Kathleen L McCullar

Kathleen was born April 15, 1924, in Calhoun County, Texas, near Port Lavaca, the first child of Joe Brett and Elizabeth Key.

The Bretts were a pioneer farming and ranching family in the county, having arrived in the late 1840s. Dr. Moses Johnson, a prominent landowner in the area (and former Austin mayor), deeded four acres four miles northwest of town to his ranch manager, Charles Brett, who had immigrated from Ipswich, England, with his wife and children in 1847.

Charles eventually moved his house from town to the four acres on Chocolate Creek. The original structure, added onto in 1898, still has a patched cannon-ball hole in the attic ceiling from a Union naval bombardment during the Civil War. Dr. Johnson rests in a gravesite on Brett land not far from the farm house and original four acres.

The Brett land holdings expanded over the years. In 1919, Charles Jr., Kathleen’s grandfather, donated land to build a new St. Paul’s Episcopal Church at Clark Station, just up the road from the farmhouse.Years later, Kathleen would roller-skate with her sister and their cousins in the abandoned church building, which had been damaged by a hurricane and boarded up.

By then Kathleen had been given the family nickname “Sip,” short for “Sipper,” which was the best her sister Joyce could do as a small child trying to pronounce “sister.” The sobriquet stuck and Kathleen remained Sip to certain members of her family for the rest of her days.

Joe and Elizabeth separated when Kathleen was four and Joyce was two. They would later divorce. For several years before Joe remarried (to Sip’s fourth-grade teacher Ora Selby), Kathleen and Joyce were reared on the farm by their father and grandfather, with help from a series of housekeepers. In addition to teaching Joyce how to read, Kathleen also read National Geographic articles to her beloved grandfather, whose eyesight was failing and who still wanted to learn about a wider world that he would never see.

Many years later, when Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, Kathleen —a loyal Book-of-the-Month-Club reader — instantly identified with Scout, the principal character. Her family could easily see the resemblance well into Sip’s later years.

Kathleen was educated at Texas A&I in Kingsville (now Texas A&M-Kingsville), graduating in 1944 with a degree in business. While working in Houston for Humble Oil she took flying lessons and became enamored with her flight instructor, Dave McCullar, a tall East Texas boy. They were married in 1947.

In 1948 they moved from Houston to Kingsville to start a small business, a service station that also sold appliances and ranch supplies (she claimed to have had the first air conditioner in Kingsville). Their first child, a son, was born in 1951; a second son followed in 1953.

The historic eight-year drought in Texas, from 1949 to 1957, drove many small businesses out of business, including Dave McCullar’s. In 1955 he went to work for a tire company that would move the family across the south and into the midwest, where the McCullar finally settled in the wooded hills of West St. Louis County in the summer of 1963.

Kathleen and Dave divorced in 1971 and she would eventually return to Texas to take a job as a high school guidance counselor in Kerrville, where her mother and sister lived. After she retired, she moved to Austin to be closer to her grandchildren while continuing to indulge her passion for foreign travel. She saw much of what her grandfather never could — Europe, Africa, India. In her early 80s she traveled alone from Austin to Bangalore, India, to visit an Indian family she had met on a previous European tour.

Kathleen had a fierce intelligence and was stubbornly independent well into old age. This combination would attract a multinational crowd of followers, including the Indian family from Bangalore. They became a meaningful part of her family circle, often visiting her in Austin.

Sip was indeed loved and admired by many. She is survived by sons Michael McCullar and Dan McCullar; daughter-in-law and son-in-law Patti McCullar and Eddie Mock; grandchildren David and Emily McCullar; half siblings Norma Jean Hyatt, Charles A. Brett and Joe D. Brett; niece Cheryl Wynne; grand niece and grand nephew Erin Wynne and Wes Wynne; dear friend T.M. (“Prem”) Chengappa; step grandchildren Bethany Belisle Gordon and Nick Belisle; and step great-grandchildren Carson Marie Belisle, Harper Grace Gordon, John Barrett Belisle and James Wells Gordon.

Services will be held at 10 a.m. Friday March 10 at Good Shepard Episcopal Church in Tarrytown. Burial will be in the Brett family plot at Hatch Cemetery in Port Lavaca. In lieu of flowers the family asks that donations be made to the Mary Lee Foundation and/or Habitat for Humanity.