Marilyn Rebecca Dudley
8/1/1953 - 11/19/2017
Marilyn Rebecca Dudley, 64, of the Kingdom of Tonga, died Sunday, November 19, 2017 following several mosquito-borne tropical diseases illnesses over a period of three years. Marilyn was laid to rest in Tonga December 5, 2017.
Born August 1, 1953 in York County, South Carolina, Marilyn was the daughter of the late George W. Dudley and Rebecca B. Dudley.
The first in her family to go to college, Marilyn received her BA from Winthrop (December 1974), both an MA in English (1984) and MA in anthropology (1988) from the University of Alaska, and a Ph.D in sociology (2000) from the University of South Carolina.
Unable to secure a position, Marilyn joined the U.S. Army after graduation from Winthrop in 1974. After training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, she was assigned to the 172nd Light Infantry Brigade at Fort Richardson, Alaska and served several years before marrying Eugene Arthur Rowley in 1976. With the death of their only child in late 1977, Marilyn threw herself into completing two degrees and eventually started the for-profit OPS-Alaska. In the late 1980's, she and Gene relocated to Columbia, SC, where she started and eventually completed her doctoral program in 2000. During that time, she supported herself with many and varied positions: Teaching, long-haul driver, clinical counselor. In 2001, Marilyn accepted a teaching contract at Sonoma State University (Rohnert Park, California), where she served in the SSU faculty senate between 2002 and 2004. At the end of this contract she began part-time teaching at a community college campus near Vallejo (2005 - 2007).
In 2008, Marilyn deployed to Afghanistan as a civilian contractor to the United States Army as an intelligence asset. In August 2009, she signed a teaching contract with the University in Tonga. On February 2, 2010, she and now husband Thomas Gagale left the United States for the Kingdom of Tonga. In addition to her teaching duties, she and Tom continued writing, particularly to increase the knowledge base for sending humans to Mars someday. A GOOGLE search shows a prolific collection of papers authored and co-authored by Marilyn.
In addition to her husband, Thomas Gangale, she is survived by her mother Rebecca B. Dudley, sisters Gwen Dudley Teague and Jackie Dudley Mosely, and brother Victor Willard Dudley. She was predeceased by her daughter Elizabeth "Lessie" Rowley (November 1977) and father George W. Dudley (March 2017).
Marilyn's own words from her Facebook "intro" best summarize her life:
The thing about me that is critical to know, if one would want to know me, is that I have had A LOT of different life experiences. This runs the gamut of having worked across a number of different occupations, having earned degrees and studied in different disciplines, and having known a lot of different people in many different places. I have been on the scene when various historical events were going down, and in some cases, I had a hand in them. Because I am from the working-class and am a woman, however, I am typically underestimated. That's my bane. I've never figured out how to get around that. I realize there are some measures I could take. I could "put on airs," adopt a diction and grammar that my English Master's degree allows, flaunt the manners of the upper middle class in which I am well-versed, and "dress for success." However, I have disdained such a masquerade enacted by other working-class people and view it as a "sell-out" of most of the world's busily living people. And, as Shakespeare sonnetized, it is an expense of spirit in a waste of shame.
