Rebecca Dickerson

Rebecca Nell Dickerson, 1916 - 2009

Rebecca Nell Dickerson, 93, died in Houston on Saturday, December 5, 2009. She was born in Cleburne, Texas on August, 18, 1916, the youngest child of Jessie Lafayette Peacock and Charles D. Dickerson, Sr. Reared in Cleburne, she was the granddaughter of Confederate veterans and Johnson County pioneers Sarah Rebecca Hogue and Lafayette Peacock.

Miss Dickerson graduated from Cleburne High School in 1934 and from the Texas State College for Women (previously C.I.A. and now Texas Women's University) in Denton in 1938. After a year of graduate study in Social Work at Tulane in New Orleans she was employed by the Works Projects Administration (WPA) and assigned first to San Antonio and then Dallas County. In 1943 she was awarded a fellowship to the University of Chicago and completed further graduate studies there.

In 1945, before the end of World War II, she was enlisted by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and commenced the adventure of her life. Stationed in London to await the end of the war, she remembered the shocking announcement of President Franklin Roosevelt's sudden death in Warm Springs, Georgia. She obtained a scarce pass to the Memorial Service for him at St. Paul's Cathedral. By a stroke of fortune she found an aisle seat and was able to plainly view the British Royal Family, most of the other exiled crowned heads of Europe, as well as Prime Minister and Mrs. Churchill proceeding down the aisle toward the front. The tears slowly rolling down Winston Churchill's cheek was an image she was never to forget. In less than a month, on the afternoon of May 8, 1945, she arrived, by military air transport, in a "Paris gone wild." It was V.E. Day, Germany had finally surrendered and she had been assigned to duty in Stuttgart, Germany. There she labored, through 1946, to help displaced, war-ravaged Europeans trying to find their way back to some degree of normalcy.

Nell Dickerson began working for the Veteran's Administration in 1947 first in Waco and then in Dallas. After completing a Master's Degree in Social Work at the University of Chicago, in 1952, she resumed what was to become her career with the V.A. Working in Chicago until moving to Houston in 1961, she retired from the Houston VA Hospital in 1981. After another 19 years at Hermann and Methodist Hospitals and ancillary clinics she retired for good in 2000.

In addition to her parents, Nell Dickerson was preceded in death by three sisters, Doris Hart Bates, Mariellen Dickerson Peyton, and Ted Dickerson Cousins; one brother, C. D. Dickerson, Jr.; three nieces, Betty Bates Aboltin, Saralyn Bates, and Martha Dickerson (Mrs. Bob) Miller. She is survived by three nieces: Susan Peyton Silliman, Great Falls, Virginia; Ellen Peyton Weinacht, Balmorrhea; Texas; and Lisa Peyton Fielder, Austin, Texas; two nephews: C. Dan Dickerson, III; Anson, Texas and Richard Holland "Dick" Dickerson, Houston, Texas, as well as a host of grand nieces and nephews.

A much loved "Aunt Nell" will be bid farewell at 10:00 a.m., Thursday, December 10, with a funeral service at Cleburne, Crosier-Pearson Funeral Home and burial immediately following, Dickerson Family Plot, Cleburne Memorial Cemetery.

Service

Crosier-Pearson Cleburne
512 North Ridgeway Dr.
Cleburne, TX 76033
Thursday, December 10, 2009
10:00 a.m.
Map to Service Location

Interment

Cleburne Memorial Cemetery