(From Oakey's Funeral Service & Crematory.)
Sue Ellen Tyree
June 30, 1943 - June 22, 2016
Sue Ellen Tyree, 72, of Vinton passed away on Wednesday, June 22,
2016. Sue Ellen is survived by her loving husband, Matthew Tyree; her
five children, Melissa Faye Spencely, Steven Andrew Booth, Gretchen
Fritz Zoch, Adriane Fritz Terry, Rebecca Fritz Ward; three stepchildren,
Teresa Barnabei-Cooper, Michael Tyree, Sr., Sharon Baker; 16
grandchildren and 9 great grandchildren.
A service celebrating her life will be held at Oakey's Vinton Chapel at
10am on Monday, June 27, 2016 with Dr. Bill Booth officiating.
Interment will follow in Sherwood Memorial Park.
The family will receive friends 2-4pm and 6-8pm on Sunday, June 26, at
Oakey's Vinton Chapel.
Online condolences may be expressed at www.oakeys.com.
In lieu of flowers, you may make a donation to the Leukemia Lymphoma Society at http://pages.lightthenight.org/
va/vabeach16/gzoch.
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(From The Roanoke Times dated Sunday 18 6mo 2011.)
All about a dad (Cyle Parr McKay)
by Dan Casey
Sue Ellen Tyree |
Many of us are thinking about our fathers today, and that includes Sue Ellen Tyree, who lost hers when she was 12. But she's taken her memories much further.
Tyree, 67, has written a book. Self-published in April, the title is "My Dad," and the subtitle is "He was a Gentleman, and a Gentle Man."
We sat down at the dining room table in her home in Vinton on Thursday, before a large spread of photos and family artifacts. Between many chuckles and a few tears, she told me all about him.
It was a humbling experience, a rare peek at fatherhood from the flip side, through the eyes of an adoring daughter.
Cyle Parr McKay was a quiet, wise and unassuming man, a handsome, black-haired fellow nicknamed "Powerhouse." He never lost a game of checkers, or raised his voice, or met anyone who didn't become a friend, she said. He died early, at 51, after an eight-year battle with emphysema.
His last six years, from 1950 to 1956, were spent here in Roanoke. Despite poor health and economic circumstances, McKay insinuated himself into this community in a way that's difficult to comprehend.
When he died, "Oakey's had to give out numbers," Tyree told me. "It took three days for everyone to pay their respects."
Photos of Cyle Parr McKay, along with some other documents amassed by his daughter, Sue Ellen Tyree, as she reserched the book about her father, "My Dad." |
McKay was born and raised outside Front Royal, on a farm in the northern Shenandoah Valley, the remnants of 100,000 acres granted to his ancestors by the King of England before the Revolutionary War.
He was the oldest of four children who grew up working the land, and he first left it to attend Randolph Macon College, where he earned a degree in mathematics and graduated first in his class.
But he had a desire to roam, so he became a truck driver.
He met his second wife, Virgie Quesenberry, when he was passing through Pulaski. She ran off with him to North Carolina, where they married.
"Mom wanted to get out of Pulaski," Tyree said. "She wanted to see the world."
After a few years on the road, the couple settled down. McKay bought a dairy farm in Portsmouth and also worked as a shipbuilder in the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. Sue Ellen, their only child, was born at the Norfolk Naval Hospital. At that time, Cyle McKay was 39 and his wife was 29.
McKay smoked more than two packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day. In his early-40s, he was diagnosed with emphysema. Tyree was a little girl at the time.
A doctor advised him to move to the mountains for his health. So he quit his job and sold the dairy farm at a loss. Virgie McKay's sister lived in Roanoke, so that's where McKay moved his family.
He bought a big white house with a large back yard that was high on a hill above Tazewell Avenue in Southeast Roanoke.
McKay renovated the upstairs into apartments and rented them out for income. The family lived on the first floor.
Unable to work because of his illness, McKay used his farming skills to plant what sounds like a legendary vegetable, fruit and flower garden that consumed almost all the back yard.
Virgie McKay did the canning in an outdoor pit.
"He fed the neighborhood," Tyree told me. On many occasions, McKay delivered flowers to the funerals of people he didn't even know, she said.
Because of his illness, McKay was home most of the time, apart from frequent visits to Roanoke Memorial Hospital. While he raised Tyree, Virgie McKay worked. And during those years the bond between father and daughter grew.
"I spent all my time going to school and taking care of my dad, while Mama worked," Tyree said.
They spent a lot of time in that garden, which became a place of many father-to-daughter lessons. Few are as vivid in Tyree's memory as the ugly one she once got in race relations.
Back then, Southeast Roanoke was an all-white neighborhood that black people entered at some risk.
On steaming summer days, when the garbage trucks would roll through the back alley, McKay and Tyree would set out ice-cold water or lemonade for the trash collectors, who were black.
Some of their neighbors bitterly resented the respect McKay paid those workers. One morning, he woke up and found the back of the house had been egged.
The next morning, he and Tyree found most of the garden's tomatoes gone. The vandals had picked them and thrown them all over the back side of the house.
"He said, 'Some people don't like it that we gave water to the trash men.' I asked, 'Why?' He said, 'Well, they're a little bit different than we are,' " Tyree recalled. It launched yet another lesson, this one in the equality of all people.
Eventually, medical bills overwhelmed the family, and McKay, who was by then on oxygen much of the time, became unable to maintain or afford the large house. So in 1953 the family moved into a public housing project in Northwest Roanoke.
That's where they were living when Cyle McKay would make his final visit to the hospital. He died Feb. 3, 1956.
In subsequent years, Virgie McKay remarried. Sue Ellen Tyree graduated from Jefferson High School, was married three times and widowed once. Virgie died in 1995.
Tyree and her third husband, Matt Tyree, a retired welder, have eight children, 14 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
To them, she'll leave this slim, 98-page volume, "My Dad." It's a grab-bag of genealogy, photos, and stories - a little girl's memories of her father, frozen in time.
Listening to Tyree talk about Cyle McKay is itself a lesson in what it means to be a father, and about earning the kind of love and respect that never dies.
Something to chew on, this Father's Day.
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