Within the Netherworld of International Currency Exchange Rates

"The Bank of Russia took another step towards a free float ruble by abolishing the dual currency soft peg, as well as automatic interventions. Before, the bank propped up the ruble when the exchange rate against the euro and dollar exceeded its boundaries....The Central Bank of Russia’s un-pegging of the ruble from the dollar and euro brings to an end two decades of exchange rate controls. The transition to a free exchange rate means monetary policy in Russia moves to interest rates and inflation targeting."

RT website, November 10, 2014

"Experts have given the petrodollar a fatal diagnosis. Falling crude prices have accelerated the petrodollar's demise, dealing a heavy blow to the system that has long facilitated the US dollar's world reserve currency status. Emerging economies are abandoning the US dollar as a means of payment for oil, having shifted to national currencies."

Sputnik International, April 2, 2016

Diminishing Gold Reserves Led to Watergate

Currency valuation set in 1945

At the close of World War II, the various economies of the world had entered into an agreement in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, whereby a system of fixed exchange rates was established, pegging all currencies to the U.S. price of gold, which was fixed at $35 per ounce. Price increases of consumer goods, however, began during the last years of Lyndon Johnson's last term and had continued unabated through Nixon's first and into his second term. The Group of Ten met in Washington, D.C. to sign the Smithsonian Agreement on December 21, 1971, devaluing the Dollar against gold by approximately 8.5 percent-- $38 per ounce--hoping to shore up . Gold speculators, however, continued to drive the price of gold ever higher.

By 1972 inflation reached a rate of 6%, while GDP growth was less than 1%. Gold reserves backing the Dollar had collapsed from 55% down to 22%. The United States did not have enough gold to cover the volume of dollars in worldwide circulation at the rate of $35 per ounce. Because foreign traders refused to buy the dollars printed by the Fed, Nixon ordered a 10% export tax to be paid by buyers of U.S. goods in the hope that European and Asian traders would lower barriers to allow trade with America. They did not. The U.S. had no choice but to devalue the dollar, since it could not pay for its imports with the gold available valued at $35 per ounce.

Nixon's advisers tried to explain to him why America's trade imbalance existed. One major reason, as discussed here previously, was that American demand for Indochina-derived opium, refined and distributed by French mobsters, resulted in a huge flow of dollars into the European trade zone. The second reason for the inflationary rise was that American oil companies had increasingly turned to foreign countries which offered more lucrative fields for production to supply American consumers, including the  U.S. Navy's undiminished demand for oil. (See source documents cited by this article.)

Removal of gold backing of U.S. $$$

Texas lawyer John Connally, Nixon's Treasury Secretary, LBJ's knowledgeable adviser in oil matters, had made their first formal announcement in mid-August 1971 of America's intent to end the existing system of fixed exchange rates set up in the Bretton Woods Agreement. The responsibility for supporting the Bretton Woods exchange rate values fell upon the United States, which had become incapable of garnering enough gold to cover the volume of dollars in worldwide circulation at the rate of $35 per ounce, even though the government had introduced countless measures in the attempt to do so. On August 15, Nixon told the world that the dollar would no longer be convertibility into gold. More detailed terms were set forth in December at the G-10 meeting in Rome, where Connally declared:

“The dollar is our currency, but it's your problem.”

At that G-10 meeting the Smithsonian Agreement was adopted, fated to last only fifteen months. In March 1973, the "G–10 approved an arrangement wherein six members of the European Community [West Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Denmark] tied their currencies together and jointly floated against the U.S. dollar, a decision that effectively signaled the abandonment of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system in favor of the current system of floating exchange rates." Britain, Ireland and Italy were also members of the Common Market, but only stood and watched.

In the midst of all the worry over the international exchange rate, Nixon had a few dozen other crises to deal with, the top three being:

• Getting out of the war in Vietnam;
• What to do about the Spiro Agnew scandal; and
• How eliminating the gold standard was affecting the price of oil agreed to in the Tehran Agreement of 1971.

What Senator Ervin's Watergate Committee might dig up was still only mentioned on inside pages of the news in the fall of 1973. Oil producing states were demanding a 70% increase in prices, unsuccessfully, at the time Egypt and Syria coordinated attacks of the territories occupied by Israel (see inset map) on October 6, 1973, following by an oil embargo,which forced the United Nations to step in and adopt Resolution 340, calling for a ceasefire monitored by peacekeepers.

