Ms. Daisy Real, the feisty woman who set up shop across the street from the Montgomery County Jail many years ago passed away Friday night. Daisy, who owns Daisy Bail Bonds and has so for the past 56 years. She started in Harris County when Buster Kern was sheriff and later moved to Montgomery County. Daisy holds Montgomery County’s first bail bond license, #001. Real said in an interview with MCPR a few years back, said it was a practical decision related to her brother, who was a longshoreman.
“He was always fighting and going to jail and I was always and I was always going to get him,” Real said. “People said you’re here every week, why not open a business.”
The rest is history. Real started out in Harris County around 1960 when Clairville “Buster” Kern was Sheriff and moved to Montgomery County in the early 1970’s, where she was the first local bail bondsman, operating under a tree outside the Sheriff’s Office. Real and her late husband, A.Z., worked for years and saved the $150,000 it took to purchase the plot of land across the street from the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office where she still operated the business. They bought what she describes as an “old rundown, torn up trailer” and placed it on the property. Real somehow managed to grow her business through the years, while being a wife and a mother of five.
“When you have a bunch of kids, you’ve got to work and feed them,” she said in an interview in 2012.
Real’s son Jesse, one of her three remaining children, is also a bail bondsman and worked alongside his mother. She told MCPR many years ago that Jesse Real will one day take over the business, but Daisy Real said then she was not ready to hand him the reigns just yet.
“I’ll retire when they put me in that box,” she said.
The feisty senior citizen really loved her job, dealing with people charged with everything from shoplifting to murder. Real said she does not “drink, smoke or party” and never even takes a vacation because what she did every day is “fun.”
“I enjoy arguing with everybody,” she said. “They want to think I’m too old or dumb or something, but I prove them wrong.”
As for the potential dangers of being her age and being available 24 hours a day, Daisy always said, “We’ve all got to die one way or another.” Oddly enough, Real said a rumor in 2012 had been circulating that she was already dead. Fortunately, quite a few people have stopped in to see for themselves.
The phone usually starts ringing around 2:30 or 3 a.m., Real says, and she just makes a pot of coffee and gets to work.
In March she turned 89 but that didn’t stop her. Daisy always spoke her mind. She never held back. In 2012, as Conroe Police located a body in a large area of brush behind her business, Daisy sat on her back porch watching. It got very interesting when, as two rookie officers were within earshot, Daisy said to someone close by, “I bet the next time they pay for their bond.” The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office had an escape years ago also. As police searched the area, Ms. Daisy sat on her back porch, shotgun across her lap. She was always there for people who had fallen on hard times. People needing a family member out of jail. She worked 7-days a week and lived right there in her office.
In 2012 she caught the spot light of FOX News when they highlighted her and her business.
REST IN PEACE MS. DAISY
OUR PRAYERS HERE AT MCPR GO OUT TO HER FRIENDS AND FAMILY
SHE WAS ONE OF A KIND AND WILL BE MISSED.
MS. DAISY KEEPS A SHARP EYE FOR THE JAIL ESCAPEE
DAISY REAL WITH SHERIFF TOMMY GAGE
MS. DAISY IS INTERVIEWED BY FOX NEWS IN 2012
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