Doug and Joan McLeod at a Mardi Gras party. They have always loved to dance.
Courtesy / Doug McLeod
Doug joined the Marines at age 19.
Courtesy / Doug McLeod
Doug served several terms in the Texas Legislature.
Courtesy / Doug McLeod
Doug McLeod was born in 1941.
Courtesy / Doug McLeod
Doug served as president of the Galveston School District.
Houston Chronicle archives
Doug McLeod insists on keeping the speeches short. He and his wife, Joan, are at Galveston’s opera house on May 30 to receive an award honoring their civic contributions to the island, and Doug does not want to bore his guests. Their accomplishments are tangible enough. He would prefer that everyone have a good time.
They say hello to their friends — some newer, others who remember Doug in his wilder high school days — and smile for the cameras in their black-tie finery.
After the speeches, the hosts propose they share a dance.
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Doug takes Joan’s hand.
They have always loved to dance.
LOVE STORY: She hadn’t spoken to her ex-husband in 50 years. Then came the flood.
Doug met Joan 71 years ago when they were both campers in the Hill Country. Doug went to Camp Stewart, escaping the Galveston humidity for a breeze that played along the Guadalupe River. Camp was a family tradition Doug’s mother began in the 1920s, one he and his siblings cemented. Doug and Joan sent their own blended family of six children. Then their grandchildren, who call them MommyO and DaddyO.
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The Hill Country camps gave Doug many of the people he loves most. He is not sure what to do with that place now.
Last July, Doug’s youngest granddaughter, Blakely, his daughter Lindsey’s only little girl, began her first summer at Camp Mystic. She’d been on the waiting list to attend her whole life. She never came home.
Doug McLeod smiles with his grandchildren at Christmas. Blakely, the youngest, is in the front.
Courtesy / Doug McLeod
March 2026
Doug has always been a man of faith — or at least, he likes to say, ever since he got a brain in his head after college — and so every Sunday, he walks through the doors of Galveston’s Trinity Episcopal Church.
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Sometimes, he notices a little girl who looks about eight years old fidgeting in the pew. Something inside him twists, and he catches himself before he falls too deep into memories.
He dreads Sunday afternoons. Those are the hardest times of the week because there’s nothing to distract him. He was always a stiff upper lip sort of a man — that’s how his father taught him to be — but these days, the tears will flow, and he won’t be able to stop them.
In a span of five months, he lost his son-in-law, then his son, then his granddaughter.
One Sunday evening, he talks to his daughter Lindsey, who misses her own daughter every day. She says, Think about what a great life Blakely had. She had eight years and more fun than anybody on this earth. She sang for her mother’s phone camera like she was performing on a stadium stage, talked her grandparents into getting her an extra book at her school’s fair, grinned atop a pony at her birthday party.
He wishes he could have seen what she would’ve been like as a woman.
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Winter 2025
Doug reaches out to a friend who, for a moment, died on the operating table. His friend says he wasn’t out for very long, but he remembers being greeted by his long-dead father.
It was beautiful, his friend says. He didn’t want to come back.
Doug hopes everyone he loved felt this way, too.
He tells himself Blakely must have drowned instantly.
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He chooses to imagine her smiling as she rushes into the open arms of her daddy and her uncle.
November 10, 2025
With the parents of six other girls who died, Lindsey files a lawsuit against Camp Mystic and the Eastlands, the family that has owned the camp since 1939. Dick Eastland, a longtime friend of the McLeod family, died in the flooding. (The suit is ongoing. The Eastlands have denied wrongdoing.)
CAMP MYSTIC: It was her first rodeo. Her sister should have been there
Doug is a lawyer. He believes the trial should play out in the courtroom. He doesn’t like the trial-by-media. He wants the Texas camp tradition to continue — safely — for generations. Camp taught him how to be a leader, what sportsmanship meant, gave him lifelong friends. But first and foremost, he is a father supporting a daughter who has lost more than anyone should ever have to lose.
When his daughters, all once Mystic girls, talk about the flood — the placement of the cabins, how fast the water must have risen — Doug has to leave the room.
Fall 2025
People rest their palms on Doug’s arm and say, We pray for you every day.
The flood killed 135 people. Blakely was one of 27 Mystic campers and counselors who died. The horror and the scale of the tragedy, Doug realizes, have moved even people he’s never met. The steady love of friends and the small kindnesses from strangers have been a blessing.
Doug walks on the beach, rides his bike in the neighborhood. He pulls open the door of the gym before most of the island is awake. He goes to work. The little tasks that make up a life wind on.
July 3 – 8, 2025
On Thursday, the Mystic girls dress in white for evening prayers. Counselors perform skits. “Taps” plays over the loudspeaker at 10 p.m. to mark the end of the day.
In the early hours of the morning, the Guadalupe bursts.
Doug has two granddaughters at Camp Mystic. One gets in touch with her mother right away. But Lindsey, on a trip to Europe, sees a voicemail. It’s from the camp. Blakely is unaccounted for.
Four of his five daughters descend on Kerrville.
They have no news on July 5, July 6.
Doug, at home in Galveston, tells the local paper: “I fear what we’re hoping for now is a recovery.”
Sometimes, when he flipped through the channels, he’d land on a true crime show. He’d wonder why parents were so desperate to find their child’s body even after a decade, even when they knew a body was the only possible outcome.
When they find Blakely — identified by the green-and-white Camp Mystic necklace her mother gave her and instructed her to never take off — the relief hits him, and he understands.
