Road Trip 3 -- Friends in Beautiful Places

Murphys, Ca. -- From Coos Bay north along the Oregon coast is an endless encounter with beautiful beaches, ocean, cliffs, trees and a great place to visit old friends.
The next few days of our journey in our white VW van "Snowflake" took us to a reunion with a former Bee colleague after almost 20 years, and a graduate school classmate we first met in Michigan 40 years ago.
Getting there was half the fun.

Just another beautiful stretch of coast

The drive along the coast continued to stun and entertain us. Oregon is truly a wonderful place, exactly as I pictured it when I wrote a sixth-grade paper on "Oregon the Green State."
Near Winchester Bay we diverted briefly to see the Umpqua Lighthouse, tucked inside a state park and next door to the Coast Guard Station. Every one of these picturesque lighthouses has dramatic stories to tell of storms on the ocean, boats in danger  and people lost or saved by the efforts of the keepers. 
Being a lighthouse keeper was much like the military. Uniforms were required, and inspectors could show up at any time to make sure the  cap was on the head properly and the requirements for precision were met.

But we just looked,and drove on. Past Florence, Yachata and Seal Rock.  Tourists and retirees and people who avoid big cities live in these places today. Once in a while we would spot a lumber mill on a river, but the dominance of logging has given way to a new economy based on multiple endeavors, particularly tourism, and the company towns are disappearing.

Dave and Cheri Hill at home

The "welcome mat" was out

Our destination was the small town of Gleneden Beach, near Lincoln City, where a former newspaper colleague Dave Hill has retired with his wife Cheri and his carefully kept Porsche.   Dave held various editor slots at The Modesto Bee, eventually became the editor of the Merced Sun-Star before retiring a couple of years ago.
Always lovers of the northern coasts, they found their dream retirement home on a ridge overlooking the ocean in a resort development called Salishan.
The Hills had just finished hosting a large family reunion, and we got to meet family members recently retired from the military, ready to head off on a one year adventure touring America in a motor home with their children. The first stop would be Alaska, a dream we share.
Their niece is skilled at doing facials and skin treatments so she provided one for all the women and girls, which provided a good evening of entertainment. The men declined.

A special treat: a facial

The Hill's new home is pretty awesome. Perched on a hilltop near the ocean, surrounded by big trees, and part of the Salishan  Resort complex that includes a golf course and clubhouse with a restaurant and bar and  anything else you might want.


  Dave took me  downstairs in their home where they have a big room for entertainment, pulled out his guitar and started serenading me. It turns out he has taken guitar lessons in retirement, loves folk music, and was happy to share his new skills.



Showing us the area the second day they took us straight to a nearby town where the sidewalk edges the bay, which was active with  whales. It was a first for us, standing within 50 yards of these wonderful animals, rolling and blowing while they found food among the kelp.

There's whales out there - somewhere

I could not capture the whales on camera, but I got one of Dave, Pat and Cheri looking for more whales. (I violated a rule not to take butt shots, but it was all I could see.)

After two great days and nights with the Hills we loaded up once more, and drove north heading for more friends. The destination was Seattle and I was worried about how lousy the traffic there would be.
Then we ran into Portland. We had managed to drive around the south side of town and avoid some traffic, but when we got on the freeway just into Washington state everything came to a stop. It turned out that the highway department was working on a  bridge on the freeway, routing bumper-to-bumper traffic off the road onto a long slow detour. After almost two hours edging along, and just before reaching the detour, they reopened the road and we drove fairly easily through downtown Seattle during rush hour.





Our destination was the home of Warren and Marsha King, both former writers at the Seattle Times newspaper, now retired. 

