Harry S. Truman would later appoint Thomason as a federal district judge. As mayor, Lea made a public declaration, after Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico, on March 9, 1916, that he would arrest Villa if he dared enter El Paso. Villa then responded by offering a thousand pesos worth of gold bounty on Lea. The Lea children had to have a police escort to and from school. In 1936, Zola May died of cancer, and Lea remarried on May 20, 1939, to Mexican-born Rosario Partida Archer (née Partida). Thomas Calloway Lea Jr. died in El Paso at Southwestern General Hospital, of a heart attack, on August 2, 1945. Lea was a forty-year member of the State Bar of Texas and a Mason. Excerpts from: "Ringside Seat to a Revolution, An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez: 1893–1923"    Most historians have forgotten about this obscure incident that took place on the border in 1917. I first heard of the U.S. government's policy that provoked these riots while I was still in high school. One evening, during a family dinner, my great-aunt Adela Dorado shared her memories with us about her experiences as a young woman during the Mexican Revolution. She recalled that American Federal Government authorities regularly forced her and all other working-class Mexicans to take a bath and be sprayed with pesticides at the Santa Fe Bridge whenever they needed to cross into the United States because a typhus epidemic was raging in Mexico and the U.S. wanted to prevent it's spread to the United States. My great-aunt, who worked as a maid in El Paso during the revolution, told us she felt humiliated for being treated as a "dirty Mexican." Even though it was not related to being Mexican or dirty, the disinfecting stations were a result of the epidemic established by the Federal not city or local government. She related how on one occasion the U.S. customs officials put her clothes and shoes through a large secadora (dryer) and her shoes melted. Many years later, as part of my research for this book at the National Archives in the Washington, D.C. area, I came upon some photographs taken in 1917 in El Paso. The pictures, which were part of the U.S. Public Health records, showed large steam dryers used to disinfect the clothes of border crossers at the Santa Fe Bridge. ... the account of the 1917 Bath Riots at the Santa Fe Bridge which was established and managed by the Federal government, not the city of El Paso.