Marilynn

Marilynn Ginsbach was born in Chehalis, Washington. Her father, Raymond Eugene Ginsbach, was a mechanic for NC Machinery (Caterpillar) and her mother, Mary Armeda Ellis Ginsbach, was a legal  secretary. There was (and is) another daughter, Margaret, three years older than Marilynn. Marilynn attended grade school and the first year of high school there, and then, when her father's company moved to Tacoma, the family moved to Olympia. Marilynn was a sophomore in high school, and she subsequently attended and graduated from Olympia High School.

Marilynn eventually fell into b*a*a*d company at OHS, as she joined a three-girl debate team. The other two members of this team were Bonnie Nugent and Sarah Knox, who by some nefarious circumstance were dating two shady boys-about-campus named Lee Motteler and Terry Motteler, respectively. By some coincidence these young fellows were also my brothers. When Terry graduated in 1958 (he was a year ahead of Lee, Marilynn, and Sarah) he went to the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, only 160 Km from where I worked at Los Alamos, so of course Terry and I got together a lot that year.

When we drove home together in June of 1959, Terry and Lee had arranged a beach party at our parents' new home on the southern end of Eld Inlet, on the Puget Sound, and since my brothers both had dates, I asked them to fix me up with one, but "preferably a bit closer to my own age" (24 at the time). They ignored the latter and fixed me up with Marilynn. I felt rather funny as a 24-year-old college graduate dating a young woman who had just graduated from high school, and contrived to ignore her. Marilynn would have none of this and stuck to me like a burr that evening. I was very impressed by her--not only by her perspicacity, but by her taste in men. ;-}

When I returned to Los Alamos, something I never expected to happen did: I received a nicely perfumed letter from her. I opened this at work and my office-mate, Grover Lewis, smelling the perfume, remarked, "Zane, you're going to marry her." (I had talked to Grover about her, so he wasn't totally clueless.) I said, "Well, Grover, if I do, you'll be my best man." Both of these witless predictions came to pass. Marilynn and I corresponded for six months; when Terry and Lee and I went to Olympia for Christmas in 1959 (by now Lee also was a student at the University of New Mexico), Marilynn and I felt we knew each other very well. And indeed, we fell deeply in love, I proposed, she accepted, and we were married June 25, 1960. After all of these years we are still deeply in love and still very much married.

Lee and Bonnie broke up; Terry and Sarah broke up; and all four have since then lived their separate lives. And all four shall always be close to my heart, because they engineered the impossible--they found my soul mate, and dragged me kicking and screaming into dating her. And then Marilynn refused to let me look at her as a stereotype, but insisted that I accept her for herself, a person mature beyond her years (beyond mine, too, I often think).

When Marilynn graduated from high school, she attended Marylhurst College (now Marylhurst University) (near Portland, Oregon) for a year, before I rudely interrupted her college career and married her. While we were on our honeymoon, I mentioned to her my ambition that some day I return to graduate school and complete my doctorate, and she encouraged me, basically saying "Go for it!" We settled in Los Alamos, where I currently was working, and it was there that she gave birth to our oldest son, Clinton Illinois Mark Motteler, on April 6, 1961. (He was named after his great-grandfather.) True to the bad timing that has plagued my life, I was up at Farmington High School, in far away northwestern New Mexico, giving a talk to the high school kids under the auspices of the NSF, when Marilynn went into labor. I arrived home late at night to find a note on the kitchen table, that she was in the hospital having the baby, and our friend Karl Balke had driven her there. Fortunately I made it to the hospital before the baby was born.

In the fall of 1961 I returned to Stanford as a graduate student, and it was there that our daughter Cara Marie Motteler was born on September 16, 1962 (our only native Californian). The miracle of bad timing had continued. My parents were staying with us; they were on their way to Hawaii, where they were to live out the rest of their lives (my mother died in 1988, my father in 1998). Anyhow, the five of us were up in the redwoods having a picnic when Marilynn announced that it was time. We came careening down to the Stanford Medical Center out of the mountains and Dad terrorized the hospital people into getting Marilynn instantly admitted. Cara was born a few hours later.

In the spring of 1963 I passed my written and oral exams and returned to Los Alamos to write my dissertation. On July 29, 1965 our second daughter, Renee Margaret Motteler, was born in Los Alamos, just days before we moved away to my first academic job at Gonzaga University, in Spokane, Washington. Bad timing hit again. Marilynn had her first and only baby shower scheduled that afternoon by a friend of hers, who had also invited her out to dinner afterwards. Marilynn's water broke that afternoon but she insisted on having her shower and dinner. While she was gone, my friend Paul McWilliams came over to return a borrowed book, and when he saw the state I was in, he sat down and had a drink with me. When Marilynn arrived home, we leaped into the car and I broke every law in the books getting her to the hospital. Renee was born shortly thereafter.

