Sweet Aunt Mary

 

by Rocky Macy

Proud Nephew

Mary Olive DAY (MACY) KING:   27 July 1925 - 11 November 2022

I learned yesterday that my sweet Aunt Mary passed away in San Diego on November 11th - Veteran's Day.   She apparently died of COVID and complications related to old age.  Aunt Mary turned ninety-seven this past July 27th, and that was the last time that I had spoken with her.   She was my aunt by marriage - and the last survivor of the relatives and in-laws of my parents' generation.

I don't know where Aunt Mary was born, but she did talk to me once about growing up in Kansas City.  She said that she lived within walking distance of the Nelson Art Gallery and loved to go there and see the exhibits when she was a child.  Mary's family had relocated to Neosho, Missouri, by the time she got to high school - and that is where she met my Uncle Wayne.

Veteran's Day seems an appropriate day for Aunt Mary to have passed because I always associate her with World War II.  She married my dad's older brother, Wayne Macy, while she was still in high school just six months before the Japanese brought America into the world war with the attack on Pearl Harbor.  While Uncle Wayne shipped out with the Army to an undisclosed location, Aunt Mary and her mother, Ellen Day, relocated to San Diego, California.  From that day in 1941 until she died there more than eighty years later, San Diego was her home.

The letters that soldiers and sailors wrote home during World War II were censored so that they could not accidentally divulge strategic military information that would benefit the enemy.  For that reason when Wayne wrote to Mary he was never able to disclose where he was stationed.  But Wayne was a clever young man and he sent Mary a piece of jewelry (a bracelet, I think), which had the name of the jewelry store where he had made the purchase - and the town - engraved upon it, and Mary, who was a clever young woman, quickly located the town on a map of Wales.   Wayne was indeed stationed in Wales where he was driving trucks for the military.

One afternoon several years ago Aunt Mary and I were walking in downtown San Diego near the harbor and she showed me where some of the camouflage netting had hung during World War II to hide the city from Japanese bombers.   She, like her young husband, had had a front row view of the war.

Our family visited San Diego twice while I was a youngster.  The first time was in the summer of 1955 after I had completed first grade, and though I did not know it at the time, our trip was so that my dad could say goodbye to his brother, Wayne, who had been diagnosed with leukemia.   We stayed at their house where my sister, Gail, and I got to know our cousins Janet and Linda.  Janet and I were the same age, and Linda was a couple of years older.

Wayne passed away the following summer, on June 23, 1956.  He is buried in the beautiful Fort Roseccrans National Cemetery on a hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean and Coronado Island.    Aunt Mary and I visited Wayne's grave one morning several years ago.   It is my understanding that Aunt Mary was to have been buried in the same grave as Uncle Wayne.

My dad was unable to go to California when Wayne died, but he did send their parents to be with their oldest child during his final days.  I remember meeting them at the Greyhound bus station in Joplin when they returned from that very sad trip.

We were back out in San Diego the summer after I completed fourth grade and stayed with Aunt Mary and her girls for a few days.  Mary had remarried to a fellow named Clarence who worked for the post office.  That marriage didn't last long, and a few years later she married Bob King and they were together for several decades until his death a few years ago.  While we were in San Diego that summer after my fourth grade year, one of my clearest memories is of all of us going to a pizza parlor for Janet's tenth birthday - and watching the pizza chefs twirl the dough above their heads.  This small-town Missouri boy was very impressed by that.  I also remember my sister almost drowning in the Pacific Ocean and Clarence pulling her to safety.

After that I don't remember seeing Aunt Mary or her daughters for many years.  My next memory of her took place in the early 1990's when I was employed as the junior high school principal in Neosho, Missouri.  There was a big reunion going on - a fifty-year affair for students who had gone to the local high school before and during the World War II years, and lots of people were in town.  One afternoon as I was standing in the school hallway talking with one of the teachers, I noticed a very attractive older blond woman trying to open one of the school's heavy exterior doors.  I rushed to help her and as we walked into the building I introduced myself and asked if I could help her.  "Yes, I think you can," she said.  "I used to be your Aunt Mary."  I hugged her and told her that she would always be my Aunt Mary.

That weekend she and she other relatives who were in town for the reunion all showed up at our home, and we had a very nice family visit.

And then it was several more years before we reconnected again.

Janet invited me to Aunt Mary's 80th birthday celebration in San Diego in 2005, but I had just taken a new job as a civilian social worker with the Army at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, and was unable to go.  But my duty location changed a couple of times over the next few years, and around 2008 while I was working at Luke Air Force Base near Phoenix, a friend from Missouri and I arranged to meet at the beautiful and historic del Coronado Hotel in San Diego.   While I was there, Aunt Mary and her daughters and I were able to meet for lunch at a really nice Mexican restaurant in San Diego's "Old Town."

The next year, while still living in Arizona, I brought my oldest son, Nick, and his son, Boone, to Phoenix and we drove on to San Diego so that Boone could experience the ocean for the first time.  Aunt Mary met us down by the harbor and she and I enjoyed fresh clam chowder and a nice long visit.

My daughter, Molly, and her boyfriend, Scott, decided to get married in 2008 while I was still living in Phoenix.  Molly wanted to be married on a beach, but it was November and the weather was already turning wintry in Oregon where they lived, so she chose the southernmost beach that she could find in the continental US - the beach behind the del Coronado Hotel in San Diego.  Nick and Tim and Tim's fiancé, Erin, came in for the wedding, and Mary and Janet joined us at sandy nuptials - so Mary had the opportunity to get reacquainted with all of my children.

While I was working with the Air Force for two years on Okinawa, 2010-2012, Aunt Mary and I stayed in contact through occasional letters and phone calls.   After I returned to the states, she came to Phoenix to visit friends of hers, and we spent one morning together there shopping in Glendale and touring an old car show.    We had lunch in the outdoor beer garden of a German restaurant - and then I took her to see my military housing on Luke Air Force Base.   

My sister, Gail (now Abigail), came to Phoenix near that same time and she and I drove to San Diego and visited with Aunt Mary and Janet and Linda at a restaurant on the ocean near La Jolla.  I'm sure that Aunt Mary enjoyed the visit as much as we did because she wrote about it in her Christmas letter that year.

After that we saw each other a couple of times in San Diego, and our final meeting was when my friend Valerie (who was then living in Hawaii) and I met up in San Diego and visited with Mary at her home in the late fall of 2019.  After our visit, Aunt Mary, who was ninety-four, drove us across town, on-and-off various freeways that were swarming with speeding traffic, and somehow managed to deliver us safely to a nice Mexican restaurant where we met Linda and Janet and Janet's husband for dinner.  

Now Sweet Aunt Mary is gone.  In addition to being a devoted wife and mother, (and grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother!), and a wonderful aunt, Mary was also a charming conversationalist with an astounding knowledge of many topics, as well as a poet, a painter, and even a fashion model.  She lived life to the fullest, and I will miss her very much.  May she be resting peacefully on that lovely hilltop overlooking the Pacific, comforted by the eternal pulse of the ocean and the loving thoughts of all who had to good fortune to have known her.