Muriel Marie Griffith Hart

Muriel Marie Griffith Hart

Muriel Marie Griffith Hart, creator of the United States' first bone bank, saver of lives, and a resident of Arizona for nearly 60 years, died July 18 in Victoria, Canada. She was 80.

Born in a log cabin on a farm in western Canada, she was seven before her family built a new house and got electricity. They never had television, so they read. As a girl she liked to read Dickens books under a tree, and when all the kids got sick once their mom read them Nicholas Nickleby. In the winter, her dad would load them up on a sleigh, tuck a buffalo robe over them and the horses would pull them to visit neighbors or town.

She finished gradeschool in a one-room schoolhouse with local farm children from French-, Ukrainian- and English-speaking families. She finished high school by correspondence at 16. She tried schoolteaching for one year, then went to nursing school, and got an additional degree as a psychiatric nurse. She applied by mail to a job in Arizona because it looked warm and colorful in pictures, and she could bring her mom and dad down for winters.

In Tucson she met two key people in her life: Her husband, Donald Hart, and her lifelong friend Rhoda Conway Keppel Vihel. Muriel was a consummate party host, convening friends who worked with Don on the Apollo XI moon shot.

She rose through the ranks as a nurse and then administrator in Arizona hospitals, and a public speaker and author in professional journals.

She was most proud of establishing a bone bank at St. Luke's Hospital in 1981. At the time, surgeons who extracted bone from patients would store it, then trade grafts if a fellow doctor needed to implant one. The hospital established rules but doctors didn't always follow them. A final straw with a traded bone graft spurred Muriel to action. The hospital bought equipment to centralize bone storage and established mandatory screening for potential graft pieces.

In that process, they found that the traded bone graft that spurred her to action had indicators for cancer, and it was never implanted.

Muriel went on to receive an MBA from Pepperdine University and opened her own business, Kitchen Classics, selling gourmet kitchen implements long before Sur la Table or others followed her to Phoenix. She marketed her wares by holding cooking classes in the store with local and national chefs, including Jacques Pepin, Eugenia Theodosopoulos and Charlie Trotter.

The Arizona Republic named Kitchen Classics the best kitchen store in the state. The store won the International Housewares Association's 2002 GIA national award for independent retailer.

In her retirement Muriel ramped up her hostessing and traveled. She liked to work though and volunteered teaching English to immigrant schoolchildren and as a nurse in Jordan with the charity Doctors Without Borders, treating patients who were injured in Iraq.

She lived the feminist revolution, navigating sexism in all of her careers and insisting in her graduate papers and speeches that a woman could succeed in management not in spite of, but because of, her human qualities. She wanted to do what was right and to treat her employees with respect.

In one generation Muriel transitioned her family from farm wives to professionals who work with their minds. She and Don showered their children with books, visits to museums and performances and interesting family friends.

She is survived by her daughters, Ariel, a journalist in Atlanta, Georgia; Stephanie, a lawyer in Victoria, B.C., Canada; and Sharlot, an archeologist in Tucson, Arizona; her sons-in-law David Johnson and William Soland; her grandson Wynstan Hart and granddaughter Eva Hart; and her siblings Gordon Griffith, Luella Sinha and Carl Griffith. She will be missed but her legacy is still with us.

A memorial will be held in Phoenix on the morning of Nov. 11. Please contact MurielHartMemorial@gmail.com for details.

In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to fight Parkinson's Disease to The Michael J. Fox Foundation.