Mary L. Shifler

Mary Reeder was raised on a farm in Bolivar, Md., one of 10 children.

Her youngest and only surviving sibling, Janet Otto of Hagerstown, was 12 years younger and said Mary was like a mother to her.

Janet was just 6 when Mary married Roscoe Shifler of Mount Carmel on her 19th birthday. Mary was about 14 when she met Roscoe, who was six years older, at the Boonsboro dental office of Dr. Lakin.

Janet vividly recalls what her older sister wore for her wedding.

“I remember her dress,” Janet said. “It was a blue dress with long sleeves. There was a print on the sleeve and she wore a hat. Oh, she was all dressed up.”

“My father used to say if she had good teeth, she would have stayed single,” only child Sandra “Sandy” Shifler said. She said her mother’s family calls her Sandra and she’s known as Sandy by her father’s side.

Mary and Roscoe were married in the parsonage of Trinity Reformed United Church of Christ in Boonsboro in 1934 and honeymooned in Atlantic City, N.J. Mary became a member of the church at that time.

Mary attended the Reno School through the eighth grade, then went to work in Boonsboro to help take care of someone who had broken their arm, Sandy said.

After the couple married, they moved to a house on Main Street in Boonsboro, where they lived until Sandy was in second grade, then settled into a home on Lakin Avenue.

They loved sitting on the porch and greeting people as they walked by, earning Roscoe, who occasionally smoked cigars on the porch, the nickname “Mayor of Lakin Avenue.”

Sandy remembers her mother’s good cooking, which included Christmas feasts, home canned goods, fruit pies and snow creams in the winter. Mary also was known for her garden and flowers.

“Mother liked to dig in the dirt,” Sandy said.

“She cooked and gardened and sewed. The cooking, sewing gardener — that was Mary,” said Karen Cunningham, a longtime neighborhood friend who was born a day before Sandy in 1947.

Several of Mary’s jobs involved sewing, although Sandy said her mother didn’t sew clothes for them, just did mending. She also was known for her embroidered pillowcases.

Mary sewed awnings at Thomas and Sons Awning in Boonsboro and as a seamstress at Western Maryland Hospital, retiring in 1978.

She also worked at Eyerly’s Department Store in Hagerstown while Roscoe served overseas with the U.S. Army during World War II and during the holidays.

Sandy said a college friend of hers considered Mary a second mother. Sandy graduated from Towson College, then had a 30-year teaching career at Norwood Elementary School in Dundalk, Md. Mary was 91 when she gave up driving when Sandy moved back to Boonsboro in 2006.

Sandy said her parents were both proud of her since neither of them graduated from high school or college and wanted more for their daughter.

Karen said she had several memories of Mary, including seeing her walk to and from work at the awning company every day, as well as at lunchtime. She said they would rope off Lakin Avenue when it snowed and that Mary would make hot chocolate for the sledders.