Character from Clinton
Woman reminisces on family, life, preservation efforts
Clinton — Mildred Phillips Worrell is one of those “characters” who hail from small towns all over the South. She’s Clinton’s character, or at least one of them.
“I was born in the Clinton Infirmary right down from the Courthouse Square,” Worrell said. “There was big drama. Life started with drama.”
In the summer of 1946, as her mother, Ione Currie Phillips, lay close to death with complications from the birth, Dr. Clovis Toler grabbed his “direct transfusion person” and administered a direct transfusion to Phillips, who lived to tell the dramatic story of the birth for almost four more decades.
Stories have been a way of life in Worrell’s world. “Mama and Daddy were both colorful story tellers. Everything was embellished. People just told lots of stories,” she said. “You got it with mother’s milk.”
Except for a few years after her marriage to Ronny Worrell in 1965, Mildred Worrell has always lived in Clinton, most of the time in the house her grandfather bought in 1926. The earliest part of the house predates the Civil War and was built by the original owners “to house a drunk brother,” Mildred Worrell said.
“The house figures so prominently in my life,” she said. “When you live in an old house, you get very aware of the atmosphere. The weight of the people that lived there stays with you.”
Her parents married in 1928 and moved in with her grandparents. “Grandpa died in 1930,” she said. “I think Mama, Daddy and Grandma Currie lived here from then on until Daddy was inducted into the Army at the age of 37.”
Her father, Mac Phillips, served in Gen. George Patton’s 10th Armored Division. “He was fighting in the Bulge when he turned 40,” Worrell said. “The people in his unit called him ‘Pops’ because he was so old.”
She graduated from LSU in 1971 and earned a master’s in social work in 1973. She immediately went to work in the Social Services Department at Earl K. Long Medical Center and later became social work director. Ronny Worrell was beginning his 33–year career at Exxon.
In the late 1970s, the Worrells moved back to Clinton but continued to work in Baton Rouge. “Mama was getting older, and she was ill,” Mildred Worrell said.
The couple moved into a home that had belonged to a cousin, Mary C. Norwood. It was built by a surgeon at Silliman Institute right after the Civil War. “I think the man who built it intended it and the house next to it to be used for disabled Confederate veterans,” Worrell said. “He always owned it but rented it out.”
From her research on the house, Worrell developed a strong interest in the history of East Feliciana Parish and preservation.
When her mother died in 1982, the East Feliciana Pilgrimage and Garden Club had just published its cookbook. “Mama had two cases of the books in the back of her car. So I called the cookbook chairperson, Mrs. J.T. Long, and I said, ‘Miss Sue, I want to bring these books back to you because Mama’s dead,’” Worrell said. “They got me into the garden club, and I began a 28–year affair with the Marston House that never came to anything.”
The Marston House is a Greek Revival-style building, completed in 1851 as the Union Bank of Clinton on one side with a living area for the Marstons on the other. The building is badly in need of restoration.
“It has been a sad experience,” Worrell said. “That has been the story of the Marston House. Up and down and up and down.”
Worrell worked for many years trying to find a use for the building so it could be properly restored.
“I finally got so heartbroken about it that I resigned from the board,” she said. “You cannot get anyone to get interested in rehabilitating a building if there is no use for it in the community, and nobody has any use for it. I continue to love it and would help anyone do anything, but I can’t be the point guard for it.”
After her mother’s death, the Worrells did some renovations and moved to the house Mildred Worrell had grown up in. “That year, I decided I had had enough of sickness and sick people and resigned from Earl K. Long,” she said.
She embarked upon several careers including a stint in tourism promotion and life insurance sales as her mother had done. And then she got a call from Dr. Tip McKnight, who hired Worrell as a social worker for his dialysis centers in Baton Rouge.
In 1999, Ronny Worrell retired, and McKnight left the dialysis centers. In the years that followed, Mildred Worrell worked at several federally qualified health centers, did some writing including a book on funerals and funeral customs in the South and worked in medical social work. She is now doing medical social work several days a week at a hospital in St. Francisville.
One of Worrell’s latest projects is the Dem Dames of the Felicianas, a new organization of about 100 women Democrats.
“Last year in the spring, this friend of mine came over here seething,” Worrell said. “She said that she was so damn sick and tired of seeing the Republican Women in the society pages and wanted us to form a Democratic women’s group so we can get into the society pages.”
Worrell and a small group of friends said they set about “trying to shake some Democrats out of the sheets.” They had a tea.
“It was amazing to see so many women Democrats from the Felicianas in one place who didn’t have on veils and shrouds,” she said. “We’re not doing anything hard–edged, but it’s more like a support group.”
Another project close to Worrell’s heart is the Feliciana Family & Friends Mardi Gras Parade, which this year will be held Saturday. She assists Sheilla Flowers with publicity and some of the writing for the event.
Last year the parade had 17 floats and 85 entries including cars, trucks, four–wheelers and bands. “The whole thing is two hours when black people and white people from the area can stand next to each other and have a good time,” she said. “It has no other redeeming social value. It’s just a little oasis of community for Clinton.”
And community is just what Worrell sees as her mission. “I have great love for this community,” she said. “I have a tremendous friend base. A whole lot of my relationships are primary relationships. When a baby comes, I get a gift. When your Mama dies, I’m going to sign the book. Networking and supporting each other is what I bring to the table in terms of talent.”
Updated on Feb. 8, 2012 to correct name of Dr. Tip McKnight.