Margaret Maggs

Margaret Anne Martin Maggs, known to friends as Maggie, passed away March 31st in Henrico Virginia, aged 94. She spent most of her working years as an educator, following in the footsteps of her mother, an enormous influence in her life. But before then she made her mark in the male-dominated world of advertising in the 1950s, like Peggy Olson of Mad Men, a show she declined to watch, perhaps because it was a little close to the exciting career she abandoned to raise a family. She did a wonderful job in that regard and was very proud of her sons and her five grandchildren.

Margaret was born on December 6, 1930, in Houston Texas to Ural Valentine Martin, a Navy officer and merchant seaman, and Bertha Ward Martin, a teacher, author and educational progressive. Her parents met when her mother, raised in Wakefield Mass., was attending the Salem Normal School, a teacher's college for young ladies that eventually became Salem State University. After getting married they lived and worked for a time in Amherst, MA where Bertha taught in a one-room schoolhouse now on the campus of Amherst College, which her son Bill later attended. Her father, an underage enlistee and submariner in World War I and a Navy reservist thereafter, was a senior officer on commercial ships during her childhood, and he was often away.

During World War II, father and family moved to Miami, back to Houston, and after his mobilization to El Cajon, California and nearby La Jolla, and then North Hollywood, attending seven different high schools and eventually ending up in Youngstown, Ohio.

Margaret Anne was a precocious child, teaching herself to read at 2 and, eventually graduated as the valedictorian of Warren G. Harding High School in Warren, Ohio, at age 15. She was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania but for family reasons matriculated at Kent State University in 1946, joined by thousands of demobilized GIs, men in their 20s that gave her early and perhaps fast experience in dating. In 1951, she married one of them, Ernest Szalma, an Army/Navy veteran who she recalls as perhaps psychologically damaged by his wartime service. They divorced in 1954. It was in college that she became a committed creative writer, and she continued to write and publish poetry, stories, plays and reflections of her experiences all her life.

She got her start in advertising writing copy for a local radio station in Ohio, and eventually moved to a station in Cleveland, where she worked alongside rock pioneer Alan Freed and eventually became creative director for Wyse Advertising. Clients included Smuckers and their famous motto. She married her second husband in 1955. Ken Fritsch was an aspiring painter who made ends meet by driving a school bus. Her career was blossoming, and in 1960, she was hired by the Radio Advertising Bureau and moved to New York. She travelled by air all over the country to meet with advertisers and to design ad campaigns. By then her second marriage was failing, and she was divorced again in 1961 or 1962.

Around that time, she met Edwin Maggs, a photographer and habitue of Greenwich Village, who worked in his family's brownstone renovation business. Discovering herself pregnant, they married in 1962, the year she had twins John and Bill, born in that order. Recognizing that she needed work that allowed her to be a mother, Maggie put Madison Avenue aside and drew on her college Spanish to become a bilingual teacher at Eleanor Roosevelt Junior High School 143 in Manhattan's Washington Heights. She eventually became coordinator of bilingual education and director of community affairs and was a well-known figure in the area's Spanish-speaking community. Among other tales, Margaret remembered meeting Lin Manuel Miranda when he was in diapers through her association with his parents, who were political activists. She helped found a school for newly arrived immigrant children and eventually became the principal of a middle school in upper Manhattan.

The family lived in the Washbridge Apartments, those unlovely grey towers that greet commuters crossing the George Washington Bridge from New Jersey. When the boys were 11, the family moved to suburban Blauvelt, N.Y. Edwin had become a NYC building inspector and soon lost his job in the city's fiscal crisis. To supplement her teacher's salary, Margaret took on spec writing jobs, helping write textbooks and guides for teachers, including, memorably a business etiquette manual for Japanese businessmen. Edwin struggled to find work and often succumbed to a lifelong gambling habit, and the 1970s were lean times. Soon after the boys graduated from high school (the next day, in fact) Margaret moved back to Washington Heights, and was soon divorced again. Even with substantial financial aid from their colleges, Margaret borrowed heavily to finance John and Bills' elite private college education and spent at least a decade scrimping on her government salary to pay off the debt. The boys had minimal college debt when they graduated.

She retired from the NYC school system in 1989 and moved to Mission, Texas, a place that she had read about as a burgeoning retirement community, and where she felt comfortable as a Spanish speaker. It was far from where her sons were living in Washington D.C. but she made no bones about her feeling that she had worked hard and sacrificed all her life, and planned to enjoy the rest of it on her on terms, and largely by herself.

And she did enjoy her time alone, visiting her sons in California and the East Coast, travelling with friends, Isabel Imundo, John's former mother- in-law, reading cookbooks and mystery books, and surviving the oppressive heat. Family would sometimes visit, but she was on her own and quite happy about it. Well into her 70s, she reconnected with relatives in West Texas on a grand road trip from San Francisco to Mission and vacationed with family in Croatia.

Age caught up with her eventually, and after a series of falls and hospitalizations, she moved to the Atlanta area, where John was living with his family, and then followed John to Richmond, Virginia. Even as she slowed down, relied on a wheelchair, and then lost an eye to glaucoma, she continued her fortnightly visits to the library, and her habit of reading more than a book a day. Like most people, she feared infirmity and mental decline in her old age, would often relate grandiose plans to take her own life if these fates befell her, then seemed surprised to realize that she was keeping all her marbles and had no serious health problems until near the end. One of her great satisfactions was voting for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential elections, pestering John to take her for early voting as soon as it began in September.

Having kids and raising them well in a challenging marriage was a great satisfaction, and she also took great pride in the books she had written. She is survived by her sons and their wives Jennifer Sachs and Sarah Kennel, and her grandchildren, Luca, Liam, Mica, Ari and Talia. While she enjoyed time alone, she loved to gather with her family and several times organized holiday gatherings in Mission, including Thanksgiving at the homestead of William Jennings Bryant, an early Winter Texan. As a former middle school teacher, she saw her mission as a grandmother as trying to fan the flames of wonder and curiosity. When she was in her 80s, she lit on the idea of taking the teen Luca for a week-long camp that taught both of them the basics of aviation. She loved the idea of Luca taking to the skies, and probably also the idea of getting there herself. Her pedagogy played a large role in grandson Liam learning to read and she helped ignite in his brother Mica a love of cooking, which was one of her great passions and talents.

It was evident that her greatest influence was her mother, who raised her well, with likewise limited help from a distracted, if affectionate, father. The most shattering experience of her life was her mother's death in 1964 at age 60, and she deeply felt the absence from her life of this exemplar, as an educator, mother, and creative force. She spoke often of her mother in her last days and also fretted that she had misplaced a silver bracelet with her name on it given by her mother shortly after Margaret Anne was born. The bracelet was found after her passing, and will be reunited with her, and she with Bertha and her grandparents, in a crypt at Mt. Auburn cemetery, in Cambridge Massachusetts.