Where Are They Now?
Carolyn Sparks Puckett started working in the kitchen in the Dublin nursing home in the sixth grade, as part of a program to keep students busy and out of trouble.The program did much more than keep her busy though — it set Puckett up for a 37-year career in food service.
Her sixth grade job was washing dishes for two hours a day. She stayed on at the nursing home all through school. When she graduated in 1983, she went to Howard Payne for a semester and worked for a short while at Appleton’s (now Emerson Industrial Automation), a factory in Stephenville that made electrical outlets.
She missed working in the kitchen, though, and soon went to work at Mulberry Manor, and then another nursing home in Stephenville. “I enjoyed cooking and learning to cook, and just being around the elderly people,” she said. “My heart just went out to them.”
To move up in the field, Puckett began commuting to Fort Worth and earned her Food Services Supervisor license. Once she received her certification, she began working in nursing homes again.
She stayed in the Dublin area until 1988, when she moved to Brownwood and helped open the Oak Ridge Manor nursing home.
In 1991 she moved to Cameron, Texas where she opened the Winnie L. nursing home and served as food service supervisor. “I really didn’t see myself as a supervisor — I was just a good team player,” she said. “I was in charge of making sure the department ran appropriately and within the state and city guidelines. I worked closely with all departments.”
In 1992 she began working at Tarrant County Sight Center, which later merged with John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth. In 1996 she began experiencing some health issues, and went to live with her sister in Brady until she recovered, and then slowly began to ease into work again.
Puckett’s husband, Curtis Puckett, worked for Rayloc in Stephenville. When the company closed the Stephenville office in 2007, the family left Texas and moved to Morganfield, Kentucky so Puckett’s husband could continue working for Rayloc.
She found a job there working in the kitchen at a trade school called Earle C. Clements Job Corps Center. “They bring people from all over the world to teach them trades like nursing, cooking, mining, all kinds of stuff,” she said.
The work there was fastpaced, and Puckett now had to feed over 2000 people instead of the 100 or so residents in the nursing home. Part of Puckett’s job — besides cooking — was to teach the students how to work in a kitchen.
“Every child that came to that school had to work a week in your dietary department firsthand so they could see what our culture versus their culture was,” Puckett said. “It was really interesting. From my side, I got to see all these children from all these different cultures, and hear the languages they spoke. It was a very good learning process for me as well.”
After working in Morganfield for a few years, the Pucketts moved to Memphis in 2013, again for Puckett’s husband’s job. “When we got to Memphis, I retired, but the Lord was not ready for me to retire,” she said.
Puckett’s neighbor ran a small daycare business, and when the neighbor fell and hurt her knee, Puckett took over. She had the business for ten years, when she and her husband moved back to Morganfield, Kentucky in 2021 and Puckett retired for good.
Puckett now spends her days working in her garden and “being grandma.”
Puckett has four children, and has also hosted numerous children in need of a place to stay. “God has blessed me with helping a lot of young troubled teens,” she said. “It makes sense because when I was a teenager I left home and I lived with my best friend and her parents, Bonnie and Bill Zimmerman.”
The Zimmermans were a great inspiration for Puckett, and being able to pay forward their kindness has been important to Puckett throughout her life. “I lived with them for just my senior year, and in that short period of time, I learned a lot,” she said. “I became a Christian, so that right there was a lot to me.”
Their guidance has stayed with her even to this day. “Mrs. Zimmerman was a very big mentor, and I just wanted to be a person like that, you know?” Puckett said. “I’m not saying that she’s better than anybody, but she always had the perfect answers and she never got upset. I wanted to be as calm and collected as she was, and walk as close to God as she did.”
Several of Puckett’s children live close to her now, and she has five grandchildren as well. When she’s not at her grandchildren’s baseball and basketball games, Puckett can usually be found gardening and canning. “I grow potatoes, onions, carrots, peaches, pears, and I put everything up,” she said.
Puckett’s advice to Dublin graduates is to follow their own intuition, and don’t do things just because other people want them to. “Just do you, and don’t give up on your goals,” she said.
Editor’s Note: This column chronicles what Dublin graduates have done since high school. If you have any suggestions for other grads, email publisher@dublincitizen.com.