My Grandmother's Ring Lecture by Laurie Bricker

$5 for Members
$15 for Non-Members

About Laurie Bricker

Laurie is a native Houstonian and graduate of the University of Texas and University of Houston. She has spent all of her adult life as a passionate advocate for high quality public education. She is a two-time former president of the Houston ISD Board of Trustees, a former member of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and the State Board for Educator Certification, as well as a former board member of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACS COC). She received the American Leadership Forum’s Jaworski Award for Public Service and is a Senior Fellow of American Leadership Forum.

About My Grandmother's Ring

Commemorating the 125th anniversary of the 1900 Storm, Laurie Bricker will discuss her book, My Grandmother’s Ring, a memoir of her grandmother’s life. Lorraine Isaacs Hofeller, a second generation “BOI”, is considered to be the last survivor of the 1900 Galveston Storm when she passed away in 2002 at the age of 106 ½. The memoir discusses the many chapters of her life, having lived in Galveston from 1896, graduating from Ball High School as president of her senior class, and through the early 1900’s of the post storm city.

From her own perspective of having lived a happy and enriched life but “nothing remarkable,” my grandmother, Lorraine Rey Isaacs Hofeller, my “Meme,” lived a full 106 and a half magical years through three centuries, experienced two world wars and countless other wars, lived through the Great Depression, positioned herself as a trailblazer long before women were considered leaders—and is remembered as the last survivor of the 1900 storm in Galveston, Texas.

Her remarkable life story, as seen through her violet eyes, and interpreted by me—her youngest grandchild, her namesake, Laurie Kuper Bricker––is a collection of tales of wonderment as Lorraine embraced each day of her life from February of 1896 through July of 2002.

Her incredible engagement ring, mailed to her from Buffalo, New York, by Sigmar Hofeller in 1918, accompanied her through the journey of youth to old age and beyond.