Ann Stokes Tubbs' Obituary
When Ann Stokes Tubbs died September 5, 2024 in Dadeville, Alabama a great spirit found her eternal reward. She was 85 years old.
Born March 23rd 1939 in Nashville, Tennessee, Ann was the daughter of James Whitworth Stokes, a Nashville Attorney with the family firm Stokes & Stokes, and Helen Hillis Stokes (née Grooms) originally from Greenfield, West Tennessee. Ann would lose her beloved father when she was 8 years old. But later gained a loving stepfather, Clinton Ethelbert Brush, a prominent Nashville Physician, who lived to be 102.
Ann Tubbs came of age in a happier time when America’s growth and prosperity seemed limitless. Her youth was dominated by three great passions: Reading (esp. English Literature), Riding Horses, and Travel - for which she created detailed scrapbooks of every place visited.
After graduating from Nashville’s Harpeth Hall School for girls (where she made lifelong friends) Ann enrolled in Vanderbilt University. Here her love of literature (especially Southern Literature) fully flourished and she was said to be the pet protégé of her English Professors. But she also loved languages and spent a year abroad in the inaugural Vanderbilt-in-France program which led her to graduate Magna Cum Laude in 1962 with a triple major in English, French, and Spanish.
At the height of the Space Race in 1963, she married Ira Payne Jones, an experienced Aeronautical Engineer in her church, and they moved to Huntsville, Alabama where NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center had recently been established. From that time Ann would make Huntsville her forever home. This union led to two children: Whitworth Stokes Jones in 1968, and Gina Payne Jones in 1970.
Ann would later marry the love of her life, Lawrence Allen Tubbs in 1976. He was a Senior Executive in the US Army Ballistic Missile Defense Advanced Technology Center, and later a Defense Contractor. Ann & Larry (as they became known) would remain life partners for 46 years until her death.
Having grown up an only child, Ann Tubbs relished being sociable as an adult. In current parlance she “brought the energy” to whatever event she was part of: lunch, brunch, or planning meeting. She channeled this energy into many different community activities. Enjoying Garden Clubs, Antique Clubs, and Book Clubs she would come to focus especially on three organizations: The Huntsville Literary Association, The Huntsville Symphony Guild, and the Burritt Museum.
Joining the Huntsville Literary Association (HLA) along with one of her old Vanderbilt English Professors she would help fuel its growth in the late 1960s and 70s and get to meet some of the Southern Authors she had studied at Vanderbilt (such as Eudora Welty and Robert Penn Warren) when HLA brought them to Huntsville. This activity culminated in the early 80s when Ann was HLA President and Truman Capote came to the Tubbs house for a reception before he read ‘A Christmas Memory’ at the Von Braun Civic Center. Her children Stokes & Gina will always appreciate the powerful inspiration they drew from these literary figures while growing up.
Ann was a decades-long member of the Huntsville Symphony Guild and regularly worked on the Crescen-Dough Auction fund-raiser to help make it a success. She later joined the Burritt Museum as a volunteer and donated much of her stepfather’s medical equipment (including his microscopes) to be displayed there - since he had practiced medicine during the same era as Dr. Burritt. She later became a member of the Burritt Museum Board and helped innovate new fundraising events (such as staging country dinners inside the onsite historic cabins).
Ann was a woman of faith and a member of First Presbyterian Church in Downtown Huntsville up to the time of her passing, where she had been an active member of the Presbyterian ‘Women of the Church’(WOC). Her last civic role was head of the Cedarhurst social committee in the South East Huntsville community where she and Larry had lived for almost 20 years.
Ann Tubbs will be remembered as a vivacious, loving, and lively soul who manifested care towards everyone she encountered. She is survived by her husband Larry Tubbs, currently residing in Dadeville, Al, her children: Gina Jones and fiancé Joe Collins of Ft. Lauderdale FL, Stokes Jones and wife Anne-Marie Jones of Dadeville AL, her grandchildren Chase Camuzzi and husband David Speedlin of Atlanta GA, Hope Jones and Holden Jones of London, England, Madison Hanscom of Lafayette CO, Merideth Hanscom of Nashville TN, Reese Parker of Austin TX.
Funeral services will be held at First Presbyterian Church, 307 Gates Ave SE, Huntsville AL on Saturday September 14th at 1:00pm followed by a Visitation & Reception at 2:00pm.
Ann’s remains will later be interred alongside her father in the Stokes family plot in Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Nashville TN.
In lieu of flowers please send donations to Burritt Museum in memory of Ann Tubbs:
https://burrittonthemountain.com/give/why-give-to-burritt/
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