Mary Dorinne Rister Glenn

September 14, 1921 - March 17, 2024

Mary Dorinne Rister Glenn died in the Ledbetter family home in Leander on Sunday, March 17, 2024, at the age of 102 ½. She is preceded in death by her husband James Louis Glenn and three of her five children, Violet (Vi) Jackson, Betty Chadwick, and Ken Glenn; and one grandchild, Jay Cothran. She is survived by two children, Carolyn Gandy and Donna Ledbetter (husband, Bill); nine grandchildren, Meredith Shaevitz, Jeremy Shaevitz, Christopher (Chris) Glenn, Heather Callender, Micah Ledbetter, Hannah Lindsley, Leah Marsden, Josiah Ledbetter, and Noah Ledbetter; and eleven great-grandchildren, Dawson and Delaney Shaevitz, Dylan Shaevitz, Jolene and Shelby Glenn, Hunter Callender, Eli and Isaac (Teo) Lindsley, Azariah and Leilani Marsden, and Atlas Ledbetter.

Dorinne was born the oldest of seven children on September 14, 1921, in Roby, Texas to Kenneth Jefferson (KJ) Rister and Geta Lodaska Pair Rister. Over the next fifteen years, siblings were born: Lonnie, Jack (Ham), Donald (Cotton), Bill, Bob, and Shirley.

The Risters were farmers in Roby, raising cotton and cattle. When Dorinne was about eleven years old, her dad took on a farm hand. Soon this man’s twelve-year-old son James Glenn joined him and became a Rister family “addon,” growing up alongside the Rister children.

In her written testimony, Dorinne remembers as a child memorizing 2 Timothy 2:15 with her grandfather while shelling black-eyed peas in his back yard under the big mulberry tree: “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman, that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”

She also wrote, “My family loved to attend the monthly community “singings” at our church on Sunday afternoons, and everyone knows there is a lot of Bible teaching in songs and hymns!” During a revival meeting one Friday night in an open-air tabernacle when she was 12 years old, her Sunday School teacher Mrs. Josey asked her if she wanted to trust Jesus Christ as her Savior. Without hesitation, she “just did it.”

Dorinne attended Hardin-Simmons University from 1940-1944 at a time when there was no money to go to college. She and her dad went to visit the President of HSU who told them that if Dorinne wanted to attend, he would find a way for her to do so. Under his direction, she was able to work her way through college while living with Thelma Andrews, the HSU librarian, who was a valued influence in her life for decades. Dorinne graduated with a BA in Chemistry.

During WWII, many of the Rister clan joined the Navy. Dorinne enlisted in the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services) and served in Massachusetts, New York, and at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. She even emceed the Second Anniversary Celebration of the WAVES. She was discharged from the Navy upon the death of her mother in April of 1945.

When James Glenn was discharged from the Navy, he returned to the Rister family farm and proposed to Dorinne. They married Christmas Eve, 1945, just months after the end of the war. Because of James’s status as an “add-on” to the Rister clan, some in the community thought Dorinne had married her brother!

Beginning in 1946, James and Dorinne both attended the University of Texas, living in a small Streamline trailer at the Pecan Grove Trailer Park on Barton Springs Road in Austin, a landmark that exists to this day. Before Dorinne graduated with her second degree, they had to live apart for a time. It seems that one of the requirements of a Home Economics degree was to live in the Home Ec house for an entire semester. James had to “come calling” on his wife to see her! She was a member of Omricon Nu, the Home Economics National Honor Society at UT, even serving as president for a time.

Dorinne began her working career as an Abstractor in Lamesa, and then as a secretary for a lumber corporation in Houston, always being involved in a Business and Professional Women’s Club or Secretarial Association wherever she went. She began working for Coulter Hoppess, a local attorney, when she and James finally settled in Bryan in 1953, where they spent the next 48 years in the same house on Highland Drive.

