January 17 1925-October 28 2021
Marie-Louise was born in Portland Maine, the youngest child of Sidney St Felix and Marie Phyllis Schuyler Thaxter. Her father was a Judge who eventually sat on the Supreme Court in Maine. Her mother, an adventurous sort, was an actress who later wrote about theater and Hollywood for the local newspaper and even traveled alone to the Soviet Union in the 1930's to write about theater there.
Marie-Louise attended the National Cathedral School in Washington DC and at 16 went to Bennington College in Vermont, graduating with a degree in political science.
The theater was in Marie-Louise's blood. She often regaled her family with stories of how as a child, she was Toto (the dog) in the Wizard of Oz in a neighborhood play. In 1955 she played Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and would often quote lines in a perfect Cockney accent to family and friends. Unlike her sister, Phyllis Thaxter, Marie-Louise did not pursue acting as a career, although she did appear with Rita Moreno in Arthur Miller's A View From The Bridge at Seattle's Cirque Theater in 1959. She was a lifelong subscriber to the Seattle Repertory Theater and the Seattle Opera.
At the age of 11 Marie-Louise spent the summer in Norway as the guest of her Norwegian nanny Agnes. She developed a love for that country and followed the events there during WW2 closely. Like many women of her generation, Marie-Louise went to work during the war. She loved to joke about her job title: “The finance unit of the enforcement section of the blockade division of special areas branch of bureau of areas of the foreign economic administration,” She told her children that she never really knew what she was doing there.
At the end of the war at age 20, Marie-Louise returned to Norway, sent by the Foreign Economic Administration. It turned out she was the first American civilian to visit Norway after the war ended. Much fanfare was made of her visit. She was asked to interview for a new magazine called Ungdom (Youth in Norwegian) that had just been started by some young veterans of the Norwegian underground resistance to the Nazi occupation. She talked about meeting all these Norwegian young men who, shaking her hand, politely introduced themselves to her. They asked questions like “tell us about youth in America.”
That evening, one of them (at the time she had no idea which one) called her saying, “Marie-Louise, I want to see more of you.” She accepted the invitation to go out to the theater with him and they really hit it off—he forgot the tickets for the play so they ended up walking all over Oslo talking until late into the night. His name was Paul Dietrichson.
She loved to tell her family the story of how at one point she and Paul were at a party in a cabin in the mountains in Norway and some reporter put a mic in her hand and asked her to “sing an American song”. Oblivious to the fact that this was Norwegian national radio, she later learned that her rendition of “I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy” could be heard all over the entire country.
At her encouragement, Paul applied to attend college in America and their relationship developed. While traveling around the country in a car (a daring thing for a young unmarried couple to do back then), with Paul's sister and her husband, Paul proposed to Marie-Louise while crossing a street in New Orleans. She had been waiting for this for so long and he hadn’t planned it at that moment, but he was so taken by the hat she was wearing that he proposed in the crosswalk. On August 16th 1947, they were married on Cushings Island in Casco Bay outside of Portland, Maine, a place where Marie-Louise had spent many summers while growing up.
Paul eventually got a PhD in philosophy from Yale, but not without the help of Marie-Louise, who typed his dissertation twice. After some teaching stints in New England, he got a job offer at the University of Washington. They moved to Seattle in 1955 with their two young children Deirdre and Tor. In 1956 they bought a house where they lived and raised their family and stayed until 2008 when they moved into assisted living. Their youngest daughter Eliza was born in Seattle in 1958. Their children’s friends loved visiting their warm, loving, humor-filled home and were charmed by Paul's lifelong very thick Norwegian accent.
During the 1950's Marie-Louise, like so many women, bought into the propaganda from the government that now was the time for the women to leave the workforce, return to their traditional role of wife and mother, and make way for the men returning home from the war to find jobs and “provide for their families.” A crisis erupted in the household when Marie-Louise read Betty Friedan's 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique” and confronted the question “Is being a wife and mother all that my life should be about?”
Paul, who was very non-patriarchal for those times, encouraged her break from the confines of the home. As she did this, she repeatedly stood up to the patriarchal ways of the workplace in those days. Think Mad Men. She demanded respect from her male bosses and would not let anyone push her around. She worked at the University of Washington in several departments and when she retired, she was an academic advisor in Civil Engineering. She also taught Norwegian in the Scandinavian department for many years. All of our family in Norway would say that her Norwegian was so good, one couldn’t tell she wasn’t a Norwegian.
Marie-Louise was a warm, selfless and caring person. In 1997, when she was in her 70's, Marie-Louise moved across the country to take care of her daughter Deirdre for 9 months during her treatment for cancer. Marie-Louise was active with the Democratic Party and she and Paul supported many progressive causes like the ACLU and Amnesty International.
Marie-Louise had a great sense of humor and a dry wit that often took people by surprise, coming from such a classy woman.
In 2008 Marie-Louise and Paul moved into assisted living. Paul died in 2010. For the past 7 years Marie-Louise lived in an adult family home, Longhouse AFH. Despite her progressive dementia, Marie-Louise maintained her warm, friendly, polite demeanor and her wonderful sense of humor until her death. Her children are so thankful for the wonderful caregivers who took such good care of her in her declining years.
She was preceded in death by her husband of 65 years and her son-in-law Wayne “Chuck” Webb. She is survived by her children—Deirdre, Tor and Eliza Dietrichson; her daughter-in-law Julia Boyd; her grandchildren—Monty Ostrander (Jeanie), Erik Ostrander (Elizabeth) and Soren Dietrichson (Yuka) and 5 great grandchildren. She will be missed by them, many nieces and nephews from both sides of the family and many more.
A zoom memorial is being planned. Plans are being laid to scatter both Marie-Louise and Paul's ashes next summer at Cushings Island in Maine, the place they were married.