The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
Notary for 50 years: 97-year-old known throughout township
UPPER DUBLIN >> Anyone seeking a notary in Upper Dublin within the last 50 or so years has probably met Mary Winslow.
Winslow, now 97, was the only notary in the township until about five years ago, she said last week. An agent of the PA Department of Transportation, she also provided title and registration services at the office attached to her home on Limekiln Pike.
“I enjoyed it — meeting everybody that moved in and getting to know their families,” she said. “Sometimes they’d catch me mopping the floor,” said Winslow, who often provided notary services outside of her stated business hours. “I did it at any hour, really.
“I was a traveling notary,” she added, noting she went to different senior living homes to provide service.
“In the end I was going to seminars,” said Winslow, who retired as a notary in July 2018. “You needed to have computers and could not be in business with the technology from when I started.
“I would be like a dinosaur.”
A lifelong resident of the township, Winslow has lived in the house — built in 1870 according to Zillow — since birth.
One of the longest living residents of the township, she was one of two grand marshals — Jean Rozycki, 100, was the other — for the township’s Tricentennial Parade in September.
Erin Woodruff, a recreation coordinator for UD Parks and Recreation, said the Tricentennial Committee was looking for “a way to get everyone involved, even the oldest in UD,” and had reached out through social media and email to find “the person who had the most years in Upper Dublin.”
“We got her [Winslow’s] name from a lot of people,” Woodruff said. “She’s been a big part of Upper Dublin for a number of years.”
“I was so proud and happy” to be selected, Winslow said. “I waved to everybody. It was beautiful.”
One of the pioneers for St. Alphonsus Church in Maple Glen and a 76-year member of the Colony Club of Ambler, which raised funds every year for charity, Winslow noted she “was known throughout the township.”
Her daughter, Marilyn Messina, said she wasn’t sure of the date when her mother became a notary, but was sure it was at least five decades.
“She’s quite a person,” Messina said, adding her mother notarized “all those petitions” over the years, for both Democrats and Republicans, “and never charged them.”
When she was a child, Winslow said, the family owned 20 acres and farmed the land, selling the produce on a stand out front. The farm was surrounded by woods and other farms, she said, recalling a dairy farm on the land now occupied by Temple Sinai and a 62-acre farm behind the property.
Winslow attended elementary school in the schoolhouse which is now a preschool at Limekiln and Mundock Road, seventh and eighth grades at a former school on Madison Avenue in Fort Washington and graduated in 1939 from Ambler High School, which was on Tennis Avenue, she said.
One of four surviving members of the class of 105, Winslow was planning to attend her 80th high school reunion Oct. 5. In the 1940s, the family went into the restaurant business in Ambler and around that time also had an auto salvage yard on the property, Winslow recalled. In 1943, she married Charles Winslow, who eventually went into business with her brother at the salvage yard, she said.
After the salvage yard was gone, she sold 14 acres of the property to a developer who built houses behind her, where one of the streets is named Winslow Way.
Charles, who Messina said was “the love of my mother’s life,” passed away 15 years ago, Winslow said.
A longtime Phillies fan, the team recognized Winslow when she was 90 — “I ran the bases,” she said.
She had to give up bowling, because she tore her ACL, she said, and has stopped driving, but uses a cane only for stability.
In addition to her daughter, Winslow has two sons, eight grandchildren and nine greatgrandchildren, she said. Her mother lived with her until she passed at age 95.
The secret to her longevity is “to forgive and forget; everybody has good and bad times,” Winslow said. “Keep moving and be kind to everyone.”