Kate’s notes:  According to Anniston, Alabama census records for 1920 & 1930, Mary Lee Gilliland was the daughter of James W. and Ollie V. Gilliland. She was several years younger than her brothers mentioned in the article, who were Carl B., Paul C. And James W. I believe her birth date was 22 December 1913 and that she died in November of 1983 but that is not yet confirmed.

The Anniston Star
Anniston, Alabama
3 September, 1944

Anniston Nurse Turns to Hanging Awnings
To Save Father’s Business, Does Good Job

By ANNE GAMBRELL McCARTY
    All her life all she wanted was to be a nurse, but fate had other plans and now she’s running up and down ladders putting up awnings – and loving it.
    That’s the story of Miss Mary Lee Gilliland, registered nurse and public health worker, who gave up her career and life’s ambition last November to put on a pair of blue jeans and take over the awning work, when her father who had operated the business for 18 years became incapacitated while her brothers were away serving with the armed forces.
    And the philosophic conclusion that she draws from the quirk of fate that changed the course of her life is that “you can’t plan too much for the future. You just have to let things take care of themselves.”
Has Special Training
    Miss Gilliland, who was graduated from Garner Hospital in 1936, and since then has worked in a Philadelphia hospital and taken further training at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, was working with the local Health Department when her father, J. W. Gilliland, became too sick to continue work last November. She didn’t take time to think about whether she would like the awning business: she just went to work.
    “If anyone had told me a year ago I’d be doing this now, I wouldn’t have believed it,” she laughs. “But what could I do? I couldn’t stand by and see the doors of this business shut up after daddy had worked so many years to build it up. Besides I’ve always felt that when I saw anyone else doing anything, I could do it too; and I knew I could put up awnings.”
    And she can too. To date, she’s put up 221 of them. And that doesn’t mean she stands on the ground and supervises the job while somebody else does it; she climbs up the ladder and does the work herself.
    But hard work is nothing new to Miss Gilliland. She’s worked hard in one way or another all of her life – just because she’s made that way. At one time when she was doing private duty nursing in Anniston, she worked on the night shift so she could go up to Jacksonville State Teachers’ College each morning to take some college work, going straight to school when she left her work at 7 a.m.  When she was working in the hospital in Philadelphia, she was also going to night school at the University of Pennsylvania, and one time when she was doing public health work in Shelby County, she was taking a course in marine pipe fitting – a course, incidentally, that she says has been invaluable to her in her awning work.
    Yes, she’s tried a little of everything – except plowing, and she’s going to try that this fall on the farm on the Birmingham Highway where she and her family have recently moved.
Likes The Work
    “I love this awning work,” she says earnestly. “But then I guess I’d like anything I was doing. That’s the way I am – I go at everything with my whole body and soul.”
    Sometimes Miss Gilliland thinks about the need for nurses overseas and wonders if she should be there. But someway the scores balance up and she feels that she is doing her part.
    “You have to think about your responsibility to your home, too. I’m so thankful that I was here when daddy got sick and wasn’t too much of a sissy to pitch in and help.”
    Mr. Gilliland is able to be back at work now, but Mary Lee is staying on to handle the heavy jobs. As to the future – well, her philosophy is to make no plans.
    Her life’s ambition was to be a nurse, and it was an ambition she inherited naturally because her grandfather was a doctor, her brother is a doctor, and her mother is a nurse. But then there’s a fascination about awnings too.
    “I’m not going to say I’m going back to nursing someday, and I won’t say I’m not,” she concludes. “I’ll just let what’s going to be happen, and I’ll follow along.”

-transcription by Kate Maynard, 2103