Marlinn Conway

Marlinn (Linn) Conway was born on February 1, 1965 in Long Beach California.  Her parents, Linda and Gene Conway, were proud of her many accomplishments.  Most especially proud that she was the first member of the family to earn a bachelor’s degree.  To make things particularly challenging for her younger siblings, she followed that up with a master’s in fine arts from the University of Missouri.

During her college years, she competed on the Southwest Texas State University Forensics team and won District and National awards including the Elton Abernathy Award for Forensic Excellence.  She starred in several “extremely off-off” Broadway productions including “Elysian Fields” (San Marcos, Texas) and “Misery” (Kuwait City, Kuwait).

Linn loved life and she lived it to the fullest.   One of her loves was travel.  She visited Spain, Egypt, Amsterdam, Qatar, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and many other countries.  During her years in Kuwait, she served as a teacher in the American International School.  She loved meeting new friends and came home with great stories of her adventures.

Linn was an educator and spent the better part of her adult life in a classroom helping students unlock the secrets of who they would grow up to be.  She fostered a love of performing in these young lives and took her kids to competitions for speech and theatre where they won many awards.  Among these are several State awards for One-Act plays.  She was an advocate for at-risk kids, for her fellow teachers and for doing what was right even when it was not easy.

Just a few years ago, Linn learned of a 10-million-dollar grant that could help her school and two others and she took it upon herself to complete all of the paperwork for the application.  She then set about drumming up the necessary excitement among the various administrators to get the grant application submitted.  One of her most proud moments was the day she found out her application was the winner.  It gave her great joy to know that inner-city students in Houston would benefit from those funds for years to come.

Linn was a force of life and her legacy will not soon fade away.  She died on Sunday, July 24 at 1:50 AM.

Linn is preceded in death by her father, Orville Gene Conway and her brother, Marty Gene Conway.

She is survived by her mother, Linda Conway, her sister, Susan Kirkpatrick, brother-in-law Wade Kirkpatrick, nieces Haylea Tubbs and Kathleen Kirkpatrick, nephew Dillon Conway many aunts, uncles and cousins and the countless students that loved her and considered her a ‘bonus mom’.