Longtime I.M. Terrell registrar 'knew everybody'

By CHRIS VAUGHN

cvaughn@star-telegram.com

FORT WORTH — Year after year, decade after decade, Charlie Parker to Jimi Hendrix, Okinawa to Khe Sanh, every graduate of I.M. Terrell High School got their diploma through Mrs. Thornton.

She verified every single credit, handwrote the name on every diploma.

All these years later, they remember.

"She was the woman who declared whether we walked across that amphitheater and got our diplomas," said Sarah Walker, a 1956 graduate of Terrell, the city’s first black high school in the years before the Fort Worth school district integrated. "She had a mind that could remember anything and everyone who ever went through I.M. Terrell."

Mary Louise Thornton, the registrar at Terrell from 1942 until 1972, died of heart failure Oct. 22. She was 98.

Mrs. Thornton’s funeral was Wednesday afternoon in her hometown of Corsicana. She lived "a good life and a long life," said another 1956 graduate, Beverly Washington.

She was always known simply as Mrs. Thornton, long after former students grew up and reared their own children and grandchildren.

Those who loved her and remembered her at Terrell were devastated that they found out about her funeral too late to attend.

"Had we known, some of us would have gone down there to pay our respects," said Marie Connally, a 1952 graduate. "She was a people person."

Mary Louise Pardee was born Oct. 19, 1911, in Corsicana. She graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in Dallas. A talented organ player, clarinetist and singer, she wanted to study music in college but ended up earning a degree from Wiley College in business education.

In the early 1930s, she belonged to a group in Dallas that performed Negro spirituals on WBAP radio, and while at Wiley College, she sang with a group that traveled to several national Baptist conventions.

She moved to Fort Worth in 1942 to take a job at Terrell and didn’t leave until the school board closed the school 30 years later to integrate black students into white schools.

"Mrs. Thornton was an easygoing person in her role at school," Walker said. "She didn’t take on the role of disciplinarian. But she could easily tell you if you were not walking the right path. She knew everybody, knew the families, knew the lineage right down the line."

She lived in the Riverside neighborhood for decades and worshipped at a variety of churches, most recently at Grace Temple Seventh-Day Adventist Church on East Berry Street.

Washington, who serves on the board of the I.M. Terrell Alumni Association, can still remember the way Mrs. Thornton called out her first name, always ending it with a slight vocal flair.

"Women like Mrs. Thornton became like our moms, really," she said. "They acted as though they were a parent. That is so lacking nowadays."

After Terrell, Mrs. Thornton worked as the registrar at Northside High School until 1976 and then took a job as a secretary in the magnet program at Dunbar High School. She worked there until the early 1990s, said Connally.

"She was 80-something years old," Connally said. "She wanted to keep busy. She was an energetic person."

CHRIS VAUGHN, 817-390-7547

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