Marie Hayes

(From Mitchell Funeral Home)

Marie Hayes peacefully made the transition from this life to the divine early Saturday Feb. 3 in hospice care at Novant Medical Center Mint Hill, NC. She was 94.

People who know Marie, remember her fearlessness and her friendliness. She didn’t hesitate to go places where other languages were spoken, to demonstrate the workings of a sewing machine and suggest that a stranger buy one. People were her hobby. She collected the addresses of friends from decades past, maintaining an epic Christmas card list.

“I’ve had a wonderful life,” she said recently and more than once.

A service celebrating Marie’s life will be held Friday, March 8, in the Chapel of Mitchell Funeral Home, beginning at 12:00pm, 7209 Glenwood Avenue, Raleigh, NC. Her ashes will be interred alongside Charles T. Davis, her husband of 49 years, in Raleigh Memorial Park.

Marie was born just weeks before the Great Crash of 1929 and grew up a small-town girl near Joplin, MO. Her parents, Ernest and Goldie Short, left the farm to support their growing family when a job with the Joplin Police Department opened up for her father.

Marie was the youngest of four Short siblings. As her brothers began to outgrow their family’s little house, one by one they answered the call to military service overseas before their sister reached adolescence. Though she adored her father, his position as a respected member of the force led him to lay down the law for his only daughter. Marie was a good student, went to church with their next-door neighbor, sang in the high school choir and worked at a five-and-dime store after school, but she chafed at some of her dad’s restrictions.

Then, a handsome lifeguard caught her eye with his skill on the diving board. Both were 18 – with September birthdays five days apart – when they married in 1947 and left Joplin behind. Before he could collect a high school diploma, Marie’s new husband Charles Davis, joined the Army and was transferred three times for training as conflict was building in Korea.

Their daughter, Carol Marie, was born in March 1949 at Ft. Belvoir, VA, shortly before her father was to graduate from officer training and transfer to Korea, but cutbacks in military spending changed his career plan. On Charles’s return to civilian life in Joplin, MO, the principal of Joplin High School handed him a diploma, recognizing his former student’s service to the country.

The couple had one son, Mark, born near Joplin in 1953. From then on, the backdrop to Marie’s story became raising children while contributing whatever she could earn in clerical jobs in new towns wherever Charles went for education, then for work.

Their first stop was Pittsburg, KS, where Charles studied chemistry at Kansas State Teachers College while Marie saw to it that Carol went to kindergarten. Upon Charles’ graduation with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, the family moved to Ponca City, OK, where Charles went to work in a lab for Continental Oil Co. Soon, he was looking for admission to a master’s degree program and found one at the University of Arkansas. Meanwhile, Marie worked as a secretary for an insurance company in Fayetteville, AR, to help support the family while Charles studied and worked in the lab.

After graduation, Charles took a job with a chemical company in the St. Louis area, and Marie found another secretarial job. Two years later, the company transferred Charles to Philadelphia and the family lived across the Delaware River in New Jersey. It took two more years for the family to decide to return to the Great Plains where Marie’s brothers had started their families and their parents were growing older in the Joplin area. While Charles hit the road selling lab equipment out of Tulsa, OK, Marie served as an administrative assistant at the Pipeliners’ Local Union.

By this time, Carol had been to 12 schools before the 10th grade and Mark was beginning to build his own middle-school resume. Soon after her high school graduation and enrollment at the University of Missouri, Marie and Mark followed Charles to Painesville, OH, where he worked in a large chemical company’s lab alongside Lake Erie. There, Marie served the Lake County Sheriff’s Office and, among other duties, managed the sales of foreclosed real estate.

When Carol married and their son left home for college, the empty-nesters moved to Houston, TX, where Marie’s youngest brother, Ross, raised his brood of four boys. The two families spent many a holiday together and joined the growing fan base for Houston Astros baseball and Houston Oilers football.

Booming Southwest Houston also called Marie to become an entrepreneur, turning her love of sewing into a profitable family business. The Sewing Basket store opened with fabric and notions, developing loyal customers that supported expansion into the sales of Singer sewing machines. She kept one of those machines busy making clothing and decorations she could display in the shop. Eventually, Marie was able to hire an assistant to run the store and free her to do some traveling with newly retired Charles.

