It all began with a pink house and a cat.
“Mom and Dad were living in Boston back then and were asked by friends who had a pink house in Annisquam to mind their cat while they were away.”
That, says Jeff Marston — one of five Marston siblings — is how his mother Shirley, who turns 100 on Tuesday, Aug. 18, fell in love with Annisquam.
It’s where her family has gathered this summer to celebrate her birthday, complete with a cake with 100 candles and family portrait.
Shirley Marston, a native of Sacramento, California, had moved with her banker husband Garth and her growing brood of children from Seattle to San Francisco, to Washington, D.C., where her husband served as chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank. Finally, the family landed in Boston, where her late husband Garth was chairman and chief executive officer of the Provident Institution for Savings. Then came the cat-sitting job.
With her kids grown and scattered in colleges across the country, Shirley Marston longed for a place where they could all come home to roost. She found it, in Annisquam.
For the next several decades, for four, long, languid months a year through a series of rented “cottages,” this boaty, beachy, manicured enclave of the city of Gloucester became the Marston summer camp, where all summer long, all members of the family and their growing generations of progeny, including great-grandchildren, would gather. Here, Shirley Marston, who her son Jeff describes as a quiet, loving but very active mother, could relax from her otherwise very active life.
Shirley Marston may have been quiet, but beneath that quiet demeanor, she was in her own way quite determined. On the West Coast, she had been an active member of Planned Childhood. On the East Coast, she’d fallen in love with New England history and served as program director of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities.
By the sound of it, she was also quite intrepid. She had to be to marry into the Marston family.
Her father-in-law, Otis Reed “Dock” Marston (1894-1979) was an American writer, historian and legendary Grand Canyon river runner .
His father, Capt. William Harrington Marston went to sea out of Boston as a teenager, became a master mariner and eventually owned a large shipping business sailing the Pacific out of San Francisco .
Her husband Garth may have been best known in these parts as a banker, but out west, in the Grand Canyon, he, like his father, was a river runner.
On YouTube, you can find a video of Garth Marston recalling taking his 21-year-old bride Shirley for quite a wild river ride. That took some grit, which, in her own quiet way Shirley Marston seems to have plenty of. Which may be why she feels so at home in the city of Gloucester. Where, by the way, Jeff Marston, himself an Annisquam resident, says that pink house is still “screamingly pink.”