson, was born in San Gabriel in Los Angeles County, California, on September 5, 1953, a year after his father had been admitted to the Texas bar. Douglas died of cancer in Austin, Texas, on March 19, 1979, at the age of twenty-five. He graduated from Memorial High School in Tulsa and received a National Merit Scholarship to Princeton University, where he graduated in 1976 Phi Beta Kappa summa cum laude. His history thesis was judged the best in the department. He was recognized statewide for his piano talent. At the time of his passing, he was a student at the University of Texas School of Law. An unnamed member of the law firm where he had been working while in school recalled: "In Doug Culbertson we lost a lawyer who would have brought honor and dignity to the profession by standing up tall true to his ideals, true to his word and obligations, and sensitive to the proprieties and the interests of others." A Douglas Culbertson Memorial Fund was established at Princeton in his honor, but it has since lapsed. Young Culbertson's place of burial is unknown.

It is unclear exactly what years Floyd Culbertson lived in Tulsa. He was there in 1952 but in California in 1953, in Fort Worth in 1958 and Keller, Texas, in 1977, two years before the death of his son and only child. He died in Tulsa in 1989 at the age of eighty-one. He and his third wife, Evelyn H. Johnson Davis Culbertson (1915-2006), are interred together at Memorial Park Cemetery in Tulsa. It is unknown how long Floyd and Evelyn were married, but they were together at the time of his death. Violet M. Culbertson died before her forty-ninth birthday and while their son was in high school. She is interred separately in the Evergreen Garden section of Memorial Park Cemetery. Son Douglas Culbertson is not listed as having been interred beside her. Gladys Culbertson is buried at Bear Creek Cemetery in Bienville Parish. She never remarried and outlived her former husband by some six years.

Evelyn Culbertson, a native of Carrington in Foster County in east central North Dakota, was residing in Ocala, Florida, at the time of her death in 2006 at the age of ninety-one. Like Culbertson's first wife, Gladys, Evelyn was a music teacher. She obtained the Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College Park, Maryland, and was as "Evelyn Davis" a professor and director of the music education program at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa from 1965 to 1980, when she became professor emeriti. In 1992, she published the documentary work, He Heard America Singing: Arthur Farwell, Composer and Crusading Music Educator, a study of the American composer Arthur Farwell, based on thirty years of research. Evelyn Culbertson was a church organist and, like Floyd's son, Douglas, a pianist. She was a member of Baptist and Presbyterian churches, respectively. Though Culbertson's grandmother was Southern Baptist, but there is no reference to a denominational attachment by Culbertson himself. From her first marriage to Joseph M. Davis, she had three sons, all born in the 1940s, the step-children of Floyd Culbertson: Bryan Wilson Davis (born 1942), Allan R. Davis (born 1945) and his wife, Flora, and Darrell Wayne Davis (born 1949), all of Ocala.

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References

Political offices
Preceded by David William Thomas	Mayor of Minden, Louisiana Floyd Douglas Culbertson, Jr. 1940—1942	Succeeded by John Calhoun Brown, Mayor Pro-tem

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