Katherine Devol Leary

Katherine was a proud lifelong Texan. Her father and mother. Charles and Blanche Devol, had followed the oil boom down from eastern Ohio to Oklahoma and finally to Texas, where she was born on the Fourth of July, 1921. Doted on by her middle-aged parents and her much older brother, Charles, she grew up in Fort Worth and entered Texas Christian University at 17. It was there that she came to know a young man from Schenectady, New York, named Jack Leary. They met in the Glee Club, although Jack (then as later) could scarcely carry a tune. Katherine and Jack married in December 1941, a mere ten days after Pearl Harbor. After the war, Katherine worked to help put Jack through the University of Texas, typing his school papers on the 1942 Royal typewriter that she kept forever after. They settled in Beaumont, where they raised their two sons, Timothy and Patrick, and where Katherine was active in the Symphony League and the St. Mark’s Episcopal Church choir, both attesting to her lifelong love of music.

After the family moved to southwest Houston in 1960, Katherine went to work as an administrative secretary for the Health Department of the Houston Independent School District. She sang in the choir at St. George’s Episcopal, where she made many friends who treasured her warm, gracious, and kindly personality. Following Jack’s death from cancer in 1978, Katherine faced her own health challenges, but in the 1980s, after retiring from the school district, she had recovered enough to indulge a longing to travel the world. She rambled everywhere, from Sweden to New Zealand to Ireland, and from the Holy Land to the Soviet Union, and brought home many keepsakes from her journeys.

Almost thirty years ago, Katherine bought a house in Sugar Land, Texas, near her older son, Tim, and his family, where she could give free rein to her love of playing bridge and tending to her garden. In her last years, when she could no longer do the gardening herself, she nevertheless took endless delight in her flowerbeds and in watching and talking to the birds who visited her back yard. She and her younger son, Patrick, who lives near Chicago, were particularly close and talked on the phone every day. Determined to remain in her home despite her increasing frailty, she reveled in holiday visits from her family. She leaves behind her son Patrick and his wife, Sherrill Weaver; daughter-in-law Diane Leary; her three grandchildren Jason Leary and his wife Jenell, Margaret Rogers and her husband Cody, Amanda Budnik and her husband Taylor; and four great-grandchildren, Easton and Mason Rogers and Zoey and Carson Budnik.