MISSING CHILD: If she were still alive, she would be nearly 80 years old.

But no one knows what ever happened to Marjory West, who was 4 years old when she disappeared on a family picnic near Marshburg on Mother’s Day 1938.

The story of Marjory’s disappearance was well-chronicled on the pages of The Bradford Era at the time, and it has been written about frequently over the intervening decades.

Clayton Vecellio of Lewis Run helped remind us of the 75th anniversary of the tragedy by dropping off copies of old news clippings.

Front-page stories chronicled days of searchers combing the heavily wooded area between White Gravel and Morrison in the Chappel Fork valley for more than a week, but not a trace of the red-haired, blue-eyed girl was found.

A call for 1,000 volunteers to search the countryside drew more than 2,500 people. Bloodhounds were brought in, along with more than 100 state policemen. Workers at CCC camps in the national forest and oilfield workers whose employers had taken them off the job helped in the search. Volunteers set up cook tents to feed the searchers and people volunteered cars and trucks to ferry searchers from Bradford to Marshburg.

A reward fund for information leading to the child’s recovery grew to $3,500.

Logging camps and hunting cabins in the area were searched, and surveyors mapped the terrain to make sure searchers worked grids to cover every inch of territory.

After more than a week of fruitlessly combing the area, the organized search was halted, although individuals kept on for weeks afterward. Trackers from an Indian reservation were brought in to check out caves for the possibility that the girl might have been carried off by a bear.

Still, not a trace of the girl turned up.

Police concluded that, had Marjory simply had gotten lost, she would have been found in the extensive search, or at least some trace of her would have turned up.

The state police finally theorized that someone must have kidnapped the child, but no ransom demand was ever received.

Reports of several cars in the vicinity on the day of Marjory’s disappearance were checked out and discounted. And a report of a man spotted near Thomas, W.Va., with a child matching Marjory’s description failed to pan out.

With the number of people who were even alive when Marjory West disappeared ever dwindling, the case is likely to remain one of McKean County’s most-enduring unsolved mysteries.