02/03/2001

By Joe Simnacher / The Dallas Morning News

Some people who were students at Kimball High School in the 1960s will remember Lucille Barron Averitt as the study-hall teacher who literally worked in the hall. Others will remember her as chaperon for girls in the ROTC program.

Services were Friday in Dallas for Mrs. Averitt, 93, who died Wednesday in her sleep at Baylor Medical Center in Waxahachie of complications from a stroke. She was buried in Laurel Land Cemetery.

"She had to be busy," said her daughter, Hester Pender of Midlothian, who noted that her mother stayed active until just a few years ago.

About the time her husband, Clifford Averitt, died in 1962, Ms. Averitt took a job as assistant counselor at South Oak Cliff High School. She later became a study-hall teacher at crowded Kimball High School.

"They actually took a hall and put desks in it, so when you walked down the hall, you walked through the study hall," her daughter said. "Everybody at Kimball knew her."

While she was working in the schools, Mrs. Averitt also had a job at Titche's department store, which later became Foley's.

She also was active at Cliff Temple Baptist Church, where she had been a member since the 1920s.

In her late 80s, she cooked for Church on the Lot, a downtown parking lot ministry for the homeless.

One of eight children, Mrs. Averitt was born in Rogers, Texas. She moved to Dallas with her family as a teenager. She was a graduate of Oak Cliff High School, now Adamson High School, as well as a Dallas secretarial school.

In addition to her daughter, Mrs. Averitt is survived by one grandchild