Marilyn Markham Cobo

Marilyn Cobo is being honored by her family as a strong and gentle woman who has provided safety, love and role modeling. She generously shares her creative and magical essence.

Marilyn was born near Oregon's Blue Mountains in 1935, during the Great Depression. Due to her family's hard times, Marilyn lived with her grandparents for much of the first three years of childhood. Then, as the oldest daughter, Marilyn worked, played, and grew up on her parent's rural farmstead near Boring.

During her younger years and with the encouragement of her mother, she developed a very strong connection and delight with the natural world. There was the taste of strawberries, wild huckleberries, garden-grown vegetables and fruit right off the vine or tree or harvested and preserved in jars for winter. Marilyn heard songs of birds, the flow of creek water over stones as well as the creaking of old wooden houses during wind storms. Marilyn felt the warm touch of her little sisters' skin and hair when bathing them. She gently handled the tender roots of new plants during planting season and put up with cold, the weight of irrigation pipes, the firm grip of hoe handles, and cold hardness of other farm tools. Marilyn was accustomed to the fragrance of bonfires during land clearing, and campfires. Later on she and Ted took their children on many wilderness backpacking trips with friends. In contrast to the wetness of rain-drenched clothes, she cherished every bright color in blossoms throughout the seasons as well as the blues in the sky and multi-shades of green growth all around. Spiders, crickets, frogs, ladybugs, and birds are among her delights.

At Oregon State College, two and a half years as an elementary education student merged into marriage. With her new baby, her antique treadle sewing machine and the family cat she took off from her college home to follow her man and be Mom to three outstanding children. Marilyn completed her degree thirteen years later at Southern Oregon College, and received her Elementary Teaching Certification. Marilyn created a rich nurturing environment for preschool students for several years. Marilyn also served a term as a VISTA Volunteer, was a parent educator in Josephine County, did some graduate study in gerontology at PSU, completed the Occupational Therapy certificate program at MHCC, and gained Red Cross certification as Life Guard and Water Safety Instructor. Marilyn informally became a skilled calligrapher, decoupage crafter, and very creative and productive quilt maker/fabric artist. While living in Portland previously, Marilyn audited courses at PSU for most terms. 

Marilyn was a founding facilitator of two women's groups in Portland, the Neighborhood Pride Team and the Vision Weavers. Marilyn's pride and support of her family extends to her two younger sisters, one husband, three children, four grandchildren, and a fine collection of in-laws. As a traditional Mom & Grandma, she has had a long career nurturing them about everything from how butterflies are formed to Native American Art and many life skills.

Her sisters remember Marilyn as the Rock; one to look up to; glue holding the family together. Her first granddaughter asserts that "You are an independent woman and a smart woman. People like you are extraordinary and should be celebrated! I don't think you have to write a book (you make quilts) or be famous, (you are "Grandma Butterfly" to all of my friends), to be on the Wall of Heroines. You make a difference in other people's lives!" 

Marilyn's great-grandparents were New Englanders who settled in Oregon in the early 1880s. Like them, she came out of the backdrop of a hard, scratching-an-existence-out-of -the-land kind of life where she learned to practice frugality & responsibility--emulating stories of her great-grandmother who traveled west to be a homemaker during the settling of the west in the nineteenth century. Her coming of age was during the deceptively tranquil decade of the 1950s. The media and pundits of the day instructed women that their only true fulfillment could be found as wives and mothers, that sexist discrimination was actually good for them, and that the denial of opportunity was, in reality, the manifestation of the highest possible goals of womanhood (Doris Kearns Goodwin, Wait till Next Year). 

In true 1950s fashion, she was a woman who had learned silent obedience and to conceal her own intelligence and curiosity about the world. A conflict was that she wanted to prepare herself for a career while following the cultural belief that work and marriage were incompatible.

A chronic pain syndrome led to only sporadic work away from home. After many attempts to arrive at full-time employment, she still found that her symptoms were debilitating.

We believe that women should be proud & stand up for themselves. They should be treated fairly as full-fledged members of the global family.

Locate on Walk:

• Naming Wall (Right Wall), 3-6