Dublin lost a native daughter and community pillar Saturday with the passing of retired judge Latrelle Cain.
Cain served the Dublin community as a municipal court judge for 25 years and also served for several years as Justice of the Peace for Precinct 2.
City Judge Juanita Torres worked with Cain for many years and had fond memories of their time together.
“She was like my second mom, my mentor and she could make grown men cry,” Torres said. “But you could count on her to tell you how it was and not sugar coat it.”
“We would always kid around and say that all the felons would be at her funeral because she became their friends and even gave them rides back to town after being in jail,” she added.
In a 2012 interview with the Citizen, Cain traced her desire to run for the office of JP to a childhood memory on Dublin’s main street with her father.
It was 1948, and her father was running for re-election as Justice of the Peace. The votes had already been cast and were being counted so they went to the downtown office of the Dublin Progress newspaper.
The Progress had a huge billboard tracking the elections at the time. They would get regular calls from the vote counters and would update the board with the latest results, wiping names from one part of the board and rewriting them in their new position.
Latrelle stood next to her father as they held hands and expectantly watched his name move across the board. As they stood facing the board, she said to him, “One day, my name is going to be up there.”
She took a step towards fulfilling that promise she made to her father in her youth when she became a City Municipal Court Judge after completing the initial training.
It wasn’t long before she was approached about running for Justice of the Peace, and she was elected to the office her father held from the 1940s to the 1960s.
Cain previously said she always tried to treat every person who entered her office fairly. “When you feel you have done your job fairly, you shouldn’t have any regrets,” she remarked of her position.
Her diligence and considerate nature were rewarded when she was named a distinguished member of the college of court judges.
Given Latrelle’s compassionate nature, the hardest part of the job for her was when people couldn’t pay their fines and were unable to perform community service.
She treats them fairly while working on the case, but to keep her sanity, she learned never to fixate on the business of the day when she went home. “It will tear you up,” she advised.
Latrelle was a true Dublin native, born in the house next to Grace Lyon’s on Valiant Street. She attended Dublin ISD and was named Miss DHS in 1953.
She moved away but when she returned in the mid-‘70s, she opened a tire shop and the Cain Pool Company.
It seems as if compassion was taught in Latrelle’s home when she was a child. She recalled that their mom used to feed homeless people who jumped from trains in Dublin, sometimes getting one or two per week coming by their house and eating on the back porch. At one point, her mom jokingly asked one of the men if her name was written on a train car that everyone was seeing.
The homeless man she asked said, “No ma’am, but word gets around.”
She remembered Dublin as a bustling commercial during her youth with so many stores that residents didn’t really need to travel elsewhere when shopping, because, as she said, “it didn’t take us as much to live back then.”
Remembering the vibrancy of Dublin during this period, Latrelle would get sad when she saw people not supporting Dublin later in her life.
Cain said the best advice she was ever given was to remember who helped her along the way.
She felt indebted to everyone who gave her assistance and she made sure to tell her children to remember everyone that’s helped them. “I told them, there’s a crowd behind you,” she said. “Don’t just shake hands with the ones up front.”
Visitation will be from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Friday, Oct.14 at Harrell Funeral Home, 112 North Camden Street in Dublin and her Celebration of Life will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 15 at Cottonwood Baptist Church, 273 County Road 527 in Dublin.