When Marcella McCaffray was a child, she and her family attended a Memorial Day parade every year. Marcella's mother told her the parade was held to celebrate Marcella's birthday, and she believed her.
Motherly love stretched the truth, but it was true that Marcella's birthday was on Memorial Day, May 30. (In 1971 the holiday was changed to the fourth Monday in May, a moveable date.)
Born in 1923 in Stockton, Calif., Marcella is the younger child of Adelia and Ned Dobrasin. Ned owned a restaurant that served breaded veal cutlets and other homestyle meals.
When Marcella was 2, her family moved to nearby Lodi, the "Zinfandel Capital of the World," where she grew up.
"It was always warm in Lodi," Marcella says. "I remember sitting under the peach tree in our back yard. The warm, ripe peaches smelled heavenly. They had a wonderful fragrance, full of potential sweetness."
The month of May not only ended with a celebration, it also started with one. "On May Day," Marcella says, "I danced around a maypole with other children, intertwining crepe garlands. My mother sewed me a dress for May Day-blue with tiers of ruffles on the skirt."
Marcella attended Lodi Union High School, so called because many students came by bus from a large area of outlying vineyards. As a teenager she was a big fan of Frank Sinatra, and still is. "He was my Elvis," she says girlishly.
She and her family moved to Sacramento after she graduated, in 1940. She entered College of the Pacific back in Stockton (COP), and commuted there her freshman year with her older brother Martin, who was also enrolled there.
Sophomore year she joined Delta Gamma sorority and lived on campus. "The other girls were friendly," Marcella recalls, "and many of them were into theater, as I was." She majored in speech and minored in theater. "Both require speaking in front of people and projecting your voice," she says softly.
"In drama classes, our choices were fairly limited in those days," she says. "Everything had to be G-rated." She recently observed a drama workshop at the University of Washington and got a glimpse of how things have changed. "The emphasis was on sex, for no redeeming reason that I could see. They were missing out on a lot. Everything else was left unattended."
She could not recall the name of the play the students were rehearsing, but it's safe to say it wasn't Shakespeare.
At COP she met fellow student Arthur McCaffray, and soon the two were sweethearts. He was already in the Marines, but had not yet been mobilized. "So many men signed up for military service during World War II, they couldn't accommodate them all," Marcella explains. "They kept them in colleges until they were needed."
In 1943 Arthur was sent to officer training at Parris Island, S.C., then to the embattled beaches of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Marcella stayed at COP, and graduated in 1944. Her first job out of college supported the war effort; she loaded propane tanks onto trucks at an oil refinery in Berkeley, Calif.
At the end of the war, Arthur returned safely and Marcella attended the University of California at Berkeley. She earned her teaching certificate in English literature and drama, then taught these subjects at Elk Grove High School outside Sacramento. But she discovered that she didn't like teaching.
"If I'd made another choice after college," she says in retrospect, "I might have stayed with it. I wish I had pursued acting, or some other line of work in theater."
But another opportunity arose: Arthur popped the question. He and Marcella came to Seattle, his hometown, and were married in July 1946.
The newlyweds moved to Pittsburgh, Pa., where Arthur played professional football for the Steelers for several years. When they returned to Seattle they settled in Madison Park, and Arthur went into the frozen food business with his brothers. Two years later Marcella and Arthur moved to Capitol Hill, near Volunteer Park, where they lived for 29 years.
They had two daughters, Carol (born 1947) and Marcie (born 1951). A Catholic family, Carol and Marcie attended Holy Names Academy, for them a neighborhood school.
In 1968, Marcella lost her brother to cancer. He was only 48. Not particularly close as children, they had become close as adults, perhaps beginning with those commutes between Sacramento and Stockton. "I still miss Martin a lot," Marcella says.
Since her marriage, Marcella has not worked outside the home. She was a full-time mother, and actively supported her husband's career by entertaining his customers and, when their daughters got older, accompanying him on many business trips to large cities throughout the United States. "That was very time-consuming," she says. She also attended the theater whenever she could.
With an empty nest, Marcella and Arthur moved to Magnolia almost three decades ago. Sadly, in the 1980s, Arthur fell ill with Alzheimer's disease. "It's a gradual disintegration of the person," Marcella says. After knowing and loving each other for 50 years, eventually he forgot who she was. "You know it's coming," she says. "You prepare yourself not to take it personally, but when it happens it hurts anyway."
Arthur was ill for eight years. Marcella took care of him herself for six years, but finally could no longer cope on her own and reluctantly admitted him to a nursing home. He died there two years later, in 1994.
Marcella still lives in their Magnolia home, an angular, split-level house near the shore of Puget Sound. The deck wraps around a huge tree. "The view is beautiful no matter what the weather is," Marcella explains. On the day we spoke there were whitecaps on the heaving, gray waves.
In the living room, the walls are chocolate brown, the carpet white and open shelves display a large collection of mostly Asian art, including seven elaborately clad Japanese dolls. Two life-size bronze cranes stand in a corner, bolted to the floor.
Marcella has become an avid theatergoer. She has season tickets to ACT, the 5th Avenue, Intiman, Paramount and the Rep, as well as the ballet and opera. "I attend theater so much, I don't have to read!" she says. When she does, it's usually a magazine like The New Yorker.
She is more selective about attending the symphony, perhaps because there is less drama. "But recently I attended the most fantastic concert in my life," she says, "at St. James Cathedral. There were 340 people in the choir. It was not just a concert, but a pageant." Pageantry is drama enough for her.
When Marcella isn't attending one performance or another, she works out with personal trainer Mark Goodman at Fitness by Design (see Jan. 17 article). She attributes her longevity 90 percent to good genes, but adds that "you have to take care of your good genes." She also spends time with her daughters. Carol lives a few minutes away on Magnolia; Marcie and her husband live on Cougar Mountain near Issaquah, where they own a zoo dedicated to the preservation of endangered species.
Marcella will have to wait until 2011 before her birthday falls on Memorial Day again (this year it's on a Wednesday). But her life is full of enough theater and pageantry to sustain her until then.
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