The embargo imposed by OPEC cut supplies of oil while the price per barrel of crude was increased, a situation which continued into March of 1974, when thirteen western nations met in Washington, D.C. to discuss the situation. The Arabs planned to hold an oil summit but repeatedly delayed it. Then President Nixon, having first me with King Faisal in June 1974, sent Salomon Brothers-bond trader William E. Simon, his "energy czar," to Saudi Arabia, trailed by Gerald Parsky, with orders to finalize the terms of the two leaders' verbal agreement.

Gerald Parsky

Nixon had recruited Parsky, a native of West Hartford, Connecticut from his "obscure" New York law firm (Nixon Mudge Rose & Guthrie), which hired Parsky straight out of law school. From the firm he was hired in November, 1971 by the Tax Legislative Council to be the executive assistant to his University of Virginia Law School professor, Edwin Cohen, a tax expert. During this time, Parsky was also "mentored" by Treasury Secretary George Shultz. Cullen Crouch wrote of the UVA alumnus in 2007:

Time magazine called him “Treasury’s Wunderkind,” a “lean, tireless, dapper, and serenely poised” public servant who was “one of the administration’s most powerful bright young men.”

Birth of the Petrodollar

King Faisal signed the agreement Parsky worked out, thus bringing a temporary settlement to the crisis. However, the King insisted that the underlying promises be kept secret, that is "King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud demanded the country’s Treasury purchases stay 'strictly secret,' according to a diplomatic cable obtained by Bloomberg from the National Archives database." Consequently, how much U.S. debt the Saudis held would be classified top-secret for 41 years. As summarized by the Bloomberg article:

The U.S. would buy oil from Saudi Arabia and provide the kingdom military aid and equipment. In return, the Saudis would plow billions of their petrodollar revenue back into Treasuries and finance America’s spending....By 1977, Saudi Arabia had accumulated about 20 percent of all Treasuries held abroad, according to The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets by Columbia University’s David Spiro.

 Stated somewhat differently by Andrea Wong in the Independent:

Treasury officials solved the dilemma by letting the Saudis in through the back door. In the first of many special arrangements, the US allowed Saudi Arabia to bypass the normal competitive bidding process for buying Treasuries by creating “add-ons.” Those sales, which were excluded from the official auction totals, hid all traces of Saudi Arabia’s presence in the US government debt market....Instead of disclosing Saudi Arabia’s holdings, the Treasury grouped them with 14 other nations, such as Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Nigeria, under the generic heading “oil exporters” – a practice that continued for 41 years.

The New York Times reported in its February 22, 1974 edition about a speech given to a merchant marine executives' luncheon meeting at the local Propeller Club. The speaker, Michael Mohamed Ameen Jr., a vice president of Saudi Aramco (who, according to Lawrence Wright in his book, The Looming Tower at page 55, had known Mohammed bin Laden [fn-Osama was his 17th child out of 54 born] during the 1950s), told his  listeners:

King Faisal of Saudi Arabia “told us, in August, 1973, there would be another war within six months, and that he would have no alternative but to use oil as a weapon. His warnings went unheeded.”**

A Republican Game of Musical Chairs

Bush campaign 1970

In the interim between the end of President Nixon's first term and his resignation in 1974, George (Poppy) Bush, was a busy man. Having been defeated for election to the U.S. Senate against Democratic candidate Lloyd Bentsen in 1970, Bush was quickly appointed by President Nixon to be Ambassador to the United Nations, which was then overseeing the ending of the Arab-Israeli War. Bush must, therefore, have been annoyed when Nixon summoned him back to Washington in January 1973 to clean up CREEP's fiasco as Watergate plumbers were about to go on trial.

Editorial - January 6, 1973

Bush was  chair of the Republican National Committee as columnists were speculating about how Bernard Barker ended up with money "laundered" through a Mexican bank in his Florida bank account. The column from Smith Hempstone (above right) concluded on a somewhat positive note by opining that the trial would be "quick, tidy, [and] antiseptic," adding that Nixon hoped the trial would be over and rumors squelched before his upcoming January 20 inauguration. But it was not to be.

