Like most children of excellent cooks, Mike Seidel has fond memories of his mother lovingly feeding her family.

“She was terrific, a great mother and terrific cook,” the oldest child of Marilyn “Lynn” Seidel, who died last week and was buried Sunday, said.

Her son is well known for his reports nationwide on The Weather Channel.

“My dad, Sam Seidel, was very busy with City Council and all the volunteer work that he was into – the Salvation Army board, the  Zoning Commission. He was gone two or three nights a week so he’d be out at meetings and she would cook for us. Everything she made was great,” Seidel recalled.

“I remember we used to go camping every summer, sometimes for as long as a month. She had to keep everything going. We’d pull into the campground at 9 o’clock at night and she had to make dinner for us all. She would say, ‘It’s no vacation for me,’” he said, laughing.

“She was always there for us and she was very proud of her kids and her eight grandchildren,” he said.

“My mother hardly ever missed me on the TV.  She followed me. She would say, ‘Where will you be today?’” he said.

He lives in Marietta, Ga. His brother Hank resides in College Station, Texas, and their sister, Jenni Duhe, a kindergarten teacher at Pemberton Elementary School, is a Salisbury resident.

Mrs. Seidel, an 83-year-old Millsboro native, died Friday, Aug. 21, and had been suffering with health problems, her son said.

She and her husband, who died 14 years ago, married in 1954. He owned a well-established insurance business -- Peninsula Insurance in Salisbury -- and was formerly a teacher and basketball coach.

In 1997, the couple gave $1 million to endow the Seidel School of Education & Professional Studies at Salisbury University.

In a university biography of Mrs. Seidel, she is saluted as a figure “who retired as an operating room nurse, has maintained high interest in nursing education and has endowed a nursing scholarship at the University.”

Marilyn Seidel graduated from SU, as did the Seidels' three children. Sam Seidel attended Salisbury for two years before transferring to the University of Maryland in 1941, and then entered the Navy. He graduated from College Park in 1943.

The daughter of the late Elizabeth and Clifford Cahall, Mrs. Seidel attended the University of Delaware and was a graduate of Peninsula General Hospital School of Nursing in 1953.

Mrs. Seidel was known for making scarves for the homeless. The family donated all of her knitting needles, yarn and materials to Lakeside Assisted Living.

“She was very involved in the community. Even since my father died, she stayed involved,” Mike Seidel said.

“She was always there for us and took care of us. She made sure we did the right thing,” he said.