Marion Miller Bryant, born Marion Imogen Allen Miller, peacefully passed away January 3, 2023 just one month shy of her 99th birthday in Santa Monica, California. She was a lifelong Texan who moved to California in 1958 and never completely lost her accent.
She was born February 3, 1924 in Allen, Texas, a direct descendent of Edmund Allen of the family that founded the town in 1872. Her parents soon moved to Dallas where she grew up. There she met her husband of 59 years at Sunset High School. Marion and Leroy Lacy Bryant married in 1942 the day he graduated from flight school as a new lieutenant in the United States Army Air Corps. After further training in North Carolina, where they lived above a funeral parlor, his squadron left for North Africa. Marion returned to Dallas to work at Neiman Marcus while Leroy and his C47 (nicknamed Texan) flew the invasions of Sicily, Italy and Normandy and every major invasion in the European theater.
After WWII and during the Korean War, Marion maintained a home for Leroy and their daughter Susan at sixteen different airbases until they left the Air Force and settled in California. There she founded a jewelry business called Chez Marsue with her friend and business partner, Sue Roth, while Leroy after retirement worked for Hughes Aircraft.
She lived a remarkably happy life through many of the most significant events of the 20th century with an astonishing sense of grace and style. In the last picture we have of her in the hospital she is wearing pearls over her hospital gown because “a lady should always look like a lady and nothing does that better than pearls”. She and her loving husband, affectionately called Buster, loved to travel with their friends and family members, Lula and O.Y. Goswick, making it to almost every continent.
She has come home to Texas to join her beloved husband, Buster, in Pecan Grove Cemetery in McKinney, Texas, not far from her mother, Imogen Allen Miller, and father, Marion Harry Miller.
She is survived by her only daughter, the Honorable Susan Bryant-Deason and husband Paul Deason and grandchildren, Jonathan Bryant Deason, his husband, David Michaels, and Stephen Ford Deason.
The family will receive friends during a visitation at 1:30 p.m., Thursday, January 12, 2023 at Turrentine-Jackson-Morrow Funeral Home, 2525 Central Expressway North, Allen, Texas. A graveside service where she will be laid to rest will follow at 3:00 p.m., at Pecan Grove Cemetery, 1701 McDonald McKinney, Texas.