|
Mary
Jean Stirling (née Congdon) passed away
peacefully at her home in Tucson, surrounded by her family on Monday, February
13, 2017. She was 93 years old. Known as "Ba" to her six
children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and countless others that
she and her late husband, Bob Stirling considered part of their family,
Mary was a veteran of WWII, the wife of a Foreign Service officer, an English and reading teacher, poet, and sometime
folk guitarist. Two years before Johnny Cash performed at Folsom Prison,
Mary and her husband and children visited a prison in Tegucigalpa, where
she played and sang for a polite, appreciative, and possibly bemused
audience of Honduran prisoners.
Mary
was born in Springfield, Illinois in 1923, the third child of Charles and
Jessie Golden Congdon (née Cooper). Mary lost
her father when she was two years old, and Caroline, Charlie, and Mary
were raised by their remarkable mother in Bristol, Indiana and Three
Rivers, Michigan. Notwithstanding the hardship of her family's
circumstances, Mary always remembered the best parts of her childhood in
Bristol, singing and reciting poetry, reading all the books in the local
libraries, adventures around the town, and an unauthorized detour to New
York City with her brother Charlie, on the way home from a visit to her
mother's family in North Carolina. All three children went on to the University of Michigan, where Caroline and Charlie made their gregarious little sister sit between them at the library, to supervise her study habits.
Mary
left Michigan and enlisted in the Women's Army Corps (WAC) during WWII; Corporal
Congdon served with the United States Strategic
Air Forces in England and France through the end of the war, and then in
occupied Germany. Flying to London on VE Day, she
celebrated with the cheering crowds in Paris in the morning,
and outside Buckingham Palace in the evening. On her return to the United
States in 1945, her transport ship Athos
II was heavily damaged in a storm, and the returning soldiers and
WACs were rescued by the USS Enterprise and returned to New York on that
carrier's last ocean voyage.
Mary
returned to the University of Michigan, and met blue-eyed naval aviator Robert Bruce Stirling
("Puma") at a bus station in Detroit, also on his way back
to Ann Arbor. They were married in April 1946, raised six children, and
were together for 56 years before Puma passed away in 2002. After Bob
graduated from Michigan, they moved to Tucson, where he was a reporter
for the Tucson Daily Citizen. Mary completed her undergraduate studies at
the UofA
and started teaching at Doolen Jr. High. They
purchased their first home on Cooper Street, where they were joined by
Mary's mother - "Granny" to every kid on the block - and the
Stirling clan began a series of adventures, including a three-week tour
of Mexico in a slow-moving VW bus in 1957, to explore the newly opened
highway from Nogales to Mexico City.
Bob joined the Foreign Service under
President Kennedy, and the Stirlings moved to
Rio de Janeiro in 1961, and to Tegucigalpa,
Honduras in 1965. Mary taught at the American Schools in Rio and
Tegucigalpa. In 1966 the family was stationed in Washington, D.C., and in
1967, Bob began a two-year tour in Vietnam, while Mary took the rest of
the family to Guadalajara. When Bob resigned from the Foreign Service,
the family returned to Tucson, where Mary resumed teaching, at Wakefield,
Gridley, and John Spring Junior High schools, and then at Tucson High,
before retiring in 1985.
Ba's generous spirit and kindness to others
were part of everything she was and did, from her earliest days to the
end of her life. Remembering the injunction to "leave this world a
little better than you found it," Ba and Puma opened their home to
people from all over the world, everywhere they lived, and the number of
people who lived in the Stirling home at one time or another over the
years surpasses all understanding.
After returning to Tucson, Ba and Puma sponsored refugee families from
Vietnam and, as their own children grew up and moved away, hosted one of
the families in their home. One of the highlights of the Stirling family
year was a party to celebrate the New Year (and the first “grito” of Brasilian Carnaval), open to foreign students and others from
the UofA who were unable to return to their
home countries during the holidays. Mo Udall dropped in, too.
In her retirement years, Ba wrote poetry, tended to the garden in her
"exquisite little patio," operated a small doll hospital, and
enjoyed the company of generations of shiny little preschoolers, including
many of her own great-grandchildren, at her daughter’s school, The
Sandbox Early Childhood Learning Center.
Ba was preceded in death by her husband, Bob in 2002 and the first
of their six children, April Romo de Vivar in 2012. She is survived her
remaining children, Penny Johnson (Donnie) of Tucson; Robin Kottabi
(Parviz) of Tucson; Mercy Dueñas (Sergio) of
Guadalajara; Robert Bruce Stirling II of Tucson; and Scot Stirling (Ann)
of Scottsdale. She also leaves 14 grandchildren: Ricardo Maduro, Agustin
Romo de Vivar (Cheryl), Mercedes Wilkins (Randy), Robert Jones
(Veronica); Amber Johnson (Alan), Aaron Johnson (Hillary), Leila Kottabi
Counts (Austin), Parisa Kottabi Cline (Eric), Arian Kottabi (Katy),
Vanessa Dueñas Conway (Jared), Marcela Dueñas Fiorentino (Andres), Ryan Flannery, Holly
Stirling (Andrew) and Robert Stirling (Samantha). Her great-grandchildren,
Riché Jones, Robert W. Jones, Royal Jones,
Roxie Jones, Oscar Leon , Jason Schutte, Lexus Wilkins, Brandon Wilkins,
Rowan Maduro, Talia Maduro, Gavin Johnson, Giselle Johnson, Gabi Johnson,
Alex Counts, Josephine Counts, Jacob Cline, Diego Cline, Paloma Cline, Fernando Fiorentino, Emma Fiorentino,
and Logan Conway. Ba is also survived by her brother, Charles Congdon and was preceded in death by her sister,
Caroline O'Malley. Other beloved members of the Stirling extended family
include Jodie Westergaard, Melissa Thomasson, Claudia Vasconcellos
Schwartz, the Hai Nguyen family, the Duong Van family, Diep and Lan Ngo,
and all the Frenches who shared amazing years
with us in Tucson and in Rio.
“Memoir A spool of song, Unwinding line by line, Rolls underneath my
door. It's not a tune I know. But once on a Paris street A man in a blue
beret Went whistling by And I remember.” ©Mary Stirling
The family will be planning a celebration of Ba's
life for her birthday in July. The Stirlings
hope that Ba's memory will be honored by
remembering the importance of kindness to others, especially children and
the less fortunate.
|
