our Arklahoma Heritage; A former Oklahoma Supreme Court Judge took his own life on July 25, 1940
In the early 1930s, a coal town in the Sans Bois hills briefly felt like the center of Oklahoma. Wilburton, in Latimer County, was nicknamed the Little Capital of Oklahoma because so many of its own were sitting at the state's table: Carlton Weaver as Speaker of the House, Reubin K. Hays as president of the State Senate, and Eugene Fay Lester as Chief Justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court.
Lester's path to that bench began far from the coal camps. He was born August 7, 1871, in Lebanon, Wilson County, Tennessee, the son of Presley Smith Lester and Elizabeth C. Crutchfield. Presley, born December 29, 1816, in Tennessee, married Elizabeth in Wilson County on December 24, 1850.
They belonged to the rural post-Civil War Middle Tennessee world of large families and modest farms. Eugene was one of several children. Later records place his father in Indian Territory by 1900, a hint that the Lesters, like so many Tennessee families, followed the western land and coal rush.
He did not come west as a credentialed professional. No college or law-school enrollment has been found. Like many territorial lawyers, he read law through self-study and clerking under practicing attorneys, and he was admitted to practice in the frontier fashion that Oklahoma still recognized after statehood. Later compilers list him among state supreme-court judges admitted by reading law rather than by degree.
By the late 1890s he was in what became Latimer County, in the Choctaw Nation's coal country. Wilburton was a boom town of mines, railroads, and sudden wealth, and it needed lawyers who could handle leases, titles, and the rough edges of a new jurisdiction. On April 29, 1902, he married Beulah Collier, born April 26, 1885, in Mansfield, Sebastian County, Arkansas, daughter of Henry Clay Collier and Bernetta Yowell.
Beulah was seventeen. Eugene was thirty. They pioneered together in eastern Oklahoma.
Family memory, preserved in her 1986 obituary, says she helped found two schools and the Christian Church of Wilburton. That church, of the Disciples of Christ, remained the family's spiritual home. Lester later belonged to the Masons and the Odd Fellows as well.
Five children followed. Thelman, born March 23, 1904, was the eldest: tall, a Wilburton High athlete and orator, appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy by Congressman C. D. Carter, class of 1925. Doris was born in Wilburton on February 22, 1907. Eugene Fay Jr. became a physician. Virginia married Eugene Bellew Mapel. Carolyn, born April 22, 1917, later married Donald James Tullius.
The household that formed in Wilburton was the classic small-town professional family: church, lodge, law office, and a son pointed toward Annapolis.
Lester's private practice was the ordinary work of a second-judicial-district town: land, coal, probate, and the disputes that follow a boom. Recognition came early. In September 1909 the Oklahoma Supreme Court named him to the state bar examining commission for District 2, succeeding W. D. Ledbetter, and also used him as a special commissioner to take testimony.
In 1917 the court directed him, as a member of the Bar Commission, to investigate and prefer disbarment charges against attorneys Linus A. Williams and Earl R. Horine for solicitation and unauthorized practice. Those appointments are the best surviving measure of his standing before he ever wore a robe. Other lawyers trusted him to police the profession.
In 1918 he became judge of the Fifth Judicial District, a trial bench he held until 1924. Some biographical notes give the dates as 1919 to 1924.
That six-year stretch, with statehood still young and dockets full of allotment, mineral, and homestead fights, was the practical education that later showed in his Supreme Court opinions. He was not a theorist. He was a district judge who had already seen how a poorly joined deed or a sloppy municipal plant could wreck a family.
He had no military record of his own. The family's uniform belonged to Thelman. Ensign Thelman Lester earned his wings as naval aviator No. 3403 on April 7, 1928, married Thelma Phelps, daughter of Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice James I. Phelps, on June 7, 1928, at First Christian Church in Oklahoma City, and died two months later, on August 6, 1928, when the plane he was piloting crashed near San Diego.
He was twenty-four. The remains came home to Oklahoma City under Navy escort. That loss sat in the middle of Eugene Lester's first term on the state's highest court.
In 1924 Lester was elected to the Oklahoma Supreme Court from District 2, filling an unexpired term. The official roster lists him from Oklahoma City, District 2, beginning 1924. The family moved to the capital in 1925. Oklahoma then chose justices in partisan district elections for six-year terms.
The chief justiceship rotated among the justices, typically two years at a time. Lester served as associate justice through 1931 and as Chief Justice in 1931 and 1932, the pairing recorded on the court's own list of chiefs. A family biographical note calls him vice-chief from 1929. Beulah's later obituary said he served two terms as Chief Justice. The official institutional record is the 1931 to 1932 chief term, after Charles W. Mason and before Fletcher Riley.
