Virginia Clinton Kelley

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Virginia Cassidy Kelley (June 6, 1923 – January 6, 1994) born Virginia Dell Cassidy, was the mother of former United States president Bill Clinton and his half-brother Roger Clinton, Jr..

She was born in Hope, Arkansas, and was the daughter of James Eldridge Cassidy, the town iceman (later a grocer), and Edith Cassidy (nee Grisham), a nurse. During her high school years she worked as a waitress at a local restaurant. Following graduation from high school, she moved to Shreveport, Louisiana to study nursing. During her training in Shreveport, she met her first husband, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., whom she married in a civil ceremony in 1943, just before he shipped out for World War II military duty. Upon completion of her training, she returned to Hope. When her husband was discharged, he picked her up and they moved for four months to Chicago, Illinois.

At the end of this, she moved back to her parents while she and Bill were in the process of getting a new home in the Hope area. It was while Bill was on his way back to Hope that he was killed in an automobile accident, three months before the future President's birth. In 1950, she married Roger Clinton, Sr., the biological father of her second son. (The future President officially took his stepfather's surname in the early 1960s.) They divorced in 1961, but remarried a few months later.

Following Roger's death from cancer in 1967, she married hairdresser Jeff Dwire in 1969, who subsequently died of complications of diabetes in 1974. In 1980, she married Richard Kelley, an executive at a food distribution brokerage firm.

Their marriage lasted until her death from complications of breast cancer, aged 70, at her home in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She is buried alongside her first husband at Rose Hill Cemetery in Hope, Arkansas.