LaMonts and Kings in Seattle

We first met when Warren and I were National Endowment for the Humanities Fellows at Michigan in 1977. It was a program actually initiated by the university and  federal government to provide mid-career journalists with a chance to go back to school for a year. We were lucky enough to win the competition along with 12 other American fellows and two international fellows. (The program continues today with private foundation financing.)
Warren was for many years the senior medical writer for the newspaper, one of the first to cover the AIDS epidemic. Marsha developed one of the first assignments at any metro paper specializing in the interests and needs and lives of older Americans.  Both did ground-breaking work that helped people, enhanced the reputation of their newspaper and were "award winning" as the papers like to say.

We became good friends in Michigan, sharing a lot of classes and seminars and spare time together. At the time Pat and I had our seven-year-old daughter Ruth and one-year-old adopted baby Zack, and they were investigating adoption. Like good reporters, they made an appointment, interviewed us throughly, took notes and then went home an adopted their beautiful oldest daughter. 
Since those years we have visited each other, watched the children grow and the grandchildren arrive, sailed in the San Juan Islands and San Francisco Bay, and shared lots of good meals and stories. Warren tells tales from his brief Navy career, and Marsha is a compassionate person and story teller.

We shared a meal with their younger daughter ( recently returned from social work in Sudan) and her beautiful baby, went off to a motel to get a good nights sleep, and took off together for sightseeing the next morning.
We went to the locks that connect Puget Sound to Lake Washington, watched the parade of boats for a while, and then visited the salmon ladders nearby. From there you can see the salmon as they work their way through the man-made ladders to get to spawning ground upstream. It was sort of a chance to invade salmon privacy, up close and real.
We discussed returning the Pikes Place Market where we had been together in years past, but decided watching fish fly was not enough incentive to test the traffic.
A day of visiting and checking out their home area ended with dinner on the waterfront where we were joined by the younger daughter and her child. A perfect ending, sunset and all, to a happy visit.
As we were getting ready to leave they delivered a couple of bottles of wine as a parting gift. Wine and good friends get better with age.

Warren likes to point out that I am  older than he is -- by three days.  I cannot deny it. He's taller too.

Next on our journey: Heading east through Washington and Idaho into Montana.

Road Trip -- Coasting Oregon toward Seattle

Murphys, Ca -- We ended our   week of camping on the North Coast of California on a Saturday and headed north following Route 101 along the ocean.

The trip took us past California's Prairie Creek State Park where we first met Banana Slugs 30 years earlier, and we spotted a few herds of elk grazing in fields along the roadside.
As we left California we could see off to the South dark smoke moving out over the ocean, a sign of the fires that were just beginning to ravage the west coast. It was the last time we would see that for the next two weeks.

Saturday is not the best day to look for a motel room on one of the busiest vacation weeks of the year, but we landed in a soft bed in a clean room in Gold Beach, Oregon, just a block or so away from the Rogue River and about 40 miles above the state line.

Gold Beach is not close to any major population area, but it is popular for fishing and camping, jet boat trips up the river and great scenic views.

We like it as a good spot to clean up, take care of some minor restocking of food supplies for the camper van, and good places to eat.  On our last trip through town we ate dinner at an all-you-can-eat fundraiser for the local high school, but we missed that this year.

We stayed in a 1970's-styled motel, refurbished, clean and available, just off the main drag. The place we stayed before, right on the river, was booked solid. The new/old motel had the added charm of a fenced-in backyard just outside our window filled with chickens. The people were courteous. The room was ample and not too expensive. Just right.

We are particularly fond of a breakfast cafe and bookstore we found on an earlier trip on this route. You can get fresh brewed coffee, bagels or burritos and a big variety of books and other readables all in one place. The customers included us, a few other tourists, fishermen and a Sunday school class of teenagers getting ready for church.

Books and coffee in Gold Beach

We headed north, primarily because there was no room in the inn for a second night in town, so  we took our time along the spectacular Oregon coast. It's hard to describe how each turn in the road brings another spectacular cliff over the ocean, or a sandy strip of beach, or a turnout to a park or a lighthouse.

