Mary Martin, community advocate, dies
By Starla Pointer,
McMinnville N-R/News-Register 12/10/2021. Photo of Mary Martin taken in McMinnville by Mac News
on Aug. 26, 2013.
Services are pending under the direction of Macy
& Son Funeral Directors.
“We will miss her big laugh, her warm embrace,
her prophetic critique of injustice, her encouraging, challenging, generous
spirit, and her wishes for a ‘Happy Day!’ even on the hardest of days,” said
First Baptist Church pastor Erika Marksbury in announcing Martin’s passing to
fellow members of the congregation.
The church “lost another saint this week,” the
pastor said.
Until shortly before her death, Martin was still
taking an active role in helping people less fortunate in the community. She
served breakfast at the church a couple times a week and stood up for homeless
people at city council meetings and other events. She advocated for restrooms,
storage lockers and shower facilities for people in need.
She didn’t like how others portrayed those
without homes, she said in a 2017 News-Register story. “I see in our a town a
division that is them and us, and it is a very unhappy thought,” she said.
She disagreed that meal programs and other
services only enabled the homeless. “These are human beings” who need a place
where they are safe and welcome, she said. “If we could just find some place
for them to be, how different our outlook might be about them.”
Martin stood up for other causes, as well. In
October, she walked with her daughter-in-law, Cheryl, in the McMinnville
reproductive rights rally.
She told the News-Register she was “devastated”
by the continual need to fight for women’s rights yet again. Still, she said,
such rallies “may wake up a few people who are sleeping. I hope.”
Martin was named McMinnville’s Woman of the Year
in the 2017 Distinguished Service Awards.
She was humble about the honor. The positive
things she’s done in McMinnville hadn’t been that special, she told the
News-Register; they just needed doing, and she was available.
Everyone who knew her disagreed. Past winners of
the award noted Martin’s professional accomplishments in business and real
estate and her extensive community service, which ranged from supporting the
library to helping get the Gospel Rescue Mission prepared to host Linfield
international students.
Martin was “an enormously effective bridge
across a cultural divide,” a fellow woman of the year winner said.
She was a great friend, said Cassie Sollars,
another past Woman of the Year. When both worked at Willamette West Real
Estate, the shared books and loved discussing what they’d read.
“Mary devoured books. She read voraciously,”
Sollars recalled. “I loved her dearly.”
What made Martin different than some
philanthropists, said attorney Dave Haugeberg, was that she was hands-on.
“She was there with her shirtsleeves rolled up,
working hard to make a difference,” he said. “She was right there, being part
of things.”
Martin said her parents set an example of
community service when she was growing up on the Southern Oregon Coast.
Her husband, the late Noel Martin, shared her
concern for others. They came to McMinnville so he could attend Linfield; he
joined the Linfield Research Institute after graduating.
They soon had four children, Noel Paul, John, Stacy
and Robert.
“This town and our church took care of us,” she
said. “It was a good place for us to land.”
In the early 1970s, Martin joined Lois Gilmore,
Marilyn Crousser, Beverly Trenneman and Rosemary Moore to buy The Book Shop,
now called Third Street Books.
US Bank offered the five women a loan, letting
them sign for it themselves, rather than requiring their husbands’ signatures.
“That was very unusual then, and a very fine
thing,” Martin said of the all-female venture in another News-Register story.
Once again, she said, “this town was good to us.”
Martin liked being in business, but she had
always dreamed of a career selling houses. Her friend Marilyn Dell Worrix, an
agent and broker at Willamette West, guided her in earning a real estate
license. She spent the next four decades in the industry and was named Realtor
of the Year in 1995.
She helped her daughter become an agent as well.
Stacy Martin said Wednesday that she had
received numerous messages of condolence from the community. For instance,
Sylla McClelan wrote that she’d seen Mary recently and “was marveling at her
ability to be out and about and chatting away with folks.”
Stacy said she marveled at her mother, too. “She
never met a stranger,” she said.
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