Melinda Turner Carson

Melinda T. Carson - 2/24/41-7/18/26
As she would always tell it, she was born during a snowstorm in Cartersville, Georgia. The roads were so bad that night, the doctor hitched up his horse and buggy and came to their house to deliver her. She spent her earliest years in a top-secret city that wasn’t even on a map, as her parents helped build the Oak Ridge nuclear facility during the war. After moving around, the family eventually returned to Cartersville. By then, she was the oldest one of six children, with three sisters and two brothers. Their father abandoned the family in her early teens, leaving their mother with six kids and one just a baby. As the oldest, she began working as a waitress and driving before she was legally allowed to in order to help support their family. The tight bonds between the sisters and brothers forged during these times was evident their entire lives with the closeness they shared as a family. She graduated from Cass High School, where she played clarinet in the band and was very good in math and science. Her good grades got her accepted to a couple of nursing schools, so in 1960, she moved to Chattanooga to attend the Baroness Erlanger School of Nursing. In her last year in school, she had a patient on her floor that was absolutely smitten with her. Right after he was discharged, our father came back to the hospital and asked her to go to a football game at the school where he taught. They would be married for 39 years, until he passed away in 2003. They had two sons, one grandson and one granddaughter. She spent forty-seven years as a Registered Nurse. During that time she was a Head Nurse of an entire hospital, Head Nurse and Charge Nurse over emergency rooms, a medical surgical unit, and a Dementia and Alzheimer center. She finally ended her career, at seventy-seven, as a private nurse for a severely disabled young girl in a wheel chair. She worked at Tri-County and Parkridge hospitals, and Erlanger hospital more than once. A lifelong lover of sports, she rarely missed a Braves, Falcons or SEC ball game, but she would watch whatever sport or game that was on TV at the time. She is preceded in death by her mother Grace and stepfather Jack, her husband Bill, her granddaughter Rachel, her sisters Jane and Sharon, her brothers David and John. She is survived by her sister Pam, her son Chris and his wife Leighan, her grandson Will and his wife Brittany, her son Kevin and his wife Mardee, and many nieces and nephews. A graveside service will be held at 11:00 am on Friday, July 24, 2026 at the Chattanooga National Cemetery. The family will receive friends from 4:00 pm to 8:00 pm on Thursday and prior to leaving for the cemetery on Friday. Arrangements by W.L. Wilson & Sons Funeral Home-Fort Oglethorpe Chapel.