Marion Hursey Sees the World Through a Camera Lens

Like her twin sister, Myrl Garment, Anderson Artists Guild member Marion Hursey is a traveler. A Navy Junior, she was living with her family in Hawaii when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Other stops were nearly as memorable. During a year in Newfoundland, Canada, she remembers taking high school correspondence courses from the University of Nebraska and spending Fridays in the bowling alley, which counted as both physical education and math classes since the students set the pins and kept score manually. She also lived in California, West Virginia and Nebraska.

Hursey attended college at Purdue University in Indiana, where she majored in microbiology. After graduating, she took time out to raise her children as the family moved several times, ultimately to Clemson.

After a divorce, Hursey spent a year training in medical technology at Anderson Memorial Hospital, ending up in the blook bank transfusion service, where she rose to supervisor and worked for 31 years. Her accomplishments are many. She started a blood donor program on which donor names were initially listed on cardboard along with blood types. “As time passed, the demands became greater, and that was not working,” she said. Eventually, she encouraged the hospital to develop a bloodmobile program, and by the time she retired, there were two bloodmobiles. She was also the force behind the first Clemson-USC blood drive, along with programs at churches and industries. “It was a very rewarding career,” she said. “I loved all of it.”

Since retiring, Hursey has traveled widely, from the Amazon River in Peru to Alaska to the Canadian Rockies. Her favorite trip was an African safari, which was also the locale for her most popular photographs. “Those are the ones I sold the most,” she said.

Her first prize winner was a shot of a boy sitting on a rock wall of The Battery in Charleston, selling roses made of palmetto leaves. It captured a prize at the Anderson County Fair. “What encouraged me was a note from Marion Fanning saying she appreciated my photography and I should keep doing it,” said Hursey.

Marion Hursey is married to fellow AAG member Ben Hursey.