JoAnn Diamond

JoAnn Diamond of Groesbeck passed away on Thursday, May 7, 2026 at her home in Groesbeck.

Graveside services will be held at 10:00 AM on Monday, May 11, 2026, at Ferguson Cemetery with her son, Terry Jones officiating.

JoAnn was born May 30, 1936, in the sandy hills of Southwest Oklahoma to Theirl and Winnie Puckett. The eldest of the four Puckett girls. The family moved to Richmond, CA during the war where both her parents worked at the Richmond Shipyards. Theirl a cabinet maker and pipefitter. Winnie was a true hot riveter. One of her most vivid memories of the war years were the blackouts in fear of a Japanese attack.

After the war the family moved back to the farm outside of Granite, OK where she learned to chop and pick cotton, milk cows twice a day, tend chickens and hogs. If she wasn’t driving a tractor, she was riding Ol’ Barney the big whiteface bull. She played basketball at Lake Creek High School and dated one of the Jones boys from the farm just up the road. She married Airman Wayne Jones at the age of 17. The marriage ended in divorce, a remarry and another divorce.

In 1960 JoAnn married John Diamond, who was stationed at Altus AFB, OK. Their marriage lasted until his death in 2005. Twenty-three years of military service took them to Texas, Germany, Kentucky, Taiwan and back to Texas. After retirement from the service the two settled into civilian life. Mom was a school bus driver and later the pastry chef for the Groesbeck ISD. Her cookies and biscuits will be missed.

So many memories and stories are left with family and friends. Sadly, she’s the last of her military group of friends. One funny story from Germany is her being chased out of the woods by a bee. Mom had gone into the woods along the autobahn to potty (a very normal thing in Germany). She came out of the woods yanking up her peddle pushers screaming and swatting. Dad was right there with the super eight movie camera. She screamed out, “John you better not be filming me”. “I’m not”, he says. For years whenever we sat down to watch home movies, that mad dash from the woods always seemed to get slipped in. During a trip through Belgium, we passed a brick wall where someone had painted “YANKEES GO HOME”. Mom said, “They don’t mean us, we’re not Yankees, we’re Okies”.

Her two grandkids both accused her of trying to poison them with pimento cheese sandwiches during a summer stay. Her thought was everyone in her family loved pimento cheese sandwiches therefore, so should they. To this day neither will have nothing to do with pimento cheese.

Mom passed Thursday, May 7th, at home with her daughter by her side, 23 days shy of her 90th birthday. She is preceded in death by her first husband, Wayne Jones, her second husband, John Diamond, sisters, Kathy McCray and Shirley Hudson, and son-in-law, Mike Duke, Sr. Surviving family members are her two children, Terry Jones (wife Janet) and Tanya Diamond Duke, sister, Charlene Wilkinson, grandchildren Jennifer Jones Bloodworth (husband Benjamin), Matthew Jones (wife Nikki), and four great-grandchildren, Lauren, Logan, Ford and Cooper.