Bush officially left the U.N. on January 16, but he was already present in Washington earlier. Nevertheless, the scandal continued to increase even after E. Howard Hunt and his Cuban associates pled guilty and the jury in the Gordon Liddy and James McCord trial convicted the last two burglars on January 30. The Senate Judiciary Committee then began its investigation of bugging activities, appointing Senator Sam Ervin to name a Select Committee for that purpose. McCord's sentencing was held up as he considered whether or not to testify in the Senate hearings. As the scandal played out on national television, Bush supposedly encouraged Nixon to tell all so the party could put the grubby "Mickey Mouse" caper to rest. The rest is, as we say, history.

Musical chair shifts began: Spiro Agnew resigned, and was replaced by Gerald Ford. Nixon resigned, and Ford was sworn in, naming Nelson Rockefeller Vice President. On September 26, 1974, after appointment by the new President Gerald Ford, Bush took the oath as replacement for David K. E. Bruce, first Liaison Officer to Beijing. Bruce at that time became U.S. Representative to NATO in Brussels, thus replacing Donald Rumsfeld, who then became President Ford's new chief of staff. Was there a method to that madness?

David Bruce had been called back from China to Washington in February 1974 to consult with Kissinger about energy matters, discussed above, which were approaching a crisis. As former head of the Economic Cooperation Agency (ECA) in France after WWII, Bruce, former Treasury Secretary Mellon's son-in-law, had helped to design counterpart funds for the Marshall Plan's foreign aid program. The underlying concern in both situations was how to prevent inflation while tinkering with international monetary exchange values (See Harry Bayard Price, The Marshall Plan & Its Meaning, pages 99 and 105).

By the time Nixon's resignation was announced in August 1974, Bush, having just celebrated his 50th birthday, was groomed and ready to fill David Bruce's shoes in China. The more experienced Bruce flew to Brussels to work out the petrodollar exchange ratios with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) western European countries. Bruce, by then 76 years old, returned from Europe in February 1976, only a few weeks following Ford's appointment of George Bush to be Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Bruce died the following year.

The first crisis of the Nixon administration in August 1971 had foretold these events. Ten years earlier, in fact, US Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York acting as its agent, had begun participating in the London Gold Pool to maintain the price of gold at $35 an ounce. In 1968 France withdrew from the pool, just as Lyndon Johnson was about to leave office--bombarded as he was by critics against the war in Vietnam.

QJ posted excerpts from The Great Heroin Coup under the heading "Changing the Middle Man," about the real reason Nixon, inaugurated as President in January 1969, began his so-called "war on drugs". There we said:

Since three Cabinet officials were cooperating in this effort, a committee of those officials was created September 7, 1971, called the Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control (CCINC). The timing of this occurred almost simultaneously with President Nixon's revelation that he was considering a devaluation of the dollar as well as cutting the connection of the value of gold from the value of the dollar. (See AP article at bottom of this post.) The two issues--international narcotics trade and protecting the American trade balance were, in fact, inextricably intertwined, and the Central Intelligence Agency worked covertly on both issues through the various agencies administered by the executive branch of the U.S. government.

Safari Club's History

The secret deal Parsky had negotiated came into play in what was dubbed the Halloween Massacre, when William Colby was replaced by George (Poppy) Bush as Director of the CIA. Peter Dale Scott explained in his book, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), that Bush's move to DCIA put him in charge of a newly minted covert agenda in which he coordinated CIA activities among Safari Club's member countries--France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Iran. Joseph Trento wrote in Prelude to Terror (2005), p. 314 that: 

"The Safari Club was run by the Saudis. It was a club to serve their purposes through the CIA."

Trento claimed their first face-to-face meeting had been held in Kenya at the exclusive African hotel by that name.

Holden sold to Khashoggi.

Earl Wilson gossiped in his column in September 1977 that actor William Holden, who had owned the Safari Club in Kenya with two partners since 1959, sold his share of the Club to "some Arabs" who just happened along. However, on October 12 the Philadelphia Daily News disclosed the sale had been made to Adnan Khashoggi, who was so unknown in those days his name was often misspelled.

