Overcoming the Odds (Hardback) | Released: 08 Sep 2020

This book is not only the story of my life but the story of my family ancestry beginning with the immigration of the Hermes Family from Germany to rural Lavaca County, Texas in 1859. It tells the story of the hardships they suffered and the successes they achieved during a time when there were few conveniences. They built their own houses, churches and schools and being farmers and ranchers, they lived a rugged life requiring hard work and having few comforts. Their trust in God and their desire to be prosperous Americans with a better life than the one they left behind, drove them to do whatever was necessary to succeed. It is also the story of my humble beginning as an under exposed country boy and the difficulties and challenges I had to overcome to reach my goal to become a successful architect and businessman in a highly competitive and sophisticated urban environment that I knew nothing about. It exposes my miss-steps, failures and regrets, both personally and professionally, that I overcame to reach those goals that I dreamed about when I was growing up. This book also reveals my many adventures and achievements and the many friends at all levels of business and society I have been fortunate enough to accumulate and know.

I wrote this book to document the history of the Hermes Family in America and as a foundation for those that come after me. It is a completely honest and critical assessment of my personal life to the extent that my friends say I told the story with warts and all. It also reveals the challenges I faced to transform myself form an under exposed country boy to a successful and engaged urban businessman and community leader. It exposes the mistakes I made in my personal life because I often lost sight of the values that were intended to guide me through my life. I allowed my ambition and desire to prove myself to the world and my need to overcome my inner feeling that I did not fit in that world, to corrupt my lifestyle. Those deviations and my selfishness cost me my marriage and did damage to my children and their needs for a fully functioning family life with feelings of confidence and security. They became the victims of my weaknesses and and abandonment of the principals I learned growing up in a wholesome and healthy family environment. I paid the price for my diversions with my own feelings of guilt and shame. After the accidental death of my oldest son in 1986, with the help of the lord I changed my lifestyle and since that time have done everything in my power to rectify my life and to correct the wrongs I perpetrated on my loved ones.

I have experienced things in my life that I never dreamed were even possible when I was a young boy in a trance while picking cotton on a boiling hot Texas summer afternoon dreaming about what I would be when I grew up. I stumbled many times but always managed to bounce back. Hard lessons are great teachers! This book satisfies my desire to share with others both my good and mostly self-inflicted bad experiences, in hopes that it may help others to find a way to overcome adversity in their lives and never lose sight of their goals. My motto has always been, stay true to your goals and they will stay true to you and most importantly never give up.
About the Author: Leroy Hermes was born at home in 1938, in Lavaca County, Texas, on a small family farm with no electricity and no indoor plumbing which did not arrive until until after World War II when electrical power was distributed throughout rural Texas. He attended a rural school where his class consisted of only eight students. Living on a farm and ranch demanded hard work and long hours because chores, crops and farm animals require attention from sunup to sundown seven days per week.

He went to high school in the closest town ten miles away where the student body consisted of about 240 students. After graduation in1957, he enrolled at the University of Texas in Austin to study architecture because he loved to draw and because he had once met an architect and knew that was what he wanted to be. He was the first person in his family to ever go to college. Because his parents could not afford to pay for his college he worked while going to school to pay his way. He lived in a dormitory on campus that was a relocated World War II army officers barracks that cost $10.00 per month to share a four-man suite with no plumbing and no conditioning except for a common toilet and showers for the entire dorm. In 1960, at the middle of his junior year he lost his job in Austin, which at the time was a college town with a population of 75,000 people. He moved to Houston to find a job working for an architect and to attend the University of Houston. That transfer cost him twenty-five semester hours of architecture courses which would not be accepted by the University of Houston. After being in college for nine years he graduated with a degree in architecture in 1966.

In 1968, he passed the five-day long architectural exam given by the state of Texas and received his license to practice architecture in Texas. One year later he started his own architectural firm in Houston where he practiced architecture for forty years. His firm Hermes Architects, grew t be the third largest architectural firm in Houston and provided architectural services for thousands of building projects throughout the United States. During those years, and after selling his firm to his employees and retiring, he remained active taking leadership roles in numerous business, political and social organizations. In 2001, Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas, appointed him to the Board of Regents of the University of Houston System for a six-year term of which he served two years as Chairman of the Board. In 1997, the University of Houston College or Architecture honored him by including him as of the top fifty architecture graduates on the colleges fiftieth anniversary. In 2011 the University of Houston honored him with a Distinguished Alumnus Award.

The only course the author did not pass in college was English 101, a mandatory freshman theme writing course. In high school he did not learn how to properly compose words into a written composition, so his writing skills were self-taught out of necessity to be successful in the business world. Writing this book was a great personal accomplishment.