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To support himself, Lassiter entered the refined trade of haberdashery. While a Rice graduate student, he worked at Norton Ditto downtown, a distinguished establishment for gentlemen founded in 1908 that continues today. Lassiter's time there coincided with the heyday of downtown department stores, when important businessmen shopped at the old-guard retail Mecca. Norton Ditto remained Lassiter's day job — a post where he could meet members of the city's elite — until his retirement in 2006. Lassiter credited Dr. Jermayne MacAgy, Dominique and John de Menil's curatorial and museum hire and the first director of the Contemporary Arts Association (CAA, now the CAMH), for his conversion to collecting. Her exhibitions became a touchstone for him to the power of objects, how they spoke to one another. From her installations, he picked up an intuitive understanding of how to place artifacts from disparate time periods in conversation with contemporary artworks. MacAgy was a Pied Piper for a group of burgeoning collectors, including the de Menils, leading them on a journey that stressed cultivating connoisseurship to elevate the understanding of art and, in turn, one's life. During the late 1950s, he met another person who transformed his world: his life partner, Edward Mayo (1918-2005), who introduced him to art, artists, and architecture. Graduating from Rice Institute (now Rice University) in 1942 with a degree in architecture, Mayo practiced architecture until 1961, when he was recruited by then MFAH director Dr. James Chillman Jr. to become registrar of the MFAH. He served under four directors until his retirement in 1986. Mayo passed away in the same bungalow he was born in — one of the first in that Montrose neighborhood. Together, Mayo and Lassiter formed a power couple whose presence at museum exhibitions, gallery showings, and cultural events defined the scene. Lassiter lived in a garage apartment, typical of that era, on Bissonnet until the late 1960s (its previous inhabitant was the painter Richard Stout). After he met Mayo, he became his tenant at a bungalow that neighbored Mayo's garden. The majority of rent was paid through the frequent dinners that Lassiter prepared — an arrangement proposed by Mayo — that led to Lassiter becoming the unofficial host for an ever- widening circle of the art community, as well as a Sherpa to the art of collecting. Aside from excelling as an art connoisseur — whose modest budget working in retail made collecting possible only at the beginning of an artist's career — Lassiter stepped into the role of a consummate host, entertaining weekly. Not only could he make a mean martini — but he developed a talent for preparing simple, classic fare that could be whipped up while guests gossiped with Mayo in Lassiter's famous library, the book room. Luminaries who gathered around the collector's dinner table, which seated five at most, included playwright Edward Albee, Menil founding director Walter Hopps, and later director Josef Helfenstein, countless museum trustees and patrons, gallerists, and a litany of artists. Two to three dinner parties a week were not uncommon. On the menu were dishes prepared from either Gourmet magazine or handwritten recipes passed down from Lassiter's grandmother and mother. The Collection It's impossible to concisely describe the Lassiter aesthetic, as it's difficult to find a connecting thread among the 600 works that comprised his collection — from lively Mexican Oaxacan wooden folk animals and outsider tramp art to understated modernist furniture and exuberant pieces of kitschy Pop, as well as perhaps the first painting Julian Schnabel ever sold, all of which somehow existed in a unique tête- à-tête in these interiors. Then there were tiny discreet treasures, such as miniature salesmen samples of furniture as well as a miniscule Pedro Friedeberg chair sculpture and, later, a collection of Glassell teacher/ photographer Amy Blakemore's ceramics, all of which the visitor would only discover during a concentrated tour of the house and close viewing. Flash forward 46 years — and hundreds of acquisitions later. Upon Lassiter's death, The collector's rolltop desk with cubbyholes displaying demitasse cups. A diminutive table bears a charming vignette of Lassiter's treasures. 52