Willie Kathryn Ulmer Daniels

Willie Kathryn Ulmer Daniels, born May 2, 1933, died at home on December 9, 2013, from lung cancer. Willie was a well-known teacher, writer, primitive artist, genteel Southern lady and outstanding Christian role model for her daughters and the many students she taught at Harrison Central High and Harrison Central Ninth Grade schools. A lover of the written word, she penned one novel, ""Sweet Beulah"" and was a voracious reader. She was an avid history buff, often arguing the fine points of an historical event with her husband and daughters. Her love of nature led to many family vacations spent camping in semi-remote areas of the country, traipsing through cemeteries and up crumbling mountainous trails, canoeing down rock-strewn, white-water rivers, telling stories around the campfire and encouraging her children to pick up unusual pebbles, tiny fossils and bits of petrified wood as souvenirs. Her ability to turn the events in their family's history into compelling stories and paintings was a source of great entertainment for her daughters as they grew up travelling the back roads of Mississippi and beyond, riding in the rear seat of a green Pontiac with a camper and giant yellow Labrador retriever in tow. She wanted to bring her daughters up with a love of the world, its geology, geography and peoples.
Willie was born in Shreveport, with one brother, Junior, and two sisters, Ida Belle and Mary Jane. Her parents, James Valentine Ulmer Sr., of Pascagoula, and Jessie Marian Bickham Ulmer, of Shreveport, moved to Mississippi in 1936 to weather the Great Depression on a 120-acre farm near the Greene/Perry county line. She attended Beaumont High School and graduated two years early as class valedictorian. She was a member of Pleasant Hill Baptist Church and was baptized at seven years of age in Atkinson Creek. She married Thomas Daniels, from Indianola/Glen Allan, on February 15, 1964, after they met at Keesler Air Force Base, where she worked as a civil service secretary. Jamey, her oldest child, died in 1968 during football practice at Harrison Central High School.
She became a schoolteacher in 1974, following her graduation from The University of Southern Mississippi. Her summers off allowed the family to travel, planning trips around her husband's Highway Patrol and Army Reserve schedule. During the year, they traveled around the state, from primitive camping on the Mississippi River near the ruins of Windsor to McCleod Water Park and from J.P. Coleman State Park in Iuka to Bogue Chitto Water Park near McComb. In the summers, grander camping trips carried them to the Land Between the Lakes in Kentucky, Shiloh in Tennessee, Four Corners, the Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains.
Her Christian faith and care for others were important parts of Willie's character. She spent many years as a Sunday school and Vacation Bible School teacher, and helped found the Maranatha Club at Harrison Central. She invited her niece, Darlene, to come live with her family during Darlene's high school and college years, a time of emotional upheaval in her niece's family. Others came to live with Willie's family as well - nephews who needed guidance; family members who needed a temporary place to live; Nano, an exchange student, who lived with them for only a year but who became like a son during that time; and several of her daughters' friends who needed somewhere to stay on weekends, holidays and summer breaks from college. Willie loved them all and gave each of them something special - the feeling of home.
She is survived by her husband, Thomas, of 50 years, daughters, Susan and Kathy, and Susan's husband John Bosarge; her grandchildren, Celeste, Gracie, Drew, and Jensen; her niece, Darlene, her husband Bobby, daughters, Sarah and Jessica, and grandchildren, Katie and A.J.; and a slew of in-laws, nieces, nephews and friends. She is mostly survived by the memories she left them all, memories of a warm and compassionate woman who never stopped finding new avenues of artistic and intellectual expression and encouraging the same in those around her.
Willie's life will be celebrated during a visitation on December 12, from 5-7pm at RIEMANN FAMILY FUNERAL HOME on Three Rivers Road in Gulfport. Her funeral will be on December 13, at 11:15am at Woolmarket Baptist Church in Biloxi, with visitation one hour prior. Burial will follow in Biloxi National Cemetery.
Flowers are appreciated as are donations to the Library Foundation of Hancock County for Dolly Parton's Imagination Library (sponsored by the Rotary Club of Bay St. Louis), 312 Highway 90, Bay St. Louis, MS 39520.
Tributes may be offered at www.riemannfamily.com.