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Lulu Roman Biography
Lulu Roman (born Bertha Louise Hable on May 6, 1946, in Dallas, Texas) is an American comedian and singer. She is probably best known as a regular on the comedy-music show Hee Haw (1969).
Lulu RomanShe was born with thyroid dysfunction in a home for unwed mothers and placed in Buckner Orphans Home. She attended W. W. Samuell High School in Dallas, graduating in 1964.
During her stint on Hee Haw, she went through a bout of drug addiction, which resulted in her absence from the program for several seasons during the middle portion of its long run. She cleaned up and converted to Christianity, after which she began singing.
This led to a career as a singer of Southern Gospel music; she has recorded several albums, although she never trained as a singer. In 1999 she was inducted into the Country Gospel Music Hall of Fame with fellow artists Andy Griffith, Barbara Mandrell, David L. Cook, Gary S. Paxton, Loretta Lynn, Jimmy Snow, and Jody Miller.
She continues to perform music and stand-up comedy and also enjoys working with Compassion International, a child-development organization. Her project Seven Times hit the number two spot on the Cash Box chart in 2010.
A new album of musical standards titled At Last was released on January 15, 2013. The album, produced by Chris Barnes and Larry Ferguson for Homesick Entertainment, features duets with Dolly Par
Lulu Roman Age
She was born on 6 May 1946, in Dallas, Texas, United States. She is 76 years old.
Lulu Roman Married
She married in 1975 and had her second son, Justin, but that marriage ended in the late 1980s. “She just got to the place that I didn’t know, h,” said gospel singer Dottie Rambo. Feb 2, 2008
LuLu Roman’s wild ride, from Pleasant Grove orphanage to ‘Hee Haw’ stardom
LuLu Roman stood before her fellow orphans at the 30-year reunion and told them what they needed to hear.
Thirty years removed from their days together at Buckner Children’s Home, she told them how deeply they had wounded her, how they had called her “the fat girl” and slammed her with insults and sick jokes.
She reminded them how they had named the school bus “Big Bertha,” in honor of her teenage girth, and sent her to bed crying too many nights, her tears raining on stiff white sheets.
“I told them how they had hurt my heart,” she says. “One girl came up afterward, got down on her knees and said, ‘I want to ask you to forgive me because I was one of those people.’ ”
These days, those same sneering classmates are proud to call themselves friends, even BFFs, of Roman, 69, who is now a national celebrity. During her days at the orphanage, known today as Buckner Children’s Home Dallas, and at Samuell High School in Pleasant Grove, she was Bertha Louise Hable. Barely past puberty, she lurched toward a peak of 386 pounds.
Soon after graduating, she adopted the name LuLu Roman en route to becoming a star on the hit television show Hee Haw, which aired on CBS from 1969 to 1971 and then enjoyed a prosperous 21-year run in syndication. The show’s final episode aired in 1992.
Roman lasted through all of it, despite drug busts (in 1971 and 1973), failed marriages (two) and children (two). Her oldest, Damon, born with a near-fatal respiratory illness caused by his mother’s drug abuse, is 43. Justin is 39. They are co-stars, she says, in the happiest moments of her life, which has been such a wild ride that no one could make it up. And yet, all of it’s true.
Roman, who lives in Nashville, laughs at the news that Moon Shine: That Hee Haw Musical, which had its world premiere at the Dallas Theater Center in September, is being considered for Broadway. Its marquee characters include Lulu, who looks less like the real LuLu and more like a blond, buxom Dolly Parton look-alike.
Even so, it’s simply stunning that Bertha Louise, who arrived at the orphanage at age 3, would one day inspire a Broadway character, or be summoned to perform for former President Jimmy Carter and former first lady Rosalynn Carter, as Roman was on Nov. 28 in Plains, Ga.
Born May 6, 1946, in a home for unwed mothers in Pilot Point, she lived with her great-grandmother until “the poor thing could no longer handle me.” After seeing an ad for the institution in a Dallas newspaper, “she stuck me in Buckner Orphans Home,” where she lived until age 18. From 10th through 12th grade, she and the other orphans rode the bus to Samuell, where she graduated in 1964.
Though she was barely a toddler when she arrived, Buckner left a searing impression.
