Herbert Ivan Reid

Herbert Ivan Reid, 93, longtime owner of Village Lumber Company in Corpus Christi, passed away on March 1, 2025, in Plano, Texas. As he had made a profession to do in 1946, at the age of 14, he fought the good fight, kept the faith and finished his course, and he's now gone on to the crown that awaits him in heaven. He was born on January 27, 1932, in Milton, Massachusetts, to recent Irish immigrants, Percy Stanley and Margaret (Peggy) Taylor Reid. He was their younger child. His older sister, Maureen Reid Grehlinger, 96, of Milford, New Hampshire, survives him.

He is also survived by his wife of 67 years, Mary Margaret Oakes Reid, who loved him to the end, and his three children, Forrest Wayne Reid of Wintergreen, Virginia, Nona Lee James of Queenstown, New Zealand, and Marcie Ann Waskey of Carrollton, Texas, and one granddaughter, Sophia Grace Waskey.

He grew up in Milton, Massachusetts, delivering newspapers and mowing lawns around the neighborhood as a youngster, and then working at Hodges' drugstore and Blacker & Holland Lumber Company as a teen, and, finally, at the Second National Bank in downtown Boston, where he tallied up the gains and losses from each day's trades.

 He was a 1949 graduate of Milton High School, where he played basketball for the Whiz Kids, beginning a love of sports that continued throughout his life. He was an avid fisherman and boater in his younger years. In the late-1970s, he organized a once-a-week volleyball night in the old Calallen Middle School gym, a tradition that, several generations later, continues to this day. He taught numerous youngsters to water-ski behind his boat at Lake Mathis. He played a weekly round of golf into his 90s. His loyalty remained with the Boston teams of his youth: the Red Sox, Celtics and Bruins, and even the Patriots, despite the fact that they didn't exist when he was a kid. Because he was a Texan for 70 years, he became a Cowboys fan as well.

 In 1952, he was drafted into the US Army. He underwent basic training at Camp Pickett in Virginia, before spending most of his Army days in Texas, first at Fort Hood, where he and his Boston buddies made many lifelong friends and lived the crazy stories he was still telling on his deathbed. He then served at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, where he was trained as a dental technician, making bridges and partials for the other soldiers. Even though he never saw active combat, he was particularly proud of his Army service and, to his dying day, treasured a funny letter that Major Bond had written about the unit he served in.

 While in Texas during his Army days, he met Mary Margaret Oakes of Lyford, and he returned from Boston to marry her on October 5, 1957. He worked in Harlingen at William Cameron & Co. Building Materials Wholesalers, while the young couple built their first home in neighboring Combes. True to his inventor/tinkerer/challenge-solver nature, he designed and constructed that house as one of the first sectional structures anyone had ever seen. In his evenings after work, he assembled 4x8 sections, window and door openings in place. One Saturday morning, he and 3 friends moved a flatbed farm trailer loaded high with those sections from the "Sand Hill," where the young couple then lived on the Oakes family farm, to their own little parcel in Combes. By nightfall a house was standing. Through 65 years of hurricanes and the storms of life, it still stands today.

 In the summer of 1966, he and his young family were transferred to Corpus Christi by William Cameron. He made his home there for 57 years, until June 2023, when he suffered a major stroke on Father's Day weekend while visiting his daughter in Dallas. His medical care required him to remain in Dallas for the last 21 months of his life, but his heart remained in Corpus Christi, with his lifelong church friends, neighbors, business associates, former employees and coffee-drinking buddies there. He loved the home he designed and built almost 50 years ago on a bluff high above the Nueces River. He could sit for hours in his recliner, binoculars in hand and CD playing, looking for deer through the big windows he somehow knew to install across the front of the house. He knew how to enjoy life, and he did. In crowds and in quiet times, he always lived in the moment.

 In 1976, he and his wife, with the help of a dear brother-in-law and sister-in-law, purchased Village Lumber Company in the Annaville area, and they operated it, rarely taking a day off, until 2002, when "Herb", as he was known to his customers, competitors and suppliers, finally retired at 70. (To everyone else, he was known as Ivan.) There was probably no other lumberyard in the land where the "customers" would gather around the front counter, sitting on paint displays and playing their musical instruments until a real customer walked in. Herb Reid and Village Lumber served their community, helping those in need and selling individual nuts and bolts when the big box stores who were then moving in would not.

 In addition to his wife, children, granddaughter and sister, he is survived by a sister-in-law, Joy Oakes of Bandera, Texas, and numerous nieces and nephews on both sides who grew up with the youngest and coolest uncle in the family. In addition to his parents, he was predeceased by his brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law: David Grehlinger, Virgil Oakes, Ruth and Kenneth Anderson, Kenneth and Darlene Oakes, and Sherman Oakes.

A true Irishman at heart, he loved language, humor, wit and poetry, and, most of all, he loved music. His children fondly recall falling asleep each night to the sound of their father playing the piano. After retiring, he played piano (and sometimes guitar, violin and accordion) several nights each week at area nursing homes and at a local Italian restaurant. He could play any song he'd heard by ear, despite his mother's efforts to teach him to read music when he was young. When it came to the end, when everything else had fallen away, he still had his love of music, his love of singing hymns with his children, his love of hearing his wife read the Bible, and his faith, which only grew stronger.

 The family would like to thank the staff at Shiloh House in Plano, and especially his faithful caregiver, Pray Mncube from South Africa, who loved him and entertained him for the last year of his life. In addition, the family would like to thank his special friend of 49 years, Lowell Pater, whose weekly calls (sometimes more often than that) were particular highlights, greatly looked forward to. The family would also like to thank Clete and Veronica Castillo, Sue George and others for their trips to Dallas to visit him when he couldn't go home, as well as William Sutton who visited often and encouraged him with the hymns he sang.

 Visitation will be held at Sawyer-George Funeral Home at 12497 Leopard St in Corpus Christi at 3 pm on Saturday, March 8th. Services will begin at 4 pm on March 8th. The burial will follow at 11 am with Military Honors on March 10th at the Coastal Bend State Veterans Cemetery.