In their second Texas decade, a vehicle stolen from their driveway in North Houston prompted Charles and Marie to move back to Ohio with a plan to develop a lake lot they had bought years before for family recreation near Painesville. As retirees, they wanted something that they could sell. Also, a grandbaby girl born to daughter Carol and husband Ed Miller in Ellicott City, MD, less than a day’s drive away sweetened the deal for them. Eventually, cold weather and a hot real estate market convinced them to sell the lake property and move to St. Charles, MO, after Carol’s family had settled in Raleigh, NC.

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) changed everything for the whole family: When the disease attacked Charles, Carol and her husband Ed Miller started construction of an apartment in unfinished space on the lower level of their home. By midsummer, Marie had cleaned out the split-level house in St. Charles and packed the remainder for the move to North Carolina.

Three adults would live in the household to help Charles as ALS destroyed the ability of his muscles to run, walk and eventually even to breathe. Within the first six months, he would need a ventilator, and Marie became a team leader and full-time nurse. Marie did receive coffee breaks and other assistance from her son-in-law, who was at home working toward a doctorate and supervising an active sixth-grader when she wasn’t in school. Marie also called on Ed when she needed a strong set of muscles and on Carol working for the local newspaper when she needed help with North Carolina’s health care system or a nurse’s aide in the evenings. Sometimes, the sixth-grader provided entertainment for her grandfather. Their son Mark visited on weekends, providing Charles with haircuts and otherwise helping out with grooming.

Charles’ death in July 1998, a couple of months short of their 50th wedding anniversary, sent Marie into a dark month of grief – until she decided to resume her own life. She left her little dog, Macho, with the upstairs family, packed some of her nicest clothes and set off on I-40 for Joplin, where her high school class was having its annual reunion. She drove back to Raleigh after a couple of weeks and during one of their after-dinner walks around the neighborhood, Marie told her daughter that she had kindled a new relationship back in Missouri, a fellow she knew in high school. That shouldn’t have been a surprise, given that Marie was a beautiful woman unaccompanied by her usual partner.

The lucky guy was a widower named Don Lindner who liked Marie’s idea of starting over in Florida’s gentle climate. They met with the Lutheran pastor who served a church that Marie and Charles had attended in the St. Louis suburbs and set a date for their nuptials. The family members still grieving their loss of Charles sent a huge bouquet of her favorite roses for the occasion. Don spoiled Marie as if she were royalty: a new car, new furnishings for a new two-bedroom house in a gated community near Leesburg, FL. All she had to do was to mention something she liked, and he would soon present it to her. She wanted to travel to Brazil; he took her to Rio de Janeiro. Marie introduced Don to old friends and members of her family from California to Kansas, Texas and North Carolina. Sadly, he died of a massive heart attack at home only 18 months after their wedding.

Widowed again, Marie invited a widowed friend to come from Oklahoma to Florida after the funeral and keep her company during those first few lonesome weeks. Then she started going to an over-55 club and met a younger man, named Ron Hayes. Ron was smitten, but Marie believed in marriage. So they exchanged vows in Las Vegas and settled in the home Marie owned in Leesburg. Ron sold his house nearby, but continued an accounting business for a time and became the unofficial tax preparer for neighbors in Leesburg.

As they grew older, Ron and Marie traveled the world. Their first trip together was a cruise of the Baltic Sea, stopping at Scandinavian countries and taking a coach excursion to Berlin. They stopped in many European capitals, including Rome and London. They cruised to Alaska, explored the ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru and experienced a political protest in Buenos Aires from their hotel window. Eventually, their travels led them to rent three-bedroom condominiums in Myrtle Beach, SC, where they could vacation with family members and visiting friends. Occasionally, they would visit Florida beaches.

They left Leesburg whenever a hurricane threatened, the last of those trips taking them to Louisiana, but Ron suffered a fall while packing their car for the trip home. And that’s where they hunkered down – watching movies holding hands in their recliner chairs -- during Category 5 hurricanes in 2018 and 2022 that skirted Central Florida.

In 2023, they began to think about leaving the warm climate they loved for North Carolina where Ron’s sons, Russell and Dan, and Marie’s son live near Charlotte, and Carol, Ed and their daughter and son-in-law live in Raleigh. The move was accomplished the first week of November 2023 in time for one more family Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Marie is survived by her husband, Ron; her son, her daughter and husband, one granddaughter, Alison and her husband Daniel; her sons by marriage Russell and Dan Hayes; nephews, John, of California, Bill and Gary, of Wichita, KS, Wayne and Jeff Short, of the Houston,TX, area; niece, Sandy Cross of South Carolina and countless admirers.

In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation in Marie’s honor to your favorite charity.