LITTLE ROCK — Lorene L. Casey was a stubborn perfectionist who always seemed to find someone to take care of, said her sister, Mary Lewis Ridgway.
"You had to do everything right," said Ridgway, the younger sister by 12 years. "She'd make me do my homework but wouldn't help me. She'd make me do it myself, and she'd look at it when I was through and make corrections."
The third of five siblings, Casey, whose mother suffered from a stomach illness, was a often a mother to her brothers and sisters.
"She would take me places after she graduated [from high school] and went to work," Ridgway said. "There wasn't much money around, but the picture shows were 25 cents, and she took me to my first one, Snow White.
"I cried wanting to see it again, and she searched and searched through her purse until she found another quarter, and we went back in. I always relied on her to be my mother."
Born in White County in 1919, Casey, 88, who died Wednesday of complications from a recent stroke, moved to Little Rock at the age of 6 and lived there the rest of her life.
She attended Little Rock High School (now Little Rock Central High School), where she excelled in stenography, the shorthand writing skill often required of secretaries before recording and dictation machines were available.
So, in 1937, the year she graduated high school, Casey, along with two other students, were selected by the Arkansas Waterways Commissionto travel the state keeping a record of public hearings regarding the development of the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System, her family said.
In 1941, Casey married J. Ralph Casey, and the couple had two children: Kay (now deceased) and Lewis.
She worked for several years as a bookkeeper at Herbert Cox Shoes, which sold corrective shoes for children, before taking a job with the Arkansas Department of Labor's Employment Security Division.
Casey worked at the Department of Labor for more than 30 years, helping out-ofwork Arkansans find jobs.
Over the years, Casey cared for her siblings as their health declined. When her parents became elderly, she moved them into her home so she could tend to them. Later, she did the same for her motherin-law and her daughter, who suffered from Lupus and died in the late 1990s.
"She ran the household," her son, Lewis Casey, said. "Dad was a reporter [for the Arkansas Democrat], and he didn't get paid much. So, while being a homemaker, she worked a full-time job. For a while, she held down two jobs."
When she had some free time, she could be found in her yard, digging up iris bulbs to spread around her flower beds and even late in life, long after hobbies had replacedhomework, friends and family still looked to Casey for answers.
"She loved gardening and particularly loved irises. Purple ones," Ridgway said. "We both had an interest in gardening, and I still asked her what the right thing was."
Arkansas, Pages 18 on 10/27/2007