Billie June Plumlee Willingham, Cooke County native, dies at 96 with Callisburg memorial set Oct. 23, funeral home obituary says

Billie June Plumlee Willingham, a Cooke County native who grew up near Callisburg, died Sept. 29 at age 96, according to her obituary from Geo. J. Carroll & Son Funeral Home in Gainesville. The obituary sets her memorial service for 10 a.m. Central time on Friday, Oct. 23, at Callisburg Church of Christ, 308 McDaniel Street, close to where she spent her childhood.

Rather than flowers, the family asks that memorial gifts go to the church's building fund or to the Alzheimer's Association, according to the arrangements the funeral home posted online with the obituary. The congregation named for those gifts is the same one that will host the service.

Her obituary records her birth on June 26, 1930. As a girl she attended Rock Creek School through the eighth grade, it says, and she later finished at Gainesville High School with the class of 1948.

She married that same summer, according to a separate obituary the funeral home published for her husband. That record dates the wedding to July 5, 1948, nine days after her 18th birthday. It also states that he died Nov. 1, 2025, after the couple had been married 77 years. Going by the dates in the two obituaries, she outlived him by a little less than a year.

The couple later returned to Cooke County, her obituary says, and ran Willingham's Rock Creek Store and gas station there until a tornado forced the business to close. The store bore the same Rock Creek name as the school she had attended decades before.

Her obituary adds that after the store closed, she obtained a real estate license. She was in her late 60s at the time, according to the obituary.

Census Bureau QuickFacts shows that roughly one in five residents of Cooke County, where Willingham was born, is 65 or older. That is a slightly larger share than the bureau reports for nearby Grayson County. Across the country, the bureau reports that the 65-and-older population grew about 13% between 2020 and 2024, while the number of children went down over the same stretch.

Geo. J. Carroll & Son lists its address as 602 S. Lindsay Street in Gainesville. The funeral home describes itself as family owned and operated and says it has served Cooke County families for more than 100 years.