Extracted from The Sun Herald (Biloxi, MS)
Sunday, June 17, 2007

God, family came first for military matriarch Bryant

When Winnie Bryant bid her eldest son goodbye at the bus station as he headed off to college on a football scholarship, she advised that he'd get there and realize other students had a lot more than he did.

`She told me, `When you feel you can't measure up, remember this: You come from good stock.'' said Terryl Bechtol, now of Pensacola. `I didn't understand that when I was 17, but later I did. We come from good stock.'

His four siblings have similar stories about the woman who sacrificed much, sometimes not eating so they could. She made their clothes and worked three jobs so they could have the basics.

`For awhile, we lived in a sharecropper's shack in Fontainebleau, but we almost got evicted because she couldn't make the $6 a month. She was an incredible woman. The first half of her life was rough but in the second half, who she was really came out.'

`Her funeral on Tuesday will be a celebration of that life.'

The 83-year-old Winona Leah Walker Bechtol Bryant will be buried Tuesday in Gulfport's Evergreen Gardens. The family hopes there is time to arrange military honors. Being a U.S. Marine in World War II was a highlight of her life.

After boot camp at Camp Lejeune she became a motor pool driver and would have made a lifetime career in the military if she hadn't started having babies. Back then, motherhood and military service didn't mix.

Two marriages to military men produced no lifetime partner, so Bryant took on the responsibilities of raising four boys and one girl. Now the clan stretches to 54 grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Bryant was the daughter of the Rev. Henry Dempsey Walker, a name remembered on the Mississippi Coast as the founder of several small Baptist churches. Her upbringing stuck, with a lifetime motto: `Put God first.'

Some of what she passed on to her children is told in the upcoming book, `Who's Your Bubba?' by her eldest, Terryl Bechtol, who is a Grand Ole Opry comedian known as T. Bubba.

`If there is one thing we learned from her, it was toughness,' Bechtol said. `We were never allowed to quit anything once we began, and that tenacity has carried on.' The lifelong Coast resident maintained her independence until failing health sent her to a Wiggins nursing home, where she died on Saturday listening to excerpts from the upcoming book.

Her daughter Dixie Smith remembers her as a loving but strict disciplinarian who required `Yes, Ma'am,' `No, Ma'am,' a throwback to her Marine years.

`The most important thing that she taught us was that family comes first,' Smith said. `That's how she treated us and how we treat each other.'