Marie McCurdy was born in 1907 in Ripley, Michigan, one of eight children. When her mother died, the younger children went to live with her father's brother, Judge Rouleau and his family in Hancock. Marie left school after primary school and went to work at 15, first in a general store, and then for the Bridgeman-Russell Dairy. For health reasons she had to leave the dairy, finding out later that she had tuberculosis and ended up in the sanitorium for 26 months with a young child and new husband. The family moved to Canada soon after where her husband worked in a gold mine near Ontario. Marie recounts celebrating the silver jubilee of King George V in 1936, as well as other anecdotes from her time in Canada, and then back in Michigan where her husband was employed for the Calumet and Hecla Consolidated Copper Company. When her husband had to leave mining because of his bad health, Marie went to work at Nutini's Supper Club in Hancock for seventeen years to support them.