On January 4, 2024, Dr. Shirley J. Litwhiler bid farewell to her family and passed away in a calm and serene manner in Atlanta, Georgia. She was surrounded by her son David and her daughter Missy at the time of her departure. Virgil “Pinky” Davis and Hazel Massey Davis welcomed their daughter Shirley into the world in the year 1937 in Poplarville, Mississippi.
Shirley, the eldest of four children, spent her childhood on the farm that her family owned close to Lumberton, Mississippi.
Both offshore rigs and oil fields in south Mississippi were places of employment for her father, who worked for Gulf Oil. Her mother was responsible for the upbringing of the children and also assisted in the management of the farm. The fact that she was born during the Great Depression and that her family did not have a lot of money did not prevent her from having a prosperous upbringing.
According to her, her father’s favourite thing to do was to use the station waggon to take the family on extended journeys across the country, during which they would visit “every damn cave and canyon” in the continental United States. She claimed that it was a true marvel that she made it through childhood alive.
These childhood years offered a foundation of tenacity and gumption, as well as a lot of fond memories and humorous anecdotes about horses with bad tempers and mischief from siblings. Shirley, on the other hand, had known from a young age that she did not want to live on a farm, and she was resolute in her intention to find a career that was very different from farming.