It is a glorious part of the U.S. that everyone should see. Oregon loves visitors, and treats visitors and residents to an amazing number of parks, large and small, scattered along the coastal road. It seems there is a chance to stop and look every mile or two, and a campground or state park every ten miles or so. Even so, it was peak vacation season and the road was busy and the stops fairly busy with people -- not crowded, just busy.

Out by the rocks is a marine sanctuary

There are so many lighthouses along this coast, maintained primarily as historical sites now that GPS navigation rules the waves, that you could spend a week and never see them all.

We stopped briefly at Umpqua Lighthouse where our in-laws had served as volunteers, but stopped and explored at Cape Blanco which showed on the map as being on a point out over the ocean. It probably was, but when we got there a blanket of fog had rolled in, the wind was howling off the  cold ocean, and we only had the sound of waves crashing on the cliffs below to assure us the water was there. It did not matter, it was still spectacular.

Pat walks to the lighthouse at Cape Blanco

The docents were well-informed and helpful, full of history and enthusiasm for their beautiful part of the world.

The coast is thinly populated in this area, but towns such as Sixes, Langlois, Bandon and Port Orford offer anything a visitor could want.

We took our time and arrived in Coos Bay, a larger and somewhat industrial town, in the afternoon, found a motel room and settled in.

Here a happy surprise caught up with us, thanks to Facebook. We discovered that old friends and colleagues from The Modesto Bee -- Bob and Becky Bazemore -- were in Oregon working at their jobs for the Good Sams Club.  Basically, they travel in their very large RV all over Oregon and evaluate Recreational Vehicle Parks for the organization. Their "home" near Coos Bay was right on the beach at a town called Charlestown, and they just happened to know of a good place to eat seafood.
A meeting, as they say, was quickly arranged.

The place, Jack's Crab Shack, was closing soon so they went ahead, got a table and arranged for beer while we drove over to meet them. We were the last customers in the place, and the hosts were gracious and the food delicious. Bob ad I both had Dungeness  Crabs and Becky and Pat had the Crab Cakes. It was the real deal, a great meal and a great reunion.

Bob and Becky love what they do, traveling much of the year, some for work and some for pleasure. They live in a giant 45 foot motor home with their happy dog. They spend part of the year working in Oregon, part traveling to see daughters and grandchildren, and part hanging out with friends in the Florida Keys. They both look 20 years younger: trim, fit and tanned. They took an early retirement from The Bee more than 20 years ago, and have clearly been living the good life on coasts, ski resorts and Alaska -- wherever the spirit moves them.

The dog in Becky's lap was eating Bob's ear -- no damage done

Back when Bob was a city editor at The Bee, and Becky a reporter, he gave me the best ski lessons I ever had -- all in one weekend day. I never became an expert -- he had been on ski patrol -- but he helped me move from novice to comfortable intermediate as a skier and I always will be grateful.
It was a great mini-reunion, which we hope to continue in the Fall.

After  a big seafood dinner, a lot of catching up on families and friends, we got another night's rest ad headed north again.
Next: More coasts, more friends waiting.

Road Trip -- Part One

Pat in our van "Snowflake"

Murphys, Ca -- If you can temporarily cut the ties that hold you down, you could take a road trip.
Pat and I did that and enjoyed almost every one of the 3,000 plus miles traveled in 24 days through seven states of the beautiful  Northwestern U.S.
The trip started with a week on the California north coast, then easing along the Oregon coast and on to Seattle.  Then to see family we turned east for a few days and ended up in Montana, then back south toward home through Yellowstone and the Tetons, and smoky Utah.
We made the trip in our new-to-us 2002 Volkswagen Eurovan, and camped about half the time and stayed with friends and family or in motels along the way.
The good news: all went well. It was a real vacation.

There is no bad news.



Here is what we saw for a week:

The ocean is never far away

One of many hiking trails

Cynics might suggest that retirees do not need a vacation. Au contraire, my friends. We get just as married to our calendars and schedules and meetings and obligations as we did when working every day. Not to mention the every-present computers and iPhones that seem to suck our brains out. But then, there is a beach.