Only days later, however, one of Holden's three partners died in a car bomb explosion. Raymond J. Ryan had been fighting to stay out of jail for more than a decade as a result of accusations against him--comping memberships to the Club to Mafia members, shredding evidence, tax evasion, and refusing to answer FBI questions. Ryan had been long suspected of ties to organized crime. Three months after his murder, the Seventh Circuit decided against him and his wife in his last appeal (568 F.2d 531, 1977). In that case Ryan had refused to answer a question propounded to him about his deposits in Handelskredit Bank in Zurich (page 536), a bank mentioned nine years later by Jack Anderson as being a bank the CIA used to store secret offshore slush funds.

Ryan's attorneys for this trial and previous cases were named partners---Herbert J. Miller, Raymond G. Larroca, and Nathan Lewin--of the firm Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin, Washington, D. C. Orrick, Herrington, Rowley & Sutcliffe, San Francisco, Cal., handled the appeal. One case was cited as 455 F.2d 728 (No. 71-1165); United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit. Dec. 13, 1971. As Modified on Denial of Rehearing March 7, 1972.

A previous case was cited 430 F.2d 658 - In the Matter of the Grand Jury Subpoena Duces Tecum of Raymond J. RYAN, Appellant. No. 23343. United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit. Decided May 19, 1970. Rehearing Denied July 29, 1970. Further examination reveals these attorneys to be the same ones chosen by Richard Nixon in 168 U.S.App.D.C., cited as 513 F.2d 430. No. 75-1063. Argued Feb. 1, 1975. Decided Feb. 14, 1975. In 1960 both Miller and Larroca constituted the Board of Monitors assigned to Jimmy Hoffa.

A third founding partner of the Kenyan Safari Club was Swiss-born Carl W. Hirschmann, a banker, who had in April 1969 been indicted for contempt for failing to appear at a grand jury investigating Ryan. Hirschmann is first mentioned in American newspapers in 1966.  He was said to be a land developer based in Long Island, NY, who had built a five-store industrial office building ten miles east of Los Angeles--9550 Flair Drive, El Monte CA. The international headquarters of Hirschmann Industrial Corporation, "specializing in precision machinery and equipment," was placed on the top floor of the building at that location. Also located in this building was a branch of the United California Bank, which would later become Security Pacific Corporation.

Years later it would be revealed in British press in 1984 that Hirschmann's grown son, trained in his father's Swiss bank, had a power of attorney from the Sultan of Brunei to act as a go-between with Egyptian mogul, Mohamed al-Fayed and his two brothers, who acquired Harrods from the House of Fraser and thus prevented Tiny Rowland of Lonrho (formerly London and Rhodesian Mining and Land Company) from obtaining the coveted department store, a prize Tiny had hoped would give him a step up to achieving British citizenship. Calling him a "Phony Pharoah," Rowland accused Fayed of using the Sultan's money to gain Harrods.

While Egypt was a member of the Safari Club, working with the CIA, Brunei was aligned with the British. What's more, Mrs. Mohamed al-Fayed was Adnan Khashoggi's sister, and everyone knew that Khashoggi amassed his great wealth from acting as arms broker between wealthy Saudis and weapons dealers.

Trump admired Khashoggi.

Donald Trump was also on the scene in those days, finding much to admire and emulate. Trump once said "Khashoggi understood the art of bringing people together and putting together a deal better than almost anyone – all the bullshitting part, of talk and entertainment." Henry Wilkins in the Gentleman's Journal (March/April 2016) described Trump thus:

Trump, like so many business tycoons of the era, seemed to have inherited some of Khashoggi’s panache for making deals and some of his taste for garish decadence. He also inherited his multi-million dollar super-yacht, Nabila. Trump bought it from the Sultan of Brunei who seized it from Khashoggi when he defaulted on a loan secured by the boat.

William Holden, like his close friend, Ronald Reagan, had an almost charmed life until his own death in 1980. A short biography of him states:

Although never involved in politics himself, he was best man at the marriage of his friend Ronald Reagan to Nancy Davis in 1952. He maintained a home in Switzerland and also spent much of his time working for wildlife conservation as a managing partner in an animal preserve in Africa. His Mount Kenya Safari Club in Nanyuki, Kenya, (founded 1959) became a mecca for the international jet set.

In 1974, he began a relationship with actress Stefanie Powers which sparked her interest in animal welfare. After his death, Powers set up the William Holden Wildlife Foundation at Holden’s Mount Kenya Game Ranch.