“Everything was white,” she says. “Nurses’ clothes, furniture, the walls, the floors. Then they took my clothes off and put me in white pajamas and put me in a white bed. … I remember pretty much everything about the whole day. It was devastating.”
Soon after giving birth to a baby girl, her mother was committed to Terrell State Hospital. She escaped, Roman, says, and married “a young soldier boy,” who took her all the way to France. She eventually died in Little Rock, Ark.
Her years at Buckner were so painful that “I’ve blocked out almost everything.” She remembers spending entire days peeling potatoes. She says her happiest memory was playing the witch in Hansel and Gretel in the first grade. She was educated at the home for grades one through nine. At Samuell, she enjoyed singing in the chorus and in operettas and remembers fondly a kind, talented music teacher named Clements Crook.
But high school is where she began to empower what she calls the dark side: drugs. She drank, smoked marijuana, gobbled methamphetamine and dropped as many as 25 tabs of LSD in a single night. Her addiction lingered until 1973.
“My whole life,” she says, “has been not so much about achievement. I have a lot of people say, ‘You’ve achieved so much.’ I guess when I look back, I have. But it was not that I wanted to achieve anything. It was survival. It still is.”
No one at the orphanage or at Samuell “ever told me how valuable I was, that I could be somebody, which is something I tell my boys every day. Nobody ever said, ‘Do you know you’re important?’ I don’t remember anyone saying, ‘Did you know that you could go to college?’ And so, I never went to college. I went to the school of hard knocks and got the best education there ever was.”
Kathleen Krueger Bishop graduated from Samuell a year behind Roman, in 1965. She remembers Roman as being gifted in “plays, operettas, and big musical productions.” And yet, “there was a shame element for kids from the home. In those days, I don’t remember a single kid at Samuell whose parents were divorced.
So, it was hard on those kids. Here they were being bused in; back then, no one else rode a bus, so, yes, it was hard.”
When Roman reached 18, Buckner gave her and her classmates $50 and packed each kid’s belongings in a single suitcase. She went to beauty school and typing school and ended up working at the phone company, where, she says with a laugh, “I learned to cuss.”
She ended up at a Dallas strip club, where her best friend worked as a dancer. They tapped Roman to do a comedy routine. “There was no way I was going to be sexy,” she says. “I was 300 pounds.”
She worked at the club for almost three years, which in retrospect proved to be a life-changing experience. There she met country music superstar Buck Owens, who shared a mutual friend. “Out of the blue,” he called one day and asked her to audition for a country takeoff on the NBC hit Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Owens told her she was one of the funniest people he’d ever met.
“The next thing you know, I’m on a plane to Hollywood and riding a limo to the CBS studios. The first person I saw was Carol Burnett, with my mouth wide open. She said, ‘Shut your mouth, child. You’re fixin’ to be one of us.’ ”
Roman cherished the Hee Haw years, and all the people she worked with, despite the fact that her addiction worsened. In total, she missed a year of production, while wrestling with a pair of probationary sentences. On April 11, 1973, a friend took her to a service at Beverly Hills Baptist Church in Dallas, where, she says, she “found the Lord.” From that point on, she says, she has thrived as a clean and sober born-again Christian.
Addiction, she contends, is the orphan child of abandonment, which led to two suicide attempts. “You’re born into this world unwanted and then you spend your whole life feeling unwanted.”
She expected to do time after her second arrest, in 1973 but got a surprising second probationary sentence and in 1981 was granted a full pardon by Texas Gov. Bill Clements.
Roman stays in touch with her closest friend from Hee Haw, cast member Cathy Baker, 68, now a title insurance agent in Orange, Va. Baker remembers Roman as having a razor wit and “endurance — she’s got it in spades.”
Having her first child and “being saved softened all the edges” for Roman, Baker says. “She became the sum of all her parts and coalesced into this phenomenal human being.”
“Anybody else would have folded up their tent long ago and stayed in the quagmire,” Baker says. “But she pulled herself out. She’s a testament to herself but is also a tremendous amount of fun. She did not become this sanctimonious, pious individual. She’s full of life and laughter.”
She is also a much-in-demand gospel singer, whose career carries multiple highlights: In 1980, she performed at the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan. In 1985, she won the Gospel Music Association Dove Award and in 1999 was inducted into the Country Music Gospel Hall of Fame.
