Beryl Moody

Polly Moody

1924 – 2020

Beryl Pauline “Polly” (Davis) Moody, who passed from this world in Corpus Christi on 3 May 2020, was born in Houston on 22 September 1924.

Her parents were Clara Katherine (Rouquette) and Arthur Lee Davis, who came from and returned to settle in Fulton. Her father built a home for his family a stone’s throw from Aransas Bay – family lore has it that the timber came from the causeway to Lamar – that has weathered every hurricane since and still stands.

Polly lived in that home while she attended school, first attending the one-room school house – now a museum – in Fulton and then graduating from Rockport High School. She then attended business college, and was, before long, working for Pan American Airways in Brownsville.  They decided to promote her to a position in Florida, but she wanted to stay closer to home and returned to Fulton.

As a young woman as well as after she was married, Polly loved to dance, traveling to dance halls from Goose Island to Aransas Pass (where she once won a jitterbug contest). She took great pleasure in her mother’s Depression-era handiwork in sewing stylish dancing gowns and jackets from flour and feed sacks.

In Fulton, on the beach, Polly met the love of her life, Fred Worth Moody, over for the day from Taft, where he’d been raised, and on leave as a decorated WWII officer and transport pilot in the Army Air Forces. They were married within the year, on 20 April 1946.

They first made their home in Taft, but soon moved to Denver City, where they ran a dry-cleaning business, then Pecos (farming) and Lovington, NM (farming).  They eventually returned to Taft to raise their children, where Worth continued farming while Polly worked with Drs. Rose and John Tunnell, for whom she served as their clinic’s office manager for many years.  They even, for a brief time, were proprietors of a BBQ restaurant in Taft. Later, they moved to a ranch outside Sinton, where she cared for an elderly member of the owners’ family and he helped with operations.

After Worth passed in 1990, Polly moved to El Rancho, just north of Santa Fe, NM, to live with her daughter and lend a hand with her granddaughters. As they finished secondary school, she moved again and lived with her son for a spell in Manassas, VA.  In both places, she made good friends and expanded the number of fans of her cooking. Over the years, she enjoyed both hosting visits from friends (and fans of her cooking) and travel adventures to and with family in California, Canada, Germany and France.  However, she came to understand that she wanted to settle down again close to her beginnings, and moved back to Rockport for the new millennium, into a home beside Tule Creek and near the home that her father had built.

Throughout her life, Polly was a doer, whether gardening (she had a prodigious green thumb), cooking (she favored sweets), cleaning (to which she brought a chemist’s acute insight and industrial-strength fervor), or caring for others.

She was unable to pass a garden center without stopping and adding to her prized collection of rose, bougainvillea, and hibiscus plants; the lattermost survived Hurricane Harvey and continue to produce dinner plate-sized hibiscus blooms.

When she arrived at family gatherings, the foremost question was, “Did Polly bring her pies?” She proudly displayed her baking creations for all to taste and enjoy … whether it was her pies or homemade fudge, her friends and family knew they would be treated to a sweet taste of heaven filled with love.

She loved to laugh, and had a positive outlook, grace, and a sense of style that she kept about her no matter the circumstance or company. She was, up until their recent passing, on the phone with her brother and sister in Houston and Bend, OR, weekly – if not daily – to argue politics and celebrate the mutually enhanced wonders of each other’s children and grandchildren. She was pleased to be part of and bring Texas to the weddings of both her granddaughters in San Diego, CA, and Portland, OR.

Interviewed by the Rockport Pilot on the occasion of her 90th birthday, and looking back, she summed up her life by saying, emphatically (as was reported then), “I’ve been pretty lucky.”

Her family is grateful for, and Polly was often touched by, the thoughtful care and supportive neighborliness – spanning the gamut from day-to-day kindness to hurricane evacuation  – provided by friends and family in recent years, especially from Wilma Littleton, Pat and Ronny Barker, Ann and Bart Davis, Kathy and Paul McLendon, Mary Anne and Ford Davis, Chelle and Billy Barker, Judi and the late Jim Morrison, Jolynn Gamboe Randle, Dot Rau, Verna Yeamans, Patti Greenlees Locascio, Betty Fowler, Angie Mendiola, Brenda Sanchez, Jane LaPlant, and Esperanza Singleterry. The family is also grateful for staff who helped most recently at Holmgreen Center and with Christus Spohn Hospice. Finally, the family would like to extend a very special thank you to her private caregivers – Ofelia Vargas, Priscilla Pena, Angela Garza, and Olga Ortiz – for enriching Polly’s final days with their kindness, love and joy.

Polly was preceded in death by: her parents, Clara and Arthur; her brothers, Arthur and Bruce Davis; her sister, Genevieve (Davis) Schwab; and her husband, Worth. She will be well-remembered by: her sister-in-law, Ruth Moody; her nieces and nephews, Chris Olson, Kathy McLendon, Bart and Ford Davis, Eric and Von Schwab, Sara Moody Williams, Duellen Moody, Ann Berry, Mega Spain, Bob Moody, and Kay Olsen; her daughter, Janet Moody (Christian Burks) in Seattle, WA, and son, Gary Worth Moody (Oriana Rodman) in Santa Fe, NM; her granddaughters, Caitlin Bacher (Jamie) in Berkeley, CA, and Marcail Moody-Burks (Frank Smialek) in Denver, CO; and her great-grandchildren, Calista, Quentin and Verity, all of whom had visited and found – as had their mothers – a home-away-from-home on her lap in the Coastal Bend.

A memorial celebration of Polly’s life will be held later this year, and an announcement will be published in the Rockport Pilot when that date is set. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Meals on Wheels program at the Aransas County Council on Aging (for details, call Debbie Thompson at 361-729-5352).