I’m starting a trend here. I’ve written a couple of columns in the last month about people who died, and maybe nobody ever wrote anything about when S.S. died in October of 1935.

I wrote my first xxx Died column about Shufflin’ Ray because it seemed to me that he died, and no one noticed. This picture makes me think that when S.S. Died, someone wanted to make sure we remembered.

I used this picture in another column in September of 2022, a time travel thing that nobody read or noted, but the mystery of S.S. still sticks with me. I took this picture in the basement of the Debusk building (underneath Lucille and Mabel restaurant.) The basement is part of that ancient underground Brownwood that is full of mysteries.

The floor of the basement is dirt and coal dust from the huge boiler that was probably in use for seventy years or so starting in 1909, and once even powered the elevator in the building. The ceilings are low and heavy concrete like a nuclear bomb shelter with pillars you can’t put your arms around, and over on the far wall people scrawled things that were important to them at the time.

Like the fact that on October 7, 1935, S.S. Died. And nine months later, in July of 1936, Lillie quit. And somehow the two are related. They have to be. Just look at the picture.

The first floor of the Debusk building was a bank in 1935, but some of the upper floors were, as they are now, rented to business enterprises as offices. If it is 1910 or so and you are looking at the west face of the building (where the main entrance is,) there are three sets of two windows. On the middle set of windows on the first floor above the bank is written the word “Dentist” with the name of the Dentist (which I cannot make out.) On the floor above that, on the right-most set of windows, we again see the word “Dentist” written on the window. Straight up from that one, on the third floor above the bank (the fourth floor) the name “Dr. Paige” is stenciled. And on several other windows, the names of different offices or businesses that I cannot make out are written. No telling what offices changed hands between 1909 and 1935.

The point, I suppose, is that we need not assume that S.S. had anything to do with the bank. And I wrote in 2022 that, if I were not lazy, it would be easy enough I think to discover who S.S. was that died in Brownwood, Texas in 1935. There have to be records and I can’t imagine many people at all died specifically on that day in October of 1935. Maybe S.S. was buried at Greenleaf Cemetery? And I think you have to agree that somehow, some way, the death of S.S. and the fact of Lillie quitting nine months later are inextricably linked. So maybe, by doing that research, we could determine what happened to S.S., why his or her death was so important that someone trekked down to the basement and noted it there forever and indelibly on the wall, and why Lillie (or someone who cared) quit nine months later and appended that information after the notation of the death of S.S.

Maybe one or some of our intrepid readers has some information about this? Wouldn’t it be pretty if there was a story behind all this? It is a mystery, isn’t it?

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.