This is the abridged version - as any version certainly must be - of my mother's life. Eventually I hope to add some of her own writings and more photographs. The photograph above was taken in the Fall of 1938.
Go to my father's page to see additional photographs.
Go to her pedigree chart to find her ancestors.

My mother grew up moving time and again between Los Angeles California, St Louis Missouri, and the countryside of south-central Missouri. As a girl she liked to read and she found older folks fascinating to talk to and was an avid listener to family history. Later she was the precocious, fashion-conscious teenager who bleached her hair and quit high school to go to work because she couldn't afford socks during the Great Depression of the 1930's.

One of her first jobs was at the cosmetics counter of Thrifty Drug Store in Los Angeles. She dated a "Mr America" but when her co-worker, Katherine Cleveland Detarr, introduced her to her brother Eddie, that was that. Marie and Eddie were 19 and 31 when they married. Daddy worked as the manager of the auto painting department at various dealerships in the San Fernando Valley and additionally in the 1940's Mom, Daddy and the Grandparents Chapman together bought houses, refurbished, and resold them. They lived briefly in Fresno CA but mostly in and around Los Angeles County until their oldest daughter Donna was 9, and then, in 1949, set out to raise the kids in the country and start a business of their own in Northern California. They chose the location by picking a spot on a map where two major highways intersected and it happened to be 3 miles north of Ukiah in Mendocino County. They ran a produce stand at "The Forks" and soon bought a nearby acre with a large commercial structure that they turned into a grocery store (the Forks Ranch Market), built a duplex home (Mom drew up the floor plans) and built a seasonal orange juice stand (The Orange Box) that Mom operated with the help of my sister Donna and other girls. I would slice oranges from time to time, but I never squeezed. Mom and Daddy worked 363.5 days a year at the grocery store and long hours too. When the grocery store was leased out for 5 years, Mom worked as a saleslady at the Palace Dress Shop in Ukiah.

Mom has always been a hard worker and an ultra-tidy and tasteful housekeeper. She favored autumn colors with brass accents. She was artistically gifted and painted pictures, ceramics, signs, and walls; sketched; sewed; crocheted, wall-papered; made furniture out of apple crates and lamps out of this-and-that. She drew the house plans not only for the Forks duplex but also for the hilltop house in Redwood Valley CA where she has lived since the early 1970's. I am still impressed that she designed the houses with the foresight that they could be expanded seamlessly. And she did "add on." Daddy had a stroke in 1989 and died in 1992. Mom continues to write poetry and has always been a good and sometimes-active Democrat. Her mind is open to philosophical possibilities, from yoga to Science of Mind to Noetic Science, to extraterrestrials to fractals to New Age and beyond. In her 70's and now in her 80's she hosts monthly gatherings of a Noetic Science group, attended by ministers, monks, and like-minded seekers.

On the physical plane, she was "double-jointed" and I remember seeing her easily cross her ankles behind her head - not recently, however. She says she has a high pain threshhold, and indeed, she suffered a burst appendix in the 1970's but declined to go to the hospital. In the 1990's, during an elective surgery, doctors were amazed to find the mucousy remains of her appendix! eeew. Go, Mom! Among her other physical attributes, she has green eyes, high cheek bones, the olive complexion that is her Spanish-Portuguese heritage, and mostly brown hair, even into her 80's. She was 5 feet 3 inches at her tallest. She currently lives on that Redwood Valley hilltop with her dear companion - and quite a story, himself - Leonard Bader.