Thomas Calloway Lea Jr. was a prominent American attorney from El Paso, Texas, and mayor of that city from 1915 to 1917.
Biography
Lea was born in Independence, Missouri, to Thomas Calloway and Amanda Rose Lea. His father, Thomas Calloway Sr., was county surveyor for Jackson County from 1870 to 1880, then was deputy surveyor until his death on April 20, 1910. His grandfather, Dr. Pleasant John Graves Lea, is the namesake for Lee's Summit, Missouri, although the name became spelled with an "e" instead of "a" because a stone culvert next to the Missouri Pacific Railroad station was set this way. Homer Lea would be appointed military advisory to Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the Chinese Republic. Lea received an LL.B. degree in 1898 from Kansas City Law School. Lea began his law practice in 1904 and was soon appointed police-court judge. On June 29, 1906, he married Zola May Utt, and the couple would have three sons, including the noted artist and writer Tom Lea III. Thomas Jr. volunteered for both the Spanish–American War and World War I, and during the former he went to Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas, for officers' training school. After the end of his service in the Spanish–American War, he decided to stay in Texas, moving to El Paso. Lea became a renowned criminal lawyer in the city, and with his partner, R. Ewing Thomason, developed acclaim for their use of dramatic emotionalism in the courtroom. In April, 1911, he presided over the hearing of community activist Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara. For some time, Lea served as the official attorney for former Mexican president Victoriano Huerta. Lea's administration passed the first U.S. law banning Mexican hemp because of its association with Mexican revolutionaries. Lea and Thomason decided to enter politics, and took on two more partners, J. G. McGrady and Eugene T. Edwards. Lea was elected mayor, and Thomason was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1916. Harry S. Truman would later appoint Thomason as a federal district judge. As mayor, Lea made a public declaration, after Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico, on March 9, 1916, that he would arrest Villa if he dared enter El Paso. Villa then responded by offering a thousand pesos worth of gold bounty on Lea. The Lea children had to have a police escort to and from school. In 1936, Zola May died of cancer, and Lea remarried on May 20, 1939, to Mexican-born Rosario Partida Archer. Thomas Calloway Lea Jr. died in El Paso at Southwestern General Hospital, of a heart attack, on August 2, 1945. Lea was a 40-year member of the State Bar of Texas, and a Mason.
