Elizabeth Ewing Foster Dennis

Published 12:42 pm Saturday, November 29, 2014

Elizabeth Ewing Foster Dennis passed to heaven on November 22, 2014.  The daughter of Sam Orr Foster, Sr. and Emmet Irene Thompson Foster, Libba was born June 19, 1918 in Lowndes County, Alabama. She graduated from the old Selma High School in Selma, Alabama in 1936. She married Allen Moore Dennis, Jr. of Selma in 1943 and moved with him to Pensacola, Florida where he served out the war in the Navy. Together, Libba and Bill would share their passion for good cooking, gardening, boating and spoiling their nieces and nephews in Pensacola for the rest of their lives.

Libba spent 50 years in the insurance business in Pensacola, serving as President of the Insurance Women of Northwest Florida in 1970. Joining the Pensacola Yacht Club about 1950, Libba and Bill would own three boats (Libba I, II, and the Houseboat Libba) and serve as officers and eager volunteers at the yacht club until Bill’s death in 1979. An advocate of the yacht club’s junior programs, Libba saw three generations of nieces and nephews spend their summers with her sailing and boating in the waters of the Bayou Chico and Pensacola Bay. She served as the club’s flower chairman into her 90s.

Libba was a rare personality: type-A, outgoing, opinionated, yet warm and welcoming. A green thumb, she surrounded her East Hill home with lemon trees and every variety of azalea and camellia imaginable. She prepared gumbo, bisque, and coconut cake like no one else, served Bushwackers before anyone had heard of them, made your birthday special, and always insisted on making everyone feel welcome at her house.  She loved estate sales and cookbooks. She was an old-fashioned networker who enjoyed collecting people and seemed to know everyone’s connections long before Facebook. She lived a long, productive life. Still, she left us too soon.

Libba was preceded in death by her husband, Bill, younger sister Catherine Foster Cannon and her younger brother, Sam O. Foster, Jr.  She is survived by her sister-in-law, Dorothy Storey Foster of Selma and Decatur, Alabama; nephews Stephen Powell and his wife, Dianne, of Pensacola, Florida, Sam O. Foster, III and his wife, Janet, of Decatur, Alabama, and Harry A. Foster and his wife, Julie, of Birmingham, Alabama; nieces Lynn Foster Penar and her husband, Bob, of Quitman, Georgia and Debbie Foster Crisp and her husband, Mark, of Russellville, Alabama; 11 grand nieces and nephews; and eight great grand nieces and nephews.  Libba will be interred in New Live  Oak Cemetery in Selma, beside Bill D. once again.