Marcia McWilliams Bystrom peacefully passed on in hospital Friday night, June 22, 2018. Born in Sheridan, WY on November 11, 1925, to Henry H. McWilliams and Julia Buck McWilliams, Marcia was the younger of two children. When not attending a one-room mixed-grade country school and then high school in Sheridan, Marcia did her chores on the family ranch. After graduating from high school, she attended New Mexico State University (Albuquerque), then transferred to the University of Colorado (Boulder) where she earned a degree in Liberal Arts, Cum laude. She was an avid informed and critical reader with a keen desire to learn and expand her horizons. These characteristics prompted her to leave Wyoming, traveling east, eventually to New York and vicinity. Her plans, such as pursuing a graduate degree, changed when Charles Bystrom came into her life. In a succession of events, without abandoning her goals, she became stepmother to three midgrade to high school girls, moved to Chicago with her new family, and then to Florence, where she began a new and truly remarkable career.
Extraordinarily competent and dedicated, intellectually honest, reliable, service-minded, generous, and energetic are terms which describe Marcia. She embodied these characteristics. Beginning in 1962 at was then called the National Fertilizer Canter of the Tennessee Valley Authority, She was a research librarian for almost 30 years serving many outstanding TVA scientists and engineers. She was among the first of her colleagues to use evolving information storage and retrieval systems, and later, when librarians began rely increasingly, Marcia characteristically also used reference books to supply information not yet on the computer networks that some library client might find of value. Only one of many examples will illustrate he unappalled effort that she put into her work: She learned a sufficient amount of French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and Russian to enable her to read table headings and data columns to provide information from foreign publications, upon request.
Marcia became a widow after 20 years of married life and devoted even more of her time on an already busy community service schedule. She was active in or supported organization addressing poverty, minority and women’s rights, Alabama constitutional reform, and related issues. Using the protocol of the Library of Congress, she organized and indexed books and other printed matter in the libraries of the Tennessee Valley Art Association and the Temple B’nai Israel (Florence), prepared and presented programs on art and/or music at the Institute for Learning in Retirement, University of North Alabama, and was an active member of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Shoals.
Marcia joined the Quad Cities Bicycle Club in 1975 and had been a serious cyclist until her mid-80s, riding a mountain bike, one of her road bikes, or their tan den with a long-time friend and companion. She rode in the annual WC Handy Festival Centuries (100 mile rides), once ln the annual ‘Ride Across Iowa (along with 12,000 cyclists), made week-long camping trips, and made bicycle tours in Costa Rica and Prince Edward Island and along the Loire river in France.
After retirement from TVA, Marcia and the dear couple she had known and enjoyed since 1962 made several Elder Hostel (Rhodes Scholar) trips here and abroad. Learning was ingrained in her nature.
She is preceded in death by her parents, her husband Charles, brother John Edward McWilliams, and two stepdaughters (Sandra Furno and Roberta Neil). She is survived by one stepdaughter (Lois Gill), a nephew (Michael Lloyd McWilliams), a niece (Diana McWilliams Bochenski), an adopted granddaughter (Laura Neil), and a sister-in-law (Mary Ellen McWilliams).
Marcia was a kind, sincere, quiet, self-effacing, private Person. She wanted no burial, no burial service. Over the years, a favorite trip was to the Unitarian Universalist mountain retreat in N. Carolina: There to meditate, and all who knew her are invited to meditate as well, and without public ceremony, to consider with their individual thoughts and emotions, the value of her life.
