The eldest child of Alonzo Nolan Stanley and Mary Walter Gordon Guinn Stanley was born on December 22, 1901 in Langdale, Alabama, and died on September 19, 2004 in Arlington, Massachusetts. She was 3 months shy of her 103rd birthday

Mary went to school in Lanett, Alabama and attended college at Bessie Tift in Forsythe, Georgia.

On June 10, 1924 she married William H. Dickson, of Arlington, Massachusetts in West Point, Georgia. They had six children all born in Boston, Massachusetts.

Mary, who all her life had an artistic talent, was creative in her endeavors and would every year at Christmas time make a favor for every patient's meal tray at the Symmes Hospital in Arlington.

Her only brother, Alonzo Nolan Stanley, Jr., died at eighteen months of age.

Five children live nearby in Massachusetts, and the youngest lives in South Carolina. She has been blessed with seventeen grandchildren and twenty-six great-grandchildren.