Holden did live long enough to see his friend elected to the Presidency, but died before Reagan's inauguration in January 1981.

Luter Branch of Atlee Family

Mrs. James H. French's "Texas Genealogy"

Mrs. James H. French, wife of famed San Antonio mayor, wrote a newspaper column called "Texas Genealogy". The genealogist's husband, James H. French, "the best mayor San Antonio ever had," moved to San Antonio in 1851, first working as a merchant before he was elected mayor in 1875, and he served in that position  through 1885. Because of political connections within the national Democratic Party, he was thereafter appointed Postmaster for the city and was also elected city councilman before his death in 1893. His widow (the former Sarah L. Webb), began writing a genealogy column about society-minded Texans for the Sunday San Antonio Light newspaper in July 1906.

In December of that year Mrs. French explained how those members of the branch from which Mary Parson Atlee sprang made their way to Texas. She had already written about the Maverick and Maury families into which Dr. Luter married almost a year earlier. Mrs. French may have been surprised that the child of a third-generation Pennsylvanian, Edwin Augustus Atlee, would find her husband in the wilds of Goliad, Texas. But that was where E.A. Atlee's third child, Anna, lived after her marriage to John Solomon McCampbell, a lawyer and later judge in Corpus Christi.

Edwin's  fourth child, Sarah Catherine, in 1856 married Giles Exum Luter, district clerk in Goliad County.

Catherine Atlee Luter had a son born in 1866, Dr. William Edwin Luter, who, in the late 1880s, had given his address simply as "Mexico". His brother, Henry Exum Luter, had a mail contract between Goliad and Cibolo in 1854, but later lived in Corpus Christi until his death in 1941.

Before moving to San Antonio, Dr. W. E. Luter was a pharmacist and assistant manager of John Sealy Hospital in Galveston. The census of 1900 records him at 119 N. Alamo, in San Antonio, which was still used as his office in 1910. Today this is the old Post Office at E. Houston and N. Alamo. By 1902 he was president of the West Texas Medical Association which met in that city.

He married Eleanor Stribling Maury in 1906, and became a member of the staff of the Santa Rosa Infirmary (Incarnate Word). He was also for a time physician and surgeon of the Mission Home and Training School for Girls in San Antonio. After their wedding, the Luters lived at 205 E. Pecan, at Navarro Street, next door to St. Mark's Episcopal Church on the north side of Travis Park Plaza.

St. Anthony Hotel, 1910

The lot on the south side of Travis Park (now 300 E. Travis Street) was in the process of being chosen as the site of the still standing St. Anthony Hotel, which was completed in 1909 by Brazilla Lafayette Naylor and his partner, A. H. Jones, Jr., the youngest child of a famous Texas hero, Augustus Harris Jones, and his third wife. Naylor died in 1910, leaving his estate to his wife and daughter, Zilla, wife of Arthur Hunter Morton, who managed Naylor's properties for many years. Gus Jones was elected San Antonio's mayor in June 1912, only months before he died the following April, attended by Dr. Luter and another physician.

117 E. French Place

Eleanor Maury's parents were Stephen Price and Eleanor Stribling (daughter of Benjamin Stribling) Maury. Her maternal grandmother, Mrs. Elizabeth Alexander Stribling, widow of Thomas Haile Stribling, had been born in 1836, the year Texas declared independence from Mexico. The 1900 census shows Mrs. E. A. Stribling living in a large residence at 117 E. French Place between N. Main and San Pedro in San Antonio, where she employed three live-in servants for herself, her son, Ben Stribling, and his nine-year-old daughter "Elinor." At some point the Luters began to live separately and were divorced. Dr. Luter died in 1930.

In that same block with Eleanor's grandmother lived John L. Luter, a Texas-born man whose parents had arrived from Tennessee before 1861. His wife was Mabel Moody. In 1924 this house was sold to become an Episcopal girls' school called St. Mary's Hall, which in 1968 became the home of San Antonio Academy, a boys' school, previously affiliated with the elite West Texas Military Academy and Texas Military Institute. One alumnus of San Antonio Academy, coincidentally, was Robert Moss Ayres, the architect son of Atlee B. Ayres, who also did work on St. Mary's Hall when it was sold to his alma mater. Atlee B. Ayres' eldest sister was David Atlee Phillips' grandmother, Gussie Ayres Young, both of whom grew up in Houston and San Antonio as children of Nathan Tandy and Mary Parson Atlee Ayres, who had moved to Texas from Highland County, Ohio.

