Person:Mary McCoy (12)

Little is known of her years before coming to Washington. She had worked in two large department stores in or around Toronto and apparently had had some romantic attachment to a man in that area. She told her son, George, that she had found out he was married and broke off the relationship. Around 1942 she came west to visit her childhood girlfriend, Beatrice Turner, who had married Jesse E Lowe. Met Clarence there and started correspondence with him. He asked her to marry him and she returned west the following year. They were married 29 May 1943. She raised three boys, George Byron, William Douglas and Donald Everett. After Clarence was stricken with heart attack she began working at Husted's Variety store at 64th and Waller road and from there worked at Peterson's fryer farm where she tied chicken's legs together and thrust them over a hook where they subsequently were decapitated. She attended Knapp's Secretarial School in Tacoma and worked in a laundry and dry cleaning plant, for a paint manufacturer and oil refinery. She left that job and worked as an accountant secretary for the Goodwill plant in Tacoma. During the time she was working at the Goodwill in 1967 she lost her youngest son, Donald Everett, to enemy fire in Viet Nam.

After she retired from the Goodwill she spent her time visiting her sons and grandchildren both in Alaska and in Sumner nearby, traveled to the eastern seaboard during the autumn and once to Isreal.

In approximately 1982 or 1983 she suffered a massive stroke which incapacitated her and left her wheelchair bound. She was never able to master speech again except the term "yes" although she did understand what was being said and one always knew, without doubt, when her "yes" really meant "NO". She died on May 29, 1987 after several small strokes. She had lived for several years in nursing homes near her son George.

She was an active and contributing member of her church, Central Baptist, and worked in the church library and also performed in a bell choir.

Per Irene Bray interview 3/25/94 she remembered her as "an English lady, prim and proper". She and CWL were married in the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church In Tacoma by Rev W.M. Turner.