Tulsa interior designer and community volunteer Jean Kelley dies at 82

The wife of Jack Kelley, a Tulsa architect and entrepreneur who later made headlines as a globe-trotting undersea explorer, Jean Kelley had an adventurous streak of her own, family members say, and regularly joined him on his expeditions.

Scuba-diving together as they visited the sites of ancient shipwrecks, she was by his side as he became a recognized authority in the field and led wreck recovery efforts.

"There was nothing my grandmother wouldn't try," the couple's granddaughter Whitney White said. "Once, during one expedition, they lived in little huts on the side of a rocky cliff for a few weeks.

"She and my grandfather had a wonderful 61-year marriage. It was definitely an adventure."

Jean Rhodes Kelley died Wednesday in Tulsa. She was 82. A visitation is set for 5-7 p.m. Monday at Ninde Brookside Funeral Home. A service is planned for 11 a.m. Tuesday at Asbury United Methodist Church.

Kelley moved to Tulsa from Texas as a child and graduated in 1948 from Central High School.

It was as a student at the University of Tulsa, where she was the 1951 homecoming queen, that she met her future husband.

The couple eloped before she finished school.

Kelley never returned to complete her degree, but with her gift for interior design, it didn't hold her back. She ran her own business, Designers Inc., for many years in Tulsa.

Dividing her time between that and being a full-time wife and mother, along the way she took up a variety of philanthropic interests.

Read the original here:
Tulsa interior designer and community volunteer Jean Kelley dies at 82