Courtesy of Randy Jamison

Mary Bullard is shown last year sitting in the restored 1939 Buick convertible she drove cross country for a friend during World War II.

RADFORD -- Mary Ingles Barton Bullard must have liked David Dickerson.

"She said she wasn't ready to die until she found a minister she liked," said Bud Jefferies, whose mother was Mary's cousin.

The Rev. Dickerson stood in the pulpit of the Presbyterian Church of Radford on Wednesday celebrating the life of Mary Ingles Barton Bullard, recounting the significance of each part of her name. Great-great-great-granddaughter of William and Mary Draper Ingles. Daughter of David Cloyd and Laura Ingles Barton. Wife of Rear Admiral George C. Bullard.

Mary Bullard seemed to have inherited the gene that enabled her great-great-great-grandmother to survive a Shawnee raid and capture, then escape and walk through hundreds of miles of wilderness to get home, Dickerson said.

Bullard had an even longer trip home in the early days of World War II.

George Bullard wasn't an admiral then. He was just another Navy flier, piloting scout planes off the cruiser Pensacola. He was at sea on Dec. 7, 1941. Mary was at their home on Oahu. She heard the bombs and saw the explosions -- and she drove their Model A over to the base to see what she could do to help.

That was typical of her, Jefferies said. "I never saw her get rattled."

When the Pensacola returned to Pearl Harbor, Dee Ventor, another pilot and a close friend of the Bullards', gave Mary the keys and the title to his 1939 Buick convertible. It had been a gift from his family on his graduation from Yale.

The whole world was at war now, Ventor said, and he wouldn't be taking any rides with the top down for awhile. They would decide what to do with the car after the war was over.

More than half a century would pass before Ventor saw that car again.

Mary stayed in Hawaii for about a year, working with the Women's Air Raid Defense and helping to map the location of enemy warships. Then she shipped the Buick to the mainland and headed home to her family's farm that lay along the banks and under the water of Claytor Lake.

Mary drove from San Francisco to Los Angeles to pick up her mother-in-law, then they headed across country. That was long before Dwight Eisenhower got the idea to build an interstate highway system. It took the women 15 days to get home.

George became a fighter pilot, assigned to the aircraft carrier Intrepid as Allied forces worked their way across the Pacific. He was taking part in an attack on a Japanese base on Truk Atoll in February 1944 when his plane was shot down.

Two years would pass before Mary got a call from a ham radio operator in Canada. George, who'd been in a prisoner of war camp since his crash and capture, wanted to let her know he was alive -- and he wanted to ask her to wait for him.

She did.

They raised four children as he rose through the ranks. They drove the old Buick until the mid-1950s, when it was retired to a barn on the farm Mary's family has owned since 1808.

Once a spread of 3,000 acres, it shrank as heirs in succeeding generations took their shares.

Then Interstate 81 paved a bit.

Claytor Lake drowned a bit.

In 2006, Mary decided to put the last 447 acres under a conservation easement.

"It would give me great satisfaction to know it would be preserved as the farm and forestland we inherited and have worked hard to maintain," she wrote on the application. "It is our heritage and our privilege to be good stewards of this beautiful land."

George died on that farm in 1966. Still on active military duty, he was building a fence when he collapsed. A heart attack.

There are other stories from Mary Ingles Barton Bullard's 93 years. The time she fell from a second-story window playing hide-and-seek. The tiny scar she wore from a sledding accident. The way she and her brothers traveled by horse and ferry to school in Radford. Her time as an art student. The way she chastised sailors attending to guests at the Bullards' home near the Pentagon. They wanted to put tin foil on her silver platters to protect them. Why have the things if you're afraid to use them? she asked.

A.C. Wilson eventually got that old Buick and restored it. Mary was his mother's cousin and they visited a good bit. One day, they were having supper at Mary's when she got up to bring a cake in from the kitchen. As she passed a window, she saw a groundhog out in the garden. She pushed open the window, stuck out a shotgun and killed the groundhog.

Then she brought the cake to the table and the meal continued.

"She was full of spirit," Wilson said. And though her body began failing her in recent years, "She never got old in her thinking."

Mary went to lunch recently at a new restaurant near Radford, Wilson said. He said she wanted to go back when they get their brewery going.

Mary was getting up last Friday morning, heading for a doctor's appointment and some errands, when she fell back into bed for the last time.

Wednesday afternoon, light poured through stained glass commemorating other Ingles, illuminating the spray of yellow roses and purple statice on top of Mary's cherry wood casket.

"It'd be hard to replace somebody like that," Wilson said. "Hard to say goodbye to that."