In 2008, she was inducted into the Christian Music Hall of Fame. She’s at peace, she says, when she’s singing, calling it her link to survival and salvation. Not that she’s problem-free.
Having finally become clean and sober, Roman focused on a nemesis that had hung around even longer: obesity. She peaked at 386, then underwent the first of two lap-band surgeries. She got down to 185 but gained back about 30 to arrive at her current 215.
Today, she travels the world, sharing her life story through her ministry, whose credentials include 28 albums. She’s working on a revision of her autobiography, released in the 1980s. She says with a laugh that it will “rock your world” with stories no one knows or has yet to hear, at least publicly. She even promises to stay in touch with all those kids who wronged her in her unhappy past.
For its LuLu, they tell her, who forgave them, freeing her of hate and bettering their lives as well.
“Who knows?” she says with a light chuckle. “Maybe it was all meant to be.”
Lulu Roman Son Death
Because some funeral accounts are yet outstanding, your support is still needed.
On Sunday night, October 29th, LuLu Roman, Country and Gospel singer and star of television’s Hee Haw received the devastating news that her son, Justin, was being rushed to Summit Medical after suffering a massive heart attack.
LuLu and her assistant Kim were en route back home from an engagement in Branson, Missouri. She arrived at the hospital where she was told by staff that all had been done to revive her son but that he had died.
LuLu now finds herself facing the costs of a funeral which can be both exorbitant and overwhelming. Because the loss of her son was so very unexpected and came during a time of particular financial difficulty, stress has been added to grief.
This GoFundMe page has been created so that anyone who is able to assist her in defraying these costs can do so. It is a labor of love; something that is apparent with every donation and expression of sympathy and comfort.
LuLu has been made aware of the generosity and kindness of those who have given to enable her to provide a funeral for Justin and is deeply touched by your outpouring of love.
The funeral was held on Friday, November 3rd at Abundant Life Church in Mt. Juliet, TN, with visitation from 11:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M., service at 1:00 P.M. and interment at Hermitage Memorial Gardens at 3:00 P.M. LuLu’s older son, Damon, arrived from Washington to be with her and gave a beautiful and moving eulogy for his brother.
Due to the unforeseen necessity of purchasing a plot, having a better understanding of expenses after meeting with the funeral home staff, and simply not anticipating what funerals realistically cost, our original goal has been increased to $14,000.
Although the funeral date arrived before we were able to reach this goal, we will leave this page open for a short time afterward, since there are still accounts to soon settle.
Please give what you can to help them during this very trying time. God will richly bless your efforts.
Is Lulu Roman Still Alive | Death
She is still alive.
Lulu Roman Net Worth
She has a net worth of $4975796 Dollars
Lulu Roman Songs
The King of Who I Am
2013
Failure Isn’t Final
Hymns, Promises, and Praises · 1997
That’s the Man I’m Looking For
Key to the Kingdom · 2008
He Was There All the Time
Hymns, Promises, and Praises · 1997
One Day At a Time
Hymns, Promises, and Praises · 1997
Til I Can Make It On My Own
2012
If He Hung the Moon
Hymns, Promises, and Praises · 1997
Precious Lord, Take My Hand
2012
When I Don’t Call Your Name
Seven Times · 2009
Amazing Grace
Hymns, Promises, and Praises · 1997
You Needed Me
2012
Do You Know How to Fly
Seven Times · 2009
Get Here
2012
Let Your Glory Fall
Seven Times · 2009
Mercy Is Who You Are
Seven Times · 2009
Summertime
2012
Train Bound for Glory
Seven Times · 2009
Last
2012
I Will Always Love You
2012
Surely the Presence of the Lord
Hymns, Promises, and Praises · 1997
Buildin’ up the Wall
Orphan Girl · 2005
Killing Me Softly
2012
In My Life
2012
Go Rest High on That Mountain
Orphan Girl · 2005
Hiding Place
Orphan Girl · 2005
Fever
2012
You Are So Beautiful
2012
I’ve Been Loving You Too Long
Orphan Girl · 2005
The Old Church House
Seven Times · 2009
I’d Rather Have Jesus
Hymns, Promises, and Praises · 1997
Giver of the Light
2007
If You Want Me To
Orphan Girl · 2005