The weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii were filled with suspense and fear for Marylou McKay. Her father and Shirley, her sister, were in Hawaii on December 7, 1941 where they had accompanied the Willamette University football team for a holiday game. Marylou, at home in Oregon, waited anxiously for word of their condition.

A Christmas phone call from San Francisco announced the group's return on a ship filled with severely wounded young Americans. The family was soon reunited, but this was only the beginning of the tension and fear experienced by the McKays and other Salem families during World War II.

One of Marylou's earliest recollections of the war years was the forced evacuation of Japanese families from the farms around Salem. "We were brain-washed," she admits, referring to society's prejudice against the Japanese and Japanese-Americans during the 1940's.

Marylou McKay was four months old when her family moved from Portland to Salem, her father having received a franchise to sell automobiles here. His ambition had been to be a farmer, but a World War I injury prohibited that. Nonetheless, Douglas McKay cared for a small farm on the empty lot next to their home on Jerris Street.

Marylou's mother was busy as a mother of three children, a housewife, seamstress, and prize-winning cook. She also enjoyed her flower garden. In 1952, when told that she and her husband would be moving to Washington, DC where he was to be President Eisenhower's Interior Secretary. Her reply was, "But I have just planted 200 tulip bulbs!"

The McKay's back yard was a playground for the neighborhood with its playhouse and bars for acrobatics. A dollhouse (that Marylou still treasures) was "store-bought" for $10.00, but it was decorated and furnished with items made by hand by her mother and grandmother. Many toys were also home-made. A neighbor's house had an attic where old trunks were filled with clothes which the children used for "dress-up."

Salem's population was 25,000 at that time but there was fun everywhere: the Elsinore Theater where Marylou performed in a ballet when she was four years old; Miss Sally's pasture (now Bush's Pasture Park)
where the children were invited to scale the fence and picnic and the Willamette River where they swam. Marylou remembers Leslie Junior High as the center of social activities such as "jitney" dinners where each serving cost five cents.

Perhaps the most stunning local event was the fire in 1935 that destroyed the Capitol building when Marylou was seven years old. She remembers her father trying to save important records stored there and how the night sky held a magnificent glow as the copper dome burned.

Two years before Pearl Harbor Day the McKay family received a late night telephone call with the tragic news that Marylou's brother had been killed in an automobile accident on his way home from Oregon State University in Corvallis. Seven years older than Marylou, she had idolized him, but the loss was felt no less keenly by her older sister and her parents. Her father would never speak of the loss of his only son without tears in his eyes.

During World War II, the loss of a brother or father was a constant fear for every Salem family. Marylou's high school accelerated its classes so the boys could enlist early. Older men volunteered for military service and their families for bond drives, metal collections, and blood donations. An A stamp allowed the bearer three gallons of gas a week; government issued coupons were used for purchases of rationed food and leather.

When Marylou graduated from high school, she went to Oregon State University, following the family tradition set by her father, brother, and sister. She met her future husband, Lester Green, while a student at the university. They made their home in Salem (both her husband and brother-in-law became partners in the McKay family automobile agency) and have lived for 40 years in a house they built. The Greens celebrated 50 years of marriage in 1999.

They are the parents of three children, Daniel, James, and Leslie, all of Salem, and have four grandchildren. Like her mother, Marylou has been a homemaker and took an active part in her children's many activities including clubs, sports, and music lessons. She was a Sunday School teacher at Saint Paul's Episcopal Church and ran a book store there for seventeen years. She is a docent at the Bush House, a member of the Art Association, and volunteered at the Humane Society until her family "forbade" her to continue as she was bringing home too many abandoned animals. Like many women of her generation, Marylou McKay Green has seen Salem grow through the 1930's Depression and the 1940's war years to the post-war growth and prosperity it enjoys today.

Bibliography:
During the summer of 2000 Marylou McKay Green was interviewed by Salem History Project volunteer Virginia Green. Information from the interview was used in this article with Marylou McKay Green's permission. (Author Virginia Green is not related to the subject of the article.)