Mineola native’s obituary recalls smalltown childhood

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(Editor’s note: Ann Criswell was born in Mineola and served as food editor for Houston newspapers for 36 years. She wrote her own obituary, which includes some insights into growing up in Wood County.)

Ann Criswell, 87, died Dec. 15, 2020 of complications from COVID-19. She was born Oct. 26, 1933 to Alma Minick, an elementary school teacher, and George D. Minick, a lawyer, in Mineola. She grew up riding her bicycle all over the small town of 2,000, building bottle cap forts on the screened-in front porch, making the rounds of local businesses to collect ink blotters (used to blot fountain pens), playing paper dolls and designing clothes for them from wallpaper samples she cadged from the hardware store.

She learned to read at 4 by listening to her mother teaching in a little country school. Her dad took her on excursions to the piney woods where he taught her about nature, directions, names of trees, plants and birds. He carved whistles from sweet gum trees and boiled eggs over a camp fire, which helped develop her interest in the Camp Fire Girls. Saturdays were spent at the Select Theater in Mineola watching movies and serials; she also listened to them on the radio, especially “Let‘s Pretend” and “Inner Sanctum.” She was a voracious reader, especially of mysteries such as “Nancy Drew,” and one of her fondest memories was reading in the county library in Quitman when she accompanied her dad to work when he was county attorney for Wood County. Books were her favorite Christmas present. She and her father memorized a new word from the dictionary every day. Another favorite activity was Sunday drives to the country, which included stopping to drink from an artesian spring that welled up from the ground beside a road east of Mineola. 

During World War II, patriotism was a major part of the lifestyle. She made the rounds of filling stations to collect bottle caps for scrap metal drives, and grade school classes rolled bandages for injured soldiers. She was always a top seller of paper poppies on Veterans Day.

When she was a junior in high school, the family moved to San Benito, Texas in the Rio Grande Valley. She graduated from San Benito High School at 15. She went to Texas Woman’s University (then Texas State College for Women) and after graduating with honors at 19 as a journalism major in 1954 she worked in the Journalism Department for almost four years. In 1957 she moved to Houston, where her father was an assistant Harris County attorney. She worked in the Women’s Department of the Houston Post for almost four years. At the time, wedding announcements were published free, and she wrote hundreds, maybe thousands, of wedding stories a year as well as features. At the Post, she met a reporter, Jim Criswell, who became her friend and dearest love. They were married April 8, 1961. He cherished her, supported her and loved her unconditionally throughout their 16 years together before he died of cancer in 1978. They loved driving around Houston and Texas just talking and visiting and cooking with friends. Jim loved to cook and prepared an elaborate dinner every month when the new issue of Gourmet magazine arrived. They loved going to the annual Wurstfest in New Braunfels and patronizing little restaurants and “joints” that Jim constantly discovered.

Two weeks after they were married, Ann moved to the Houston Chronicle. Her Chronicle co-workers became her extended family and lifelong friends. At intervals she served as home furnishings editor, society editor, then home furnishing editor again during her almost 40 years at the Chronicle. She and Jim had a daughter, Catherine, and son, Charles, of whom they were inordinately proud. Sandra (Sam), Jim’s daughter from a previous marriage, and her late brother, Ronald, lived with them for several years. 

In 1966, Ann became Chronicle food editor and creator of the first free-standing newspaper food section in Houston, a position she held for almost 35 years. She retired in 2000 after her daughter was almost killed in a car accident in Bryan and spent six months at Houston’s Memorial Hermann Hospital and TIRR.

Ann won several honors including being named the first honorary member of the South Texas Dietetic Association and awards of excellence from the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society and the Texas Restaurant Association. In 1992, the Texas Dietetic Association named her Media Person of the Year. In 1999, she received the Hearst Eagle Award, the highest service honor given to employees by the Hearst Corporation, owner of the Houston Chronicle. She was named a Legend of Houston Restaurants in 2002 by My Table magazine. She interviewed many famous culinary figures and cookbook authors including Julia Child, James Beard, White House chefs and Paul Bocuse. But her greatest satisfaction was the interaction with people and rapport with food section readers whom she felt she communicated with personally each week. She wrote eight cookbooks based on Houston restaurant recipes and contributed to several others including most of the recipes in the first Texas the Beautiful Cookbook in 1986.

She loved experiencing and reporting the evolution of Houston from a down-home Southern meat-and-potatoes town to one of the most exciting culinary and restaurant meccas in the U.S. It has become home to creative chefs who achieved national attention and to outstanding supermarkets and specialty food stores. She was grateful to the Houston Chronicle for the opportunity to travel the U.S., Europe, Mexico and Canada to visit farms, wineries and food companies that eventually contributed to the development of a diversified Texas “cuisine.” She judged several state and national contests including the Pillsbury Bake-Off, chili, barbecue, chicken, beef and wine competitions. Another high point of her era was the development of the Texas wine industry and learning and writing about wine. 

The food section and her children became her life after Jim’s death. Her favorite hobby was shopping and she loved exploring supermarkets, retail stores, flea markets and restaurants. She always loved music and singing (except heavy metal and rap) and knew the lyrics to almost all the Big Band songs and popular music of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Her tastes in music were eclectic – everything from Tschaivosky to Leonard Cohen and Willie Nelson who was the same age. She liked opera “except for the singing.” In the ‘90s she was introduced to the Irish singing group Celtic Thunder by her daughter and became a devoted fan, attending all but one of their concerts here as well as performances by Neil Byrne and Ryan Kelly and Keith Harkin. 

She was addicted to TV mysteries and cop shows, especially Inspector Morse, Prime Suspect and Frost on PBS, NYPD Blue, Law and Order and SVU, The Mentalist, Blue Bloods and Castle.

She was thrilled to have lived in two centuries and had been able to see the development of TV, remote controls, electric typewriters, microwaves, computers and the Internet as well as medical advances such as the artificial heart, but she was never able to master the Smartphone. 

She was grateful to have had so many wonderful doctors through the years including the late Dr. C. Frank Webber; the late Dr. Harold Reuter, the late Dr. Van Lawrence, orthopedist Rosemary Buckle (instrumental in saving her daughter’s life after her accident), cardiologist Dr. Stephanie Coulter, Dr. Alfred Lopez, Dr. Dawn Stoecker-Simon, Dr. Don Quast, Dr. Paul Salmonsen, Dr. Eric Orzeck, Dr. Michael Appel and dentist Dr. Kathy Frazar.

She is survived by daughter Catherine Lester and husband Michael and son Charles and wife Cindy and four exceptional grandchildren: Ryan Criswell and Christopher Criswell, James Lester, Ann Claire Wilson and her husband Tristan, and stepdaughter Sandra (Sam) Criswell.