Marllys "Scotty" Huntington

The eventful life of Marllys Scott (Scotty) Huntington ended Jan. 6, when she died in her sleep at her home in Santa Cruz. Scotty's life took her from Hill City, Kan., where she was born in 1924, to numerous places across the globe, as she followed her Marine Corps aviator husband, Kenneth Huntington, to his duty stations and did her part in raising their two daughters. Scotty married Ken during World War II while he served as a training officer at Cherry Point N.C. The years brought the couple and their two daughters to a variety of locales, including Santa Ana, Calif.; Corpus Christi, Texas; Guam; Newport, R.I.; Kaneohe, Hawaii; Naples, Italy, and eventually back to California, where Ken served as Commanding Officer of the Marine base at Santa Ana. Daughter Judy Martin of South Pasadena recalled those years, which at various points saw Scotty riding a camel in Egypt and winning awards for gardening, home-decorating and dressmaking. In the mid-1960s Vietnam took center stage, but Ken was ordered to Naples. (He would eventually serve in Vietnam, where he was wounded in action.) "Mom sat excitedly with the almanac to understand where we would really be living for the next three years," Judy remembered. "We were able to go to the San Carlo Opera House to hear La Boehme and to Rome for Aida, which was among her favorites. Talk about La Dolce Vita! Mom and other wives took full advantage of the beautiful Italian fabrics at bargain prices, and she spent many hours making us beautiful clothes. She taught us to sew, right up to the couture level. She was quite the teacher." When Ken died in 1994, Scotty remained in their beloved golf retreat for the next 20 years. "We all loved visiting her, having dinner on the pier and watching the sunset," daughter Victoria Cole of Santa Cruz reminisced. "Just last week we watched a beautiful sunset there and remarked that it was one of the prettiest we'd seen, even though Mom had seen many all over the world. "My thought last Saturday was, Mom seems so sharp mentally that she should last another 10 years…We are all grateful for the years we had and the crazy adventures." In addition to her daughters and their husbands, Scotty leaves six grandchildren. She will be buried alongside her husband on January 19th in the Veterans' Cemetery, Riverside.