If asked to describe herself, Darla might have said that she was just a simple Texas country girl. Those who knew her best would know that was an incomplete answer. There are many, many pieces that made up the mosaic called Darla Riley.
She was certainly a Texas country girl, heart and soul, but she was anything but simple.
A humble beginning, Darla Riley was born on Feb. 20, 1944, in the small Texas town of Star. She was the second oldest in a farming family of six. After several years farming in Shive, her father moved their family to Garden City to work in the oil fields.
She attended school in Garden City, where she finished high school and graduated in just 3 years. She also met and married Glenn Joe Riley in Garden City. They were married on March 14, 1959, when she was just 15 years old.
Darla cherished the Lone Star State. She was Texas proud and it was evident in the way she dressed, spoke and the outgoing confidence with which she carried herself. Even though yellow roses were her favorite flower, she was not a Longhorns fan; it had to be the Red Raiders. Darla graduated from Texas Tech University with a Bachelor of Business Administration. She was a staunch, outspoken Red Raider in a vast family of Aggies. Even so, she always stuck to her “guns” and used small words for the benefit of her maroon- hearted family members, whenever they were around.
After college, Darla and Glenn Joe moved to Kennedale, where they purchased 11 acres to raise and breed horses, sired by their stallion, King Turk. Glenn Joe also began working full-time as an electrical engineer at Bell Helicopter in Hurst.
Darla loved animals: horses, dogs, cats, birds, horses, raccoons, horses, they all found a friend with her, except snakes.
She HATED snakes. Darla had a “pet” raccoon one time that lived in a dresser drawer, which she fed with a baby bottle. Darla named that raccoon “Coonie,” obviously. It seemed at times that she attempted to feed the world’s wildlife all by herself. Eventually, the family moved to Keller and lived there, without horses, until Glenn Joe and Darla divorced. Family was very, very important to her and it showed in many ways. Darla thought that birthdays, and especially hers, should be treated as major EVENTS, requiring mandatory celebrations and attendance. She liked to travel, especially on ocean cruises with family to experience the world together. Family time always involved food too, since food was one of her love languages. Meals were meant to be shared with loved ones. Even better if the meal was homemade and she didn’t have to cook it. Darla was a homemaker and a very progressive parent who loved her two boys, Joe and Terry, dearly. As a parent, she saw nothing wrong with sending Terry on a school field trip wearing a Heineken t-shirt that said, “Grab a Heiney” or to don a campaign manager’s hat when Terry ran for school class president. “Be a Smiley, Vote for Riley” was the catchy slogan she penned that helped him win. Darla did not think twice (and maybe she should have) about driving the family Honda ATC 3-wheeler to Keller High School to pick up a mortified Joe when her beloved Lincoln Mark V wouldn’t start, yet again. And that cutting-edge parenting spirit whispered to Santa that 4-year-old Joe should, and did, receive a Superman costume (discretely labeled that it did not enable flight) AND a Daisy BB gun with ammo. No, he did not shoot his eye out. Besides being a homemaker, Darla worked for many years in Property Management for the West End Dallas, as a business administrator for various companies around the metroplex, and for a short time as a legal assistant/secretary in a Dallas law firm. Darla was also a remarkable typist with an impressively high 88 WPM in her prime. She performed this magic on an actual typewriter, the technology that followed the slate tablet favored by Moses. Darla stayed in Keller until a devastating house fire necessitated a move. Darla settled in Texas country once again, living in Scurry, this time with horses, on a plot of 10 acres.
Darla was a Dallas Cowboys fanatic, a Super fan, who stood by her Cowboys through many horrendous seasons, defying all logic and sanity. You could not reason with her to look objectively at the year’s dismal record and pick another team. To her, there were no other teams. She often said, surprisingly, that the Cowboys could be even better, possibly unbeatable, if they could just get rid of that armchair coach, Jerry Jones.
Darla was an accomplished water skier, fair snow skier, an impressive oil and acrylic painter, and a prolific macramer.
Darla was also a lifelong Methodist and very faithful, when able to attend in person. Despite increasing mobility difficulties, she still worshipped mostly through online ministries.
Darla also liked to gamble for fun and had a soft spot for casinos, particularly the slots at Winstar in Oklahoma. She would often call upon her faith when things at Winstar were not to her liking. She won more often than lost.
Darla was a voracious reader, with Harlequin Romances being her favorite for the longest time. She would often come home with Piggly Wiggly paper grocery sacks stuffed with the novels; where she found them was a mystery sometimes.
