after a severe stroke in late August. She retired from innkeeping about ten years ago but her imprint remains. Her paintings and photographs hang on the walls of the inn and the curtains she designed and sewed flutter in the windows, and she collected, and read, most of the volumes in the library. We are still serving her very popular Oatmeal Pancakes for breakfast at least once a week, look for the recipe in the latest addition of the Best Places Northwest Cookbook and on our website.She was a traveler, reader, gardener, wife and baseball fan. A talented cook and seamstress, a realtor, innkeeper and community activist-when she was president of the Chamber of Commerce she lobbied hard for what became the #8 bus line that joins Capitol Hill with the Seattle Center. Her mother was a suffragist and Mary remembered coming home from school to a house on Queen Anne Hill that was domestically neglected while her mother was out working on some campaign. Mary was strongly opinionated, but fair-minded and respected the toil and dignity of workers. Her father was a builder in the Midwest, she was born in Lake Forest, Illinois. Affluent as a child, they slowly lost everything in the Depression, the house in Minneapolis and farm in Wisconsin; her father headed to Seattle to find work, first picking hops in the Kent Valley and then again as a builder, when he could finally send for the family.
Mary was the youngest of four and the only girl, wan as a child but 
a beauty as a young woman. Smart, she skipped a couple of grades and was the first in the family to graduate from college. After college she went to work for United Airlines in San Francisco where she met Charles Wiese, a Marine on recruiting duty, he recruited a wife in addition to scores of grunts. They moved up and down the coast and then in 1961, outside of San Diego, she had a baby girl and this writer came into the picture; because Mary was a lot of things, but most important to me, she was my mother.
a beauty as a young woman. Smart, she skipped a couple of grades and was the first in the family to graduate from college. After college she went to work for United Airlines in San Francisco where she met Charles Wiese, a Marine on recruiting duty, he recruited a wife in addition to scores of grunts. They moved up and down the coast and then in 1961, outside of San Diego, she had a baby girl and this writer came into the picture; because Mary was a lot of things, but most important to me, she was my mother.--Cathy Wiese, Innkeeper
