In Memory of Martha Quimby

Martha McMaster Quimby

10 January 1930 - 21 October 2021

Service Information

An memorial service held by St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Anchorage, Alaska, on Sunday 21 November 2021.

Order of Service/Program/Bulletin for the Service (PDF)

This site will stand as a memorial for the time being. It will grow as we get time to add to it.

The family is still collecting recollections of Marty's life from those that wish to share them with us. Recollections and/or a request for updates on service details can be mailed to: mmquimby.memories@outlook.com

Obituary

Martha (Marty) McMaster Quimby was born January 10, 1930 at Walter Reed Memorial Hospital in Washington DC to William Robert McMaster and Edna Crusius McMaster. She passed away October 21, 2021 at the age of 91.

Marty grew up traveling the world as part of an Army family, living in many parts of the US. After two tours of duty in the Philippines in the 1930s, her family returned to the US at the dawn of WWII. While her father went off to fight in North Africa, Marty, along with mother and brother, lived with family in Oregon.

After high school graduation, she attended Mills College in Oakland, California where she studied art, with an emphasis on drawing. At a dance with the Coast Guardsmen from the Alameda station she met her future husband, Thomas W. Quimby. After graduation in 1951 the two became engaged and married January 3, 1953. They went on to raise a family of five children.

Marty once said all she wanted on her obituary was: She was born and then she died. But in between those two events she did so much more than merely exist. She lived a very full life and was grateful for all she’d seen and the people who touched her life as much as she touched theirs.

During her life she worked many fascinating jobs including computer programming using punch cards before returning to college to earn her RN. She loved working in the Emergency Room and when the family moved to Alaska in 1977 she worked the ER at Providence Hospital. In the 1980s she worked for the State of Alaska as an itinerant Public Health Nurse and felt privileged to see practically every corner of the state. She retired from the Alaska Department of Corrections as Nurse Coordinator in 1996.

Outside work she had many interests and was a big supporter of the arts and contributed time and talent to the One Percent for Art Council, Anchorage Opera, Anchorage Museum, and Anchorage Spinners and Weavers Guild. She was very involved with St. Mary’s Episcopal Church. She loved to travel and learn, and over the course of the years she made many friends from all walks of life. One of her great loves was watercolor painting which she continued until a few days before her death.

Marty is preceded in death by her husband of forty-two years, Thomas Wallace Quimby (d.1995), her parents William R. and Edna C. McMaster, and her brother William H. McMaster.

Marty is survived by her children and their spouses: Helena and Bob Modell, T. Bart and Sandra Quimby, John Quimby and Kate Egan, Karl and Coral Quimby, Gretchen and Jim Neeley. She is also survived by grandchildren Kristina (Gregg) Stevens, Shauna (Eric) O’Brien, Thomas (Mandy) Quimby, Michael (Dene’) Quimby, Sarah Quimby, Bryan (Callie) Quimby, Donald Quimby, Sam Quimby, William Neeley, and Parker (Abby) Quimby. At the time of her death, Marty had twelve great-grandchildren, all of whom she dearly loved.

In lieu of flowers, it is requested contributions be made to the Mills College Alumnae Association, University of Washington, or the charity closest to your heart.

At Marty's request, she is being cremated and her ashes will be spread over Cook Inlet to join those of her husband.

Extended Eulogy

Martha McMaster Quimby (1930-2021)

Mom once said all she wanted on her obituary was: She was born and then she died. But in between those two events she did so much more than merely exist.
Martha (Marty) McMaster Quimby was born January 10, 1930, at Walter Reed Memorial Hospital in Washington DC to William Robert McMaster and Edna Crusius McMaster. She was born 4-6 weeks prematurely and was small enough she barely filled her father’s hand. Her first crib was a dresser drawer.

Mom grew up traveling the world as part of an Army family. Her earliest memories were of living in the Philippines where her father served two tours of duty. She told stories of a long family vacation visiting China and Japan before returning to the states, in fact, she recalled seeing the Japanese army march into Peking. Soon after the vacation, her family returned to the US at the dawn of WWII. While her father went off to fight in North Africa, Mom, along with her mother and brother, lived with family in Oregon. She finished high school in Tennessee, June of 1947.

