We Grieve the Loss and We Celebrate Her Life
Mary Maxwell Gates (1929-1994)
Mary Gates grew up in Seattle's North End and graduated from Roosevelt High School where she was class valedictorian and a star forward on the girls' high school basketball team. She received a degree in education from the University of Washington 1950. While at the UW, she met law student William H. Gates Jr. (as he was then known) and they married. While he worked as a Bremerton Assistant City Attorney in the early 1950s, she taught school there.
The Gates family moved to Seattle where William (1925-2020) practiced law. Mary involved herself in a wide array of civic activities in Seattle, volunteering as a lecturer at the Museum of History and Industry, serving on boards for the Seattle-King County United Way, KIRO, Inc., Washington Gives, and Leadership Tomorrow. She was the first female president of King County's United Way, the first woman to chair the national United Way's executive committee, and the first woman to be a director of First Interstate Bank of Washington. A national United Way award was established in her name for "exemplary projects" typifying Gates' emphasis on cooperation between staff and volunteers.
In 1972, she joined the Board of Trustees at Children's Orthopedic Hospital and worked on a variety of committees before heading up the board's legislative affairs committee. She lobbied officials in Olympia and in Washington, D.C. on issues that affected the hospital and children. It was Gates who proposed to the trustees at Children's that they form a foundation to manage the hospital's investments and giving programs. When the Children's Hospital Foundation was organized in 1985, Gates chaired that board. She also chaired the committee that drew up a strategic plan for the board, which had been formed in 1907.
In 1975, Governor Dan Evans (1925-2024), a former bridge partner of Bill and Mary Gates, appointed Mary Gates to the University of Washington Board of Regents. In the mid 1980s, she led a movement on the board to cut, and then divest, the University's investments in South Africa to pressure the government there to change its racist and oppressive system of apartheid. She served more than 18 years on the Board of Regents. In 1993, the First Interstate Bank named Gates to its board of directors.
Mary Gates died on June 9, 1994, the day before she was to be honored by the Seattle Municipal League of King County as Citizen of the Year. "One of Seattle's greatest treasures has passed from the scene," said Mayor Norm Rice, who called her "an extraordinary civic leader and philanthropist, a champion for social justice and a remarkable human being."