JOHN ROBERT KEELING

 The following bio was taken from page 266 of the book entitled “Rusk County History” compiled and edited and used with permission of the Rusk County Historical Commission.

 Transcribed by Shirley Koym

 Submitted by Gloria Brimley Mayfield, Cemeteries of Texas

My father, John Robert Keeling, was born March 19, 1896, in the Rhodes Community of Rusk County, son of William Briley Keeling and his first wife, Sarah Atwood Clinton.  William Briley Keeling was the oldest son of Leonard Worthy Keeling and Frances Ann Briley.  Sarah Atwood Clinton was the daughter of Robert Alexander Clinton and Myra Jane Brown.

 William Briley Keeling died just before his son’s twenty-first birthday, and John Robert joined the Marines that year, training at Parris Island, South Carolina, and Quantico, Virginia.  I think he always regretted the attack of flu that kept him from going overseas earlier, since the Thirteenth Marine Corps arrived in France too late for the fighting.  After the war, he spent some time in Haskell County with his sister, Annie Eugenia, who had married Charlie McLeroy, and their children, and then he worked for Tidewater Petroleum before he married Emma Roberta Williams on February 11, 1927.  Emma, my mother, didn’t care for oil fields, so before their marriage, he returned to Rusk County and the farm he had inherited from his grandmother, Myra Jane Clinton.

 “Robbie” Williams was born September 23, 1898, in Rhodes Community, the daughter of Robert Walton Williams and Catherine Elizabeth Wood, and granddaughter of Zachariah C. Williams and Mary Elizabeth Iverson, and of Robert Bennett Wood and Emma Malvina Jones.  Emma Roberta, or “Robbie”, attended North Texas State College in Denton, and taught school in Rusk and Upshur counties before she married.

John Robert and “Robbie” had five children.  They had Jean, who married William E. Langford; John Robert, Jr., who married Betty Fields; Carolyn Elizabeth, who married Dr. B. J. Blankenship; Mark Williams, who married Evie Joy Butler; and Gerald Albert Keeling.

Gerald or “Jerry” graduated from Henderson High School, but the first four children graduated from Minden High School, the third generation to attend school on that hill since Grandmother Williams attended Rock Hill Institute.

I’ll never know how our parents had the courage in the 1930’s to tell five children that they were going to college, but they did; and we did.  I was first to finish at Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches, in 1947, and Jerry was the last one in 1967.  Dad had died in 1963, so I took Mother to Nacogdoches for Jerry’s graduation.  It was the end of a very long road, 1943-1967,  but Dad had seen four of us through college, and Mother had completed the task.

Mother lived alone in the house she and Dad had built in 1936, until 1980.  She turned her extraordinary energy to her flowers, iris, roses, daylilies, and camellias.  She grew them, loved them, and shared them.  It was hard to think of Mother without thinking of flowers.  The other joy of her life was her grandchildren:  Elizabeth and William E. Langford, Jr.; John Robert III and Jennifer Keeling; Roberta, Lynn, and Jean Ann Blankenship, and Cheryl and Melissa Keeling.

Mother died June 25, 1981, and is buried beside Dad at Shiloh Cemetery.

Submitted by Mrs. William E. Langford