The Selee Family - Melrose history - Sunday, March 7th, 2021

It was a circuitous path that brought the Selee family to the grand home built for them in 1895 at 115 West Emerson. Nathan and Annie Selee had begun their careers as teachers. Both of them were ardent Methodists. Nathan felt a call to preach, and became a minister, but this calling ultimately did not agree with him, and by 1865 he had moved the family to 25 West Emerson Street in Melrose, where he took up work as a manufacturer of patent medicines while Annie raised the children.

But motherhood was not the sum of Annie’s ambitions. When the children were a bit older, she went back to school, and in 1882 at the age of 49 she graduated from the Boston University School of Medicine, becoming one of the first female medical doctors in New England. She opened up a clinic in an office of their home. By 1895, her practice had grown large enough that the house at 115 West Emerson was built to accommodate both her medical practice and the family home.

One of her sons, Frank, became a significant figure in the early history of professional baseball; we will talk about him in another post. Her daughter, Lucy, married the Methodist pastor, John D. Pickles, with whom she would have a daughter, Marion. Pickles died, and Lucy moved into her parents’ house, where Marion was raised, graduating from Melrose High School in 1918.

Marion’s talents were quite different from her grandmother’s. Her love for singing in the Methodist choir brought her to Julliard and then to a career in opera and musical theatre, where she appeared under the name Marion Selee. In 1954 she was part of the original off-Broadway cast of The Threepenny Opera, along with Lotte Lenya and future stars Bea Arthur, Charlotte Rae, Jerry Orbach, and Jerry Stiller.

Marion died in 1961, still in the Threepenny cast, having given over 2200 performances. When asked what she made of her life as the daughter of a Methodist minister who played a prostitute on stage every night, she said “the part may be seedy, but it’s never boring.”

#historicpreservation #melrosema