Maxine Mobley

1940 - 2024

Maxine Mobley
03/05/1940 - 06/02/2024
Maxine Bates Mobley of San Angelo, Texas, peacefully left this world on June 2, 2024, at age 84. She was born on March 5, 1940, in Walters, Oklahoma, and spent her final days in Austin, Texas, near her son Michael and daughter-in-law Holly. She was a much beloved, fearless, and fun-loving mom, aunt, friend, and neighbor who fiercely protected those she loved.
Maxine was liberal and liberated long before women from small-town Oklahoma were supposed to be. She graduated from Walters High School and moved to Wichita Falls, Texas, at the age of 18 to attend business school. After obtaining her degree, she ventured to Abilene, Texas, where she worked in the business office for Shell Oil. While there, she met Don Mobley, the service manager at the local Chevrolet dealership. They married on May 23, 1964, and adopted their son Michael in February 1969.
In her life with Don and Michael, Maxine was the glue that held everything together. She kept the books for Don's many businesses. He was the visionary, and Maxine was in the background-supporting him, helping keep almost all his schemes afloat and successful, navigating them through bankruptcy, and squirreling away enough money over the years (hidden even from Don) to ensure Michael's college would be paid for.
Maxine loved and spoiled Michael-some would say too much, others just enough, but none would say too little. She encouraged Michael to be curious about the world and they made many trips to Waldenbooks. After a bad day, she'd watch The Carol Burnett Show with him, teaching him that laughter is healing.
Maxine and Don moved several times, and Maxine made dear friends everywhere they lived, and those friends became family. When Don went on hunting trips, she went shopping in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, with her girlfriends, returning with all sorts of treasures and loaded up with sarapes (traditional Mexican blankets). Maxine would host fun-filled dinner parties. At one of these, she and her friends had so much fun laughing and drinking Zombies as they cooked fried chicken that they covered themselves and the kitchen in flour. It's not clear if the food ever actually made it to the table because that was not the point of the story. What mattered was that Maxine was having a fabulous time laughing with her friends.
Her dinner parties continued when Michael was in his 20s and working as a DJ at K-Lite. Most of his friends and co-workers did not have family in San Angelo, so Maxine stepped in as a surrogate mom, hosting Sunday night family dinners. The homecooked meals were wonderful, but the guests came for Maxine because she loved them, laughed with them, and enjoyed the stories about their lives and misadventures.
Maxine loved to laugh. She laughed at Don's and Michael's goofy jokes and stories. But she also laughed and found the fun in many moments that would have frustrated and upset others, including her husband and son.
She laughed when she and a young Michael went swimming in her childhood swimming hole and got covered in chiggers. She laughed when, while helping Don try to kill a rattlesnake on their ranch, the snake went into a cattleguard. As a young Michael watched from the truck, Maxine and Don got on either side of the cattleguard, armed only with a garden hoe. Whatever Don did to get the snake out worked but sent it coming out the side Maxine was on. Her ability to find joy in (or at least after) these moments helped her young son be less anxious and more joyful.
The day before she passed, Michael, her niece Sherece, and Sherece's husband Bill visited her and were laughing as they told old family stories. Maxine couldn't respond, but by all indications, she could still hear her visitors. At one point, she started shaking. It didn't last long, and she had never done that before and did not appear to be in any distress, so we believe she was shaking with laughter.
Maxine also loved animals. She loved riding her horse JoJo around their ranch. She taught Michael to ride so that, as a young, he could help with a cattle roundup from his Shetland pony, Cherokee. She loved their cats and dogs, but it didn't stop there. She let Michael and Don bring a goat into the house-until it destroyed her houseplants.
While finding fun wherever she could, Maxine took two things very seriously: politics and investing. She stood up for herself and what she thought was right. She was the president of the San Angelo Planned Parenthood board in the 1980s because she believed all women should have access to affordable healthcare. She'd debate-with a smile-anyone who made derogatory statements about women or their rights. She liked to tell the story of one such debate with a mechanic at her car dealership regarding then-candidate Trump. She said she'd never vote for anyone who treated and spoke about women the way he did. If Maxine was being belittled, condescended to, or not taken seriously because she was a woman, she told them exactly what she thought about that.
After losing Don in February 2005, she took the money that remained after the medical bills and taught herself how to invest it and play the stock market. She became quite successful at it and found it, like so many other things, fun. CNBC was almost always on in the background so that she could be informed in her choices. She studied every investment statement to ensure anyone helping invest her money was doing the job right. She didn't do this to live an extravagant life-she was very frugal (except the occasional QVC purchase)-but to make sure she could take care of Michael even after she was gone because she knew radio jobs don't come with 401ks.
Maxine also enjoyed travel.
She and Don visited Greece and Japan with other General Motors dealers and went on family fishing trips every summer in Chama, New Mexico. As a widow, she took a European cruise with friends and Caribbean and Alaskan cruises with Michael.
In her later years, she also became a Wednesday night regular at the House of FiFi Du Bois in San Angelo, where she would dance (and laugh) with her newly made but already fast friends.
Maxine made many fun memories with and for the people she loved and will be dearly missed. But those who love her best find comfort in knowing she is no longer suffering. Maxine is survived by her son Michael Todd and his wife Holly McIntush-Mobley, niece Sherece Bates Bauman and her husband Bill, and many friends she made along the way. She is preceded in death by her mother Mattie Lee (Vardell) Bates, her father Burl Balford Bates, and her husband John Don Mobley. As you remember her, Maxine asks that you laugh at the fun memories and raise a glass of Jim Beam and Coke in her honor.
Per her request, the service will be a small private ceremony. Maxine's ashes will be spread in her beloved West Texas and Oklahoma. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas or the Recording Library of West Texas.