A view of Agate Beach from our campground

The journey began with a reasonable travel day from Murphys to Garberville, a small funky town just into the edge of the Costal Redwood territory of the north coast. If you have never been to Garberville,  check it out. It is welcoming, consistent and a little strange.
The strange part is the mix of people on the streets, actually one street carrying Highway 101 through town.  It is a town that sees a lot of travelers, and many of them have dirty backpacks, rumpled clothing and look as if they just stepped out of the woods. They hang out near the grocery store, sitting in the shade, waiting for something. They are mostly young, non-threatening, not too clean and  sometimes a little on the strange side. The old joke "They are not like us'" probably should be turned around to "We are not like them" to be fair. Are they just happy travelers with a backpack and a friend and a yen to see the world, or maybe part-time employees at a local pot farm? We'll never know.
The good part of Garberville is plenty of moderately-priced places to stay (plan ahead in peak season) and a great little restaurant that we found, for the second time, that provides good Italian food and has a fiddler on the balcony overhead playing every tune he knows, Local color, plus red wine.

Our destination for the first week of travel was Patrick's Point State Park, one of the gems in the California park system.
Perched on a high bluff above the Pacific Ocean, it offers a variety of campsites (sunny or shady, warm or cold), a perfect climate (fog in the morning, sunshine the rest of the day, and temperatures in the 70s),  and great hikes and interesting towns nearby.

Tidal pools a few steps down the bluff

We always camp near the trail down to Agate Beach, a gorgeous stretch of beach known by gem lovers and those who simply want to look at the ocean. (Note to non-Californians: people do not generally swim in the ocean here. It is too cold and somewhat dangerous unless you know where exactly to go.)

The trail south along the coast

We were lucky enough to join our daughter, her family and in-laws (Grays and Todds) for a week of family, outdoor living, good food and great companions. At least 24 people made up our band of relatives.
The hikes along the park's bluff are spectacular, with  views of the ocean every few steps, side trails to tidal pools, and no crowds.
The small closest coastal towns  -- Trinidad and Arcata -- provide everything you need, obviously at tourist prices, but are well worth a visit. It is also a short drive to a park with a resident elk heard, and not far from an Indian casino so there is something for everyone. There is  even a local brewery nearby.

Reliving my past in an Aracata music store

I did not take notes, or many pictures, because the whole point of our week was relaxing.
With extended family surrounding us we spent a lot of time visiting,  catching up, playing cribbage, eating other people's food, playing games, hiking, sleeping, reading and just being.

A "chain gang" is required when one of the Todd family shows up with a load of firewood

For us it is a big family event, one to which we feel welcomed by all my son-in-law's family. One night a relative we had never met showed up, grilled burgers, and fed everybody. Our son-in-law cooked fritatas for breakfast while his dad grilled linguica. His mom cooked Portuguese beans for everybody. We cooked salmon over the fire.
On our final day Uncle Bob Todd  came through the campground collecting everyone's leftovers, cooked them into a great camp stew for the final night's dinner. He flavored it with Bloody Mary mix which was the perfect touch.

Uncle Bob insisted everyone play "Old Fart Baseball"

It was an absolutely lovely week, touching base again with people we care for but do not see very often, visiting a place that is beautiful and cool and welcoming, and relaxing.

The  best thing we did? Stayed in one place for a week so we could really unwind.
There was no  worst part.

Next: Travel along the coast of Oregon to see old newspaper friends, and then to Seattle for a reunion of sorts with  classmates from graduate school.