Battle of Flowers Queen

Eleanor Maury Luter's paternal aunt, Ellen Maury, married James Luther Slayden, Congressman from San Antonio during 1897-1919. Ellen Slayden originated the Battle of Flowers, in 1891 "as an April 21 salute to the heroes of the battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto." The parade quickly became a week-long fiesta which culminated with the crowning of a queen, and eventually a king as well. The Battle of Flowers Association was set up to plan the event as part of Fiesta San Antonio, and the city's women in society all worked together to make it a success. It remains as one of San Antonio's biggest traditions.

The Maurys intermarried with the family of Texas hero Samuel Maverick, an 1825 Yale graduate and Virginia-trained attorney, who sought his fortune by moving to San Antonio in 1835. Ellen Maury Slayden kept diaries, which revealed how observant Mrs. Slayden had been during her husband's tenure within the Texas delegation in Washington, D. C. Much of her knowledge of Texas lore no doubt was passed to her sister, Jane L. Maury, who married Samuel Maverick and became the mother of  F. Maury Maverick, another Texas Congressman.

Cong. Maury Maverick's wife, Terrell Louise Dobbs, after his death in 1954, married Walter Prescott Webb, editor of the Slayden diaries. University of Texas professor Webb died in a one-car accident on March 8, 1963, at almost the same time the diaries were published.

Webb's historic property, Friday Mountain Ranch, was sold that same month to Rodney Kidd, long-time Texas University Interscholastic League director, who turned it into a camp for boys, which would later (1983) be sued when a counselor allegedly sexually abused a young male camper.

The Story of DAVID ATLEE PHILLIPS (Part VI)

The Atlee Family in Texas

David Atlee Phillips' descent from Mary Parson Atlee (click to enlarge)

David Atlee Phillips was born and bred in Texas, but his great-grandmother, Mary Parson Atlee, born in Athens, Tennessee, was a direct descendant of William Augustus Atlee and Esther Sayre, the Pennsylvania-born progenitors of the Atlee clan.

The Children of Edwin Augustus and Sarah Gilbert Atlee

Amelia Varian Atlee - Atlee Marriage to Ayres

Named for Edwin's eldest sister, Elizabeth Amelia, who had married Episcopal minister Alexander Varian, Amelia Varian Atlee, was born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1829 but lived in Athens, Tennessee, at the time she was married in 1850 to Rev. Alexander Findley Cox.

Their eldest daughter, born in 1852 in Athens, was given the name of a popular poet, Felicia Hemans  Cox. The Coxes' second child, Peery At Lee Cox, was born in Virginia in 1854, and a third child, born a year later in Tennessee, died at six weeks of age. Less than a year after the death of the baby, Rev. Cox was sent to do mission work in Texas, where a fourth child, Mary Eliza Cox, was born at Goliad, Texas in late summer of 1857--twelve years after the Republic of Texas had been annexed to the Union as a state. Felicia Cox grew up to marry in 1868 Youngs O. Coleman, one of the bosses at the Coleman ranches in Rockport, Texas, started by Margaretta Atlee's husband, Thomas M. Coleman and his father, Youngs Levi Coleman, who died in 1881.

Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH

Their younger daughter Mary was married in 1881 to John H. Williamson in Lockhart, Texas, and a son, Alexander Bascom Cox, would be born in Goliad in 1861. When he was 30, he married Martha Rischke, a German-born citizen of Texas. A widow since 1910, Martha and her daughter Amelia Katherine Cox had for many years lived in San Antonio only a mile or two from Bascom Cox's uncle, the architect Atlee B. Ayres. Katherine, single, was a schoolteacher supporting her mother when Atlee's first wife died in 1937. A few years later the cousins married. Martha died in 1952 at their home in San Antonio at 201 Belknap. Katherine's brother, A. Bascom Cox, Jr., became a Brownsville, Texas, attorney. Martha's sister, Anna, had married another cousin, Alex. O. Coleman, son of Youngs O. and Felicia Cox Coleman, and but she had died in 1909.

