Mildred Moore HolleyJune 15, 1917 ~ January 24, 2009 Mildred Moore Holley, 91, a retired secretary with the Veterans Administration Regional Office and a former Bellmead homemaker, died Jan. 24, 2009 at a local nursing home. Services will be at 10 a.m., Wednesday, January 28, at Connally/Compton Funeral Directors Chapel with Bert Mercer officiating. Burial will follow at Waco Memorial Park. Visitation with family and friends will be from 6 to 8 p.m., Tuesday, January 27, at the funeral home. Mrs. Holley was born Nora Mildred Moore in Bigfoot, Texas, a small community south of San Antonio that was named for Texas frontiersman Bigfoot Wallace. Her parents, Peter Kenneth Moore and Emaline Carrol Moore, ran a general store in Bigfoot. She was the apple of her father's eye, family members recalled over the years. She accompanied him on cattle-buying trips to area farms and on weekly trips to market in San Antonio, and he taught her to drive his truck at age 9. Mrs. Holley started to school at age 4, when she begged to accompany her older sister Edith to her first day of first grade. Instead of coming home at lunchtime as planned, she ended up staying. In high school, she played for the Bigfoot Cathounds volleyball team and drove the team vehicle and won awards in University Interscholastic League declamation contests. At age 15, she was valedictorian of her 1932 graduating class and imagined herself becoming a teacher, but fate intervened. The family home and general store burned to the ground shortly before she finished school, and just a few weeks later her beloved Papa died after a long, debilitating illness. Although she had been offered a scholarship to the school then known as Southwest Texas State Teachers College, her mother and the Bigfoot school superintendent decided that, because of the double tragedies the family had recently endured and because of the Depression, it made more sense for her to go to Business College in San Antonio. After two years at Draughn's Business College, learning typing, shorthand, bookkeeping and other business skills of the day, she worked briefly for the Terminix Co. in San Antonio and then, after taking the civil service examination, received the offer of a job with the U.S. Soil Conservation Administration regional office in Waco. She had never been farther north than Austin, but her older brother, Luther, counseled her about taking the train to the mysterious Central Texas city, hailing a cab to the best hotel nearest her office in the Post Office building on Franklin it turned out to be the Roosevelt and then finding a room in a respectable home after she got her first paycheck. She did just that, and Waco became her home for the next 70-plus years. In 1940, she married Horace M. Holley, a Whitney native, and not long afterward followed him to Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Ala., where he was stationed with the Army Air Forces and she worked as a secretary with the military. Returning to Waco after the war, the couple moved to Bellmead in 1948, and Mrs. Holley devoted herself for the next 25 years to being a homemaker. She was a superb cook, known for her cakes and pies and sumptuous holiday feasts. Raising three sons, she was deeply involved in La Vega school activities and in the La Vega Church of Christ, where she and her husband known as Holley were charter members. When her boys got to be high-school age in the early 1960s, she went back to work for the federal government, as an executive secretary for the Veterans Administration. She retired in 1979. In retirement, she and her husband enjoyed traveling throughout the country, as well as in Mexico and Canada, and visiting their far-flung children and grandchildren. In 1972, they moved from Bellmead to Waco, where they became members of the Crestview Church of Christ. Preceding her in death were daughter, Carolyn Sue Holley, in 1956; son, Steven Dwight Holley, in 1994; and husband, in 2002. Survivors include two sons, Joe Holley and wife, Tara of Washington, D.C., and Ken Holley and wife, Susan of Austin; a sister, Violet Harris of San Antonio; six grandchildren, Heather, Rachel, Sarah, Matt, Pete and Kate; and five great-grandchildren. Pallbearers will be Charles, Don, Jerry, Jim, Matt and Pete Holley and Ryan Long. In lieu of flowers donations may be made to the Alzheimer's Association 3429 Executive Center Dr. Ste. 100, Austin, TX 78731.