Remembering my sister Mary LaMont Richardson

Mary Elizabeth LaMont Richardson b. 1937 Atlanta, Georgia
d. 1991 Jamison, Alabama
Mary Elizabeth LaMont was born Feb. 2, 1937, in Atlanta, Georgia.
Her parents lived in a rented house in Ansley park, an old Atlanta neighborhood a few blocks off Peachtree Road and about two miles from downtown. She was named after her grandmothers.
Both parents were working. Her father Louis Ernest LaMont traveled for insurance companies as an auditor. Her mother Dorothy Strickland LaMont was a nurse at Piedmont Hospital where Mary was born.
She was the first child. Her Grandfather Fred Strickland lived with the family briefly. Grandmother Mary Barry LaMont came to visit from Montgomery and had their picture taken while sitting in a rocking chair made for the family in the 1800s. . Mary’s nearby family included numerous Barry cousins in Montgomery, her mother’s two sisters Sarah and Betty, and Strickland, Arrington and Looper cousins across North Georgia.


Atlanta was the booming center of the “New South,” Southern in character but more progressive. The novel “Gone With the Wind” had been published the previous year, written by a reporter for the Atlanta newspaper. Nostalgia and romanticism, tempered by concerns about war in Europe, were the order of the day.
By 1940 the family had moved to Decatur in the suburbs, to a small house owned by a family friend on the edge of the golf course belonging to the Atlanta Athletic Club.
Mary started kindergarten in Atlanta, but the family relocated in 1943 to Mobile, Alabama. Mobile, on the bay near the Gulf Coast, was an old seaport city. At the time they moved there World War Two was underway and the town was booming with military-related industries including ship-building.
Mary spent most of her public school days in Mobile. She attended Leinkauf Elementary School, a short walk from their rented duplex at 1214 Government

Street, then Barton Academy, and graduated from Murphy High School. During the middle years of elementary school her parents divorced, and later her mother remarried.
Mary was popular, a good student and active in a wide range of activities. She was a “maid of honor” in the Mardi Gras Court in
elementary school, a member
of the precision swim team and a cheerleader in high school. She joined a sorority and was active in the youth group at Dauphin Way Methodist Church.
The family owned one car when she was in high school, a huge pale yellow 1952 Packard. She learned to drive in the parking lot of Ladd football stadium, and on special occasions during her senior year she was allowed to drive the car to school — if she would give her brother a ride. Four years separated us, and we were not close friends until later.


Mary had a good time in high school. She made good grades without working too hard, was pretty, had a busy social life and was popular with the boys.
When she was about 17 she had a boyfriend she really liked a lot. Robert was a nice guy, well liked, but Mary’s father felt they were getting too serious. He was particularly concerned because Robert was a a Catholic, and the LaMont family had a long history as Protestants and the older members were somewhat suspicious of Catholics, a not uncommon prejudice in the South. He wrote Mary a very carefully worded letter in which he acknowledged Robert was a nice boy, but gave Mary a long-distance lecture on why being serious with a person of ““another faith would create problems if they ever decided to get married. In the 1950s Protestants who wanted to marry a Catholic had to join the Roman

Catholic Church and be a practicing member. Catholics were also expected too have large families. The discussion never got angry.
The matter was settled when graduation came in 1954, and they both went away to different colleges.
Mary graduated from Murphy High in 1954 and moved to Coral Gables, Florida, to live with her father and attend the University of Miami as a freshman. She liked Florida, the “rich Yankee boys” who went to school there and the university classes. She briefly joined a sorority, but dropped out when she discovered they blackballed Jewish girls.
During that year she attended college full time, kept house, took care of our ailing father and had a part

time job at a clothing store in Coral Gables.

Her father was in failing health so after the end of her Freshman year she quit college and the two of them moved back to Alabama.
He was no longer able to work, and Mary—then19 —wenttoworkin Montgomery and took care of her dying father throughout that Fall and Winter. It was a hard time. He

was in and out of the VA hospital. She changed jobs, briefly working as a sales clerk in a department store and at a
printing company. She ended up working for an insurance company at better pay and more hours.


