Mary Juanita Seay

Mary Juanita Seay, third of the three children of Lulu Fay Brown and Edgar Gardner Seay, was born 20 March 1913 in Texarkana, Miller County, AR, where her father had recently become the pastor of College Hill United Methodist Church. When Mary was less than one year old, her father was stricken by polio. His condition worsened and he passed away before Mary reached two years of age.

Lulu did not remarry, but carried on as a single mother. When Mary was quite young, Lulu moved herself and her offspring to Arkadelphia, Clark County, AR, and that is where Mary attended elementary school. She shared her childhood home with older brother Edgar William Seay. Her only other sibling was Margaret Seay. That was a sister Mary never knew because of Margaret’s death in early infancy two years before Mary was born.

At some point, probably just as Mary was about to start high school, the family seems to have relocated to Little Rock, AR. The reason to phrase it as “seems to” is that while it is plain that Mary and her mother were based in Little Rock in the mid-1930s, sources differ as to when they arrived. One reference specifies that they were in Little Rock by 1927. This is logical. Edgar turned eighteen that year and the fact that he was hitting that milestone would have logically triggered a shifting of the living arrangements. There is however no source that definitvely places Lulu and Mary in Little Rock until the mid-1930s. What is true is that Edgar was in Little Rock in the late 1920s; he was employed there by an aircraft manufacturing company. Whether Lulu and Mary were there too is open to question. The 1930 census should clarify things, but apparently the enumerator missed the house and neither Mary nor her mother nor her brother appear anywhere, whether in Arkadelphia or Little Rock or some alternate possibility.

By the time Mary was a teenager, she became employed in her mother’s nursery and florist business, and continued to do so after graduating high school. It may have been while she was on the job behind the counter or making deliveries that she met the man who was to be her one and only husband. He was Paul Russell Abel, a son of Robert Carl Abel and Margaret Dotts, Paul had been born 19 January 1915 in Shannon City, Union County, IA. The wedding took place 8 December 1936 in Little Rock.

During the early years of the marriage Mary and Paul (shown at right in 1938) moved about somewhat -- though little could compare to the transient lifestyle Paul had experienced as a child. His father had been a mechanic and a salesman of auto parts whose job frequently required the whole household to relocate. By the time he wed Mary, Paul had become familiar with many parts of Iowa, as well as Chicago, IL and then Arkansas. During the World War II era, Mary and Paul resided in Vicksburg, Warren County, MS. That was where (and when) both their sons were born.

The Navy mustered out a great many of its young men on Pearl Harbor Day, 1945, whether or not they had fulfilled a standard term of enlistment. Paul was part of that throng. He would go on to serve in the Navy Reserve for several years, but he did not take up that obligation until the spring of 1947. In the meantime, Mary and Paul were able to reestablish themselves as a civilian couple. At first they did so in Vicksburg, but in the late 1940s, Paul received an offer to manage the newly-built Shawnee Mills Wholesale facility in Elgin, TX, a suburb of Austin. The couple moved, and quickly found they liked Elgin a great deal. They would continue to be residents of the immediate area for the rest of their lives, purchasing their first home there two years after their arrival. After a small number of further changes of address, they found a piece of property they particularly liked, upon which they had a house built specifically for them. Over the years they made many improvements -- in fact, they were in a sense forced to do so in that when they first acquired the lot, curbs did not exist along the street side, and their driveway was made of dirt.

In the first part of the 1960s, both sons went off to Southwestern University. The eldest, after time away in his twenties, returned to Elgin and became a horse breeder and cattle rancher, remaining in the area for good. The other, after a Navy career spent largely in Japan, became employed by Exxon and variously resided in such disparate locales as Texas, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Australia. Both married while in their twenties, and both became fathers. Mary thereby became a grandmother, though because she herself had not become a mother until she was on the cusp of turning thirty, she was in her fifties before her first grandchild was born.

In middle age, Mary was not only one of the key relatives looking out for her own mother in her last years, but also played this role for her aunts Ethel Brown Cannon and Ada Brown Luton, both of whom were like Lulu in that they had been widowed young and had never remarried. Mary was also an important part of the life of her first cousin Hazel Cannon Rodgers. Mary was in effect Hazel’s heir at least in terms of family memorabilia, though ultimately did not personally fulfill that duty because in the long run Hazel survived Mary by a few months despite being eight years her senior.

Mary’s health declined early by the standards of the Martin-Strader clan -- she was only in her seventies when she was obliged to enter a rest home. She passed away Sunday, 2 September 1990 in Austin. Her remains were interred 5 September 1990 at Elgin Cemetery. Paul survived her by nearly four years. He remarried in the summer of 1991, but then perished 1 August 1994 only three years into that union. His second wife, though well into her nineties, still survives as of 2019.

Descendants of Mary Juanita Seay and Paul Russell Abel

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