Biographical Note by William Gray Purcell

From the typeface and paper, this brief preliminary manuscript can be dated to the late 1930s when Purcell generated the first drafts of the Parabiographies. The bracketed dates are lacunae in Purcell's typescript, but have been filled in here. MARION PARKER She was our first regular draughtsman. She did pretty well from the first. Her fingers were skilled, draughting dependable, but not brilliant, her knowledge of construction sufficient to follow but not to organize. She was with us from [1908] to [1915], and in these seven years she learned most of what she knew of architecture as a building art, as distinguished from a graphic art as she had learned it at school. After she left us, she set up in business in Minneapolis as a "lady architect" and did pretty well for a number of years. She moved to California and built a home and a sales shop on the Coast Highway at Laguna Beach. It is a strange coincidence that she died on her way over from Laguna to see me in Monrovia where I was in bed following t.b. surgery. Felling ill, she stopped in at the home of a relative, a few blocks from our home, and died that night. She was a typical New England "down-easter," of a family which came west from Maine "with the lumber." There was always a note of frustration and unhappiness due, I think to a very large dark facial blemish on one cheek. But she made a real effort to discount her lone life, and except on certain to-be-forgotten occasions, over which Strauel and I have shaken some heads, she was a pleasant enough companion.

research courtesy mark hammons