World Citizen Alights in Empire: An Interview with Marian Gyr

By F. Josephine Arrowood
Sun contributor
Fans of the 1971 cult classic Harold and Maude may be thrilled to discover that a vigorous, free-thinking, octogenarian social activist has recently made her home in Empire. Yet Marian Gyr is much more interesting and engaged than a hippie-era movie character.
The lively educator, environmentalist and matriarch says, “I wouldn’t mind making space for younger people, but it’s good to be in this world.” In an era where few happily admit their true age, she’s proud to state, “I’m in my eighty-seventh year,” though her birthday isn’t until October.
“I love to walk, that’s probably what’s kept me going.” These days, she makes the village rounds with a walker: library, grocery store, recycling site and the Township Hall, where she enjoys senior lunches and assists a blind friend twice a week with her memoirs. She also spends time with friends who drop by her townhouse, and visits with her son Jack and his wife Dianne, who live nearby.

She finds large gatherings difficult, due to hearing loss, but, “I enjoy people one-on-one,” she says with the zest of the lifelong learner. A Quaker, she hosted Sunday meetings in her home last fall, until winter weather made gatherings chancy for members.
Marian came to her nonviolent activism gradually. She describes her upbringing in Cincinnati as “very privileged, though my mother said we had to work for everything we had. My dad sold tires all his life, and he was a good salesman, even during the Depression. He didn’t even go to high school, until later. [Yet] he lived during a time when huge innovations came in, like electricity, cars, the TV. I inherited a wonderful gene from him: he was perennially happy.
“As a young woman, I had to ask myself, ‘Do you want people to respect you or feel sorry for you?’ I didn’t know the answer until I asked if I wanted to feel sorry for me.”
During the Second World War, she served in what she laughingly referred to as the “B.A.M. — the Broad Ass Marines — though I didn’t know it at the time [officially the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve]. Marines prided themselves on having the saltiest language! I went to Aviation Machinist School in Norman, Okla. That was fun!”
She continues, “I joined them instead of the Women’s Army Corps because I’d have a better chance of doing what I wanted. Oh, I loved it! I could have gone to officers’ school, but I didn’t want to give orders. I was a ‘grease monkey’: we would do engine overhauls, take off all the attachments. We worked on radial engines with air-cooled fins — if you weren’t careful, you could really skin your knuckles! To look like we had on clean clothes, we starched ‘em like anything. Then it was hard to get your legs in!”
She served in the military from 1943 to 1946. After the war, the young veteran went to junior college, then transferred to the University of Cincinnati. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I love to study, so I became a teacher. It scared me, so I went to Switzerland for 12 months on the G.I. Bill. That was a very special time in my life.”
At her pension (rooming house), she met her future husband John, a psychology student at the University of Geneva. He had been a teenage prisoner of war, the result of his family’s Resistance activities in the Netherlands, helping downed American and British pilots out of the country. The two married in 1948, and came to the United States, where John pursued graduate studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and the University of Michigan.
In Ann Arbor, the antiwar Swiss and the American former Marine looked for a church to join. They found the Quakers, whose pacifism and unadorned simplicity “appeal to me strongly,” relates Marian. “I’m a minimalist! We had a very active five years there.”
The family was against the Vietnam War, and after the “terrible convention in ’68,” decided to move to Edmonton, Canada. “We had to be very careful not to be ‘ugly Americans’,” she remembers. After a year, “Kent State happened [May 1970], and then the media turned around.” The family returned to Brighton (about 20 miles north of Ann Arbor), where Marian resumed teaching kindergarteners and first graders.
“I set up my classroom to suit boys because they’re much more active, and the girls are more willing to go along with that. We went on a lot of field trips, and to teach them, I’d make up songs like, ‘Satchmo the saber-tooth tiger, hasn’t got teeth any more,’” she warbles to the tune of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
Home was a teaching experience as well, with six lively sons at the family home on a lake. “In child rearing, I didn’t believe in TV, so we didn’t have one. I think that spoils a person’s resources — it’s deadening, even though it has many good programs.” Their house was at the end of a dirt road, and the family found ways to entertain each other.
“A child would rather have another child to play with than a lot of toys. The boys liked to wrestle,” she confides. “That’s their manly way of expressing affection, even now.”
Furnishings had to be sturdy and practical. “I was always building furniture — two-by-fours with plywood on top. I’d make covers with foam and my sewing machine.”
With a teaching career, activism, her husband’s work, and six boys, Marian says she sometimes longed for time to herself, to read a book, or write a letter. Instead, she plunged into a whirlwind of relentless activity, taking long hikes though the chain of state parks and recreation areas near their home, joining the Livingston County Democrats, and embarking on extended camping trips.
The tribe would pack into a Volkswagen van, customized by Marian. “I built long bunks for the kids; they could all go to bed at eight o’clock. John and I would take turns driving the two-lane roads, and all these little villages — there was always a graveyard,” to pull over and rest for a few hours.
“I always said, ‘F, F, F, F! Family, Friends, Fun, First!’ — and convention far behind,” she laughs. She vividly remember a three-month camping expedition in Switzerland in 1964, with the boys, John, and her father careening up and down mountain roads in a VW camper, “with the top open so they could all stick their heads out!”
“They all got imprinted on Switzerland, and all have lived there at some time,” she relates. The family has dual nationality, and two sons still live there. “Every Swiss has compulsory military service, beginning with six months in boot camp, then annually for three months until about [age] 45.”
The Swiss also take their voting responsibilities much more seriously than Americans do. Candidates don’t run on their image or sound bites, but on the issues, and boasting is perceived negatively. “You get your voting materials in the mail six weeks ahead of the elections, including a packet called Propaganda. I had to study them in German.” She didn’t mind, though: “When it came to people, I studied that.”
In 1980, Marian and John divorced. He returned to Switzerland, and she moved to Benzie County, where her son Jack runs his Fieldcraft Printing business. In a house he owned with his first wife Barbara, Marian lived in an addition that “I designed and paid for — a 10-by-12 foot space with a hot plate, sleeping couch, everything I needed.”
Ever the activist, she joined the Benzie County League of Women Voters, where “we all studied the electoral college issue,” and concluded it was time for that institution to end. She went to Nicaragua with a Michigan peace team organized by Gerard Grabowski (co-owner of Pleasanton Bakery) to help build a school, traveled to Poland with Global Volunteers, and home schooled her grandchildren Leland and Emory.
She could also be seen hitchhiking around the area, to the amazement of local residents, concerned over a lone older woman’s safety. “Back then, everyone did it, but now people worry. You have to have faith, use your head, pay attention to situations.”
In 2004, John asked her to come to Switzerland; she lived there until he died in 2007, when she returned to northern Michigan and a new home in Empire. A citizen of the world, Marian stays abreast of current affairs, both local and global.
“I write letters to the editor at the Record-Eagle, although they only allow one every two months. I just had one published in April; I’ve already got the one for June written. The next one I write, I’m going to insist that we start taxing carbon, move our oil-based industries to wind.” She pens about eight letters a week to friends and family, relating the large and small doings of life on the Leelanau peninsula and the larger environment. Recent reads include Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and James Kunstler’s Plan B, “about how we have to create energy alternatives at war-time emergency speed. Windmills and solar — these two are renewable.”
The activist still marches to the beat of a different drummer, albeit with the help of the walker she calls Rosanante, after Don Quixote’s broken-down, elderly steed. One suspects she is poking a little fun at her own frailty of body, as well as referencing the indomitable spirit of the man of La Mancha. But unlike him, she dreams a future of possibilities, affirming, “I’m not tilting at windmills — I want windmills!”