CLEARVIEW — Martha Perry didn’t mind getting up early and working until the early afternoon. The gardens around the 5-acre home she shared with her husband, Arthur Mafli, in Clearview kept her busy and happy.
So did her many other hobbies.
“We had a lot of mutual interests: travel, gardening, reading, music, opera, symphony and eating out,” Mafli said. “We did a lot of that earlier in our lives.”
Mafli met his wife after a fellow teacher who was familiar with his carpentry skills told him a woman needed some work done at her cabin. The couple met on Oct. 31, 1976, when Mafli came to make repairs at her cabin on Denny Creek near Snoqualmie Pass. Ten months later, on Aug. 7, 1977, they married in the back yard of their Seattle home.
Both avid gardeners, they longed to own more land. In 1978, they found property near Snohomish and designed and built a home with solar power there three years later.
Perry died at home the morning of March 3. She was 69 years old.
She is survived by her husband, daughters Renate Mafli and Lisl Mafli; granddaughter, Sabeqwa de los Angeles; sister, Jocelyn Powell, and her husband, Robert Lathlaen, of Raleigh, N.C.; one niece; three nephews; and many friends.
Perry was born to Howard and Harriet Perry on May 21, 1940, in St. Paul, Minn. She liked to swim and taught swimming lessons at the YMCA after graduating in 1958 from Ramsey High School. She earned her bachelor of arts degree in psychology from Oberlin College in Ohio, in 1962, and continued her schooling at Syracuse University, in New York, where she earned a doctorate in psychology. She interned at Duke University for two years before she came to Seattle in 1972 for a job interview. She stayed when she was hired to start the child clinical psychology program at the University of Washington. Perry was a professor of psychology at the university for the next 10 years.
Perry and a business partner remodeled an old house in Kirkland in the early 1980s, turning it into a private practice, Northwest Psychological Services.
She was selected to be part of a group of 32 people who traveled to China in September 1982 to learn about mental health care in that country and to share ideas. Mafli was one of three spouses who were teachers who also went on the three-week trip.
“We went to mental hospitals and observed,” he said. “The patients there were very well cared for.”
His wife enjoyed genealogy and spent nine years gathering photos and information about his relatives, Mafli added.
“She loved research,” he said. “She loved to get into something and dig.”
The couple traveled together and visited Europe, Central America, Australia and New Zealand. They went on a Balkan and Norway cruise and visited friends twice in La Paz, Bolivia.
Closer to home, Perry enjoyed backpacking trips, garden walks, cross-country skiing, birding and fishing. She liked nature photography and used her original photos to create cards and calendars for family and friends. She taught herself how to sew, knit and type.
Perry didn’t enjoy watching movies and preferred to get caught up in a good book, Mafli said.
“She liked to imagine things rather than seeing them on the screen,” he said. “She would tackle history but mainly mystery (books).”
She also enjoyed cooking, said Renate Mafli, and would host an annual Christmas dinner party.
“She liked to do dinner parties for her friends and family. She tried something new every time,” Mafli said. “I don’t think she followed recipes either. She kind of looked at them and would get ideas and then do her own interpretation.”
Perry was an active member of the Snohomish Garden Club and held the positions of treasurer and secretary multiple times since joining the club in the early 1990s. Last summer, she and other Snohomish Garden Club volunteers started a community garden to raise food for local food banks.
“She and I got the idea that the food banks weren’t getting a lot of gifting and being organic gardeners we found a nice plot of ground in Snohomish,” Arthur Mafli said. “It was a lot larger than we had planned but it worked out.”
Perry worked tirelessly to get donations so she could create raised beds, get tools and have a storage shed for the community garden, said club president Ed Poquette.
“Many days of each week Martha and her crew would be planting, weeding and caring for the garden,” he said.
She kept track of how much food was donated to local food banks and would announce the totals at board meetings, he added. By the end of last year, she reported that 9,300 pounds of produce was donated to food banks.
A sign in the front of the garden once read Snohomish Veggie Garden, Poquette said, but the garden was recently renamed The Martha Perry Snohomish Veggie Garden.
“I don’t know whether she had a chance to go by and see the sign, but I hope that the garden will continue as a living tribute to her memory,” he said.
At the family’s request, memorial donations may be made to the Maltby Food Bank, 21104 86th Ave. SE, Snohomish. The family is planning a celebration of life for Perry in the spring or summer when the gardens are in full bloom.
Amy Daybert: 425-339-3491, adaybert@heraldnet.com.
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