Her parents moved to San Francisco while she attended Mills College in Oakland, California. During the summer of 1950, Mom boarded a boat for Europe. Part of her time was spent in London before visiting family in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Her passport also notes a stop in Dublin, Ireland, but we never heard any stories about it. Upon her return to the states, she recalled sitting down to a meal of a dozen fresh eggs, which had been few and far between in post-war Europe. At Mills she studied art, with an emphasis on drawing, and planned for a career in medical illustration. Instead, at a dance with the Coast Guardsmen from the nearby Alameda station, she met her future husband, Thomas Wallace Quimby.

After graduation in 1951 the two became engaged when Tom proposed in the Japanese Tea Garden of Golden Gate Park and married January 3, 1953, in the chapel on the Mills College campus. Their honeymoon was spent driving from California to Coral Gables, Florida where Dad went on to finish a degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Miami while serving in the Coast Guard Reserves. Helena was born in 1954, and Bart followed in 1956, just a month before Dad graduated from college.

Over the next seven years, Dad worked for Honeywell and the family moved throughout the Southern US states. John was born in Atlanta, Georgia, Karl in Tampa, Florida. They lived in Mobile, Alabama, before moving to New Orleans, Louisiana where Gretchen was born. Two months after Gretchen’s birth, the family moved to Livermore, California where Dad worked at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. This move brought the family closer to Mom’s brother and his family, as well as her newly widowed mother.

The years in California were busy ones. Mom and Dad had an itch to travel, and most weekends found the family piling into the 1969 blue Suburban, often referred to as “the bus” by neighbors, and heading out. Sometimes we went into San Francisco to see the sights and visit our grandmother. Some weekends turned into camping trips, sometimes with Boy Scouts sometimes just family and a few friends, up and down the length of the state. And closer to home, we often visited friends who had a ranch in the Livermore hills where we kept an old white horse named Snowy. In the hills there were rocks to climb, snakes and tarantulas to capture, and catfish to be caught in the ponds around the ranch. Mom would sometimes head up there mid-week while we were in school and take Snowy out for a ride. At Christmas we gathered mistletoe from the oaks.

Mom’s ability to organize a large family was critical to how we traveled. The Suburban was always loaded in order of how camp needed to be set up. We all had our parts to play, and this proved crucial on our trip to Mount Lassen Volcanic National Park in California. Camp was nearly set up when Mom had trouble breathing. While Dad got directions to the nearest hospital in Redding from a ranger, we broke down camp and repacked the Suburban in under thirty minutes. One recalls it took only seven minutes, but others merely recall it was incredibly fast. We learned how to treat hyperventilation that day.

It was while living in Livermore that Mom returned to work after Gretchen entered school. Her first job was working for Lox Equipment, doing computer programming with punch cards. A few years later, she left Lox and returned to school at Cal State Hayward where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Nursing and became a Registered Nurse. When she put her new degree to work, she worked nights in the Emergency Room of a small hospital in Tracy, California.

In the spring of 1976, the family moved to Benicia, California, before moving to Anchorage, Alaska just one year later. Dad took a job with Alyeska Pipeline Service Company just months prior to oil beginning to flow in the pipeline and Mom went to work in the Providence Hospital Emergency Room. She also taught continuing education to nurses outside of Anchorage. By this time, only Karl and Gretchen lived at home and were in high school. In April of 1977, the first grandchild, born to Helena, came into the world.

In the early 1980s, Mom took a job with the State of Alaska as an itinerant Public Health Nurse. For the next ten years she traveled to the far reaches of Alaska. While teaching health aides in village clinics, she tended to many minor and a few major emergencies, including traveling on the back of a snow mobile to another village to deliver a baby when the mother couldn’t get to Fairbanks or Anchorage due to a raging snowstorm and no planes could fly. It is during this time she made many memories of friends she met through her job, and she began to collect Alaskan art in all its many forms. Her ivory collection, in part, grew because it seemed in almost every village an artist wanted to sell a piece to finance having pizza or cake flown in for a birthday party or a kid needed new shoes. She’d write a check, and before it cleared the bank, the check could have up to a dozen signatures as it was passed from one person to the next in place of cash.

The family home in Anchorage became a hotel of sorts. Friends from the villages and Outside passed through the doors. Itinerant doctors in town for only a month or so came to stay, as did opera personnel in town for a performance. At times, cots were set up and rooms held two to three such travelers. All were welcomed and treated like family, including being put to work washing dishes. Every holiday dinner Mom gathered in those she called stray puppies and kittens. The house was filled to bursting, and it was often chaotic, but that was how our parents liked it. It wasn’t just holidays when Mom could lay out a feast. She could pull together something to eat for folks at the drop of a hat. Mom welcomed folks anytime and was always able to toss something delicious/delectable together. It was her way to “add another cup of water to the soup” and make room for whoever needed a meal. Often those meals were so much more than merely food for the stomach. Long discussions and many jokes were heard around the dining table most evenings. One visitor, during a relatively quiet dinner, noted that three of us were talking about different topics, and yet we followed each other seamlessly. Eventually he grew to accept it.

