MARIAN GOODMAN

1921 - 2022

GOODMAN--Marian. Marian Powers Goodman, a resident of Manhattan, passed in her sleep on January 17, 2022, five weeks shy of her 101st birthday. A designer and artist, who later in life turned to writing short stories and poetry, she retained a cheerful disposition and natural curiosity to the end. Born February 25, 1921, in Cleveland, Ohio, Marian was brought up by her grandparents. Her mother, Margaret L. Tonne Powers, died in childbirth. Her father, William A. Powers, a graphic designer, suffered from tuberculosis and was often away. She spent the summers with her maternal grandmother, Cora May App, on the shore of Lake Erie - a period in her childhood that later became the subject of many of her short stories. When Marian was a teenager, she and her older sister, Jean, moved to the East Coast to live with their father in Bronxville, New York. The change of scene ignited Marian's passion for art and culture. She graduated from The Cooper Union School of Art in 1942 and, while continuing to paint, became a textile designer. In 1950, she married Edmund N. Goodman, a prominent surgeon at Columbian Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. They lived on the Upper East Side and, in the early 1950's, after the births of the first two of their four children, built a house in Sands Point, on the Long Island Sound. Marian was an elegant hostess and devoted mother, not only to her own children, but to many of their friends. She continued to paint, exhibiting her moody watercolors of solitary surfcasters and stormy Scottish peaks, at the FAR Gallery in New York City. She was also a dedicated letter-writer for the Visiting Nurse Services of New York, a vocal activist in nature conservation efforts in Port Washington and a long-time member of the Port Washington Library Art Advisory council. Her aesthetic and cultural acumen was strongly felt by all those around her. "She had an incredible and innate sense of style, which impressed everyone she encountered. It became part of our DNA," Her daughter, Tonne Goodman, former fashion director at Vogue wrote in her book "Point of View." Even nearly blind and confined to a wheelchair in her last year, Marian continued to listen to her books on tape, and greet her visitors with a smile. She never complained nor gave up, following her own advice, as she wrote in her poem, Waters Edge: "Follow the light/That goes under the earth/ Until it comes back in the morning." Marian is survived by her children, Wendy, Tonne, Edmund, and Stacy; her grandchildren, Liliana Dirks Goodman, Cole Gimbel, and Evie Gimbel, her great-grandson, Otto Dirks Byrne, her nephew William Gifford and her niece Susan Gifford Carter.