SUMMERS CO., W.Va. (The Hinton News) – Amy Lowry Parker was barely an adult when she left West Virginia to work in Washington. During World War II, she and tens of thousands of young women from across the country moved to the capitol to fill in for men who left their government jobs to fight Nazi Germany.
Parker grew up in a farming family with deep roots in Summers County but prepared for a career outside agriculture. Samuel Lowry’s ninth child had been the first to graduate high school and the first to go to college, she would later tell one of her great nieces. In July 1946, at age 19, Parker received a diploma in secretarial studies from Mountain State College in Parkersburg.
Over the years, her climb up the career ladder — from a secretary at the Pentagon to an administrator at a major aerospace and electronics manufacturing firm — took her farther away from her hometown. In the early to mid-1990s, she retired from Rockwell International Corp., a manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Orange County, California, where Parker lived until her death last month at age 99.
Her daughter, Kathi Mericle, described her as “incredibly intelligent” and “a lifelong learner.” She said Parker prided herself in becoming one of Rockwell’s first female managers and enjoyed traveling in the company helicopter to work events. However, her long work hours left her little time for herself and made it even more difficult to raise her two children on her own.
Mericle said her parents split up when she was about 4 years old.
“She was a good mom, when she could be home,” recalled Mericle, who owns an accounting firm in South Carolina. “The only time she took for herself was Monday night bowling with a church team.”
Once Mericle and her brother Keith were adults, Parker started visiting West Virginia twice a year. Each time, she met up with two close friends from college, Oleta Lawton and Rosa Lee Blake. From the front porch of Blake’s house in Frametown, the three women ate, laughed and shared stories.
One of Lawton’s favorite stories about Parker: The time Parker baked her a wedding cake and decorated the church for Lawton and her future husband on a $10 budget.
“She had just gotten married and she said, ‘Oh, you must wear my wedding dress,’ which I did,” Lawton said in a video call from Ohio. She thought so highly of Parker that she later named one of her daughters Amy after her.
Parker made these cross-country trips primarily to see her mother, a widow by then, and her siblings and to spend time on the Lowry farm in Buck, some 20 minutes outside Hinton.
She was particularly close to her older brother Amos Lowry, a farmer and timberman who served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II. He passed away in 2009.
“She loved to come home to the old home place and spend time reminiscing with him,” his daughter Brenda Weikle wrote during an interview conducted via Facebook Messenger. “Our last time together was such a good memory driving around the farm.”
Parker’s second husband, Earl Parker, whom she married in 1982, sometimes joined her on these trips. Charley Lowry, Amos Lowry’s son, has fond memories of them visiting when he was a boy.
“She would always say she would take me back to California with her, and her husband, Uncle Earl, would tell me I could fit in their suitcase,” Charley Lowry wrote, responding to questions sent to him on Facebook Messenger.
He has flown to the West Coast to visit Parker, who became a widow in 1987.
“I visited her at her home in California four or five years ago, as she could no longer make the trip to WV,” he wrote. “She insisted on making dinner and cooked a full meal, including mashed potatoes, turkey breast and dressing. We looked through photo albums and talked a lot about my dad. She had a room in her home that she called “Amos ’room,” where she had lots of photos and memories of them growing up. She truly loved my dad and my dad loved her.”
Parker valued her childhood memories so much that she spent years writing about them in hopes of eventually publishing a book. She finished 110 pages before her eyesight began to fail and she had to stop.
Michael Wamsley, a family history buff, is grateful for her recollections. He has learned a lot about his grandmother — Parker’s younger sister, Mary Louise — by reading them. Mary Louise Lowry Wamsley died in 2004.
“I reached out to my great aunt Amy over 20 years ago in hopes she may shed some light on the history of the family I never got a chance to know growing up,” Michael Wamsley wrote in a text message from Florida.
“She displayed a great appreciation and enthusiasm for her roots as well as her accomplished adult life,” he continued. “I was searching for a family connection with my great aunt. But I found something even better — a friend.”
In addition to her two children, Parker is survived by seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
About the author: Denise-Marie Ordway is a journalist and Amy Lowry Parker’s great niece. Ordway met Parker once, while on a business trip to Los Angeles in June 2024. For several hours that afternoon, Parker, age 97 at the time, shared countless stories about her life and the Lowry family.
