ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 15, 1996 TAG: 9602150039
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: E-4 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: S.D. HARRINGTON STAFF WRITER
When some residents of East Clay Street in Salem were selling their homes to Roanoke County in the late 1970s for the county's new jail, Mary Deyerle Guy initially refused.
The widow, then 84, had lived in her three-bedroom brick home since it was built in 1935. She had the house built the way she wanted it and paid cash for it.
She wasn't about to give it up without a fight.
After negotiating with the county, Guy agreed to sell the house under one condition - that she be allowed to stay in it for as long as she lived.
The county agreed to that, and Guy sold the house to Roanoke County for $45,000.
"They figured maybe Mary will live two or three years," said her son, Richard Guy.
Two weeks ago, nearly 20 years after that contract was made between Guy and Roanoke County, she died at the age of 102. She had been living at Richfield Retirement Community for about five years.
With the money Roanoke County paid for the home, Guy was able to pay for her stay at Richfield.
"She was a very frugal woman," said Uldene Guy, her daughter-in-law.
Mary Guy's husband, Samuel Richard Guy, died in a flu epidemic in 1918 when their only son, Richard, was 16 months old.
After she and her son moved in with her father, Mary Guy took a full-time job in the clerk's office of the Salem Courthouse. Later, she went to work for Salem's commissioner of revenue.
Guy's mother had died several years before, and she was doing all of the housework and cooking, as well as looking after young Richard.
"She had dreamed of having a home of her own for us," Richard Guy wrote in the introduction to an autobiography of his mother.
While living with her father, she saved money to fulfill that dream, Richard said.
And when Richard neared graduation at Roanoke College, he said that she feared his leaving home. She knew Richard wanted to be an aircraft engineer, and he most likely would have to go elsewhere to do that.
"She figured if she had a home, I'd stay with her," Richard said.
In 1935, she bought a vacant lot on East Clay Street and had the house built.
"She had it built to how she wanted it," said Richard.
He lived there with his mother for four years before he left to take a job at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica, Calif.
Mary Guy lived in the house until she broke her hip in a fall about five years ago.
Through the years, she became known as "The Walking Lady of Salem" because she never learned to drive and walked everywhere.
Even after Guy moved into Richfield, Richard and Uldene Guy, who now live in Lakeland, Fla., stayed at the house when they visited Guy.
Roanoke County Sheriff Gerald Holt said he hasn't given much thought to what he would like the county to do with the house. Eventually, he will probably ask that the house be razed and used for parking and access to the jail.
"I have a dire need for accessibility to the jail," Holt said.
Richard and Uldene Guy spent much of this week in the East Clay Street house, cleaning and clearing out his mother's belongings.
Whatever becomes of the house, Richard Guy said, he will miss it.
LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. Guy had her home built in 1935 and paid cash for it.by CNB2. DON PETERSEN/Staff. When Mary Guy was 84, she agreed to sell her
home to Roanoke County to make way for a new jail, but only if she
could live in the house until she died. Two week ago, she died at
the age of 102.