Houston Museum of Fine Art Battles Family Over Will

The Museum of Fine Art, Houston is now in court proceedings defending the will against heirs of oilman Alfred C. Glassell Jr., founder of Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line Co. The family is disputing the large bequest to the museum, claiming Glassell was not in the proper state of mind when he left a large portion of his wealth to the museum.

Bloomberg reports the jurors of the trial will have to decide which of the 12 Glassell wills to accept. The museum of course is fighting to keep the large donation from the long time benefactor.

Bloomberg reports

Glassell decided “to give most of his money to charity,” Gerger said. “Nobody tricked him to do that or bamboozled him to do that or pulled the wool over his eyes.” Curry Glassell also will be receiving money from a trust fund, he said.

A lawyer for Curry Glassell said she was set to receive a much larger bequest until her father signed new wills in 2000 and 2003. The earlier wills left Curry Glassell about one- quarter of his estate, a share worth between $100 million and $150 million, attorney Jack Lawter said at the trial today.

‘Changes Radically’

“There’s a long history of how he wanted to treat his family and his property,” Lawter told jurors. “It changes radically right at the very end.”

By this time, Glassell was “a very sick man,” Lawter said. “We’re not saying he was in a coma or couldn’t talk. The evidence will show Mr. Glassell couldn’t form a reasonable judgment on these issues.”

Curry’s lawyers described her as a single mother of two teenage sons who is part-owner of Good Vibes for You, an Australian organic bottled-water company. “She doesn’t run in the same circles as a lot of people in this case,” Lawter said before trial, referring to Alfred III’s prominence on Houston’s charity ball and country-club circuit.

Doubled Size

It will be difficult to persuade jurors that the museum didn’t have a special place in Alfred C. Glassell Jr.’s heart, museum lawyer Joe Jamail said in an interview. As chairman of the museum’s board of trustees in the 1990s, Glassell led a capital campaign that raised $112 million to build an exhibition wing that doubled the museum’s size in 2000, making it the nation’s fifth-largest.

The most visible sign of the oilman’s support was his 1979 donation of the Glassell School of Art, which serves as the MFAH’s teaching wing.

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