Iola Thompson Watson Hart

Graveside Service:  2 p.m. Saturday, November 23, 2019 at Springtown Cemetery. On May 2, 1913, Iola Lorena Thompson was born on a small creekside homestead east of Springtown, near the community of New Hope.  When she was three years old, the family moved to a larger place closer to Springtown, so the children could go to school.  She graduated from high school in 1931 and moved into Fort Worth to find work, but her thoughts were never far from Springtown. She had a special bond with her two older and two younger brothers.  In the 1930’s she first worked in the packaging department at the Montgomery Ward Distribution Center and lived in a boarding house with a group of girls who became lifelong friends.  After World War II began, she went to school to become an electronics technician and worked at Consolidated Vaultee, until shortly before the end of the war.  She also repaired all of her friends’ irons, until new ones were manufactured.  Before dawn, six days a week, she and Clifford, her closest brother, carpooled to work and arrived home again in the evening after dark.  As the war was waining, her brother, Hammie, returned to the U. S. on a hospital ship gravely ill.  She drove her parents through the night in heavy rain and fog to Longview to see him; he lived.  A few years later, her father was felled by strokes and completely incapacitated.  Iola, Clifford, and their mother cared for him for over ten years. After the war, Iola and her husband, Ed Watson, settled again in Fort Worth, and she enjoyed being a housewife, cooking, cleaning, and sewing to her heart’s content.  After many more years of going back and forth between Fort Worth and Springtown, she and Ed moved “home” in 1963; and, she went back to work, this time in Azle at Mitchell’s in piece goods, and then, for several years in the mid-seventies and early eighties, she manned the Springtown desk for White’s Funeral Home.  She finished off her working years in 1986 and enjoyed family, traveling, and leisure pursuits. In 2004, after being widowed, she moved to the Houston area to be near her remaining family, since she couldn’t induce them to move to Springtown.  She had many happy memories from such a long life, and she had perfect recall of all of them until the end. She is predeceased by her mother Aggie Pearson Thompson; father, Wm. Marion Thompson (Jack); brothers, Lee Hamilton, Clifford, Milton, and Quentin (Skeezix) Thompson; husbands, Edward E. Watson and Wm. Marion Hart (Bill); special sisters-in-law, Gay, Marguerite, Ruth and Dorothy Thompson; and special cousin, Stella Faye Elam; and special nieces, Connie Rux and Margaret Scott. Survivors are her daughter, Marion Garrett Wilson (husband, Jackson); granddaughter, Erin Garrett Mayer (Rob); grandson, Edward W. Garrett (Connie); great-grandchildren, Sierra (Daniel), Matthew (Amy), Wilson, Allie (Mason), and Jessica “the little one” Mayer.  She saved her greatest and purest love for her grandchildren, but she had special love for many friends who’ve gone on. She was “A BEAUTIFUL BROWN EYED GIRL”!