Marjory Allingham Ramey

Marjory Allingham Ramey was a University of Oregon administrator, mountaineer, and longtime Eugene civic volunteer who died peacefully in her sleep on 29 August 2026 at the age of 101. Lookout Eugene-Springfield and Musgrove Family Mortuary, which handled her arrangements, reported her death and published the family obituary that forms the core public record of her life.

She was born on 22 January 1925 in Portland, Oregon, to William and Lucile Allingham (nee Watts), raised in Tigard, and descended from Willamette Valley pioneers. That pioneer inheritance shaped how she talked about her own life. At 14 she became, by her family's account, the youngest female in the region licensed to operate a ham radio, using the call letters W7HER. In her teens and early twenties she joined the Mazamas, the Portland mountaineering club founded on the summit of Mount Hood, and climbed most of the major peaks of the Pacific Northwest. Mount Hood alone she climbed sixteen times.

After graduating from Girls Polytechnic High School in Portland, she enrolled at the University of Oregon in 1942. She helped pay for college by working at the KGW and KEX radio stations in Portland during breaks and summers, and she earned a degree in English. Before graduation she met Howard L. Ramey, who became her husband and partner for decades. The couple married on 30 August 1947. After Howard studied drama at Yale, they moved to New York and worked in the theater, touring with travelling shows and serving on the original company of Tennessee Williams's play The Rose Tattoo from its Chicago tryouts through Broadway. They returned to Eugene after the birth of their first child. Howard built a career as a university professor while Marjory spent years raising their three sons, Timothy, Jonathan, and Christopher.

When her youngest child was eight, she returned to work part time in the University of Oregon Housing Office. In 1984 she became the university's first female Housing Director, a post she held until retiring in 1992. Colleagues and former student staff later remembered her as a mentor who shaped residence life on campus. Alumni writing in Oregon Quarterly in 2022 still recalled her as the longtime housing director whose portrait had appeared on the magazine's Autumn 2021 cover, and as the administrator who had interviewed them for RA jobs decades earlier.

Her public life in Eugene reached beyond campus. She served on the boards of St Vincent de Paul, the University Art Museum (where she was also a docent), and the City Club of Eugene. She belonged to Fortnightly and the Shakespeare club. For about seventy years she worshipped at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, serving on the Altar Guild and as a lay reader. Her devotion to Delta Delta Delta included advising the local chapter, sitting on the national board of directors, and serving as national membership director. She credited her survival of breast cancer in the late 1970s to faith, work, and steady swimming.

Howard Ramey died in 2006. Marjory's own death came one day before what would have been their 79th wedding anniversary. She remained a lifelong University of Oregon Ducks fan, a longtime season ticket holder, and a devoted bridge player and swimmer into her final years. She is survived by her three sons and their families, including seven great grandchildren. Services were planned at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Eugene. At her request there was to be no open microphone: if people did not know her by then, she said, it would be too late for elaborate and possibly inaccurate remarks from survivors.