Marjory D. McKillip

What are the characteristics of a true heroine? Women who unselfishly serve the interests of the public in a great and noble way are often called heroines and justifiably deserve this honor, though what a person does in her working or volunteering life is only one aspect of who she is. Less often lauded, but no less heroic, is the legion of ordinary, non-public women who remain bright and grounded role models for their families in the face of whatever obstacles arise in their lives.

Ever optimistic, always soul seeking, and sweet with a stubborn streak, Marjory D. McKillip, a longtime Oregon resident who died March 24, 2008 at the age of ninety-seven, was a heroine of the second kind. A child of Greeley, Colorado, Marjory came west as a toddler to settle with her family in southern California, where her lifelong interest in reading and learning was sparked by a life-threatening early childhood accident that left her incapable of strenuous physical activity. Turning a minus into a plus, she developed her mind. A super-achiever in high school, Marjory moved on to the University of Southern California where she studied journalism until the collapse of the economy during the Great Depression forced her she quit school and go to work.

Marjory married the love or her life, Edward Francis McKillip, a farm boy from Nebraska, not long before he joined the Army Air Corps and shipped out for Europe and World War II, where he took part in the Normandy Invasion. Upon his return home, the couple set about their everyday lives raising two children, only to have their plans interrupted when Frank died unexpectedly at age fifty-two. Without bemoaning her fate, Marjory jumped back into school at Chico State University and took a degree in education so that she could better support her family financially. “I just did what I had to do,” she recounted to her son years later of her take-charge attitude at the time. Both her approach to adversity and her educational accomplishment have been inspirational to her children.  

Marjory was a popular and dedicated grade school teacher, and she remained actively involved in her profession long after retirement from the Oregon City School District, working first with disadvantaged teens in VISTA and later with Head Start in Hillsboro, where she taught ESL to newly arrived immigrants from Mexico and Vietnam. When not contributing to the community, Marjory was contributing to the lives of the two most important young people on her earth: Alexis and Mark Rule. At seventy-one, she took on the task of caring for her new granddaughter, Alexis, on a daily basis for two years; at eighty-one, she did it all over again for grandson Mark. She was the first to notice Alexis’s musical and artistic talent and to point out Mark’s insatiable curiosity about everything. “I want to know my grandchildren well,” she told her daughter—and she made a point of doing it.

Marjory made a point of following through on the things she most believed in. For example, she began a recycling campaign in her home more than three decades ago, long before the rest of the world jumped seriously into recycling, and it would irritate her daughter no end when she would be asked to rinse out tin cans and bundle newspapers. ”Why should I recycle every box I use or newspaper I read when no one else is doing it?” she whined. “Because it’s the right thing to do,” Marjory explained. “Because the world is changed by the actions of individuals; in the case of our recycling efforts, that means YOU crushing one box at a time.” The message behind her words was clear: “Situations provide opportunities; the way you react to them matters.”

“You must be the change you want to see in the world,” Mahatma Gandhi told his followers. Without giving it too much thought, Marjory McKillip lived her life like that, turning ordinary activities into thoughtful—and when necessary—principled actions that spoke volumes about who she was as a person. 

If you think about it, there is quiet heroism in a life lived like that.

Written by her children