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Letter to the editor

'True confessions' writer Marian Coe Zipperlin dies

By CRAIG BASSE, Times Obituaries Editor
Published August 8, 2007

ST. PETERSBURG - When longtime newspaper feature writer Marian Coe retired, she turned from fact to fiction and found a new audience.

Even as she maintained her bread-and-butter freelance travel articles, Coe embraced writing novels, building on her experience with romantic "true confessions."

It's what interested the former society columnist the most, recalled a former colleague, retired St. Petersburg Times business editor Elizabeth M. "Betty" Whitney said last year.

"Not the social scene," Whitney said. "She had an excellent feel for dialogue, for the incongruous remarks that people make. She was really more interested in that than in describing people's clothes."

Marian Coe Zipperlin, as she was formally known, died Monday (Aug. 6, 2007) in a North Carolina hospital. She had ovarian cancer, said her husband of 23 years, Paul Zipperlin. She was 86.

She and her husband, an artist who illustrated her books, lived in Banner Elk, N.C., but they spent winters in Dunedin.

For the seven years before her retirement in 1983, the former St. Petersburg Evening Independent reporter was a travel writer for the Times and kept her membership in the Society of American Travel Writers.

Ms. Coe built a track record with fictionalized "confession" stories for MacFadden Publications. But not all of her nine books were fictional. In 1983, she wrote Women in Transition. She arranged the text, some in prose, some in poetry, like a journal or notebook in which a woman could commit her thoughts.

She also found herself drawn to research into humanistic psychology and wrote about it in On Waking Up in 1979.

Her interest in mind-sciences influenced her portrayal of Lelia Elliott, the central character in her novel Legacy, one book reviewer noted.

The main pleasure of the book, set in Pinellas County, came in the recognition of familiar place names like Central Avenue, Mastry's Bar, the Don CeSar and the Bath Club, the reviewer said.

Legacy, a suspense mystery set on the Pinellas gulf beaches of 1945, won the 1993 Fallot Literary Award for Fiction.

Ms. Coe's experience as a travel writer was cited by one reviewer of her 1998 mystery, Eve's Mountain, which won first place for contemporary mystery in the Clara Awards. She fashioned the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina as a backdrop for her story. One reviewer said Ms. Coe brought to life the area's mountains even for readers who had never been east of the Rockies.

The following year, Ms. Coe was honored with an annual scholarship in her name at Appalachian State University in North Carolina in either creative prose or creative poetry.

She was born in Birmingham, Ala., and came here in 1958 from Alabama, where she was a general assignment reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser-Alabama Journal. She joined the Times staff in 1962.

Remembering

Marian Coe Zipperlin

Born: March 12, 1921

Died: Aug. 6, 2007

Survivors: Husband, Paul Zipperlin; daughter, Carol Coe; son, David Coe; two grandchildren; and three grandchildren.

Services: Celebration of Life on Sunday at Corner Palate, Banner Elk, N.C.

[Last modified August 8, 2007, 00:51:23]