Still childless in 1955, Dorinne and James sought to adopt and were blessed with an infant son, Kenneth, just a few hours old. After two years, they got word that a sibling group of three girls was available, Violet (6), Betty (5), and Carolyn (4), so they jumped at the chance to fill out their family. Unknown to them, Dorinne was pregnant with Donna when they went to pick up the girls. They had five kids within two years, spaced seven years apart!

After a short stint at being a stay-at-home mom, in 1960 Dorinne continued employment with Mr. Hoppess as he and others worked to establish a local life insurance company. She became the secretary at General Security Life Insurance Company, an association that would stay with her until her retirement at the end of 1986 and even beyond. GSL was the only home office life insurance company in Bryan, and she was the first female life underwriter. After attending Texas A&M University for post graduate work, she was promoted to Chief Underwriter and Corporate Secretary in 1968. She continued to study for recertification with the Academy of Life Underwriting every other year throughout her career.

Back on the home front, James and Dorinne and their children were active at Calvary Baptist Church until sometime in the 1960s, followed by 15 or 20 years at Emmanuel Baptist Church, and then for about 20 years at Central Baptist Church.

Sometime after all their kids had left home and while still working for GSL, James and Dorinne prayed and thanked God that they had so much -- more than enough -- after so many lean years. When she next got a raise, they prayed again, and decided that anything God gave them over what was already enough would be given away, so they gave the “raise” to church, to their children, and to others, from then on. One of her favorite life verses was Malachi 3:10: “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in My house, and test Me now in this,” says the Lord of hosts, “if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until it overflows.”

They always found God true to this word. After her retirement in 1986, Dorinne took Tole Painting classes and learned to paint wood pieces. She eventually bought a scroll saw and taught herself how to cut her own pieces to paint. She even participated in some local craft fairs, especially to raise money for her favorite causes. Her pieces have been given as gifts to many of her friends and family members.

During the 1990’s Dorinne was an active participant in the Discovery program, a Christian outreach for wives of foreign students at A&M, where she taught Bible Studies, as well as sewing and painting classes.

James and Dorinne moved to Leander in 2001 to live in the little house behind the home of their youngest daughter, Donna, and her family. They made First Baptist Church of Leander their church home, and then after James died (5/12/2012) and Dorinne could no longer drive, she joined Bill and Donna at their church home at Hope Chapel in Austin, beginning in 2014. In Leander, she had a “ministry of banana bread.” She baked a big batch of small loaves of banana bread every weekend or every other weekend, along with a big pot of soup or stew, so she’d have soup and banana bread to take to the shutins of her church. Even in her nineties, she drove around after church delivering her goodies and a copy of the Sunday bulletin to those (mostly elderly or injured) folks who couldn’t come to church. When she started going to Hope Chapel, she would make enough bread to stock the church coffee/tea bar and one extra mini loaf for the junior high boy who always sat near her and brought her a Sunday morning cup of hot tea.

Over her lifetime, Dorinne taught Bible classes for a long span of seven or eight decades, continuing to substitute teach in her Sunday School class into her 90s. She was an authorized Kay Arthur Inductive Bible Study teacher. At both Central Baptist in Bryan and First Baptist in Leander, she was part of a church prayer chain, where someone could call in a prayer request, which would be immediately prayed for and then passed by phone chain to the next person in the chain, who would then pray together with that caller, and so on down the line. Dorinne herself had an extensive personal prayer time almost every night, of about an hour or an hour and a half, which included prayer for all her family (until her memory faded, she could tell you each grandchild’s birthday, because on her prayer list, she had birthdates written beside each name), friends, and any others the Lord brought to mind. She would write on her church bulletin the names of people she met during the service and then pray for them that week. There were even some occasions when she stayed up the whole night praying and weeping for family members going through a critical time.

Dorinne’s grandmother name was Dodie, which is how she was known to almost everyone since living in Leander. Dodie was valued and loved and will be remembered by so many whose lives she touched through her prayers, teaching, gifts of banana bread, and various creative outlets like quilting, painting, sewing, and crocheting. She loved her Lord and sought to honor Him her whole life. She did her work heartily.

“Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance. It is the Lord Christ whom you serve.”

~

Colossians 3:23-24