Research Update: Week of June 6, 2026
Last week’s research diary stopped at the genealogy. This one picks up where the family record turns into objects, patents, and people we can still call. A second in-person session with Tim and Nancy Draves, a deer-mount patent resolved from an offhand “it’s on Google Scholar,” a Facebook post from 2024 we only just caught up with, and a museum visit happening this weekend. Here’s the accounting.
The Menger family record — a second sitting
On June 12 we returned to the Draves home for a second recorded session. Where the May 28 visit was a listening tour, this one was meant to be a photography day — and it became another long conversation before the camera came out. A few threads from it are now woven through the Menger family pages.
Edward Menger’s patent — resolved. Tim Draves mentioned, almost in passing, that Edward “Ed” Menger — the metal craftsman among the six brothers — held a patent for taxidermy hardware and that it was “on Google Scholar, type in Menger and his patent.” We pulled it. Edward W. Menger of San Antonio is the named inventor on at least five U.S. patents (1921–1939), and the deer-mount he described is US 2,003,896, “Horn Mount” (filed 1934, granted 1935) — a single ornamental plate that grips the horn bases, with a center bolt that clamps the skull against the plate. That single patent embodies both halves of what Tim described: the “art-like mount” and the “clamp to hold the head against the plaque.” A companion design patent, USD 96,848, covers the wall bracket; his earliest, US 1,387,996, is a 1921 “Pressure-Screw.” The 28 May notes had recorded only an oral reference to a “patented improved deer-mount” — it now has a number, a date, and a drawing. Edward has his own page for the first time.
Rudolph W. Menger, amateur archaeologist. Nancy’s grandfather R. W. Menger was a 25-year member of the Texas Archaeological Society. He and his brothers dug methodically — recording the depth of each projectile-point find, on the land of hunting friends — and the collection was later assessed by the Society and partly held at the Witte Museum. He taught his grandchildren to read riverbeds for points, and Nancy’s father (a Belcher — a landscape architect and forester) hand-catalogued the collection in drawings. The detail is now on the Rudolph W. Menger page; a related lead — that the interest may trace to the great-grandfather, the naturalist Dr. Rudolph Menger — is recorded as a hypothesis.
Charlotte Malone Menger at the Witte. R. W.’s wife Charlotte was an early bluebonnet painter who took lessons at the Witte Museum, from “a little man who wore tan” with a small studio in Brackenridge Park; Rudolph would drive Charlotte, the instructor, and their daughter out to the Stubing Ranch country to paint. Surviving canvases are split among the family today — and Tim once bought one of her paintings back on eBay for $9.99, the listing having misread the signature as “Chax Menger.” See Charlotte Malone Menger.
The roasters that went to Mexico. Nancy and Tim place Chris Jasso physically in Mexico, training the buyers of H&H’s roasters, with a run of letters from Mexico still in the family papers. This corroborates a documented event: in 1971 the four Jabez Burns Jubilee roasters were sold to Ernesto Gonzales of Monterrey, who flew Jasso and retired roaster Lupe Valdez down to commission them. The session’s “Mr. Valdez” is almost certainly that same Lupe Valdez — not a new name — and the loose “H&H sold the roasters” is really Continental selling them, nine years after the 1962 acquisition. Notes added to the 1971 Monterrey roaster sale.
What the building is made of
A practical thread, for once not about people. From a walkthrough of 601 Delaware: the natural-gas main enters on a five-inch pipe, feeding what was an estimated four-to-six roasters of 500–600 lb on the second floor. The structure is columns and beams in three layers with knock-out hollow-brick infill; the front office section is metal lath and plaster; the windows are eight-foot steel-sash units, pivot-hung, with second-floor glazing in a fiberglass-like sheet that has never been replaced. The concrete is lime-based, not Portland. These are field notes, not a measured survey, but they’re now on the 601 Delaware Street page as a record of the building’s fabric — the kind of detail that matters if the plant is ever a candidate for historic designation.
Community memory — a Facebook post from 2024
We finally processed a November 2024 post in the “Classic San Antonio: 1950–1999” group that turns out to be the densest cluster of living H&H memory the project has found. Terrie Leonard found original H&H photographs in a purchased storage locker and posted them; the thread drew 389 reactions and a string of first-person memories. It’s now synthesized at Community Memory — November 2024 Facebook Discovery.
The most important thread on the Hoffmann side of the family, which has been nearly opaque: a descendant identified his grandmother as Olga Towers, a niece of William R. Hoffmann — the first Hoffmann-family (not Menger-family) contact with surviving materials, including original photos and two coffee cans. Olga Towers now has a page, thin as it is, as the starting point for reconstructing Hoffmann’s sibling tree. Other memories in the same thread: a coupon-redemption program (eighteen coupons off the package face for a free pound), a glass premium packed inside the coffee — a format we hadn’t documented — and the recurring neighborhood memory of the roasting smell, recalled block by block decades later.
The Peché family — and a visit this weekend
One name surfaced from three directions at once. David Peché is a San Antonio author whose Arcadia “Images of America” book Downtown San Antonio includes a chapter on his father — who drove an H&H delivery truck at sixteen, got lost on his first day for want of a map, and in 2012 walked David through the old building, naming the roasting area, the lunch area, and the spot where the men played dominoes. That’s the most specific interior account of the working plant we have. He turned up in the Facebook thread, in our LinkedIn outreach, and again in conversation with the Draves family — and this week he replied. He’s bringing his older brother to the factory this weekend, over Father’s Day, and hoped to bring his sister and their 101-year-old mother as well. We’ll record what they remember.
Three Rivers Glass — to the collectors
The H&H Crystalvac jars were blown at the Three Rivers Glass Company, and the best surviving collections are in private hands. Kevin Mackey, a Live Oak County collector, replied this week and pointed us past the institutions toward Mac Johanson of Austin — a former Grace Armantrout Museum board president who holds a larger Three Rivers Glass and H&H collection, and whom Kevin thinks ought to start a dedicated Three Rivers Glass museum. Both now have contact pages; the Grace Armantrout Museum entry carries the outreach plan.
A dating hypothesis — the fifty-year charter
A quieter find, logged as a hypothesis rather than a fact. Hoffmann-Hayman was chartered in 1912 with a fifty-year term — which would have expired in 1962, the very year Continental Coffee of Chicago bought the company. Texas law of the era required re-incorporation at charter expiration. It’s at least possible the Menger family faced a renew-or-sell decision in 1962 and chose to sell. We can’t confirm motive from a coincidence of dates, so it’s flagged on the 1912 charter and 1962 acquisition pages pending Texas Secretary of State renewal records or a line in Gus Menger’s narrative.
Also this week
Smaller moves: H-E-B’s founding date (November 26, 1905) was pinned from Wikipedia and added to the timeline, alongside ingested Historical Marker Database entries for the H-E-B Kerrville and Three Rivers Glass markers and a read-through of the National Register of Historic Places listing process. On the operations side, the artifact-photography kit is complete — a Fujifilm X-T5 with an 80mm macro for object work and an X100T for field shots — and the collection site-visit runbook that guided the June 12 session is now written down.
What’s next
The Peché visit this weekend is the immediate one. Beyond it: the rest of the June 12 session audio is still to be transcribed, and the object photographs from that day still need processing under the family’s per-item consent. On the Hoffmann side, the Jack Loep / Olga Towers thread is the first real opening into the founder’s own family. And the next archival target is dull but decisive — the 1962 Texas Secretary of State records that would turn the fifty-year-charter coincidence into a fact, or rule it out.
