Mary O. Rivers

Mrs. Mary Osborne Rivers, 77, of Piney Flats, TN, passed away in her home on Saturday, September 12, 2020.

Mary was a native of Memphis, TN, where she attended Sacred Heart Catholic School. She was Captain of the Girls Softball Team. She married prior to graduation to “see the world”; which she eventually did.

She entered government service in the mid-nineteen sixties as a bottom level key punch operator and retired 30 years later as Chief of Education and Training for a Department of Defense computer training center in Keesler Air Force Base, Biloxi, MS. Her career spanned the gamut of computer language development, from FORTRAN to COBAL and beyond, where her personal training skills and aptitude for learning, assimilating, and instructing led to significant advancements in the U.S. Air Force’s advanced curriculum. She was a multi-year Training Developer Chief of the Year as well as receiving multiple awards as Instructor of the Month and Instructor of the Quarter. So well respected by her students and co-workers was she that she earned the affectionate unofficial title as the “Dragon Lady” of Training and Development.

In private life, Mary was a wonderfully devoted wife and loving mother, passing her love of life, travel, the world, and the beauty that surrounds us to all who came in contact with her. She did travel the world as she had always desired; beginning in Rota, Spain, almost sixty years ago, and moving through Hawaii, New Zealand, Europe and Korea. She was our personal cheerleader and shoulder to cry on throughout all the trials life threw at us. A remarkable woman and grand matron of the family, Mom will be remembered as tough as nails and soft as velvet.

She is survived by her husband of sixty years, Russell H. Rivers; her children, Mike (Russ) and his wife Susan, Jim and his wife Deborah, Tina and her husband Paul and Bill and his wife Robin; her grandchildren James, Matthew and his wife Lindsey, William and his fiancée Jamee, Steven, Maggie and Joshua; and her great-grandchildren Emma and Rayna.

No services, at her request, will be held, but her husband will receive friends at their home on Friday September 18, 2020, from 1:00pm to 2:00pm.

In lieu of flowers or gifts, the family requests you send donations to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, TN, in her name.