This photo was taken when Mary Ellen Givens was about 30 and visiting Ireland.
Givens family gives library painting in daughter's name
By Kara Chalmers
Mary Ellen Givens Slane was never pushed into loving books as she did. As she grew up, her parents made thousands of them readily available for her in their home on Debbie Lane in Saratoga. It seems fitting that Slane's family has decided to commission a $10,000 oil painting of a Saratoga library as a way to memorialize her in her hometown.
Slane was killed in February 1996, when she was 32. A fourth-floor deck separated from the wall of a San Francisco apartment where she was attending a going-away party for a work colleague. Slane died from the fall, and others were injured.
Slane lived in San Rafael at the time with her husband of eight months, Daniel Slane, who was with her that night when she took her last breath. It was his idea to find a way to keep his wife's memory alive in Saratoga.
Slane's parents are Jim and Mary Givens, who now live in Los Gatos. One day, while listening to a speech by Willys Peck on the history of the Saratoga library, the Givens thought of the perfect way to commemorate their daughter--whom they said was a "walking Chamber of Commerce" for Saratoga.
The Givenses, Daniel Slane, and Slane's sister Jane and her family, all of whom are members of the Friends of the Saratoga Libraries, donated $10,280 to the Friends to select and pay an artist to paint either the old Oak Street library, which was the one Slane used as a child, or the current library, which is slated to be completely redone. Even Slane's three nephews, William, James, and Benjamin, ages 12, 10 and 8 each contributed $10 cash to the project.
"This is a family affair," Jim Givens said, adding that the money could be enough to purchase two paintings, one of each library. The family members are not yet sure of the size of the painting or paintings, or who the artist will be, but they hope the artist will be local. The Friends will donate the finished painting, which will hang in the brand new library, to the city of Saratoga.
Slane left Saratoga for the first time to attend the University of California in Los Angeles. After college, she lived in Los Angeles, but moved back to the Bay Area. She became the assistant vice president for global marketing at Marsh & McLennan Inc., an insurance company in San Francisco.
Her parents said she was a natural at selling, partly because she was a "sweet talker." She was a people person, said her father, although when she was young, she was shy. "Mary outgrew that shyness because I have seen her walk into a room and nobody was a stranger," he said.
"She had a nice disposition," said her mother, Mary Givens, adding that Slane could see the good in anyone, and something to be happy about in any situation.
At SHS, Mary Ellen Givens competed in varsity track.
Being an avid reader was only one of Slane's interests. In grade school, she developed a love of history, which she studied as her major in college. Her books on Victorian England and the history of Czarist Russia line the bookcase in her parents' home. She collected Russian postcards, a hobby introduced to her by her mother who has taken over her collection. Slane read a lot of nonfiction but also loved novels by Ruth Rendell, her parents said.
Slane became quite a traveler, too. She took trips to Ireland and Scotland. Slane studied law and social control at Oxford University in England during college. Her mother says Slane was always attracted to boys with an Irish look.
At Saratoga High School, Slane ran varsity track and competed in the mile relay and in the quarter- and half-mile events, as well. She continued running all her life, with the distances increasing as she got older. In high school, Slane also worked on the school newspaper, first as a reporter, then as the advertising manager in her senior year.
Slane had a real entrepreneurial side. When her parents planned a family trip to Europe in the summer when Slane was 16, they offered to pay her and her sister Jane minimum wage to paint their house in Saratoga. Mary logged more hours than her sister and ended up making more than enough spending money for the trip.
And when the old white colonial house on Los Gatos-Saratoga Road near the Village was for sale in the mid-1980s, Slane tried to talk her family into purchasing it and running a family bed and breakfast.
What was truly unique about Slane, and what seemed almost puzzling to her parents, at times, was her strong attachment to Saratoga, where the family moved when Slane entered the first grade.
"After she left and lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Rafael, she always came back and saw herself as really tied to Saratoga," Jim Givens said. "Now, we couldn't explain it, except that's the way she felt."
Her parents said that their daughter would always give her friends the grand tour. Slane would take them to Villa Montalvo, the city's historical museum, or to the Russian Orthodox church on Elva Avenue to look at its architecture. Each year since it began, Mary would go to the Holiday Open House in the Village, the Friday after Thanksgiving.
"She made it a point to do that so she could go down on Big Basin Way and see people that she didn't get to see very often," her father said. "Because most everyone was there and she was in and out of every place all evening long."
Slane's mother said she walked in on her daughter once when she was talking on the phone to a friend who was going through some tough times.
"I just walked in on the end of the conversation, so it wasn't staged," Mary Givens said. "And she was saying, 'why don't you go home, where people love you and will be glad to see you?' And I was very flattered, very flattered with that."
Saratoga, California Since 1955
