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William Theodore Block, Jr.7/29/1920 - 12/15/2007
He graduated from Nederland High School, Cheniers Business and Radio College, and Lamar University with an MA degree in history. He also served 3 years in the U. S. Naval Reserve, and taught at Lamar for 2 years as a teaching fellow. During World War II, he served from 1942-1946 in the 78th Infantry Division, earning 3 battle stars for the Battles of the Bulge, Rhineland, and Central Europe. After the war, he worked 31 years for the Postal Service, including 20 years as assistant postmaster and postmaster in Nederland, or as officer-in-charge in Orange. Later he served on the Lamar University staff for 11 years, retiring in 1981. Mr. Block was a dedicated historian, publishing 9 books of East Texas history, many academic articles in historical journals, and he was a guest columnist for Beaumont Enterprise for many years. He was a member of First United Methodist Church in Nederland, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Texas Gulf Historical Society. He was also a Knight of the Royal Order of Orange-Nassau, a knighthood conferred on him by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. He had also been a ham radio operator for 32 years, and served several years as an assistant scoutmaster. Like us on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/WTBlock |
Contents
The links at the left will connect you to each of the major categories on this site. The content is divided into six categories described as follows:
| Biography: Some biographical information including an article about W. T. published in "The Southeast Texas Business News" in March of 1996, by Bill Deevy. | |||||||
Books:
W. T.'s books
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Articles: a summary of
W. T.'s articles divided into
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| Documents: several articles are published here online | |||||||
| Family: articles about W. T's family | |||||||
| Photo Credit: Several of the photographs in the family section are very old and were in very bad shape. One of our readers, Mr. Francis M. Barnett, Jr. contacted W. T. and offered to "digitally repair" these photographs. Look at this page to see "before and after" pictures. | |||||||
| Guest Book: leave the site and other visitors messages here | |||||||
| Search: this site and the web |
What's New
We are in the process of scanning W. T.'s first book, A History of Jefferson, County, Texas, which will be a work in progress for some time. This book was W. T.'s master's thesis at Lamar University and was published in 1976.
There are now 468 articles published on this site. Up to this point most of the work has been relatively easy, since the majority of what is on the site to date was written within the last decade and was therefore already in electronic form.
Some of the newest articles represent the beginning of the next phase, converting work that was done in the prior three decades into electronic format. Sabine Pass in the Civil War was originally published in the East Texas Historical Journal in October 1971. This article was scanned in from a photocopy of that document. Scanning is imprecise at best, and downright error prone at worst. Our best efforts to find and correct these errors are being employed, but the process is slow. Naturally, we welcome any feedback with regard to errors discovered by our readers.