The Woman in the Green House
It’s 1975, and the faint smell of cheap coffee is drifting through the male-dominated boardroom. In walks a young woman, wearing her father’s old leather jacket. She exudes confidence, but also a soft kindness. That’s Marjory Horton.
As I finish the steep climb up to her house-a historical trust-with a deep green color, I am welcomed with an open-armed hug and a tray of water with lemon from the tree I can see from my front yard. At first glance, she is a sweet and generous grey-haired woman that lives in the green house, but throughout the course of my conversation with her, but there is much more to Marjory Horton.
Being born in the throes of the Great Depression, in Portland, Oregon, Marjory grew up in the mid-20th century. She describes her family and childhood as “radical.” The person that most stood out is her father: “He didn’t care what anyone really thought of him. But he was very forthright, and he would always help people, he had all kinds of different kinds of views. He was a free thinker, although he was also conservative. He had that weird edge.” Her childhood intrigues me because of its unfamiliarity. She took trips to Sutro Bath, something I always saw as somewhat of a folk tale, and jet set across Europe as a young woman.
Being a tall woman is a complex topic for Marjory. Now, she is around average height, but to my surprise, she was even taller than me in her youth: “I think I was feeling bad for what other people thought about me physically. Yeah. I mean, you know, something I couldn’t do anything about like how tall I was or how big my feet are. I have huge feet.” When she brought this up, it immediately sparked my interest because that is something I relate to in my everyday life. I feel that something I, as do many teenage girls, struggle with is caring too much about what other people think about me. In life, we take other people’s opinions so seriously, when in many cases, we can’t control their view of us, especially when it is about our own physical attributes.
“Then you realize that people who are concerned about such things are people you don’t care really care about, and you start getting a little thicker skin. But yet you’re sympathetic to those people because you sort of feel sorry for them. They don’t understand, don’t have the compassion themselves to have gone through a physical difficulty,” she says. While her self understanding may have come with age, she possesses a natural sense of depth and awareness that few have in life: “I think having something that’s a little maybe not normal or not something that’s praiseworthy outright is a great blessing.”
That is what I love about Marjory. Her ability to find the positive in any situation and really learn from every experience; it is something I wish we could all do.
After Marjory graduated from college, she went to graduate school in Portland. She was studying Child Psychology and learning from world-class professors. While this was an impressive feat, Marjory didn’t feel like this was the right place for her. Throughout our conversation, she told me about how she feels about societal values. Her drive to go to graduate school at the University of Portland and learn from fancy professors was driven from a place of status. Her brother attended Stanford University, a highly selective college. Although there was a societal norm of what a “good education” or a “good college” is, Marjory was open to change in her life, no matter what it would look like to the people around her. “But it’s in comparison, you know, it’s just your, your status thinking or snob thinking. But when you feel the real values, you know, that you really were helped enormously. Just enormously,” she said when I asked her why she decided to go to grad school. Just because there is a set expectation of what life should go like, Marjory followed her heart.
“You learn that you can change, you go in a different direction,” is what she said when I asked her about change and developing as an adult. During graduate school, Marjory decided to go work in WW2 Germany. She was a “female war worker,” meaning she was there with the soldiers but was not fighting in the war. She prepared coffee, ran errands, planned excursions, and entertained the men. This is a big shift from being a full-time student-but she said she loved it. Going through different stages in life was essential in Marjory’s growth in life. “Because then, if you’re beating yourself up, do you think you’ve made a mistake? You know, it’s like, okay, so what? Yeah, we’re gonna move ahead, and I’ll put the next foot forward.” This next foot forward for Marjory was focusing on her art.
One can assume the life of an artist is spontaneous, but for Marjory, this was a good thing. Today, as we sit on her porch, I see hundreds of her pieces of art throughout her yard and home. From the beautiful oil paintings to the tile mosaics, her talent is evident. Each and every detail is perfected. As we sit there, she tells me about her time at the Art Institute, both as a student and as a professor.
She was the first female professor of all time there. During her first meeting, she wore her dad’s old motorcycle jacket: “ It was leather because I felt protected with it. And then I started jumping up to fix everyone’s coffee. In the middle of it, I said to myself, no Marjory, what are you doing? So then I sat down.” Even though her position was equal to every man in that room, she still felt the need to get up and accommodate the men. Maybe it was just her giving disposition or her past serving in the war, but something tells me it was the fact she was the sole woman in the room. Being in that new environment shifted Marjory’s character; she had to become stronger in order to keep her place in a male-dominated industry.
While these various chapters of her life could be seen as mistakes or wrong turns, Marjory’s outlook on life is very simple. She tells me about her life philosophy, hands set steadily on her knees, looking out at the setting sun over Mt. Tam. “I have no regrets actually when you feel your regret something he has time to say, Oh, I better look at this again, see what my lesson is here because everything has a gift. Sometimes it seems really negative, but we deserved that some way or another. It doesn’t surprise me. She sees mistakes as a learning moment, as her gratitude and positivity for each and every aspect of life is immense.
The words she leaves me with are: “To me in the older I get, the more I feel very grateful for those learning experiences,” and I think that very sentiment sums up Marjory Horton.
