LaDonna Jeanne Alford (née Palmer) was born to Arthur and Geraldine Palmer on Aug. 5, 1930, in Dodge City, Kansas. The family had seven daughters, and LaDonna was the middle child.
She grew up in Wichita and graduated from Wichita North High School in 1948. She went on to study nursing at El Dorado Junior College, where she was crowned homecoming queen. The boy who plopped the crown on her head was the captain of the football team, W.T. “Wimpy” Alford, whom she married the next year.
The couple made their home in Wimpy’s hometown of Hull, Texas, where they raised three children: Rhonda, Rudy and Rita.
LaDonna was a nurse at Dayton Memorial Hospital before working for Dr. Gibson in Hull, and she was told that she always gave “painless” shots. She was a member of First Baptist Church in Daisetta, where she taught Sunday School to three- and four-year-olds.
She was an immensely talented visual artist. She was self-taught, and the walls of her home featured her oil paintings: pastoral landscapes, flowers, snowy mountains. LaDonna and her friend Mary Jo Best painted run-through signs for the Hull-Daisetta Bobcat football team that were almost too pretty to be destroyed by the players who tore through them on Friday nights.
She loved having animals around, and her family had countless dogs and cats over the years. There were rabbits for a time, as well as cows, various birds, and a pet skunk. If she saw a stray, she tried to take care of it. Even in her final days, she fed neighborhood cats that herded around her house on Bobcat Lane, and she fretted over having enough corn for the squirrels in her backyard.
LaDonna and Wimpy’s house in Hull was a hub of activity for their family as it grew. For decades, Wimpy ran the family propane business in their garage, and LaDonna tended a swimming pool large enough to fit all six grandchildren at once. They kept a fridge full of Dr Peppers just off the carport, and “Granny,” as her grandkids called her, seemed to have an unlimited supply of candy bars (not the bite-sized ones). She let the kids stay up late, watched game shows with them, and often slept in longer than they did.
LaDonna was strong-minded and very particular, and she liked things to be a certain way, so it makes sense that she was such an active member of the Texas State Association of Parliamentarians. She was treasurer of its Beaumont unit, and when she wasn’t doing that, she was bowling as much as she could, traveling all over the U.S. for tournaments. She bowled until her league shut down for the pandemic in 2020, when she was 90 years old.
In recent years, LaDonna followed the Houston Astros religiously. She hated to miss a game the way some people hate to miss church. She watched from her recliner and devised her own method of keeping score at home, turning her spiralbound notebook to a fresh page at the start of each game and then filling it with numbers and lines and squiggles that made sense only to her, inning after inning.
Her travels also included family reunions in Kansas every summer. Sometimes her grandkids traveled with her, marking their route in the atlas. If she’d had her way, every one of her kids and grandkids and great-grandkids would’ve made the trip with her every summer, so she could show them off in front of her six sisters, who called themselves the Sisty Uglers.
The pull of her family in Kansas and her commitment to staying connected to where she came from informed LaDonna’s interest in genealogy. It was more than an interest -- it was an obsession. She could talk about her family tree for hours, and she often did. More than most of us, she understood that those who came before us, even a hundred generations ago, are like the headwaters that feed the currents of our lives.
LaDonna passed away on March 22, 2025, at Houston Methodist Baytown Hospital. She was preceded in death by her parents, her husband, and four of her sisters: Thelma Varner, Joyce DeWinter, Wynona Marsh and Phyllis Britton.
Some say that we die not when we take our final breath, but when the last story about us is told. If that is true, then LaDonna will live for many more generations in the stories told by those who survive her: two sisters, Deane Richardson of Wichita, Kansas, and Janice Wakeland of Grove, Oklahoma; her children, Rhonda Maxwell of Nederland, Rudy Alford and wife Marcie of Hull, and Rita Rudolph and husband Mark of Huffman; her grandchildren, Casey Maxwell and wife Heather of Nederland, Angie Alford of Houston, Kristin Bayard and husband BJ of Nederland, Aaron Alford and wife Lauri of Bryan, Kelsey Price and husband Steven of Victoria, and Bret Rudolph of Houston; and her great-grandchildren, Kaylee Greer of Nederland, Katelyn Maxwell of Houston, Savannah Maxwell of Nederland, Owen Alford of Bryan, Leila Maxwell of Nederland, Everett Alford of Bryan, and Conner Price of Victoria.
Her pallbearers are Casey Maxwell, Aaron Alford, Bret Rudolph, BJ Bayard, Steven Price, and Eric Zapalac.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you donate to the charity of your choice.