My name is Marcella Sherfy Walter. I spent my career putting words to paper or to live audiences on behalf of history and historic preservation. Here in retirement, I find that I can’t quit. But I’ve moved into the arena of memory.
I’m old by any measure. In the black-and-white tiny Kodak print way. The land beyond time as so many friends reckon it. I was born in 1946—almost nine months after my father, Paul, got home from his noncombatant position in the U. S. Navy during World War II. My mother, Esther, was 39 that year. Paul was 34.
I was born in McPherson, Kansas, a county seat of 10,000, 30 miles west of the 100th meridian in an absolutely flat, wheat-growing slice of Kansas. An oil refinery, a flour mill, two small church colleges, and the home office of an insurance company kept the town employed.
We were members of the Church of the Brethren, and like the Mennonites and Quakers, did not smoke or drink; we believed in pacifism, simplicity, the teachings of the New Testament.
For a small, rural town, the community provided a full banquet of social opportunities: lively football and basketball, world class choirs, operas, orchestra concerts, a Carnegie Library, an annual Kiwanis pancake feed, a May Day celebration, a county fair, a small museum.
I led a busy, safe, sheltered, sweet childhood. Short on trinkets and toys but rich in books, imagination, art, and music.
If you were to ask me the moments from my youth that remain alive in memory—either in joy or frustration–they would be:
- The time in 6th grade when Miss Johnson ask us to write an essay on our favorite season. And my paper, all about autumn, came back with this question written in red “Don’t you like spring?”
- A middle school dress-up day—my first outing wearing nylons. Mother gave me her garters to hold up my stockings. Except they didn’t. My knees were too skinny so the garters and stockings bagged around my ankles every time I climbed the stairs.
- The August when I won the 4-H Junior Miss Style show for a skirt and blouse outfit that I hated sewing.
- Every single magical afternoon and Saturday when I worked at the library.
- The day before our Junior Prom when Steve Kubin called and said, “My mother told me to see if you wanted to go with me to the Prom?” She had good taste in flowers, too, picking a gardenia corsage.
- Joining the debate team as a high school junior and realizing that I was damn good at it, especially with Anita as a partner and Mr. Ulery as a coach.
- And on the strength of that unlikely success, when I ran for and won the Student Council President’s post my senior year.
I attended the little Church of Brethren college in McPherson and gained my first stretch of independence by living in the dorm throughout.
To augment what I’d earned at the library, I spent three summers typing insurance policies for the Farmers’ Alliance Insurance Company home office and locking the college’s women’s dorm at night.
After my junior year, I flew to Bethesda, MD to serve as a healthy guinea pig at the National Institutes of Health.
The next summer, I worked at Gettysburg National Military Park.
And then headed straight to the University of Oregon where I had a graduate fellowship in American History.
On the heels of those two wickedly rough and powerful years, I got a job teaching American History to juniors at a rural Maryland high school 30 miles south of Gettysburg. I loved preparing for classes and never got over being scared to death of my students. I never ever doubted my refusal to sign the next year’s contract.
Instead, I began what would become a ten-year stint with the National Park Service, the first four of which were at Gettysburg National Military Park.
And the next six were in Washington D. C.: staff historian to the Chief Historian; National Register of Historic Places reviewer; brief gigs as a cultural resource planner and an interpretive historian.
Before kicking over all the assumptions of my life and moving to Helena, Montana, to become the Montana Historical Society’s State Historic Preservation Officer.
And marry Dave Walter in 1986, and become a stepmother to Heather and Emily and Amanda; daughter-in-law to George and Dorothy; and mistress of households at the cabins in the North Fork of the Flathead and at the almost-bungalow on Choteau Street.
The next years shoot by in tattered-edged scraps: forest fires; heart attacks; a mastectomy; 4-H fairs; dinners carried from our house to George and Dorothy’s; basketball games; the long drives up Highway 12, to 141, to 83, to 2 and then beyond onto the gravel and into cool nights of river talk and mountain light.
And at work tense meetings; the traumas of supervision; days of mixing and stirring just the right recipes of admonition, threat, and thanks. And writing–always writing–letters and briefing papers and draft speeches, award text, justifications, explanations, annual reports.
All of which changed on July 19, 2006, when Dave died.
In these years since his death, I’ve worked – but only some and with varying degrees of contentment and challenge; moved from Choteau Street to an osprey’s nest of a condominium—drafting off the long views to the Belts; fallen in love with music and lyrics that set my feet dancing, and traveled as I never thought I would to Italy and Greece and Britain and Spain—to people and places that have – irrevocably and wonderfully – shaken all the dirt of Kansas and the church and fear off my roots and allowed me to fly – if only as a beginner. ©