Family and friends are remembering Marilyn Wentela and sharing this remembrance with her community:
Longtime West Seattle resident Marilyn Wentela has “go(ne) off to glory land” (her words). Born in rural Wisconsin, Marilyn overcame early struggles and her family having changed residences TEN times before she finished high school. Her father was a respected and sought-after manager of small-town hardware stores. Wide spots in the road Marilyn once called “home” include Wawina, Floodwood, Deer River and Sebeka, each in Minnesota. She once told of moving from a town that had electricity to one which did not. Eventually she knew the relative luxury of four years spent at Superior Central H.S. (class of ’51).
Marilyn arrived in Seattle with her family in the waning days of 1952 while still a teenager. After quickly getting a job in the shipping dept. at Marshall Wells Hardware, she told a coworker a few weeks later: “It has rained every… single … day since I got here.” 70 years later, she was still very proud that the record for consecutive days with measurable rainfall at rainy Seattle’s official measuring spot of Sea-Tac Airport was in January of 1953.
Election night of 1960 found Marilyn on a bowling team at the old Rainier Lanes in Seattle. Between frames, interested parties would gather near a radio at the counter, which was their lone shared source of election news. Upon returning, each bowler might be updated by others nearby as to which new state had been declared for Kennedy or Nixon. It was during these exchanges that Marilyn met her only husband George, then in a different bowling league elsewhere in the establishment. The couple married in 1962, with a honeymoon baby soon to follow, and they added two more children before the decade ended.
“Traditional” family life saw Marilyn stop working to stay at home and be a mother to her children, whose childhoods were filled with care and comfortable routine. A thoughtfully prepared dinner on the table each night and great friends down the street. Even a streetlight right out front so the kids would know when to come in at night.
Marilyn returned to the workforce when her youngest child was five and later evolved to become a single parent. There were challenges in that, but she endured, somehow managing to keep her children in the same home and schools. Priorities inspired in no small part by her own mobile childhood.
Marilyn Wentela was steady, responsible and well grounded, and it was those traits which allowed her children to pursue lives of their choosing. They always knew that mom’s subtle support was behind them in many various ways. She herself was an avid reader, a very serious gardener, and a lover of genealogy and politics. Voting was essential to her, and she’d already sent in her November ballot at the time of her passing. Marilyn would also burst into song at any random time, much to the chagrin of any child who might have a friend visiting.
Her residence was not only home to her kids, but also to numerous pets of many sorts scattered across the decades. Seldom was there a time when zero pets were numbered among the denizens of Marilyn’s home.
In the early 1990s, Marilyn became a grandmother for the first time, by then having already outlived her own mother, who sadly passed away before Marilyn’s children were born. Marilyn was able to build decades of memories with lone granddaughter Ashley, and a year of memories with lone great grandchild Wesley.
After retirement in 1998, Marilyn did some amount of traveling as well as spending lots of time with family. She was especially fond of trips to Boston, Washington DC, Florida and New York City, where she spent her 75th birthday surrounded by her loved ones. She also got a dog for the first time in decades – her most memorable dog as a child having been named “Bozo.” In Bozo’s honor, Marilyn made sure that all future dogs she ever had took names that began with “B.”
Marilyn was deeply proud of her 100% Finnish heritage and talked of saunas and other Finnish traditions experienced during childhood.
Although not much of a drinker, Marilyn’s go-to move was a “Lemon Drop” if out for dinner where one was available. In later life she developed a fondness for the “Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘N Fruity” menu item at IHOP. Her first reaction to it having memorably been to look upward while still in the restaurant, audibly inquiring of her long-departed mother: “Mom, why didn’t you make this for me when I was a kid?”
During her final decade on Earth, Marilyn visited 38 of the 39 counties in her adopted state of Washington (missing only the ever-challenging “San Juan County”).
After suffering a small stroke in 2020, Marilyn’s daily routine was altered, but she carried on and continued to thrive at home with the help of her adult children. She prepared her family just a bit in 2019 with a most amusing tale: on Marilyn’s cell phone one day appeared a photo taken by her son, then traveling in Oregon. The picture was of a trio of deer grazing in somebody’s front yard late at night, snapped because they seemed out of place. Upon noticing the picture on her phone, Marilyn texted: “Thank you for taking a photo of the constellation Cepheus…” while simultaneously causing immediate concerns related to her mental acuity.
It was only later, after consideration of the declining eyesight of a then-86-year-old person and upon scrutinizing the picture, that her family was blessed with greater understanding. Marilyn had observed (from memory/knowledge alone) that four visible and well-placed eyes on three different deer, a nearby porch light, and another light reflected in a car window had assembled themselves to mirror almost precisely the constellation Cepheus. It left her family still wondering about her mind … though suddenly from an angle 180 degrees opposite.
Marilyn was predeceased by her father George, mother Marie, brother Eugene, and by special older cousin Viola. She leaves behind son George, daughters Anne (Chris) and Karen (Leigh), granddaughter Ashley (Mario), and great-grandson Wesley, as well as an old tomcat named Cyrus.
A West Seattleite to the end and beyond, she passed away at Providence Mount St. Vincent’s Home and will be laid to rest at Forest Lawn Cemetery adjacent to her brother.
(WSB publishes West Seattle obituaries and memorial announcements by request, free of charge. Please email the text, and a photo if available, to westseattleblog@gmail.com)