Elna Grace DuBose West

Rocky Mount – Elna Grace DuBose West, age 96, passed away on Wednesday, February 5, 2025.

Born in Lamar County in south Mississippi’s Piney Woods region on September 1, 1928, Elna was the daughter of the late Samuel Ulys DuBose and the late Marinda Rebecca Slade DuBose.

Elna was also preceded in death by her husband of more than 26 years, Loyd Avery West. She is survived by her son, William Franklin West, who is a Rocky Mount Telegram reporter and a longtime journalist.

Elna was a homemaker, an Episcopalian and a fan of the Ole Miss Rebels. Additionally, she loved New Orleans; the Mississippi Gulf Coast; Destin, Fla.; the Raleigh-Durham area; Southside Virginia; northeastern North Carolina’s Albemarle region; and the Outer Banks, including Coquina Beach. And she loved to cook and loved animals and children.

She also believed in long-term financial planning and had extensively kept track of her finances.

After Loyd unexpectedly died in 1989 at age 61 in Bolivar County, Miss., in the Ark-La-Miss Delta region, Elna and son Bill eventually hit the reset button in life. Elna and Bill subsequently lived together in Oxford, Miss., while he took journalism courses and worked to earn a master’s degree in journalism from Ole Miss.

After Bill graduated, the two lived together while he worked as a reporter for The Greenwood Commonwealth and the (Greenville, Miss.) Delta Democrat-Times, as city editor of The (Columbus, Miss.) Commercial Dispatch and as a reporter for The Meridian Star.

Elna particularly enjoyed making friends with people in Greenwood, Greenville and Columbus.

The two also lived together while Bill worked as a reporter for the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, as an Oxford, N.C.-based regional reporter for The (Durham) Herald-Sun, as a reporter for The (Henderson) Daily Dispatch and as a reporter at The (Elizabeth City) Daily Advance.

Elna also enjoyed interacting with neighbors at her and Bill’s waterside residence along the Pasquotank River in Elizabeth City before Bill transferred to the Telegram.

In Rocky Mount, Elna lived at the Spring Arbor senior living center for a period before Bill secured an apartment for her in the city, enabling them to live together once again.

A can-do and devoted person, Takia Washington, also provided part-time care for the last few years of Elna’s life.

Elna was a 1945 graduate of Forrest County Agricultural High School, also in Mississippi’s Piney Woods region. She worked for what was Southern Bell Telephone in Jackson, Miss., and became friends with the late Nobel Prize winning author William Faulkner and his immediate family.

In 1962, Elna married Loyd, a Mississippi State University alumnus who was from Monroe County in what today is known as the Tennessee-Tombigbee waterway region.

At the time she married Loyd, he was working for the Mississippi Agricultural and Industrial Board as manager of the board’s agricultural industries department.

However, a significant part of Loyd and Elna’s life, as well as Bill’s earlier life, would not be spent in a city, but in the village of Mer Rouge, La., also in the Ark-La-Miss Delta. That was where Loyd was the manager of Pellets Inc., which was a livestock pelletizing feed mill and the largest such operation west of the Mississippi River.

In Mer Rouge, Elna was involved in social life and was friends with people from all walks of life. Loyd eventually left the pellet mill and he and Elna operated a grocery store in Mer Rouge.

The couple left the grocery business because Loyd was hired to run Wimberly Oil, which was a wholesale petroleum products distributorship about 10 miles away in the village of Oak Ridge. Elna returned to being a full-time homemaker.

Loyd’s last job was as manager of what was the Mississippi Delta city of Cleveland’s pellet plant. The plant’s operation included a large field designed to be irrigated from the municipality’s adjacent wastewater lagoons.

Loyd died while on the job, but Elna rapidly received strong support from friends she, Loyd and Bill had made in Cleveland. She and what was Thweatt-King Funeral Home in Cleveland arranged for a dignified graveside service for Loyd in a rural cemetery in Monroe County on the opposite side of Mississippi.

A special gathering of friends to celebrate Elna’s life will be held on Saturday, February 15, 2025, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at Wheeler & Woodlief Funeral Home and Cremation Services, 1130 N. Winstead Ave., Rocky Mount, NC 27804.  At the end of the gathering, the Rev. Les Carpenter, who is the rector of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Rocky Mount, will speak and say prayers.

Arrangements entrusted to Wheeler & Woodlief Funeral Home & Cremation Services, 1130 N. Winstead Avenue, Rocky Mount, NC 27804.  You may share memories and condolences with the family by visiting www.wheelerwoodlief.com.