During this time, Mom once more returned to school and earned a Master of Public Health degree from the University of Washington. Each summer she’d spend a month in Seattle, then do course work by mail in the time before most people had home computers and the internet was not yet a reality.

In the 1990s, Mom went to work for the Alaska Department of Corrections as the first statewide Nursing Coordinator. It was from this position she retired in 1996, a year after Dad’s passing. She might have retired, but it didn’t slow her down one bit. Retirement allowed her the time to dive into her many interests. Between trips around the world including Scotland, New Zealand, the Galapagos Islands, the South Pacific (including Pitcairn Island), Mexico, and Norway, she spent her time painting, knitting, spinning, and weaving. She continued to provide room and board for visiting opera personnel, including Kate Egan who later married into the family.

One of her best loved places in retirement was her late October/early November timeshare in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Each year Mom would take her place at a shaded table by the pool, sitting so she could see everyone coming down to the deck, beach, or restaurant. She quickly gave up reading because people wouldn’t stop to visit if she were involved in a book. Instead, she’d work on knitting or watercolors, often giving away small face cloths and paintings as she finished them. Daughter in law Coral went one year and after two weeks of scuba diving and hanging with Mom, on the way home in the Seattle airport people came up to her and said, “You’re the scuba diver.” Of course, Coral had no idea who these people were, but Mom loved to tell stories of her children to anyone willing to listen.

A few of the organizations she contributed time and talent to include the One Percent for Art Council, Anchorage Opera, Anchorage Museum, and Anchorage Spinners and Weavers Guild. It’s entirely possible there were many more groups she was committed to. The family is hoping to hear more from former colleagues and friends who knew her through one of these organizations. One of her greatest loves was her involvement with St. Mary’s Episcopal Church where she was a core member of their early Wednesday morning Euharist group for many years and other church initiatives. The enduring support of her church was a comfort to her the last few years, and the support extended to her family in her final hours helped ease many hearts.

As her time wound down, she moved into Marlow Manor. Their compassionate care was all we could have asked for. The spinning and knitting faded away, but up until her final week, she had weekly watercolor art lessons. Her last work, one of her best, was completed just three days before she passed. Staff members remember her as being feisty, friendly, and involved. During trivia games she always spoke up, usually with the right information, but sometimes she made up a cheeky answer. If she had an opinion, she voiced it.

Mom also had a few pithy comments she dropped from time to time. Gretchen recalls on more than one occasion Mom would shrug and say, “I’ve given each of my children something to take to their therapists.” She never claimed to be a perfect parent, but as all parents do, she and Dad made it up as they went, mostly getting it right, as they raised five independent adults.

She often said – and this is a paraphrase, “Don’t be sad when I go. I’ve lived an extraordinary life, I’ve seen many wonderous places and things few others can claim.” This has been borne out as many of the people who have contacted the family remember Mom as smart, funny, and a force of nature. While impish in spirit, she was often the calm in the face of the storm. Although not demonstrative, she loved deeply and cared for the people around her. She was also pragmatic and didn’t spend time worrying about things over which she had no control.

In the end, we can honestly say, she lived a very full life and was grateful for all she’d seen and the people who touched her life, possibly never fully realizing how much she touched the lives of those who knew her, and a few who only knew of her.

Marty is preceded in death by her husband of forty-two years, Thomas Wallace Quimby (d.1995), her parents William R. and Edna C. McMaster, and her brother William H. McMaster.
Marty is survived by her children and their spouses: Helena and Bob Modell, T. Bart and Sandra Quimby, John Quimby and Kate Egan, Karl and Coral Quimby, Gretchen and Jim Neeley. She is also survived by grandchildren Kristina (Gregg) Stevens, Shauna (Erick) O’Brien, Thomas (Mandy) Quimby, Michael (Dene’) Quimby, Sarah Quimby, Bryan (Callie) Quimby, Donald Quimby, Sam Quimby, William Neeley, and Parker (Abby) Quimby. At the time of her death, Marty had twelve great-grandchildren, all of whom she dearly loved.

In lieu of flowers, it is requested contributions be made to the Mills College Alumnae Association, University of Washington, or the charity closest to your heart.