Ancestors

Carr Pritchett Collins Sr.

Carr Pritchett Collins was born on 12 May 1892 near Chester, in Tyler County, East Texas. His parents were Vinson Allen Collins, then a schoolteacher studying at Huntsville, and Elizabeth Stedman Hopkins, called Lizzie. His First World War draft card gives his birth plainly: "b. 12 May 1892 Chester, Texas." His father later wrote that he was "born May 12, 1892, near Chester in Tyler County."

He was the second son. An infant brother had died in 1890, before he was born. A brother, Halley Houston, followed in December 1893. The family genealogy says the two boys were named after two of their father's professors at the Sam Houston Normal Institute in Huntsville. A sister, Lois Qualena, was born in February 1895 and died that August at six months. Another sister, Jessie May, was born in 1897.

His mother had run a boardinghouse in Huntsville to keep his father in school. She taught her sons to read and write before they went to school. She died on 13 April 1900, when Carr was seven. His father became a lawyer the next year and in December 1902 married Nannie Kuykendall of Grand Saline. Four half-siblings followed: Allene, Warren Kuykendall, Lillian Mae and Jack Dies.

His father practiced law in Beaumont, and Carr went to Beaumont High School. He then spent one year at Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos. There he met Ruth Woodall of Hallsville, who was training to teach.

In 1913 his father, by then a state senator, wrote the Texas workmen's compensation law. The act paid injured workers from insurance rather than leaving them to sue their employers. It created a state Industrial Accident Board to run the new system. Carr, at twenty-one, became the board's first secretary. He was later secretary of the Texas Employers Insurance Association as well.

He married Ruth Woodall on 21 November 1914 at Hallsville, her hometown. Their first son, James Mitchell, was born there in April 1916. By 1920 they lived in Dallas, where the census found Carr with his wife, Jim and a baby, Carr Jr. A daughter, Ruth Elaine, was born in 1924. In 1919 he applied for a passport.

In 1924 his father ran for governor of Texas. Carr paid for the campaign. His father said so thirty years later: "In 1924 when I ran for Governor my son, Carr, financed my campaign. But it was all in the family."

In 1928 he founded the Fidelity Union Life Insurance Company in Dallas. The family genealogy dates it to 1929. The Handbook of Texas says its growth came from a stock-option plan he helped design. His son Jim became its president in 1955, and in 1978 the company was sold for about $300 million.

In the 1930s he made a second fortune in mineral water. He and his brother Hal took up the Crazy Water business of Mineral Wells, Texas. Hal was president of the Crazy Water Company, and Ruth's brother Bill Woodall was its vice-president. Carr sold "Crazy Crystals," the dehydrated mineral salts of the Mineral Wells springs, from coast to coast by radio. The Handbook says the product reputedly brought in $3 million a year until the Food and Drug Administration called it fraudulent. For the advertising he owned XEAW, a radio station across the border in Mexico.

In 1935 he and Jim, then a student at SMU, arrived at New York by ship on the same passenger list.

In 1938 he advised W. Lee O'Daniel in his race for governor. That September an Associated Press story described him as an "insurance executive and close friend of O'Daniel." O'Daniel then tried to put him on the state highway commission, and the Texas Senate rejected the appointment. In 1941 a Senate committee questioned him about radio time given to O'Daniel that had not been declared.

He was a Baptist, and he gave much of his money to Baptist causes. In 1944 he helped bring the preacher W. A. Criswell to the First Baptist Church of Dallas. He sat on the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention and was a trustee of Baylor University. Baylor gave him an honorary doctor of laws in 1952. In 1957 Baylor completed a women's residence hall named for his wife. In 1961 he gave Baylor the largest gift in its history to that date. In 1979 he endowed its Carr P. Collins Chair of Finance. He also helped bring Bishop College to Dallas in 1961.

He gave to writing as well. In 1946 he endowed the Texas Institute of Letters' annual prize for the best book

The 1959 family genealogy lists his other interests. He was chairman of the Brinson-Collins Oil Company and senior partner in the Vent-A-Hood Company, which his wife's nephew Miles Woodall ran. He was a director of the First National Bank in Dallas and developed Plymouth Park. In 1968 the American Academy of Achievement gave him its Golden Plate Award. A biography, Carr P. Collins: Man on the Move, by Dorothy Neville, was published in Dallas in 1963.

Ruth died on 30 January 1979, after sixty-four years of marriage. Carr died a year later, on 17 January 1980, in Dallas. He was 87. He was buried at Restland Memorial Park in Dallas, in the Rose Section.

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Cite: Heirology, "Carr Pritchett Collins Sr. (1892-1980)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/carr-pritchett-collins-sr-1892-1980-4e0dc7.