News

By Emily J. Minor

    DELRAY BEACH — Marian J. Buehler, a devoted Catholic, mother and wife whose life’s work centered on taking care of people, died Oct. 6 at her son’s house near Lake Ida. Her daughter said that in recent months her 96-year-old mother had gotten weaker and weaker, finally deciding “it was time to go to heaven and be with daddy.”
    “Every day, God took a little piece of her, until it was time to go,” said her daughter, Patti, who moved here from Colorado six years ago to care for her mother.
    In younger years, when Mrs. Buehler and her husband, Joseph Michael Buehler, had first moved to Delray Beach after World War II, the couple ran John’s Beach Service, the oceanfront concierge business that offered daily rentals of beach chairs and cabanas both here and in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
    In the summer months, when Patti and her brother, Chuck, became of school age, the couple lived separately so that Mr. Buehler could run the business in South Carolina in the summer, and then come to Delray Beach for the winters. “She was basically a single mother every year for those five months,” her daughter said.
    In South Carolina, Marian Buehler was known as Mrs. B. during the years when she and the children were still going north for the summers. “My dad didn’t want them calling her Marian and she didn’t want to be called Mrs. Buehler, so everyone just called her Mrs. B.,” said Patti Buehler.
    In Florida, where the Buehlers had the contract in Delray Beach until the mid-1980s, Mrs. B. also considered the lifeguards part of their family, even though the city — not the Buehlers — did the hiring, her daughter said.
    “She was the type of person who was a mother to everybody,” said Patti Buehler. “She really didn’t have any hobbies except for taking care of people.”
    After the Buehlers sold the Myrtle Beach portion of the business, the couple moved to Linden Arms in Delray Beach and lived there for 28 years. Mr. Buehler died in 2005.
    Married in 1945 after her mother’s friend set them up on a blind date to play cards, the young couple moved to Delray Beach in 1948 “when there was nothing here,” their daughter said.
    Although she never attended college, Mrs. Buehler worked for many years as the accountant for the family business.
    The daughter of the late Charles and Martha Knox, Mrs. Buehler was born at home in the suburbs of Philadelphia and was raised in Glenolden, Pa. She graduated from Glen-Nor High School in 1938.
    Mrs. Buehler — or Mrs. B as she would prefer — was an active parishioner at St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church. Her services were held Oct. 20, and the family asks that any memorials be made to the American Diabetes Association.