Her father died in February 1957.
The day of his funeral cousin Dan Stanford brought his Auburn University roommate Roy Richardson with him to the house when he dropped by to pay his respects. They had been on a fishing trip, but Roy made a good impression, despite coming straight from camping.

Mary moved to a rooming house for working women, where she joked her roommate was “a Yankee girl,” but her life was about to change significantly.
She and Roy, who was still in college, started dating in that spring. They were engaged almost immediately.
Mary married Roy that summer on the August day he graduated from Auburn. It was a small family wedding held in the basement of a Methodist church in Auburn.
Roy went to work as a management trainee with the phone company and they moved to a small apartment in Birmingham. They immediately got a dog, named him Bo, and got into the young-married lifestyle of barbecues on weekends, watching football games (particularly Auburn). Roy took up golf. His job required frequent moves around
the state. In the next five years they lived in Decatur in North Alabama and in Anniston in Eastern Alabama, before moving back to
Birmingham.
During this time Mary and Roy, convinced by doctors they could not conceive children, adopted a boy, named him Ben, and then adopted a daughter named Beth.
Mary stayed home and took care of the children as Roy rose in the management ranks of the Southern Bell phone company. His job took them to a temporary assignment in New York City, and they moved to Berkeley Heights, N.J., outside New York City, in the early 1970s. It was the first time Mary had lived outside of the South. Much to their surprise, while in New Jersey Mary became pregnant and gave birth to a son, Philip.
Judging from her letters to me at the time, it was one of the happiest years of her life.
She wrote one 15 page letter on stationary she brought back from a cruise on the Queen Elizabeth 2 — she called it the “Q E 2” — full of details of life just after Philip’s difficult birth. She covered the details of Roy’s work, furniture needed for the new baby, and her six-week post partum medical exam, including details about a surgery planned “on my bottom.”

“If the doctor can convince me that I have a good chance of successful pregnancy next time I really want to have another baby. Philip will need a playmate and I’m too young to retire.”
She encouraged the possibilities of adoption to others, including her sister-in-law who had a back injury., She was all for adoption when people could not have a baby on their own. “The mixed racial child is the big thing here in N.J. but would not go over too well in North Florida.”
She bragged on her children: “Ben is up to my shoulder...and grows while I look at him. Books are his thing.” She described how he tried to like horses, but didn’t, and she gave him permission to stop riding lessons. “Beth loves horses and enjoys every minute of riding... I think she does real well for a five year old.”
And Beth was so eager to start school she woke everybody up at 4 a.m. the first day.
Philip, as the baby, got lots of attention. “The Rooster is the apple of everybody’s eye. The nurses from the hospital even call to see how he is doing.” He had been small and premature, but by then Mary wrote, “He’s fat and round, has square feet and sausage fingers.... He started smiling yesterday and it is beautiful.”
The family was completed with three
children, and when the New York
assignment ended they use the profits
from the suburban house in New Jersey
to by buy a house on a 85-acre ranch in
Chilton County, Alabama, halfway between
Montgomery and Birmingham. They were to become country folk.
Mary loved it. She settled in and ran the ranch, including cows and chickens and one pig named “HamFat,” while Roy commuted to jobs in Birmingham and elsewhere in Alabama.

