Doris Juanita Smith Adkisson

Doris Adkisson died eight days ago in Hawaii, her home for the last eight years, but will be buried in Dallas on November 11. Doris, 82, will be laid to rest next to her husband Jack and their sons Chris, David, Mike, Kerry and Jack Jr. at Grove Hill Memorial Park following a memorial at First Baptist Dallas downtown.

“I will always love her, but today she is with my brothers,” says her sole surviving son Kevin. “It’s a good day.”

The public is invited to her memorial, because Doris Adkisson lived much of her life in the public eye. Much of the time, it was against her wishes. In 1988 she told D‘s Skip Hollandsworth she wanted to be known as Doris Adkisson — preferred it, that one last vestige of normalcy. But by then, it was too late: She was the matriarch of Dallas’ beloved wrestling family: wife of Fritz Von Erich and mother to boys whose lives and deaths have been told and retold countless times.

“But to be honest,” she told Hollandsworth, “we hardly know who the Adkissons are anymore. We have been a wrestling family for so long. I suppose I want the family to know that when they are tired of being Von Erichs, there is a place they can come to where they can still be Adkissons. But I don’t know if you can ever stop being a Von Erich.”

Doris had long suffered from emphysema, even before she left Dallas and her Swiss Avenue manse and moved to Hawaii, where Kevin and his wife Pam and their kids and grandchildren have lived for close to a decade on a single, sprawling expanse of faraway paradise. When she died last week, she was surrounded by the entire family, which serenaded her with “How Great Thou Art,” says Kevin’s daughter, Kristen Nikolas.

“I kissed her hand, and didn’t let it go,” Kristen says. “Those hands raised six babies, taught me how to crochet, made about a million cups of coffee and held each one of us at one time or another as we cried over the deaths of our brothers or uncles, her sons. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much comfort her hands had offered considering what grief she’d experienced, and that I’d never see them outstretched again for a hug or hear the words, ‘Come here, baby. Cry with Meme.’ She was a rock, as cliché as it sounds, always willing to talk you through the sad times even though her own losses were so much greater.”

Doris Juanita Smith married her Crozier Technical High School sweetheart Jack Adkisson on June 23, 1950 — when Jack was a junior at SMU, and a pretty decent tackle on the Mustangs football squad. Their marriage cost Jack his scholarship, and he transferred to Corpus Christi University before returning to Dallas in 1952 to play for the NFL’s Dallas Texans, which signed him as a free agent.

For a time, early during their marriage, Doris thought she and Jack would live a quiet, anonymous life. “Jack, a raw behemoth of a man, wanted to move to Corpus Christi to open a bait stand,” wrote Hollandsworth in D in 1988. But by 1952, he found his true home: the Sportatorium. He became The Master of the Iron Claw and the father of wrestlers whose fame surpassed that of the mighty Fritz Von Erich.

The tragedy that consumed the family for years is well known — it was the subject of a short ESPN documentary about Kevin just months ago.

Published in the Dallas Morning News.