Alma Ruth Meredith

Alma Ruth (Piercy) Meredith (b.1923), age 93, died in New Orleans on February 5, 2017. Alma, who also went by Betty, retired in 1994 from Hillsdale Middle School after 20 years as a social studies teacher. Mrs. Meredith was preceded in death by her husband Olin Meredith (1975) and sons John Meredith (1967) and Eric Meredith (2012). Among her survivors are her sons Olen Meredith of St. Augustine, Fl, Robert Meredith of Andes, NY and Paul Meredith of New Orleans, La, as well as seven grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

Alma is best remembered as a teacher, a mother of five boys and a world traveler. But her unlikely journey began as a child in abject poverty. After she married her husband, Olin in 1941, it was still years before the family escaped the coalmines of southern Illinois.

In 1964, Ciba-Geigy hired Olin as supervisor of maintenance for its new chemical plant and the family moved to Mobile. That same year Alma’s youngest started school and Alma started college. She was forty-one years old. Passionate about education, she completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of South Alabama and made it a point to enroll in at least one class with each of her of her five sons.

Alma started teaching at age 50 and lost her husband at 52. The next year, she took graduate classes at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria. Travel liberated her. Thereafter, each fall, she reported her latest expedition to her social studies students.

Alma was among the first modern Americans to tour China. She hiked the jungles of Central America; she slept in yak-skin yurts in the Gobi desert and completed the long difficult journey from Peking to Moscow using buses, cars, camels and the Trans-Siberian Express. Later, Alma was honored at a banquet given by the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union in the American Embassy in St Petersburg, Russia. Her world travels continued into her 80’s.

With a jaunty walk, a quick wit and an irrepressible smile, Alma traveled long and far. She finally comes to rest in Mobile at Radney’s Funeral Home on Dauphin Street; Her family invites all of her former students and friends to attend the memorial service at Radney’s, Sunday, February 12 at 11:00 a.m. and thereafter join us at the burial in Pinecrest Cemetery. Arrangements under the direction of Radney Funeral Home-Mobile, Mobile, AL.