Elsie L. Costello

Memorial services will be held at Baldwin-Lee Funeral Home in Pearl on Sunday, October 27, 2013, at 4:00pm with visitation commencing two hours prior to service time. Interment will follow at a later date in the Jones Family Cemetery in Lucedale.

Elsie was a native of Lucedale, having been born December 10, 1952, to Cleve Howell and Myrtle Lee Jones Howell. Following the deaths of her mother when she was three, half-brother Everette Donist Langley when she was eight, and her father when she was eleven, she was reared by her sister and brother-in-law, Bessie and Ernest “Shorty” Howell, who moved to Pearl in 1968. Elsie graduated from Pearl High School in 1970, and attended Hinds Junior College in Raymond for legal secretarial training.

She began her secretarial career in 1971, working for several area attorneys, Rankin County Cablevision and Kap International. In June 1985 she was employed by McLaurin & McLaurin attorneys in Brandon where she worked for over twenty-eight years as a valued employee until shortly before her death.

In her spare time Elsie loved cooking, entertaining, Red-Hatting, playing bunco, attending plays and concerts, bargain hunting and spending time with her extensive network of family, former classmates and friends. She was a member of the Baptist faith.

Elsie is survived by her husband of thirty-seven years, Robert M. “Mac” Costello, Jr., whom she married on September 25, 1976; son, Robert M. “Robby” Costello, III and his wife Bridget; and grandson, Robert Briggs Costello, all of Pearl. She also leaves her sister, Bessie M. Howell and husband “Shorty”; niece, Denise Davis and husband Todd; nephew, Tracy Howell; and special cousins, Donnie Sue Cumberland, Audrey O’Neal, and Tina McCraney, all of Lucedale. Additional survivors include her uncle, Jimmy Dale Jones, of Carson City, Nevada, and great-niece, Chloe Howell, of Lake Charles, Louisiana. She also leaves many treasured friends, who together with her loving family cherish her memory