When people in trouble talked, founder of church ministry listened
MARY HUNGERFORD
People could tell Mary Dennard Hungerford anything. The founder of a Stephen Ministry at Houston’s First United Methodist Church, she listened for decades, also training other leaders to minister confidentially to people struggling through personal crises.
“She had a knack for letting people talk about themselves. She knew how to talk to people,” says Ed Hungerford, her husband. That included him, a prominent particle physicist. “Think about what you’re doing,” she would tell him if she thought he was off track on something.
“She knew what was right and what was wrong; she could see it when I didn’t,” he said. “She was my compass.” They were married 58 years.
Mary Dennard grew up in southern Georgia and earned a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education at the University of Georgia. She met Ed Hungerford by default, after her date for a sorority party shipped out overnight with the Navy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hungerford, a Marine stationed in North Carolina, was the cousin of a friend. He persisted, staying around for the weekend. They were married within a year.
Mary taught first grade in Atlanta while Ed finished his Ph.D. After a few years in Oakridge, Tenn., their family life blossomed in Houston, where they raised their son and daughter and renovated a MidCentury modern home near Braes Bayou. They loved that home. Mary made friends quickly, first as a Sunday school teacher for professional women (some of whom remembered her in their wills). She also served on First Methodist’s pastor parish relations committee.
For many years the family spent holidays and several weeks each summer at a getaway home in Los Alamos, N.M., where the views stretched 100 miles. Mary liked to travel, so vacations also took them to Alaska and Montana. “Her father was a gentleman farmer, and she always liked getting outside and doing things,” Ed said.
Hurricane Harvey and Mary’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease upended it all. The Hungerfords couldn’t save their home, and Mary “just never really recovered,” Ed said. In a memory care facility for the last 18 months of her life, she developed several infections after COVID-19 swept through this spring. After two weeks in intensive care, she died April 27. She was 78.
Along with her husband, her survivors include her children, Mark Hungerford and Catherine Scott; her grandchildren Chloe and Owen Scott; and her brother and sister-in-law, Tom and Marie Dennard. A memorial will be held after Mark Hungerford, State Department official in Ecuador, can return home.