Amelia V. Atlee Cox was the first of this branch of the Atlee family to arrive in Texas as early as 1855. Rev. Cox, a Virginian and a Methodist, arrived in Athens, Tennessee (home of East Tennessee Wesleyan College), and there he met Amelia, whose younger brother, Edwin Augustus Atlee, Jr. had recently attended Ohio Wesleyan University, not founded until 1844. In Ohio he met an Ohio native, Nathan Tandy Ayres, the man who would marry Mary Parson Atlee, Edwin, Jr. and Amelia's youngest sister. In Goliad the Coxes would meet John S. McCampbell, an attorney, who would marry another relative.

John Smith Gillett, of Karnes County, who for 36 years was secretary to the West Texas Conference's board of missions of the Methodist Church, wrote Rev. Cox's obituary in the Beeville, Weekly Picayune,  9 Apr 1897:

"AN AGED PREACHER GONE
Rev. A. F. Cox Passes Peacefully Over the River."

According to this piece, Cox lived in that region of Texas around 40 years, "having reached Goliad December 1, 1856, and being a minister and most of the time actively engaged in preaching... He was born in Washington county, Va., December 1, 1823, was at the time of his death 73 years, 4 months and 4 days old. On May 1, 1850, he was married to Miss Amelia V. Atlee, who, with seven children survive him." It adds that Cox was a preacher for over 52 years, as well as having been for seven years "editor and publisher of a weekly paper in the town of Goliad, called the Goliad Messenger, which was finally changed to the Goliad Guard by the father of the present publisher (R. T. Davis). For about twenty-five years Bro. Cox has been a member of the West Texas conference."

 John Light Atlee

Edwin's second child, John Light Atlee, born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1832, grew up in Athens, Tennessee before moving to Philadelphia to study medicine. Two uncles had studied there before him:

• John Light Atlee (1799-1885), for whom he was named, who studied medicine and 
• Washington Lemuel Atlee (1808-1878), who graduated from Jefferson in 1828 and practiced medicine at Lancaster, Pennsylvania until 1845 when he moved back to Philadelphia to teach at Jefferson's successor, Philadelphia Medical College.

After graduating in 1853 from Jefferson College in Philadelphia, where his uncles had studied and taught, he returned to Athens, Tennessee to practice. There he married Sarah Humphreys. He could easily be confused with an uncle and cousin with the same name, who were also physicians, but who practiced in Pennsylvania.

In May 1855, soon after his sister's husband was sent to Texas as a missionary, Dr. Atlee packed up his belongings and announced he too was moving to Goliad, Texas. The Athens newspaper bid him farewell and wished him well in his move to south Texas. Dr. Atlee, however, clearly did not find the wild west to his liking, as he had returned by August of the same year. In 1906 he and his wife celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he died six years later. 

Anna Elizabeth Atlee

E.A. Atlee's children have reunion, 1907

Anna Elizabeth Atlee, born 1834 in Gettysburg, grew up in Athens, Tennessee, but, in 1857, while visiting her elder sister Amelia Cox in Goliad, Texas, met a lawyer named John Solomon McCampbell. They married in Athens but made their home in Texas. In 1876 McCampbell formed a partnership with Anna's younger brother, E. A. Atlee, Jr., for three years before Atlee became a politician. McCampbell  then entered into a second partnership with John S. Givens, which lasted until Givens' death in 1887. Givens' sister, it should be noted, was the widowed mother of  Archer Parr, who grew up in Givens' home after his father's death. Edwin Atlee McCampbell, born in 1856, also practiced with his father in Corpus Christi following Givens' death.

John McCampbell would also serve as a director with Richard King of the King Ranch on the railroad King and Uriah Lott were starting to build by 1876, which was sold in 1881 to a syndicate that chartered it as the Texas Mexican Railway to build westerly to Laredo on the border with Mexico. By 1890 the McCampbells were engaged with Uriah Lott in building a harbor in Corpus Christi, and by the end of the century they were in a law partnership with Robert Weldon Stayton, noted legal scholar.

Sarah Catherine Atlee

Sarah Catherine Atlee was born in Gettysburg, PA in 1836. In 1856 she married Giles Exum Luter, whose parents had moved west from North Carolina to Texas. Luter died in Texas in 1868, and afterward Sarah took her three daughters (Emma, Sarah Margaretta and Clara Augusta Luter--all born in Goliad, Texas) back to her mother's home in Athens, Tennessee. They did, however, return to Texas from time to time, including in 1907 for a family reunion in Corpus Christi, hosted by the McCampbells.

