SHERIDAN - Funeral services for Sheridan resident Mary Gray Lane Buchanan, 78, will be conducted at 10 a.m. Thursday at Champion Ferries Funeral Home.  Interment will be in Sheridan Municipal Cemetery, Masonic No. 43 Section.

She died Oct. 18, 2001, in Westview Health Care Center in Sheridan.

She was born Feb. 9, 1923, in Rapid City, S.D., the oldest child of Ted Richard Lane and Lois Marion Grant.  She was raised in South Dakota and New Hampshire before moving to Sheridan in 1933, where she graduated from Sheridan High School in 1941.

During World War II, she worked as a telephone operator for American Telephone and Telegraph Co. in Sheridan, spending six months as an operator in Arizona before returning to Sheridan.

On May 25, 1945, she married Thomas Earle Buchanan in Billings, Mont.

She was involved in all of her family's activities and served as a Cub Scout and Girl Scout leader for many years.  An Accomplished pianist and amateur botanist, she loved classical music and loved the Big Horn Mountains where she spent many hours bird-watching and identifying wildflowers.

She enjoyed fishing and camping in the Big Horns, reading, painting china and oils, and ceramics.  A member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and Cheery Chicks Homemakers Club, she delivered for Meals on Wheels for several years.

Survivors include her husband; a son, Ted, and a daughter, Nancy Talbott, both of Gillette; brother, Walter Vernon "Bill" Lane of Missoula, Mont.; and five grandchildren.

Memorials may benefit the Shriners' Children's Travel Fund, Box K, Sheridan 82801.