Obituary of Mary Ellen Haley
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Mary Ellen Roberts Haley passed away on her 100th birthday, June 12th, 2016, in Grundy County, Tennessee. Mary Ellen was born in Florence, Lauderdale Co., AL, on June 12, 1916, the oldest daughter of James C. Roberts and Mary Louise Albright Roberts. She graduated from Coffee High School in 1933. She was editor of the student newspaper and elected upon graduation as the most popular member of her class. In 1937 she graduated from Mississippi State College for Women (MSCW) in Columbus, MS, also serving on the college newspaper as managing editor. Upon graduation she moved to New York City (Greenwich Village) and subsequently to Katonah, NY, as a teacher at Bailey Hall, a home for the mentally disabled. In 1938 she married Charles Little Haley III, a recent West Point graduate also from Florence, in the First Presbyterian Church of Florence. Her two sons, Chip and John Owen, were both born at Ft. Bragg, N.C., in the years just before U.S. entry into WWII and the four-year long deployment of her husband in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, Southern France, and Germany. After the war and the return of her husband, she lived on army posts in Oklahoma (Ft. Sill), Kansas (Ft. Leavenworth). and Atlanta (Ft. MacPherson). Her first daughter, Marian, was born at Ft. Sill. Between 1952 and 1955 she lived in Caracas, Venezuela, while her husband served as military attaché the U.S. Embassy. Her second daughter, Ninian, was born in Florence the summer after her return. The family subsequently lived in Carlisle, PA (Army War College), Ft. Meade, MD, and Birmingham, AL. In 1960, after her husband’s retirement, the family moved to Memphis, TN and then in 1963 returned to Florence. For several years thereafter she was the director of the Hope Haven School for special education in Sheffield, AL.
From age two Mary Ellen regularly spent summers in the Monteagle Sunday School Assembly in Monteagle, Grundy County, TN, first with her grandmother, Ellen Stedman Albright, her parents, and finally her children. She became a member of the Assembly with the purchase of a cottage in 1957 and resided there year-round after her husband’s death in 1983.
She is survived by her four children-- Chip and John Owen, both currently of Tucson, AZ; Marian Farmer of Austin, TX; and Ninian Williams of O’Brien, FL—seven grandchildren and seven—soon to be eight—great grandchildren as well as her one niece, Ann Hayden Bangert of Bloomington, IN, and sole nephew, James R. Megar of Florence, AL.