Margaretta Susan Atlee

Born 1839, Margaretta, at the age of 20, married Thomas M. Coleman of Rockport, Texas. She died in 1872, leaving one son, Thomas Atlee Coleman.

Letitia Smith Atlee

Letitia Atlee's husband

Born in 1841, Letitia married Percival Clark Wilson in 1856, a year after he graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University. He joined the university's faculty in 1861, but soon became an officer in the army as the civil war began. After the war, they moved to Athens, Tennessee, where he became a merchant, but he soon became involved in the organizing of the Athens Female College. Letitia's father, Edwin Atlee, helped in the founding of the college. However, the first President of the college bought additional lands with his own personal funds, which he then loaned to the college, on which he held a lien. It was Atlee who bid at the foreclosure sale to acquire the lands for the Methodist school in 1866. The next year the charter was granted, merging the female school into East Tennessee Wesleyan. It became coeducational in 1868.

 Mary Parson Atlee

Mary Parson Atlee was the sixth daughter, born 1843 in Athens, Tennessee. When her two youngest brothers were sent to Ohio Wesleyan College in 1865 for their education, they met a young man named Nathan Tandy Ayres, also a student at Ohio Wesleyan College in Delaware, Ohio, about 30 miles north of Columbus. According to an article that appeared in 1966 in the Hillsboro, Ohio, Press-Gazette, Nathan's father died when he was one week old, and his mother, having already lost two husbands to death, married William Plummer Bernard, a wealthy man of Hillsboro, Ohio, located east of Cincinnati. When the civil war began, Nathan joined the 89th Ohio Voluntary Infantry, which served three years during 1862-65. In December 1863 he was in Chattanooga, sending reports of the regiment's action back to his hometown newspaper in Ohio. He remained in Athens, Tennessee, to attend the Methodist college and in 1867 married Mary P. Atlee, whom he eventually brought back to his home in Ohio.

In 1869-70, Tandy Ayres was recording secretary for the city of Hillsboro, Ohio, when he and an associate bought a glassware and china store. He sold his interest in the store to his partner in late 1873 and went into the dairy business, with 30 cows from whose milk he made his own cheese. In 1876 he made an exploration tour from St. Louis to south Texas on the Iron Mountain Railroad, writing a report, the first of several, for the local newspaper. He remained in Texas from February until late May that year, as he was said to suffer from asthma, which was relieved by the drier climate. This routine continued every winter until September 1879, when he packed the family up and moved to Houston.

During her marriage to Tandy, Mary Ayres gave birth to four children, though the first son died as an infant:

• William E. Ayres in 1872, and died the same year;
• Atlee Bernard Ayres in 1873;
• Anna Mary Ayres in 1878; and
• Clara Augusta "Gussie" Ayres in 1880.

Edwin Augustus Atlee, Jr.

Edwin Augustus Atlee, Jr., born 1846, was a student at Ohio Wesleyan College in 1866, when he met Nathan Tandy Ayres. In 1872 Edwin taught Latin and literature East Tennessee, before he relocated to Texas and became state senator from 1885-1901 for a district including Duval, Webb, Nueces, Cameron, Hidalgo and other counties bordering Mexico. This is the same district which would later be controlled by Archer "Archie" Parr, who began his career working for the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Co.,  owned by Thomas Coleman, Edwin Jr.'s brother-in-law. Around 1907 Archie, assisted by his uncle, John Givens, law partner of another of Edwin's  brothers-in-law, began a political career Duval County. By 1915 he was noted for election fraud, political corrupution and manipulation of the court system, protecting Democratic politicians. His son George Parr succeeded Archie and became known as the Duke of Duval. The Parr political machine was mentioned in a piece I wrote in 2000, relating to its role in stealing an election for Lyndon Johnson.
  
Bernhardt Gilbert Atlee

Named for his maternal grandfather, Bernhardt, the youngest of the siblings, was born in 1848 and attended preparatory school in 1866 at Ohio Wesleyan, along with his slightly older brother, and later studied dentistry there.