Everett woman spent her life learning and growing

Mother, counselor, playwright, actress and star of McDonald’s and Hallmark commercials, Mary Rygg never stopped learning and doing.

The Everett woman’s life was a lesson in reinventing oneself.

With three children nearly raised, she earned a master’s degree in social work from the University of Washington. She went on to a counseling career, serving as director of clinic services at Deaconess Children’s Home in Everett. She also had her own family counseling practice.

When the residential facility closed in 1980, Rygg was 65, old enough to settle into quiet retirement. She wanted none of that.

Rygg studied drama at Everett Community College and with the Northwest Actor’s Studio. She found an agent and landed commercials, including a McDonald’s ad that aired during the 1988 Super Bowl. Another TV spot, a Hallmark ad dubbed “the birthday club,” aired for years. As an actress, she was a perennial favorite at the Historic Everett Theatre and with other area drama groups.

All of it wasn’t enough for Rygg. At 75, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts. For her senior project, she wrote “No Ties to Bind,” a play that combined her interests in drama and counseling. With a plot involving sexual abuse in a family, the drama was performed in prisons and for community groups, and was a catalyst for open discussion of a taboo subject.

Mary Cline Rygg died June 1. She was 93.

She is survived by her three children, twins Mary Ann Sande and Robert Rygg and their brother, Larry Rygg; one sister, Roberta Anderson; six grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her parents, Maude and Robert Cline; two sisters; a brother; and a granddaughter.

Mary Craig became Rygg’s friend after playing the role of her daughter in “No Ties to Bind.”

“It involved three women characters, mother, daughter and psychiatrist,” Craig said. “After performing this play for sex-offender groups and church groups, Mary would make herself available to begin a dialogue.

“She was a remarkable woman, resilient and strong despite her tiny frame,” Craig said. After a divorce and a battle with cancer in her 60s, Rygg “went on to remake herself into the person I came to know and love,” she added.

Rygg’s daughter, Sande, said that her mother went back to school for a master’s degree the year she started college. Raised on an Eastern Washington farm near the town of Touchet, Rygg had a bachelor’s degree in political science from Washington State College, now WSU. On the debate team in college, she thought about law school, her daughter said.

Instead, she married Adolph Rygg, whose family operated the Meadowmoor Dairy in Everett. She worked at the dairy, which had a shop on Hewitt Avenue where Comcast Arena is today. They were married 38 years and divorced in the late 1970s.

“She was always interested in political things. She was just really, really smart,” said Sande, who also recalled her mother’s fun side. “She was a ham, very theatrical and a really fun mother — like one of my friends.”

Her mother was always learning. “She was a stay-home mom, but I remember her sitting at a desk typing, with my little brother on her lap, and reading a book at the same time,” Sande said.

Larry Rygg, her youngest child, joked that his mother was “a terrible cook.” At home, her favorite pastime was gardening. He recalls driving out to a bog near Silver Lake to haul back a load of peat for landscape projects at their Everett home.

Her turn to acting fit with character, he said. “She’d always been interested in the arts, and just wanted to do something with her time. She tried painting, and was a rock collector. She’d find driftwood and carve it,” he said. Going through his mother’s home, he found other plays she had written. Rygg had also penned a memoir of her childhood.

Karen Charnell, now executive director of the Snohomish Senior Center, also acted in “No Ties to Bind.” Before ever meeting Rygg, she had read an article about her and had clipped it out.

“She was such a vibrant person, she was a role model. This was the kind of person I wanted to be,” Charnell said. “And she turned out to be such a delightful friend. She was beautiful, intelligent and positive.”

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.