While I was at Gonzaga, Marilynn, who is very outgoing and sociable, made many friends and was very active in the Faculty Wives' Club. She was also very busy being a good mother to our children. I nearly lost her to pneumonia one winter there, and grew to appreciate her more than ever. During our stay in Spokane, We adopted our fourth child, Seth Milton Motteler (born 16 May 1968). Clint wanted a brother--and this was one way that we could guarantee him one.

In 1972 we moved to Houghton and I began my career at Michigan Tech. At this point Seth was old enough to go to nursery school, so, with all four kids in school, Marilynn want back, and over the next several years, completed a B. A. in Liberal Arts at Michigan Tech (English option). There are some Michigan Tech graduates who claim there is no such degree, but by golly she has it hanging on her wall. Marilynn graduated "with high honour" in 1978 and was elected to the Phi Kappa Phi honor society.

At the time, Michigan Tech had a program in conjunction with Michigan State whereby students could take some courses towards the M. A. at Tech, then transfer to State to finish the degree. So Marilynn enrolled in this program, took some graduate courses, and taught freshman English. Toward the spring, out of the blue, she got a letter from State offering her a teaching assistantship for the following year. I still remember the play of emotions over her face; the joy, and then the sorrow and the regret as she said that she couldn't do it, she couldn't leave the children. I told her that of course she could, I would cope. And she did, and I did.

1978-1979 was a tough year for both of us, separated by 960 Km and some of the worst winter weather in the 48 contiguous United States. Clint went off to Grand Valley for his freshman year at the same time, but I was home with the other three: Cara, a senior in high school; Renee, a freshman; and Seth, in the fifth grade. Marilynn came home at Christmas with pneumonia and was late getting back to school, but made it. I resigned the department headship at Tech and applied for a sabbatical, so during 1980-1981 we were all in downstate Michigan (Cara was by then attending Oakland University in Rochester, MI). Marilynn compiled a very distinguished record as a graduate student and teaching assistant at State, completing all of the course requirements for the Ph. D., including a fantastic job in the giant-killer research course of Professor Sherbo, and received her M. A. in 1981.

After we moved to California, Marilynn alternated between teaching English at Cal Poly and working at Mervyn's, a department store. But she was still far short of what had been her ambition since she was a child--to be a librarian. This ambition finally came within reach when I took my sabbatical year in 1989-1990, and went to Lawrence Livermore Lab on a grant. We lived in Fremont, which was equidistant between Livermore and San Jose, and Marilynn enrolled in the Library Science program there. As usual she did fantastically well, and received her M. L. S. at the end of 1990. She did her practicum at Fremont Main, and has worked as a volunteer at several libraries, but has been a victim of the tremendous cuts in funding of libraries over the last ten years, and as a consequence has never held a paying job as a librarian.

However, she has always been active as a library volunteer, in Pleasanton before we moved to Albuquerque, and here in Albuquerque. She is a member of the Friends for the Public Library, represents them on the Library Board, is active in the monthly used book sales, and is a mainstay of the Library's used book store, where she and I each volunteer a half day a week. The book sales and book store raise large sums of money for the public libraries in town.

I love Marilynn so I am very prejudiced. I think that she is a beautiful woman, in every sense of the term. She is a  good person, an excellent mother and grandmother, a wonderful and supportive wife. She is highly intelligent and cultured, and is multi-talented, being poet, seamstress, artist, craftswoman, and musician in addition to all of her other talents. She is my soul mate, my heart of hearts, and my best friend. As of June 25, 2003 we have spent forty-three years married to each other.

The major difficulties of our life together and a cause of great unhappiness to both of us, but more especially to his loving mother, were attendant on raising our youngest son Seth. Sharing the traumas of dealing with, first, learning disabilties and emotional impairment, and then mental illness and substance abuse, and finally his untimely death at his own hand, was the hardest thing either of us has ever been through. Seth was handsome, brilliantly intelligent, likeable and in fact charismatic. When he was a very little boy, Marilynn bought a small banner for his bedroom wall, which said it all: "Not flesh of my flesh, not bone of my bone, but still, miraculously my own. Do not forget for even a minute: you didn't grow under my heart, but in it." To this day we miss our golden son, so full of potential that was so sadly squandered and lost. We hope and pray that he is happy and healed at last, with his many departed and loving relatives, and the angels, in heaven.

I hope to add some of Marilynn's poetry to this page as time permits.

email to marilynn

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