Virginia Clinton Kelley
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Virginia Dell Cassidy Blythe Clinton Dwire Kelley (June 6, 1923 – January 6, 1994), born Virginia Dell Cassidy, was the mother of former United States president Bill Clinton and his half-brother Roger Clinton, Jr.
She was born in Bodcaw, Arkansas, and was the daughter of James Eldridge Cassidy, the town iceman (later a grocer), and Edith Cassidy (nee Grisham), a nurse anesthetist. During her high school years she worked as a waitress at a local restaurant. Following graduation from high school, she moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, to study to be a nurse anesthetist like her mother. During her training in Shreveport, she met her first husband, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., whom she married in a civil ceremony in 1943, just before he shipped out for World War II military duty. Upon completion of her training, she returned to Hope. When her husband was discharged, he picked her up and they moved for four months to Chicago, Illinois.
She moved back to her parents while she and William were in the process of getting a new home in the Hope area. It was while William was on his way back to Hope that he was killed in an automobile accident, three months before Bill's birth. In 1950, she married Roger Clinton, Sr., the biological father of her second son Roger. Clinton was an alcoholic and was physically and mentally abusive to Virginia and the boys. He did not adopt Bill but Bill took his surname legally in 1962 by his own request. He told his mother that it would be easier if they all had the same last name. Roger and Virginia divorced in 1961, but remarried a few months later.
Following Roger's death from cancer in 1967, she married hairdresser Jeff Dwire in 1969; he subsequently died of complications of diabetes in 1974. On January 17, 1982, she married Richard Kelley, an executive at a food distribution brokerage firm.
Their marriage lasted until her death from complications of breast cancer, aged 70, at her home in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She is buried alongside her first husband at Rose Hill Cemetery in Hope, Arkansas.
[edit] References
Clinton, Bill My Life, Knopf (June 22, 2004). ISBN 0-375-41457-6
Kelley, Virginia Leading with My Heart (with James Morgan), Pocket, ISBN-10: 0671522957, ISBN-13: 978-0671522957
[edit] External links
- Autobiography at Amazon.com
- Family Tree
- Washington Post Obituary
- Virginia Clinton Kelley at the Internet Movie Database
- Virginia Clinton Kelley Breast Cancer fund
- Virginia Clinton Kelley at Findagrave.com
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