Lucille Whitten

Lucille was born as the daughter of Joe Wesley Jones and Ola Presley in Bloomington, Greer
County, Oklahoma. Her family had moved from DeKalb in northeast Texas to the Childress
area, following her grandfather John Carroll Presley’s leadership for agricultural opportunities.
During the 1920’s, significant increases in farming resulted in the plowing, and subsequent destruction of native grasses and topsoil. Coupled with long periods of decreasing rainfall and
high winds, the area became known as the Dust Bowl or “dirty thirties”. Many of the Presley
clan remain (or returned) in the area.

The Jones / Presley family migrated back to Texas, first to Streetman and then to Mansfield. As
a teenager, Lucille became active in the area, and married on September 7, 1937. To help her
mother and raising children, she worked at numerous jobs, from shelling pecans to cleaning the
church building and grounds, involving her daughters in the process. Working in the cosmetic
sales department of Leonard Brothers Department Store in downtown Fort Worth, her
knowledge of sales and cosmetics resulted in her seventeen-year employment at Ray’s Pharmacy in Mansfield.

She and her husband moved from Mansfield to a mobile home at Lake Palestine, where she
became the subdivision’s office manager. Upon suffering from formaldehyde contamination in
the mobile home, she and her husband moved to their daughter and husband’s home in Plano for a couple of years until the daughter was able to construct a waterfront house for their use,
granting them a life estate in the home. In 1998, the lake house was sold and a home in
Mansfield was purchased for their use, with the life estate transferred.

Following the death of her husband in late 2005, Lucille got involved in the Senior Center, where she met Billy Joe Watson. They enjoyed married life together for about nine years, enjoying a
social schedule of game nights, line dancing, travel, and church activities. After Joe’s death,
she continued to live alone in her house under the daily attentive care of daughters Sandra and
Delores of Mansfield until failing health resulted in her transfer to a nursing home in August 2023.

She is survived by her daughters Carol Wilshire of Plano, Delores Pigg of Mansfield, Sandra
Lopez of Mansfield, and son Gary of Pueblo, Colorado. Her family also included 11 grandchildren, 22 great grandchildren, and 18 great-great grandchildren.