Nell Sue Gurley

NELL WHITMAN GURLEY 1887-1984 THE ACTRESS

She was 92 years old, but young men vied to sit beside her at dinner parties. She was not beautiful in her old age. she had lost weight and ws thin, and her former silver hair had lost its lustre and was just plain gray, but her wit and repartee were her attractions. People gathered around her to tell stories, but unexpectedly she always topped them, which brought forth roars of laughter from her audience.

She was the "belle" in any setting, but she never remembered the next day even having been there. She lived every minute of the present fully, but she could not recall the immediate past.

Nell Whitman was born in 1887 at Danville, texas, the fourth of ten children of a Baptist minister, the Rev. Charles DeBose Whitman, and his genteel wife, Emma Dale Jones. Both her mother and father were college educated and sprung from the antebellum planter families in Tennessee and Alabama. Her father's chosen profession made them poor, but all of the children were endowed with good looks, intelligence, and fun loving spirits.

Somehow, all of the ten children got to college. It was there that Nell excelled. She was introduced to drama at the University of Texas, and from then on, her idol was Sarah Bernhardt. More than money, she wanted a career on the stage, but to her minister father, that was unthinkable. So, she obtained a scholarship to the Chatauqua Summer School in New York state, where a drama professor fom the University of Chicago taught her elocution and how to tell Bible stories in a theatrical manner. She developed this teaching into a remarkable skill which she possesed and applied throughout the rest of her life.

She returned to Texas to the respectable profession of school teaching, but each summer she signed up with the Chatauqua Circuit to perform before small town audiences in a tent. As long as she confined her actiing to Bible story-telling, she had her fther's approval, but she was allowed to appear only i towns where she could be the house guest of the local Baptist minister's family.

At 28, she married Davis Gurley, III, heir of a prominent and wealthy Waco family. She had four children, and through the Depression, motherhood widowhood, and a reutrn to teaching, she put aside her dream of being an actress. Then, after retirement when she entered old age and her arteries began to harden, she forgot tribial day to day events, but her mind remembered those wonderful summers of Chatauqua training and her longed for destiny. From then on, she was THE ACTRESS--the main attraction at every gathering she attended, glowing with the story telling and repartee.

At age 92, she developed pneumonia and was taken to the hospital, where she was fed intravaneously. Even the tubes nd parapharnalia could not heep her "off stage" when she decided to leave her bed and roam the hospital corridor. Told by the nurse that she could not go because the equipment must remain attached to her body she declared, "Then I will just take it with me," and started out the door. The nurse grabbed the bottle, and holding on to the long tube, followed her down the hall. "The Actress", in her element, made it look like the procession of a queen and her entourage.

Upon her return home from the hospital, she did not like the placement of the furniture in her room, and so began re-arranging it, lifting and moving heavy objects without physical repercussions. That very same night, she turned over too far in her bed, fell out, and broke her hip.

Back to the hospital for surgery and a lengthy stay, then home again. While still confined to bedpans, she declared she was going to get up and go to the bathroom. The nurse reminded her, "You cannot walk on that leg with a broken hip."

And she answered, "The I'll hop." And The Actress did.

She recovered completely from the broken hip and lived on to age 97. She died in 1984 in California, but was buried beside her husband on the Gurley lot in Oakwood Cemetery at Waco, Texas.