Lillian Meeker

Our beloved mother, Lillian Mae Meeker, ne Hart, died peacefully at her home in Duncanville, TX. She was alert and in good health and had been talking earlier with her house keeper, Val. She fell asleep in her recliner for the last time. She would have been 101yrs old on 23 June. She's survived by her three sons, her grandchildren Kirsten Blanchard, Gennifer Lyon, Barrett Meeker, and Lara Meeker, and by her great-grandson David Blanchard and his son Wyatt.

Mae Hart was born in Lampasas, Texas, in 1914. But when she was 3, at the beginning of World War I, the family, her father Isaac Newton Hart, her mother Dollie, and sister, Jewel, moved to a farm near Rumley. She grew up on that farm. She was a tomboy and companion to her father, Pap. She was named after her mother Lillian Mae Groves, but her mother was always called Dollie, not Mae. She learned about farming, animals, and machinery from her father. Throughout her life she could fix things with some wire and tape and whatever was at hand. Once when a radiator hose split on our car she fixed it by wiring a metal tube from a lipstick in place of the break.

She loved school and started a year early when she was five. She decided to make herself a school teacher and when she graduated from high school at 16 she went to San Marcos State Teachers college for two years to get her teaching certificate. So in 1932, at age 18, she started teaching school in a one-room school house with twelve students on The Young Ranch near Fredericksburg. She taught there two years and then moved to a two-room school at Clayrock. During the summer she took courses at Alpine State College and that's where she first met Riley Morris Meeker. They were married in May of 1936. In 1937 she quit teaching and she and Riley moved to Waco where she helped him sell Wearever cooking utensils door-to-door. Their first son, Brent was born in Lampasas in '39. Riley then went to work for Lever Brothers wholesaling soap and shortening to grocery stores. They moved to Austin and bought their first house on Shoalwood.

Mae and Riley had intended to have children four years apart, but because World War II intervened their second son, Riley Morris II, didn't arrive till 1946. Riley took a new job, selling memberships in Nation's Business. His territory was all of west Texas which meant a lot of traveling. They bought a 30ft house trailer and the family, with Brent, the new born Morris, and dog Cocoa, traveled around west Texas for the next year and a half, sometimes staying in the same town only two or three days.

In 1947, Riley got San Antonio as territory; one big enough we didn't have to move. They sold the house in Austin and the trailer and bought a new tract house on the north side of San Antonio. Their last child, Terry Lee Meeker, was born there in 1950. Shortly after Terry was born, Riley got a promotion and the family moved to Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a suburb south of Pittsburgh.

Mae had decided that when Terry started school she would go back to teaching. But now every state required teachers to have a four-year college degree. So she started taking courses at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.

After three years in Pittsburgh, Riley was offered the territory of Oklahoma and Arkansas. That was closer to relatives, so the family moved to Norman, Oklahoma. Mae was then able to complete her 4-year degree at the University of Oklahoma, graduating the same summer Brent graduated from high school. Once when asked what she learned in those two years at OU, she said, "Not a thing! Those professors never spent a day teaching school."

Riley was getting tired of all the travel required by being district manager and he asked to go back to being a salesman in a city big enough he could sleep at home at night. They gave him Houston. So the family moved to Spring Branch, just outside Houston.

Mae started her second teaching career there in the Spring Branch Elementary School District. It was twenty years that was filled with fad teaching reforms. She learned the "New Math" and "Team Teaching" and "Open Classroom" and "Whole Language". Through all the fads she did it her way, the way she taught herself in those one and two room country classrooms. The principal assigned the problem kids to her class. She was glad to take them because she knew she could make good kids out of them. She was a disciplinarian, but the kids loved her. She believed a person chose their life. She never talked about you becoming a doctor or engineer; you MADE a doctor or engineer. She always said, "Choose a job you like doing, because you'll spend a lot of your life at it."

When she and Riley retired in 1978, they moved to Temple, Texas. Riley was in declining health and died in 1982. Mae met Ray Ashcraft, a widowed career army man and they got married in 1985. Sadly Ray died suddenly only a year later.

She met Bob Allison at a square dancing club in Temple. Bob loved to travel too and they spent the next 15yrs traveling around the US together in Bob's fifth wheel RV with Mother's house in Temple as their base. After Bob died in 2007, Mae moved to Duncanville Texas to live near her youngest son Terry.

She passed away the way she always said she wanted to, peacefully in her sleep in her own home.

Funeral services will be held at the Grove's Family Cemetery northeast of Lampasas at 1:00pm Saturday, 11 April. Mae's remains may be viewed at Harper-Talasek Funeral Home, 500 W. Barton, Temple Texas, between 10:00am and 11:30 before the funeral.

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