Luis Lemus

Prompted to share the best lesson he had learned from life, he said, "Don't take yourself or what you do too seriously. In the end, we are all the same."

He learned tennis and soccer as a child in the port of Tampico, and shared these passions throughout his life with friends, family and youth groups. He helped organize and coach one of the first soccer teams for youths in Houston. He had an eye and skilled hand for oil painting, and played guitar with verve and gusto.

His appreciation for fine food and wine led him to study French and Italian cuisine and co-found an early Houston dining club with friends. He devoured books on cosmology, design and art, along with psychology, philosophy and the occasional bit of good fiction. He could quote Borges, Neruda, Bennedetti and Paz. He always wore a jacket and tie to work, even at jobsites. As a boy I watched him skip along girders, a high wire artist with tie gusting and coat tails flapping in the breeze.

Raised in a military family, he discovered his calling as a teenager, directing crews laying rail lines under canopies of emerald jungles and across greasy waterways on the Yucatan Peninsula; threading the Pan American Highway through passes in Tehuantepec; building wharves in Campeche or buttressing mine shafts in Chihuahua and Sonora, all while studying Engineering at the Escuela de Mineria in Mexico City, the Polytecnic Institute and UNAM. He received his Engineering degree from Lamar Tech in 1957 and eventually became a Civil and Structural Consultant, laying out roads and subdivisions and bridges Houstonians travel every day, innovating systems in steel and concrete, building homes and commercial structures. He devoted efforts to rebuilding the city of his birth after the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. Love for his profession drew him to the faculty at University of Houston Architecture School, where he taught Principles of Engineering and Structural Mechanics while mentoring several students at his eponymous Engineering firm. Some followed his footsteps; no one will walk in his shoes.

He often told me, "Do your best. Pursue your dreams. All else will follow."

Born on the 21st of October 1932, peacefully passed away on the 1st of July 2011, at the age of 78, while being attended to by friends and family, after a prolonged yet dignified struggle against complications from a 2006 heart operation and subsequent infection. After consultations with physicians and family, he asked all to accept the inevitable and allow his decline to take its course. "I am not giving up, my body is. We must accept reality." He died quietly the next day.

He was preceded in death by his parents Luis Lemus Ugarte and Esther Covarrubias, and his brother Mario. He is survived by Senya Susan Morrow Lemus, his wife of 53 years; two siblings, Guillermo Lemus of Brandenton, Florida and Sylvia Fuentes of London and D.F; three sons, Robert, Chris and Luis; and two grandchildren, Luis Carlos and Morgana Christine. He is much loved and will always remain greatly missed.

The memorial service is to be conducted at eleven o’clock in the morning on Thursday, the 21st of July, at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, 717 Sage Road in Houston, where the Rev. Martin J. Bastian, Senior Associate Rector for Pastoral Care, is to officiate. Immediately following, all are invited to greet the family during a reception at a venue to be announced during the service.

In lieu of customary remembrances, the family requests that contributions, in the name of Luis Lemus, Jr., be directed to the University of Houston, School of Architecture, 4800 Calhoun Rd., Houston, TX, 77004.