He prays that when she was underwater, she wouldn’t have known to be afraid to die.
Blakely loved animals. She was also a prankster.
June 29 – July 2, 2025
Like her cousins and her mother and her aunts and her MommyO and her great-grandmother before her, Blakely loves camp. It’s her first summer as a Mystic girl.
She giggles with her friends, splashes in the peaceful banks of the Guadalupe River. She rides horses and plays tennis. She says her prayers each night in the Twins I cabin.
In a letter to her mother, Blakely writes: camp is “amazing.”
March – June 2025
Blakely’s father dies at the end of March. He had been battling cancer and had a heart attack. He was 59 years old. Doug grieves especially for Lindsey and Blakely.
Blakely, Doug thinks, understands her father is not coming back, but she doesn’t quite grasp the concept of death.
Not even three months later, Doug’s only son dies at 59. Chanse McLeod, like his father, was a lawyer; like his father, he spent his summers at Camp Stewart in Hunt. Until the last moment, he had his work delivered to him in the hospital. He loved Frank Sinatra and the Texas Longhorns, but he loved nothing more than his wife and three children.
Doug knows Chanse had a wonderful life, despite the pain he was in. In some ways, knowing he’s at peace is a relief. And Doug’s faith promises: He’ll see his son again.
After the church service, they have a celebration of life at one of Doug’s daughters’ homes. Blakely announces: Well, it’s time for me to do my thing, and she leaps into the pool fully clothed. She has always loved the water.
FOUND ON THE RIVER: The last days of a Hill Country warehouse
April 10, 2017 – Summer 2024
Sarah Blakely McCrory is her mother’s first child, her father’s second, and Doug’s youngest grandchild.
Blakely is precocious, bossy in the best way. A little liberated woman, Doug calls her. Not related to Joan by blood, but entirely like Joan in spirit, with Doug’s sense of humor. She loves pranks and adores animals. One morning, she sticks her box turtle in her mother’s purse. She kicks off her pool season on March 1 every year. She sings “Pink Pony Club” word for word, a guitar that’s almost the size of her body clutched in her hand. When her cousin goes on one too many dates with a guy who doesn’t ask her to be his girlfriend, Blakely advises, “Dump him, girl!”
She catches bullfrogs by the pool in her backyard, clutches them gently in her small hands. “He likes me, so he doesn’t wanna let go of me,” she chirps. “And he went into the house, guys. But I invited him.”
“But, I think he invited hisself a little bit.”
When she grows up, she wants to be a vet.
Before she’s old enough to attend Mystic, Doug drives her to the day camp at Moody Gardens, where she gawps at a honking penguin, her mouth wide in a smile. One morning, Doug picks Blakely up and asks her questions. She sighs and says, just like she’s Joan, DaddyO, I’m not much for talking in the morning.
She has Doug’s round eyes.
Doug and Joan McLeod at galas.
1960 – 2017
Doug’s father liked to joke that he always did things backward, starting with a breech birth, and that’s how he orders his life as a young man.
He joins the Marines at 19, and then he goes to college. He gets married, has children. At 36, he’s elected to the state legislature. And then he drives into Houston four nights a week to get his law degree.
Sometimes, he sees the girl he met at camp all those summers ago around the island. They say hello, catch up on their lives. Joan is married now, too.
They don’t talk about how unhappy they are.
They each get divorced.
One day, Joan shows up in his office. Even after years living separate lives, they still enjoy being together.
She asks Doug to marry her.
Doug becomes chairman of the board at Moody Gardens. Joan works in real estate. They serve on charities, attend galas and pray in the pews.
Their children go to college, discover their places in the world. There are weddings, and then there are grandchildren. Their granddaughters spend summers at Camp Mystic, their cabins cooled only by box fans.
Doug McLeod got sworn in to the Texas House of Representatives in January 1977. He’s pictured here on the house floor with two of his daughters: two-year-old Lindsey (left) and eight-year-old Alex (middle).
Courtesy / Doug McLeod
Summer 1958
Doug writes Joan letters. She’s in Richmond, he’s in Galveston. For several summers, Joan’s parents drive her down the hour and a half to visit and stay in the Grand Galvez. They walk along the beach, park at drive-in movies.
But they are teenagers, both of them, with their own lives to live, and they slowly drift apart.
Left: Doug won Best Camper in 1955. Right: Joan at Camp Mystic.
Summer 1955
Erle Douglas McLeod is 13 years old. This summer, he’ll win the Best Camper cup. It’s an honor that makes it into obituaries.
The Camp Stewart boys head to Camp Mystic for a dance. Whenever Doug walks to the tennis courts, he notices a tall, pretty girl in a blue crepe dress. He introduces himself.
They are less than a minute’s walk from the cabins where the smallest Camp Mystic girls sleep. Where, 70 years from now, Sarah Blakely McCrory will close her eyes on the night of July 3.
He hasn’t been back since the flood.
Doug does his best to keep the memories of his joy and his heartbreak separate as best anyone can. He knows one truth does not lessen the other.
He would like to return one more time before he dies.
Because nothing that will happen decades later can change what waits for him here, as the opening notes of “Rock Around the Clock” echo through the sky, and the girl in front of him — Joan, she says, Joan Williams — smiles at him for the first time and asks him to dance.
Doug and Joan at Joan’s family ranch in the summer of 1959. He was 17, she was 15.
Courtesy / Doug McLeod