His years on the court ran from Coolidge prosperity into the first shock of the Depression. Caseloads rose with bank failures, tax fights, and resource contracts. While chief, he represented Oklahoma in a University of North Carolina study of whether state supreme courts could work more efficiently by sitting in divisions rather than always en banc, an administrative question that suited a man who had already spent years managing a trial docket.
The opinions that survive under his name are not flashy. They are the work of a statutory judge. In Warden v. Kerns (1925) he reversed a homestead case out of Stephens County. A wife had conveyed allotted land in 1918 without her husband's joinder. Lester held the deed void under the homestead statutes, rejected thin evidence of abandonment, and refused to let an affidavit do the work of live testimony. Temporary absence was not enough to strip homestead protection. The case went back for a new trial.
In City of Lawton v. Wilson (1927), writing for the court, he treated a city's negligent sewage plant as an abatable nuisance. Pollution of Cache Creek was not a one-time permanent injury that the statute of limitations could lock away. Fresh harm from a plant still failing could support a new suit. He was not sentimental about the plaintiff. He struck $115 in fencing and well costs that lacked causation. The principle was tight and practical. Municipalities do not get immunity by waiting out the clock while the ditch still runs.
Franklin v. Ryan (1927) upheld a 2.32-mill highway levy for Oklahoma County under a 1923-24 legislative amendment. The excise board could add the levy beyond the ordinary current-expense cap without a special election, so long as the total stayed inside the statutory mill limit. Infrastructure funding, in Lester's reading, was a legislative choice the courts would not second-guess if the numbers fit the statute.
Oklahoma Coal Co. v. Atkinson (1926) enforced specific performance of a mining lease. In a coal-county justice, that was not an abstract commercial rule. It was the same industry that had built Wilburton.
Joint School District No. 132 v. Dabney (1927) showed the other side of his caution. Voters in a Major-Alfalfa joint district had approved $2,000 in building bonds. The attorney general, as ex officio bond commissioner, refused to approve them. Lester wrote the opinion denying mandamus. Local schools would get judicial help when the statute was followed. They would not get a writ to paper over a defective issue.
Taken together, the cases sketch a judicial temperament: protect the homestead, keep commercial promises, make cities clean up continuing harms, and refuse to stretch statutes for convenience. That is a coal-country lawyer's conservatism, not a theorist's.
His Supreme Court service ended in 1932.
Earl Welch of Antlers appears on the District 2 line thereafter. Lester remained in Oklahoma City.
The public record of those later years is thin: a former chief justice, a churchman, a man whose son was already in a Navy grave and whose health, by the end of the decade, was failing.
On the night of July 25, 1940, he died in an Oklahoma City hotel room of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He was sixty-eight. A note at the scene attributed the act to prolonged ill health.
Acting Coroner Ben LeFon ruled the death a suicide. Wire services carried a spare paragraph. The Emporia Gazette of July 26, 1940, printed it on an inside page. No later official investigation revived an alternative explanation. The documented cause is the one he left in writing.
Beulah outlived him by forty-six years. After 1940 she owned and managed the Medical Book Exchange, serving the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center until she retired in 1977. She died January 31, 1986, in Oklahoma City, remembered at First Christian Church, where she had served for years on the Board of Deaconesses.
She is buried at Rose Hill Burial Park in Oklahoma City. Family cemetery records link Eugene F. Lester, 1871 to 1940, as her husband at that same cemetery. No separate digitized funeral notice for him has surfaced with plot or officiant, but the family burial ground is Rose Hill.
The children scattered and endured. Doris Lester Burns died in Pittsburgh on September 24, 1993, at eighty-six. Dr. Eugene Fay Lester Jr. died in 1981. Virginia Mapel lived into later decades in Florida. Carolyn Tullius remained in Oklahoma City. Thelman's widow had already buried a husband at twenty-four.
Lester left no law school, no named courthouse, no statue. What remains is a line in the official roster, 1931 to 1932, E. F. Lester; a cluster of opinions about homesteads, sewers, coal leases, and school bonds; and a hometown story. Wilburton's Little Capital year was real enough. A mining town sent a speaker, a senate president, and a chief justice to Oklahoma City at the same moment.
That is a more Oklahoma career than a marble bust would have been. A Tennessee farm boy who read law in Indian Territory, kept a district docket, and wrote opinions that treated statutes as they were written, then died quietly and badly in a hotel room, citing only his health.
The record does not support a military chapter for him. It does support a family that paid a military price. Between those two facts sits the life that Wilburton still has some claim on: Eugene Fay Lester, attorney, district judge, justice, and, for one hard Depression rotation, Chief Justice of Oklahoma.
