Sandra Christine Sterling

The world will be a less sparkly place with the passing of Sandra Sterling on December 6, 2024, after a long battle with Alzheimer’s.

 Sandra Christine Gibbs Sterling was born March 14, 1938 in Baxley, Georgia to Anne Carter Gibbs and John Gibbs. She was adored by the numerous aunts and cousins in her colorful family, who gave stability to her life when her parents divorced.

 In 1957 she was working as a hostess at Anton’s restaurant in Savannah when she met airman Don Sterling. They got engaged on their third date and married 18 days after meeting.

 Sandra loved living in Texas and creating a happy home for her two children, Tracy Sterling Bristol and Bruce David “BD” Sterling. Air Force life was filled with good friends and parties, a tradition that continued after the Sterlings moved to Hurst in 1966 when Don began flying for American Airlines.

 Every child on Pleasant View Drive knew where to go for the best snacks and whose mom would allow roller skating inside the house. Sandra was a fabulous cook and a gracious host, opening her home and kitchen often. She loved “inventing” recipes — usually by adding extra butter — and leaves behind a trove of barely legible butter-stained recipe cards for her famous pumpkin soup, pineapple stuffing, snowcap pie and many more. She enjoyed trying new things and setting a fanciful table, surprising her family with baked cream puff swans— for no particular reason on a school night.

 Endlessly energetic, Sandra believed in keeping the family busy. Nearly every day of the week she hauled her kids around town in a ’66 Pontiac GTO to golf lessons, dance classes, piano lessons, art lessons, peewee football and basketball, Scouts, and confirmation classes at Peace Lutheran.

 Sandra had a gift for numbers and played a mean hand of bridge, even as her memory was starting to fail. She was competitive at bowling and the decades of Scrabble games she played with Tracy.

 She loved doing things for other people, serving as a hospital Pink Lady, a Girl Scout Cookie Mom, and hostess of parties for student organizations at Bell High, and later the Cedar Summit Book Club and Azilian Study Club of Dallas.

 After her children left for college, Sandra combined her outgoing personality with her math skills and became a real estate agent for Lou Smith Realtors and Best Texas Realtors. She used her earnings to purchase a one-acre lot overlooking Cedar Hill, Texas, where she and Don designed their dream house, a destination for entertaining friends and family for the next two decades. Sandra retired from real estate just in time to become a doting grandmother to Kate and Jack. An overachiever, she decorated seven indoor Christmas trees yearly.

 In 2004 she fiercely rallied against Stage 3 breast cancer. She lost her hair but gained a new look: after chemo she was rarely seen without jewels and a jaunty cap, a look Kate dubbed “Biker Granny.”

 Sandra will be remembered for her loyal friendships, her stunning blue eyes, her offbeat youthful humor, delicious cooking, her irrepressible personality, her uncanny resemblance to Liz Taylor, her generous spirit and her continued support of the underdog. Her motto: “Try to have a little fun every day.”

 Sandra’s husband Don passed after a brief illness in April 2022, with Sandra too far into her dementia journey to know. She leaves behind indelible memories for nearly everyone who met her, along with daughter Tracy and her husband David Bristol; son BD and his wife Suzanne; granddaughter Kate and husband Winston Nget, and great-grandchildren Amelia Jane and James Oliver “Ollie” Nget, and grandson Jack Bristol and wife Heather.