The Indy Herald & Globe

By Vickie McCubbin.

South Polk County lost one of its most eminent citizens in July when cancer took Marilyn Morton from us. Marilyn spent her life being everything to everyone all while being everywhere all at once. She was a woman of capacious energy, who knew how to get things organized. She created programs, festivals, events that will endure for decades and be signposts of her time with us.

The Indy Herald’s Vickie McCubbin takes a look back at Marilyn and her many incredible accomplishments as she connected our communities together like few others have in recent memory.

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Marilyn Morton’s journey to become our community’s quintessential volunteer began when she, her husband, Victor, and their three children moved to Independence from Salem in 1990. Their goal was to settle down in a smaller town where they could get involved.

Victor joined our local the Masonic Order, where he still active, while Marilyn took on everything! This is not hyperbole. She took on everything.

From our first conversations, I knew Marilyn was approachable, kind, an encourager, a listener, and always had a new idea for how others could be a part of community. If we hadn’t chatted for a while, I would receive an email, simply saying, “Let’s meet for coffee and catch up.”

When I thought of Marilyn’s accomplishments, I felt it important to talk to the people who knew her and worked with her on City Council and the numerous volunteer organizations she founded or joined.

Liane Moser, Independence librarian for nearly 40 years remembers when Marilyn and her family moved in just down the street from her. Their kids were close in age and were good friends.

Shortly after arriving in town, Marilyn started a program at Independence Elementary School that she called, “Moms for Reading.” The group consisted of Marilyn, Liane, Kristy Vandercreek, and Joy Hoffman. They read to, and with students at IES, and also supported the IES Read-A-Thon for 22 years.

The moms not only read together but developed a tradition of going out to eat together on Tuesday nights with a friendly argument of where they should go. The friendships Marilyn forged were a part of her commitment to community.

Marilyn’s volunteerism inspired many to join her, and her reach extended into Monmouth.  She had a vision for bringing the two communities together, which led her to create a montly newsletter she called, “2C1C”-Two Cities, One Community.

Monmouth City Councilor Roxanne Beltz, whose friendship with Marilyn extended over 10 years said they developed their initial relationship through their roles on the MI Chamber Board, then later as city councilors. She reminisced about how she and several other friends, “would gather, usually over coffee, and occasionally over an adult beverage to solve the world’s problems, laugh, share stories, and simply enjoy each other’s company.” 

Making people feel comfortable was Marilyn’s forte. One of Karen Frascone’s fondest memories is of an awkward moment at a YMCA fundraiser when Karen ordered wine, but unbeknownst to her it was a cash only bar. Marilyn quickly recognized Karen’s plight and treated her to the glass of wine and invited her to join her at her table. They quickly became fast friends and served together as members of the Independence Downtown Association Board.

“It would be easier to list the organizations that Marilyn wasn’t involved in than to list the ones she was a part of,” were the words expressed by fellow City Councilor Shannon Corr, who served with Marilyn. Councilor Evan Sorce remarked that Marilyn, “loved the community and was a wonderful mentor to a young councilor.”

Marilyn adored the Heritage Museum and served as the City Council Liaison for the Museum Advisory Board for many years. Most recently, she chaired the Heritage Museum Society.

Thursday afternoons would find Marilyn at the front desk of the museum, greeting visitors, getting to know them as she scanned and logged long forgotten city documents from the Independence archives that had been stored in the museum’s old location’s basement for decades. The documents included city fees for having candy and cigarette machines in an establishment and citations for public drunkenness back in the early days of Independence’s rough and tumble history.

That information of course, became fodder for her story telling. Marilyn was an extraordinary raconteur and charmed listeners wherever she went.

She loved guiding people – young and old through the Heritage Museum. Joe Martinez, a Museum Advisory Board Member and museum volunteer, commented that, “I liked how easy she was to approach; she was very supportive during those first few school tours, and I was able to go ahead and get them done.”

Jasper Smith, another Board Member, echoed the feelings of her support by commenting that, “She was so open and accepting, open minded [and] very comfortable with people, no matter who they were.”

Museum Director, Amy Christiansen, recalled, “My first impression of Marilyn was that she was so clearly someone who prioritized supporting her community in many ways. She had a very intimate connection to its history and wanted to share it.” 

When Amy first took over the helm of the museum, she said Marilyn pointed her to the strengths she possessed and helped her move forward into her new role. Several years ago, Amy, in a nod to Marilyn, curated a fall exhibit in the museum featuring a paranormal investigator’s office, titled, “M. Morton, Paranormal Investigator.”

Marilyn developed an abiding interest in the paranormal. She even downloaded an app to her phone that supposedly detected words coming from the spirit world. Marilyn loved collecting the stories of the downtown buildings and their ghostly inhabitants.

In 2000, she founded the Ghost Walk, leading tours of our older buildings with rich stories of hauntings and poltergeists. During that first effort, Marilyn had hoped perhaps a half a dozen people would show up. She was greeted by about 300.

Marilyn led the tours herself for years, taking people down Main St. and through the Masonic Lodge. As more people came each year, she recruited and trained other tour guides. She eventually made maps and sent folks out to find the inhabited locations where they were greeted by Ghost Hosts, who used script created by Marilyn. She would tell her hosts to feel free to extemporize from the scripts, adding in other stories or rumors they’d heard about the buildings they showcased. 

Never content with the status quo, Marilyn added “Apparition Avenue” to the Ghost Walk, with a start time a few hours before the main tour. It gave people an opportunity to visit sites a little further away from downtown in daylight and encouraged folks to do a little ghost hunting before dinner at a downtown Indy establishment.

Marilyn always insisted that the event be free as her gift to the community. Her daughter, Joy, in her mother’s absence is carrying on the tradition by assisting with this year’s Ghost Walk.

Twenty-six years later, Ghost Walk attendance has soared to over 1,500, making it a fixture of October in Independence.

Though Marilyn had great fun with her stories, she was an avid researcher, using Sanborn Insurance maps and vintage newspapers to learn about the buildings, businesses, and the people who lived in early Independence.

She compiled her stories in 2013 into a book; Haunted Independence Oregon. She later penned a novel titled, The Spirits of Independence. She was the go-to person for questions about the history of the town.

I have a notebook, gifted to me by Marilyn, filled with her building-by-building research and we often chatted about our mutual love of digging into old primary source material. She told me once, “You love the facts, I love the stories.”

She felt stories united people. Over the years, she organized storytelling and reading sessions around town and during the Hop & Heritage Festival. Most recently, she arranged a storytelling reading at the Valkyrie Wine Tavern as the May fund raiser for the Heritage Museum.

Marilyn asked me be a reader of one of her stories at that event. It was titled, “Characters and Character,” which she later published in her booklet, “M-I Story Night, Community Edition.”

The ending paragraphs sum up Marilyn in her own words, “Finally, there is a local woman who has apparently made it her mission to reveal and honor the spectral aspects of our community’s downtown…I love my community and I will continue to avow that no place can have character unless it first has characters, and perhaps even contribute to that canon.”