The house in Keller had bookshelves, which Glenn Joe would build, lining almost every wall to hold the number of volumes of the “trashy” Harlequin novels she read. It was some time before her young son Joe realized that the walls of their house were not constructed out of romance books. Later in life, she turned her reading attention to all kinds of detective fiction. Books by Michael Connelly, Harlan Coben, Lee Childs, Karen Slaughter, James Patterson, John Sanford and others now line the bookshelves in her home. She always preferred to turn a paper page to a virtual page on a tablet. There are still a few Piggly Wiggly- like sacks tucked away waiting for her attention.
With a terrific sense of humor, Darla was often at the center of something amusing. Many times, the focus was directed at herself by her own doing. She once showed up for a cookout wearing a white t-shirt that had an air-brushed figure of a voluptuous woman in a micro bikini from the neck down. The image was so “real” many men asked her about her . . . tan.
Darla loved to dance, mostly two-step and line dances, the Cotton-Eyed Joe, even disco; she also learned to “belly dance” with classes and a great deal of practice. The belly dancing interest, though, was short-lived. Small favors, since the music was terrible. Darla did love other kinds of music with vinyl records playing frequently at home; there was even some dancing too. She did enjoy live music and attending concerts, but Elvis in concert was her favorite. She saw him in concert at least three times in Ft. Worth. Having attended with her, Joe and Terry can attest that her Elvis “enthusiasm” was quite embarrassing.
Halloween was one of her favorite holidays. When Darla was not dressing her kids up or working on their costumes, she was dressing up herself in often unique Halloween attire. Once she went to a Halloween party dressed as a female gorilla; Glenn Joe was the male gorilla. Why she felt like she needed to specify that her gorilla was female is anybody’s guess. Her costume, however, left no doubt that she was the female of the gorilla couple, with a pair of very prominent clues.
Unfortunately, photos still exist of her in that costume, which Joe and Terry cannot unsee because they lived through it. Games were a big part of her life. She enjoyed card games of all kinds, dominoes, Mahjong and many classic board games. Darla was particularly fond of the card game, Nertz. Those Nertz games were legendary. They were wildly competitive, frantic and often violent, especially if she was playing against her brother.
Over the years, Darla had several hobbies. Her interest in many of those hobbies came and went, often quickly. But one hobby seemed to stay with her: Arrowhead Hunting. For those who don’t know about this activity, arrowhead hunting is a type of country scavenger hunt that takes place in an open field that contains periodic deposits of flint rock and, according to legend, was at one time inhabited by native Americans. The arrowhead “hunter” then scours the surface of the property with head down, in the blazing hot sun, devoid of shade, avoiding snakes and scorpions to pick up scraps of flint that “could be a point” of an arrowhead. The jackpot being the discovery of a tooled, legitimate partial arrowhead, after many hot and dusty hours in the Texas sun with an increasingly blistered neck. Darla loved this challenge and spent many hours, year after year, engaged in the pursuit of a whole, unbroken arrowhead. Even though she did find several nice arrowhead specimens, more often than not, Darla ended her search with big bags of what she called “scrapers” that she swore the “Indians” used. To the rest of us, they looked a lot like a bag of rocks.
As she got older and there were no more horses to feed and stable, Joe and Terry convinced Darla to move to Grapevine, where she lived for 9 years. Instead of horses, Darla enjoyed the company and involvement in the lives of her two sons, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Darla died July 28, 2026, at home in Grapevine, after a brief illness. She was 82 years old. Darla was indeed an original: a Texas country girl, a daughter, a sister, a mother, a grandmother, a wife and a friend, who was loved and will be missed by many. When you see a simple yellow rose, her favorite, think of Darla Riley. But unlike that yellow rose, Darla was clearly many things, just not simple. Darla was preceded in death by her mother and father, Lois and Hershel Williams; sister and brother-in-law, Wanda and Don Plagens; niece, Alisa Plagens and brother-in-law, Steve Young. Darla is survived by brother, Gary Williams; sister, Bobbie Young; son and daughter-inlaw, Terry and Daneen Riley; son and daughter-in-law, Joe and Wendy Riley; grandchildren, Maggie Riley, Matt Riley, Bennett Riley, Palmer Riley, Joe and wife Crystal Enyart, Miles Enyart, Emily and husband Roan Oosthuizen; great-grandchildren, Lydia, Lucile and Coraline Enyart and PJ, Kat, Nic and Ben Oosthuizen; niece, Shana and husband Matt Lyles; nephew, Nathan and wife Leanne Plagens; niece, Jessica and husband Jeremy Purvis; nephew, Brandon and wife Kylie Young; nephew, Brent and wife Donnice Hooker; niece, Kristen Archa; as well as numerous friends.
Services were held Aug. 15, 2026, at Stacy-Wilkins Chapel, Goldthwaite. Interment followed at Oakwood Cemetery, Hamilton. Arrangements by Stacy-Wilkins Funeral Home, Goldthwaite, Texas.
