Wayne Stewart
Generation 8 of The Generations of Texas, J. Wayne Stewart is a baby boomer who followed his Dad’s footsteps to become a professional, manager, and executive in major technology industries. A native Texan, he graduated from The University of Texas and joined Texas Instruments, where he worked for 21 years leading large Defense and Information Technology organizations.
Wayne and his wife, Dottie, met while at UT, marrying in 1973, and they have spent their entire 48 (so far) year marriage in Texas (except for a 5 year frigid sojourn in Minnesota). Generation 9 includes Brad Stewart and Christie Stewart Turner, who have contributed 5 members of Generation 10 of The Generations of Texas.
Wayne was a senior executive with high tech companies, then launched his own entrepreneurial ventures, retiring in 2013 to become a rancher, writer, and mentor to the next generations. He responded to his Dad’s challenge, writing a commentary on his generation, Yesteryear, The Next Generation.
Wayne’s next book, Mentoring Intentional Excellence, A Guide for Early- and Mid-Career Professionals, was released in June 2017. It’s a business mentoring and ethics book, based on his 40+ years in industry, and it is receiving great reviews. Passing The Torch, Wayne’s next project, is a faith-based book on the challenges of generational transitions. Wayne’s Generations of Texas: Ten Generations of Texas Family History, is a history of generations 0 – 10 of the family, from pre-Revolutionary War through the Texas war of independence, The Civil War, and the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was released in December of 2021.
Wayne and Dottie Stewart live in Allen, Texas, north of Dallas.
Jeff Stewart
Generation
7 of The Generations of Texas, Jeff Stewart was a member of “The Greatest Generation,” born in 1921, the oldest son of a sharecropper family in West Texas. He grew up doing the hard work of farming in The Great Depression, but was determined to get an education beyond the part-time, rural schoolhouses of the time. He earned academic and football scholarships to Texas Wesleyan College just in time for the attack on Pearl Harbor, which interrupted his college when he joined the US Navy. He earned his pilot’s wings and spent most of the war as a flight instructor stationed at the Naval Air Station at Corpus Christi, Texas.
Jeff met his future wife, Dottie (Dorothy Elizabeth Vickers) during the war and they married in 1944. Following his discharge from the Navy, Jeff went to work selling Studebakers in Brownsville, Texas, eventually owning the dealership. In 1956, he joined John Hancock Life Insurance Company, where he remained for the rest of his career, retiring in 1983 as a Vice President. Over their 56-year marriage, Jeff and Dottie raised two children, Wayne and Vicki, who are Generation 8 in The Generations of Texas saga.
Jeff was a newspaper columnist during his retirement, writing Yesteryear, his weekly column in the Hood County, Texas newspaper. A respected documentor of Depression-era West Texas, a way of life that had disappeared, he also introduced his readers to Generation 4, with his recount of Captain Francis Asbury Vaughan’s Civil War experiences, left to us in his diary of that period.
Son of a West Texas sharecropper, Jeff was the first Stewart to go to college, become a pilot, work professionally, and rise to the executive ranks in a large U.S. corporation. In 2003, Yesteryear was published, a collection of his columns documenting the West Texas farming life. Filled with wit, folksy humor, and the vernacular of the times, it’s a window into the struggles and successes of a “salt of the earth” bedrock family. Jeff Stewart died in 2005 in Granbury, Texas.
Future Authors
Finally, there are future generations of Texans, preparing to follow the challenges laid down by Jeff and Wayne to document their own generations. SGR Publishing will provide the platform for their projects.