Person:James Sampsell (1)

James Roscoe "Jack" Sampsell was the fourth of six children born to Charles Aubrey and Georgia Christabel (Crittenden) Sampsell. He was born 22 Feb 1922 in Denison, Grayson Texas, and was given the nickname "Jack" by his brother Aubrey because he "cried like a jackass" when he was a baby!

After he graduated from Denison High School in 1938, he enrolled at North Texas Agricultural College (now the University of Texas at Arlington)as an art major. He was a cartoonist, and several of his cartoons were published in the annual while he was there.

He met his wife-to-be, Mary Sheridan, there in an art class. Mary recalled that he was "cute" and flirted with her during class. When class was over that day, he waited for her at the door as though he was going to hold it for her. When she got close enough, he shut the door in her face! She swore that would be her last contact with him. That was before twenty-nine years of marriage and three daughters.

Jack enlisted in the Army Air Corps during World War II and was deployed to the Pacific. While there, he was going about shirtless one day and a tree limb scratched a large mole on his back. Soon he was diagnosed with melanoma, and was released from service in 1945. Jack and Mary planned to be married on June 16, but a date was set for him to go to the Mayo Clinic for treatment and the wedding was moved up to June 9th.

Because of the melanoma, Jack's left arm was removed all the way to the shoulder. He was only given six months to live, and because of the prognosis, he was given unlimited access to heroin as a painkiller. Two years later, when he and Mary were expecting the birth of their first child, they realized that the prognosis was incorrect - he would be around awhile longer! So he chose to withdraw from the heroin on his own, "cold turkey," a process which took somewhere around two or three weeks. He did so without medical assistance or supervision from anyone other than his wife. He lived almost twenty-five more years, fathered three daughters, and started his own drafting business (Metropolitan Drafting). The company grew into "Sampsell-Mitchell" and "Sampsell-Mangum" over the years, moving into an emphasis on contract engineering, until the company was sold in 1969.

Jack was elected to the Texas Legislature in November 1963, filling Place 6 in a special election. He and Hughes Brown, elected at the same time to Place 7, were the first Republicans elected to office in Dallas County in some time. Their election made the front page of both Dallas newspapers. Jack was (obviously) heavily involved in Republican politics. His work with others on the first campaigns for Senator John Tower and congressman Bruce Alger is now seen as the beginning of the tide which turned Texas from a one-party (Democratic) state to a two-party, and very heavily Republican at that, state.

Unfortunately, after Jack's election as a Republican on the first Tuesday of November in 1963, a Democratic President was tragically assassinated in Dallas on the fourth Friday of November in 1963. In that terrible time, Dallasites in general and Republicans in particular were blamed for the death of President Kennedy. Jack's business began to wobble when federal contractors threatened to remove their business because he was heavily involved in the Republican party. For the sake of his livelihood, he chose not to run for re-election in the general election of 1964.