Our soccer brother from the best years of Brandywine. Ed Searls mom passed Mary Walter Searl, age 97, died at home on June 24 in Brandywine Hundred under hospice care. Mary was born in Paulsboro, New Jersey, to immigrant parents from Austria-Hungary. While she was a toddler, her parents, Eva and Joe Walter, purchased a thirty-acre farm in nearby Clarksboro. With her nine siblings, Mary was an integral part of the truck farm’s operations that sustained the growing family during the Great Depression. Those formative years on the family farm provided her a lifetime of joyful stories and strong remembrances. As a result of her life on the farm, she was intimate with practical aspects of agriculture and gardening. From her beloved mother Eva, she learned the arts of cooking and baking. Mary was famous for her cakes and pies, with piecrust that was melt-in-the-mouth tender. On her acre plot on the Delaware Arc, she kept a large vegetable garden and a succession of artfully designed flower beds. She often claimed it took only a bucket of dirt to give her happiness. She married Clint Searl, also of Paulsboro, in 1939, on the first of two Thanksgivings proclaimed by FDR. The young couple lived in Boothwyn, PA, throughout the 1940s, where their two sons, Clint and Ed, were born. In the early 1950s, through their own labors, they built a home in what was rural Northern Delaware, where Mary and Clint lived for the next sixty-plus years. It was their proud paradise. Worldwide Marriage Encounter in 2011 deemed Mary and Clint the longest married couple in Delaware. A recent News Journal “Crossroads” feature article chronicled their nearly 75 years of marriage. Clint survives Mary. Mary had many virtuous attributes, especially a sweet love of children, who in turn adored her for the attention she gave them. She is survived by four grandchildren and five great grandchildren, as well as her two sons. Ed’s Naamans Little League chums still remember Mary a half-century later as a partisan “Super Fan” for her exuberant cheering atop the concession stand where she often kept score in the late 1950s. She stayed active until a few weeks ago when a “c diff” infection brought on a sharp decline. Among her sibling survivors are her 96-year-old sister, Eva, and brothers George, Paul, Frank, and Tony. Mary requested that memorial gifts in her name be designated to the Sunday Breakfast Mission in Wilmington, “for all the poor souls who go without meals.”
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 01:32:03 +0000
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