"Susan May you find peace in all of the wonderful memories of your mother. I really enjoyed having the opportunity to spent a few minutes with you this fall. I will call you when I am in Seattle in the spring of 2013 for the National Garden Club Convention. May you and Peter find a special peace. "
In loving memory of
Marianna Lee Hardcastle
February 18, 1923 - December 10, 2011
Marianna Lee Hardcastle (nee Redding) died peacefully in Bellevue on December 10, 2011, after a long illness. Lee was born Feb 18, 1923 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to Clarence and Mildred Redding. She graduated from University of Wisconsin in 1945, just as WWII was ending, met her future husband, John, while working at Great Lakes Naval Station, and they married the following year in Whitewater, Wisconsin. In 1947 they took off for the Alaska territory, as the government was giving land away to veterans who would homestead. They pulled a trailer up the Alaska Highway on the way, crossing the Peace River on a train (had to get the car and our trailer onto the train), got stuck on the very muddy roads, stayed at "interesting" road houses and inns, drank lots of horrible coffee and ate many terrible pork steaks. After checking out Palmer, Anchorage (where they could have homesteaded in Spenard), and Seward, they eventually landed in Seward, living over the Seward Hardware store.
Lee worked on the Army dock in Seward, where she met life-long friends Bea Watts and Erma Walker. Lee went "outside" (to Kenosha, Wisconsin) where her son, Peter, was born in 1949. Returning to Alaska, she and John built a house on Salmon Creek Road in 1951. In 1954 they moved to Homer where John worked for the Extension Service, later moving back to Seward where Lee taught at the Seward Tuberculosis Sanatorium (aka "the San") in the late 1950s, and John ran the rehabilitation program until the San closed.
They lived in Seattle from 1959-1960, where their daughter Susan was born, and moved back to Seward, where John managed the Kenai Coop, a grocery store. In 1963 Lee and John started The Country Store in a building at Mile 1 on the Seward Highway that had formerly been a WW II warehouse, then The Plantation (a nightclub). They moved to their house on Bear Drive in Clearview, survived the Alaska Earthquake on Good Friday 1964, and life rolled forward while they worked at the store, raised their children, and enjoyed their friends. She was able to travel to visit her family in Wisconsin many summers, later visiting family members in Florida, North Carolina and Maine. Her mother was able to come and visit her in Seward in the early 1970s.
Lee and John purchased their home in the Seattle area in 1974 for their retirement. They lived there happily in their beloved home in Clyde Hill, where she enjoyed gardening, attending the ballet and theatre, crafts and traveling. She lived a rich life, and will be missed by many. She is interred with her husband John at the City of Kirkland, Washington cemetery. Lee is survived by her children Peter and Susan, and grandchildren Rebecca and William. She was preceded in death by her husband John, and her friends Bea Watts and Erma Walker, although she continued to be a second "mother" to their children to the end.