If Velma E. Chears thought her friends weren’t eating right or working too much, she would hound them, often chiding them to rest and luring them to her home with the promise of a hot, home-cooked meal.
“She was a mama. She mama’d everybody,” said Rev. Helen Carry, executive minister of Christ Universal Temple of Chicago, where Mrs. Chears was a minister for nearly 30 years. “I loved to eat her food, and she loved to cook. I’d call her up and say, `Velma, I’m hungry.'”
Mrs. Chears, 80, of Canal Winchester, Ohio, died of natural causes on Monday, Feb. 9, at her home.
“Nobody was ever a stranger to her,” said her eldest son, James Dorsey. “Most people who met her just fell in love with her. I’ve got one brother, but I’ve got a thousand sisters. Every time I talked to her or visited her, she had a new adopted daughter.”
Born in 1923 in Clarksdale, Miss., Mrs. Chears moved to Chicago as a child to join her mother, who had come to the city several years earlier looking for work.
She graduated as salutatorian from Wendell Phillips High School in Chicago.
She married, had a child and divorced several years later.
She remarried in 1947 and had another son.
Her second husband died in 1974.
In the 1960s, Mrs. Chears attended beauty school and became a licensed beautician, opening up a shop in her home. In the 1970s, Mrs. Chears got involved with Christ Universal Temple of Chicago and became an ordained minister there.
She moved to New Haven, Conn., in the early 1980s to be close to her younger son and started the Absolute Center of Truth, a branch of her church. While there, she received her bachelor’s degree in human services at New Hampshire College at age 60.
She returned to Chicago in the mid-1980s, resuming her duties at the church: performing marriages and funerals, giving sermons and teaching. She was the director for the Ambassadors of Love, a group that reached out to the elderly and the ill during the holidays.
People often sought her counsel during difficult times. “She had a way with comforting people in crisis,” Carry said.
Last spring, she planned to move to Ohio to live with her former daughter-in-law, Gloria Madison, whom she had come to view as her daughter. Madison wanted to care for Mrs. Chears, but after Madison was diagnosed with lung cancer, Mrs. Chears took on the role of caretaker.
“She took care of me,” Madison said.
“I was sort of jealous. I didn’t know which one of us was 80 and which was 55.”
When Madison was upset or distraught, Mrs. Chears would hold her, soothing her with strong words of encouragement.
“I couldn’t have done it without her. She never gave up. She said that I would come through this,” Madison said.
Last week, Madison’s doctor told her she was free of cancer.
“She impacted so many lives positively that she cannot die, because that’s what made Velma, Velma, and she will continue to be that in our lives,” Carry said.
Survivors also include another son, Victor Chears; two sisters, Johnnie Ramsey and Dorothy Jean Simmons; and six brothers, Arthur Hicks, John Frazier, Roger Frazier, Dave Frazier, Herman Frazier and Horace Frazier; and 11 grandchildren.
A celebration of her life will be held at 5 p.m. Feb. 20 at Christ Universal Temple, 11901 S. Ashland Ave, Chicago.