The ranch had fenced pastures and woodlands. The house sat in the middle of a pasture, with great views all around. There was a small well house and a shed, and on the hill above the house was a large old barn and a garden.
Mary got into the farm life. She wore boots and jeans, joined the Alabama Cattlemen’s Association, and negotiated a deal with a neighbor to use the pasture, bale the hay and keep up the fences.
Her favorite aunt, Elizabeth Gill or “Aunt Betty,” moved to the closest town, Jemison. Mary kept her Birmingham city contacts, including going with friends to the symphony.
For a woman who had never lived outside a city, she reveled in country living, pickup trucks, and horses and cows.
Shortly after moving there she became active in the Episcopal Church in nearby Montevallo which served townspeople and students at the local University. That’s where their youngest child Philip was baptized. She eventually became a member of the vestry, and loved her little church and the formality of its services.
Life seemed idyllic, but it was not always easy. There were money problems, and the challenges of keeping up a large piece of property that did not generate any income. Roy worked long days, and when he was home he was almost always working somewhere on the ranch on his tractor, or drinking too much and parked in front of the television on football weekends. They saw less of each other, and began have disagreements about money and how to raise the children.
Mary was stubborn, and so was Roy.
By the early 80s Mary decided that because it had been left up to her, she would run the home and the children. Roy was absent a lot, so she started making independent decisions about the home and their finances that Roy did not always agree with. Her attitude was that if he was not there to help make decisions and do the work at home, he would have to accept it.
He was constantly spending week nights in Birmingham, whether for work or to play cards with friends, and they grew more and more estranged.
The marriage fell apart. They never really discussed all the reasons, but Roy moved out to an apartment in Birmingham and they divorced after 25 years. It was a hard time for everyone.

About this time Beth was in college at Auburn, Ben had finished high school but due to learning disabilities unable to hold a regular job, and Philip was just beginning high school.
It was a severe blow to Mary and everyone in the family, and something she never expected to happen. She struggled to hold things together. She agreed to accept the house and half the acreage as a full settlement in the divorce, giving up claims to Roy’s retirement and Social Security. That left her with no income.
But she knew how to work.
In the first year after the divorce she tried to make a living by increasing the house garden to almost an acre and selling produce through farmer’s markets in the area.
She used her quilting skills to make pillows and decorative items to sell through craft fairs and local stores, but it was never enough to live on.
She had some financial support from our mother who was retired in Atlanta, and close family nearby in Aunt Betty. Both older women doted on Mary, but also tried to give her advice she was not eager to hear. For a while she became isolated, trying to figure out how to survive, raise her children and hang onto the farm.
During this time her church in Montevallo became increasingly important to her, and she became more and more active in the leadership..
When Betty died shortly after the divorce Mary inherited her home and turned it into a small rental house. Money from the inheritance from Betty helped pay the bills for a short while.
Even in the hard financial times Mary believed people needed to have fun, so she would still put away enough for a trip to the symphony or a short vacation at the beach at Gulf Shores.
In the late 1980s she gave up on farming for a living and applied for a job in Clanton, managing a furniture store for the owners. She had never done anything like that before, but she was smart and worked hard and initially liked the job. It was a classic small-town furniture store, selling mostly to poor farm families and share croppers. One of her jobs was to collect monthly or even weekly payments from the poor people who could not afford any other way to buy furniture, after

working out a schedule and a price. She joked it was “a dollar down and a dollar
a week.”
Mary on the farm, her happy place
She stayed active in the church, and working at the furniture store even when the owners turned out to be difficult.
It took a while but she got over the shock of the divorce. She began to find new friends, even dated once or twice, and focused on helping her children get through school to adulthood.
Around late 1990 Mary decided the farm was too much to deal with. She liked Montevallo — it was a college town with an interesting population — and began exploring making a move. Beth was away in college. Philip was close to finishing high school, and it looked like Ben would need to live at home with her. The farm was too much work.
She found an attractive old Craftsman bungalow house near the edge of the college campus, arranged to sell the farm, and was in the process of buying and moving in to the Montevallo house when she died. The boxes were still being unpacked at the “new” house.

She was at work one day at the furniture store, walking away from a soft drink machine, when she collapsed.
She died instantly.
She was at a good point in her life, 54 years old and in control and seeing a better future for her family.
The cause was never known for sure. She had been seeing a doctor for cholesterol problems, and was a life-long smoker, but put off doing anything about it. She had too many other things to take care of.
The funeral service was held, with the High Episcopal service she had wanted, at her little church. She was buried next to her father in Montgomery in the family plot in Oakwood Cemetery.