Mary Lilly

One of the 'grande dames' of old Carbondale, Mary Lilly was deeply committed to the local community and helped found the Mount Sopris Historical Society. After her death at the age of 100, Mary left a legacy bequest to KDNK that formed the largest single gift to the station's endowment at the time.

Some excerpts from an article by John Stroud in the Post Independent:

She was born Mary Crouch in San Diego on April 7, 1916, and grew up in southern California where she studied art. She married John Lilly in 1936 and they had two sons, John Jr. and Charles, both of whom preceded her in death. The family left California and moved about the Eastern Seaboard before heading to Colorado in the 1940s and befriending John and Anne Holden, who later founded Colorado Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale. The Lillys’ sons both attended the school. In the 1950s, Mary and John moved back East to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., where John Lilly, a renowned neuroscientist and psychoanalyst, dove into his research on a variety of topics. Most notable was his work in human sensory deprivation and human-dolphin communication. However, his growing fame took a toll on the marriage, the obituary notes, and he and Mary divorced in 1958. Mary Lilly went on to earn an advanced degree in art from American University and then taught at Holton-Arms School in Bethesda, Maryland.

She and son Charles moved back to Carbondale in 1971 and bought into the Four Pines Ranch on Nettle Creek south of town, where they grew heirloom apples and boarded farm animals. According to Linda Criswell, Lilly was one of the charter members of the Mount Sopris Historical Society, along with another of the town’s matriarchs, Mary Ferguson. Mary Lilly and Charles moved to Hawaii for a period of time in the late 1990s to take care of John Lilly, who had retired there. He died in 2001, and a year later Charles also died unexpectedly. Mary Lilly again returned to Carbondale, becoming active again with the library, her church and the historical society. “I met her when I was giving a historical walking tour of Carbondale,” Criswell, the former director of the Mount Sopris Historical Society, said of their chance meeting in 2002. “She gave me her phone number and address and said, ‘Call me,’” Criswell said. “We have been friends ever since.” Lilly was instrumental in helping to get the historical museum on Weant Boulevard up and running, continuing a love of history that Charles had fostered in the community.

She was also a regular participant in the “Wake Up Now” gatherings at the flag pole in front of Carbondale Town Hall on Tuesday mornings, a tradition that started after the Iraq War broke out in 2003 as a way to honor lives lost. “Those were the things that were meaningful to her,” Criswell said. “It is a great honor to us in Carbondale that she came back to this place to live. She could have settled anywhere, but she came back here because she liked the people.”