Remembering Marlys Smith
A longtime member of the Camp Trinity community, Marlys Smith passed away during the summer of 2021. She was 98.
If you were a camper, counselor, or visited Camp Trinity between 1960 and 2010, then you enjoyed the good food she prepared and most likely overheard her distinctive laugh coming from the camp kitchen.
Marlys was the Camp Trinity Food Services Director for 50 years, overseeing the hiring of the kitchen crew and cooks, planning the menus, ordering food, and making sure all those ingredients were assembled into delicious meals for (literally) generations of campers. She was famously frugal, expertly managing her Food Service budget, and doling out the cookies personally at the foot of the Sunday Hike bag lunch table. She was also incredibly thoughtful, remembering birthdays with a gift of homemade fudge, and mailing out cards that (thankfully!) arrived in time to remind one of their own upcoming wedding anniversary. Marlys also served as a member of the Bar 717 Ranch Core Staff, a dedicated group of camp alumni who shepherded management of Camp Trinity during the years following the retirement of the founding Directors, Grover and Erma Gates.
In addition to her work at camp, Marlys was Camp’s nearest neighbor, living just two miles down the road on land she and her husband Ray moved to soon after the end of WWII. It was on that property they built their own house, raised a family, and put in orchards and gardens whose abundance over the years won her mountains of ribbons at the annual Trinity County Fair.
Marlys had tireless energy. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, becoming an accomplished ballet dancer before moving to Hyampom. She drove Trinity County’s mountain roads in all weather—and often at a high rate of speed—to visit friends, see plays, act in plays, and participate in rural civic life well into her 90s through her volunteer work for the Lions Club and Hyampom’s weekly community lunch program, Food For Folks.
In 2000, when Marlys was 77, we threw her a surprise party at the end of the season to recognize the conclusion of her 40th summer of hard work at Camp Trinity. I believe we all imagined it might be a soon-to-be-retirement party too, but true to form, she wasn’t about to slow down, going on to manage the hustle and bustle of the camp kitchen for another ten years. We dedicated the kitchen building to her that day, placing a sign over the door that reads “Marlys’s Kitchen”.
