Every Tuesday morning, for fifty straight years, Autince Green skillfully lunged her black 14-pound ball down the Brunswick Zone’s bowling lanes in Norcross. “Tince,” as she was called around town, was well known at the alley, where she long held the high-score in her tight-knit league.
Even in the final days before her death, at the tender age of 90, she piled into a car with friends and made her weekly trip, albeit with a lighter ball and a little less gusto.
“I try not to slide anymore,” Green told her family recently. “I might fall and break a hip. I just kind of drop the ball.”
On Dec. 22, during an annual family dinner at a local restaurant, surrounded by her children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, she suffered a massive heart attack and died.
Family members say she never got over the recent death of her husband of 63 years, Herbert Green.
“She suffered from a broken heart,” said her son, Terry Green. “She cried a lot. She missed my dad terribly. That was her life. She was there to take care of him. And that’s what she’s always done. She was the backbone of the family, the rock of the family. She was just someone you could depend on.”
Funeral services will be held at 11 a.m. Wednesday at Winters Chapel United Methodist Church in Doraville.
Green grew up one of seven siblings, on a cotton farm in Sand Rock, Ala. Her father ran the local cotton and saw mills. Green often helped her family on the farm.
Green attended a local teacher’s college before deciding the profession wasn’t for her. She later moved to Atlanta where she worked as a foreman at Bell Aircraft during WWII.
She soon met her husband, Herbert, who was in the Army Air Corps at the time.
She decided to be a homemaker and take care of her two children while he traveled as a union advocate and political campaigner.
“She taught us the Christian values we have as adults,” said her daughter Cathy Letson. “She lived her life that way, too.”
She became active in her Berkeley Lake community, joining a local chapter of the Eastern Star, and the bowling league.
She was also specially active at her church, Winters Chapel United Methodist Church. She was a member of the United Methodist Women and later served as chair of the church’s senior citizens’ committee.
“When anybody was sick or ill, she was always there,” said Letson. “She set a good example for all of us.”
Green stayed physically fit up until her death, going on long walks with friends, participating in water aerobics at the local spa and tending to her garden behind her home where she grew cucumbers, okra, squash and African violets, her favorite flower.
“She was a caring, nurturing Christian woman,” Letson said. “She loved her family and her church with all her heart.
In addition to her children, she is survived by a brother Guy Parker and a sister Isabell Oliver, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
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