Marie Willey

Marie passed away peacefully at her home in Sandy on Sunday, December 12, 2010, of cause’s incident to age.
On Christmas day in 1916, Marie was born; the ninth child and seventh daughter of the twelve children of Alma Henry Peterson and Annie Rankin Campbell Easton. It was in Byron, Wyoming during a raging blizzard that her father hitched his best horse to the buggy, heated some rocks for warmth and headed to Cowley, a seven-mile trip, to get the only doctor in the area. The doctor refused to leave during the storm and Marie’s father was forced to make the seven-mile trek back to Byron alone. Once in Byron, he stopped at the home of the local midwife for help. By then the storm was so bad that he had to carry the midwife to his house where Marie was born.
Marie’s mother and father were some of the original founders of the Big Horn Basin in Wyoming. When Marie was about twenty months old, the entire family moved to Cowley, where she lived until she married Lynn R. Willey on December 17, 1937, in her parents’ home. It was much too dangerous for anyone to travel to Utah at that time of year, so it was not until March 25, 1938, before they were sealed in the Logan temple. It was in her junior year of High School that she met Lynn and they dated for five years before they wed. She and Lynn were married for 71 years before he passed away in 2008. The year following their marriage Lynn and Marie moved to Logan so Lynn could attend college. They lived in a used trailer, which they pulled to Logan from Wyoming. Marie made new curtains, Lynn laid new linoleum, they slept on a sofa bed and there they stayed until Lynn graduated from USU, which was known at the time as Utah State Agricultural College. From Logan they moved to Laramie, Wyoming where Lynn worked in a small garage. During this time, Marie went to beauty school and was fortunate to be able to earn enough money to pay for her tuition and help a little with the rent. After she graduated, they moved to Casper, where Lynn worked for a large oil drilling company. She would laugh when she reminisced about these times, saying that she could hardly believe that Lynn was earning a hundred dollars a month. She said she felt they were wealthy.
Eventually they moved back to Logan where Lynn was a professor at Utah State University for over thirty years until he retired. During these years in Logan, Marie attended numerous classes at the LDS Institute of Religion. She could have graduated from the Institute but she never chose to take the classes for credit. After Lynn retired from the University, he and Marie spent many years working in the Logan LDS Temple in various capacities. She loved these years and the work was a source of great joy in her life. Marie was also very committed to exercising. She was an avid walker, walking outside nearly every day until she was physically unable. She also regularly attended exercise classes held in the community. For those who knew her, they would undoubtedly say the two most important things in Marie’s life were her family and her faith; she was devoted to both. She was dearly loved and will be greatly missed by her family.
Marie is survived by two sisters, Laura Webber of Salt Lake City and Betty Jean Tribe of Ogden; her four children, Richard (Sheila) of Yuma, AZ, Kay (Jerry) Gines of Sandy, Jim (Marci) of Atlanta, GA and Alan of Logan; eleven grandchildren, twenty-five great grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.
Services will be held at the Allen Mortuary chapel of North Logan, located at 420 East 1800 North, North Logan Saturday, December 18, 2010, at 11:00 AM. A viewing will be held prior to the funeral from 9:00 – 10:30 AM that day. Interment will be beside her husband in the Logan City Cemetery. Condolence and thoughts may be expressed to the family online at www.allenmortuaries.net .