- Date Of Birth: January 8, 1918
- Date Of Death: February 4, 2014
- State: Idaho
Mary S. Barclay, 96, passed away in Boise on Tuesday, February 4, 2014.
Mary was born on January 8, 1918 in Sharon, Wisconsin, the daughter of Calogero and Maria Ingrassia, immigrants from the Sicilian town of Corleone. Her father, a railroad laborer, moved the family to Pekin, Illinois when Mary was in elementary school. In Pekin she shared the family home on Catherine Street with her parents, older brother Carmine, and her younger siblings Lucy, Anna, Esther, and Marty. After graduating from Pekin Central High School in 1938, Mary worked as a cook at Angelo’s, a Greek-owned diner where she learned to cook a number of American dishes such as pork tenderloin sandwiches, a Midwestern delicacy. Throughout her life Mary would remain a skilled cook whose cuisine was influenced by her career as a diner cook, her Sicilian heritage, and a frugality born of growing up in a large family during the Great Depression.
After the U.S. entered the Second World War Mary enlisted in the United States Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (which later became the Women’s Army Corp).
At the end of the war Mary separated from the Army with the rank of Technician-5 and went to work as a civilian at Hamilton Field in Marin County, California. At Hamilton Mary met and married native Idahoan Louis H. Barclay, a former Army infantry sergeant who had re-enlisted in the then-new United States Air Force. Louis and Mary lived the life of an Air Force family, traveling from base to base and raising three children in the process.
An avid reader her entire life, Mary especially enjoyed reading cookbooks, biographies, travel books, and mystery novels. Her knowledge of cookbooks was so encyclopedic that she often caught later-day cookbook writers presenting as their own recipes they had taken wholesale from earlier cookbooks.
Mary was preceded in death by Louis, who died on October 30, 2009. She is survived by her daughter and son-in-law Mary and Mike Betournay of Boise, daughter Laura Barclay of Boise, and son and daughter-in-law Donald Barclay and Caroline Dawson of Merced, California. She is also survived by her granddaughter and step-granddaughters Mary E. Barclay, Emily Featherston, and Alexandra Featherston of Merced, California; her brother and sister-in-law Marty and Betty Ingrassia of Pekin, Illinois; her sisters-in-law Alice Kincaid and Polly Johnson of Emmett; and numerous nieces and nephews.
