Elizabeth Jean Dillman

Born in 1936 in Great Falls, South Carolina to Thomas Neely Quinton and Amy Rea Baker Quinton, as the fifth of nine children, she spent much of her childhood in Grovetown, a small community outside Augusta, Georgia and near Fort Gordon, where her father was stationed during his active duty in the U.S. Army. These formative years were joyous for her, living the life of a southerner with her 8 siblings, Ann, Bill, Tom, Vic, Jimmy, Jayne, Jackie and Skeetie.

Her happiest time, she would often say, was when she and her brothers and sisters would gather in her mother’s kitchen to sing gospel songs while Vic and Jimmy played guitar in accompaniment.

At age 18 she married Baltimore native Raymond Dillman, whose father was also stationed at the Army post. Raymond enlisted in the Air Force and began a 20 year military career that took them across the globe as they raised four children together.

During their most nomadic years, when the family of six lived in Florida, Spain, Texas, England, and South Carolina, she heroically took on the role of a military wife often filling in for dad when he went on maneuvers overseas and for an entire year while he was in Vietnam. She was an old fashioned, died-in-the-wool mom characterized by a consistent tenderness that grounded the family’s home life in warmth and fun. A popular personality and striking presence in each military base they were assigned, she was

known for affectionate gestures like bringing homemade cakes to her children’s classrooms on their birthdays each year.

She was also a voracious consumer of popular culture. She regularly had her favorite music blaring from the record player at home, dancing and singing along to the likes of Elvis Presley, Sly and the Family Stone, Tom Jones, Petula Clark, Dusty Springfield, Herman’s Hermits, Val Doonican, and Roger Miller. This was supplemented by a constant reading habit; she always had a book in tow during her travels, often choosing titles from the canon of Great American Novels like To Kill a Mockingbird and The

Agony and the Ecstasy. But her guilty pleasure was romance novels, she always had one tucked away in her purse or within easy reach on her bedside table.

Her greatest passion, however, was the movies. She absorbed anything and everything about Hollywood culture, fostering an encyclopedic knowledge of film and celebrity through an unrivaled collection of VHS tapes and DVDs of virtually every popular movie produced in her lifetime. Her daily routine of winding down to the voices of classic late-night TV hosts Johnny Carson and Jack Parr, or watching movies with her loved ones, was a pastime she cherished through every stage of her life. And Oscar night was

the greatest night of the year.

Libby, as her family knew her, will be best remembered for prioritizing her family above all else. Whether she was filling the kitchen with the sweet aroma of her famous peach cobbler and banana pudding, blissfully harmonizing in song at a family reunion, or turning her early bond with Raymond into a marriage of sixty-eight abundant years, she was a model of selfless love and loyalty through and through.

She is survived by her husband Raymond, her four children Ray, Bill, Chris, and Cindy, her grandchildren Elliot, Connor, Grey, Tessa, Jamie, Jessica, Jered, Taylor, Ashley, Lindsay, Ryan, and Madison, and her great-grandchildren Mila, Savannah, Xander, Xoey, Ava, Jackson, Cooper, Josephine, Eden, Brianna, and Emily.