Leifer Manor, where hundreds married, now Marysville history

If you’ve hosted a wedding, you know how detail filled and nerves-on-edge it can be. Try three weddings — in one weekend.

At Leifer Manor, for years a popular wedding venue in Marysville, that’s what life was sometimes like. Now, it’s time for the mistress of the manor to relax.

Donna Leifer, 88, and her daughter and business partner, Melody Leifer-Fitzmaurice, staged Leifer Manor’s last wedding Sept. 14. The next day, they hosted 70 people at a Leifer family reunion on their gated property along State Avenue near Smokey Point.

Twenty-seven years after Leifer opened the venue, in the elaborately landscaped yard of a stately brick house her parents built in 1948, she is retiring. Her daughter and son-in-law now live in the Chicago area. In recent years, one of Leifer’s four granddaughters, Brittany Fitzmaurice-Fager, has pitched in to help.

There weren’t always multiple ceremonies each weekend. But Leifer recalled the year that pushed her to the edge, and nearly out of the wedding game.

“Of course everyone wanted to be married in the year 2000,” she said. “We did 52 weddings that year, and we’re only open May till October. It was too much.”

Neither she nor her daughter could say how many couples celebrated nuptials at Leifer Manor. It was also the site of class reunions, anniversaries and a memorial service attended by more than 400 people.

On their lush grounds — which have a fountain, waterfall, gazebo and a covered reception area with chandeliers and white chiffon draping — they talked Wednesday about those hectic weekends.

“We almost lost the love of what we did,” said Leifer-Fitzmaurice, 50. She recalled when their calendar was booked with back-to-back weddings Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, with Thursday night rehearsals. “And I’d always do the linens,” Leifer said.

This isn’t her first retirement.

Early on, the 1947 Marysville High School graduate was a partner in a secretarial agency in New York. She later owned an employment service in Lynnwood.

From 1980 until 1992, she was then-Snohomish County Executive Willis Tucker’s executive assistant. Tucker, once managing editor of The Herald’s Western Sun edition, was the county’s first executive.

Leifer was 62 when she retired from the county. A 1992 Herald article about her no-nonsense style said she’d had “the first word, the last word and the appointment book” when it came to Tucker’s schedule.

Not ready to truly retire, Leifer considered a bed-and-breakfast but couldn’t get a permit.

Weddings worked out well. “I’m not a morning person,” she said.

In nearly three decades of hosting what were meant to be perfect days, Leifer and her daughter don’t remember many mishaps. “We lost power just once,” Leifer said. Oh, and there was a wedding that included “a biker group from Stanwood,” Leifer-Fitzmaurice said. “We had the police out.”

The women also recalled the wedding of a beautiful woman they said was related to the last Shah of Iran. Limo after limo drove up, carrying not only the bridal couple but many guests, they said.

In full makeup and a stylish outfit, Leifer doesn’t look the part of a former farm girl, yet that’s who she is.

Her parents, Clarence and Vina Leifer, came to the Marysville area in 1923 from the tiny Eastern Washington town of Pine City. Starting with a 10-acre chicken-and-egg farm, they acquired land until they had what Leifer said was the Northwest’s biggest strawberry farm.

At 300 acres, the C.D. Leifer farm north of Marysville was larger than Biringer’s or Due’s berry farms, she said. It stretched to what is now the Navy’s support complex at Smokey Point. Herald archives show that in 1942, during World War II, Clarence Leifer gave war savings bonds to his farm’s top berry pickers, most of them kids.

Leifer, the only survivor of four siblings, did her own yard work before weddings, and is proud of her begonia garden. “I’m an old farm girl,” she said.

Leifer Manor became part of the community’s heritage as the venue for the Marysville Strawberry Festival’s annual fashion show and scholarship luncheon. In June, at the venue’s last festival luncheon, Marysville Mayor Jon Nehring honored Leifer with a bouquet of roses.

Dennis Niva, 73, a minister at 92nd Street Church of Christ in Marysville, officiated at more than 30 Leifer Manor weddings. He and his wife, Ginger, celebrated their 50th anniversary there last year, and this year held a reception there for their grandson, Cody Shumway, and his bride, Amanda.

“Anytime we had a wedding rehearsal, Donna or Melody or both were there to help,” he said. “They were there to give guidance and help for brides and grooms. The brides, sometimes they become ‘Bridezilla,’ but the ceremony is just the beginning of a marriage.”

The venue had one unique issue — several times each day, a passing train blows a horn.

“Anytime I’d do a wedding there, I’d tell them ‘If a train goes by, we just stop because nobody will be able to hear,’” said Niva, who performed ceremonies from the gazebo.

Leifer has no plans to sell the brick home, and intends to keep busy. She volunteers at the Greater Marysville Tulalip Regional Visitor Center. And with outdoor weddings now in her past, she’s leaving behind one big worry.

“One thing I will not have to look at anymore is the weather,” she said.

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; jmuhlstein@heraldnet.com.