Miriam Snider

1937 - 2023

Miriam Snider
June 29, 1937 - April 15, 2023
"More interested in you as a person than as a status symbol"
Born Miriam Colleen Smith in Columbus, Ohio to Alma and Carl Smith, she went to Dana Ave Elementary, Starling JH, and West HS, where she was a National Honor Society student, with her one sibling, sister Charlene, three years her junior. She spent many grade-school summer nights in the family cottage, complete with outhouse amenities, on the shore of Buckeye Lake, running straight out of the back door and off the dock into the water.
Miriam went to Ohio State University where she met her husband Tom in a French class. Before graduating, she married, moving with Tom to NYC to support him during his studies at Cornell Medical School in Manhattan. In 1960 he graduated, and she had their first child, Tim.
San Antonio was the next stop, as Tom joined the Army for his residency in pathology. Miriam bore two more sons at Ft Sam Houston, Ted and Terry, in 1962 and 1965 respectively.
The Army sent the family for three years to an officers' neighborhood atop the ocean cliffs near "El Morro" in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1967, where Tom would finish residency and military life.
They settled permanently back in San Antonio in 1970, where Miriam finished her BA in psychology at Trinity University in 1974. She led Great Books of the Western World seminars at the Institute of Texan Cultures and was a founding member of a neighborhood women's investment club, L.E.T.S. (Learning and Earning Terrorist Society), where she... did well.
Miriam spent a lot of time outdoors. She enjoyed a lifelong love of hunting deer and freshwater fishing, keeping a large cabinet full of shotguns and deer rifles firmly alongside her ACLU/Common Cause/PBS values. She loved going with the family to the "chalet" on a fishing pond near Callaway Gardens, GA. She enjoyed years of tennis with family and friends in San Antonio and Aspen.
She loved the Colorado Rocky Mountains, especially drawn to the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Study where she and Tom audited seminars on Great Books of the Western World and anything led by Mortimer Adler, covering world religion, government, philosophy... She loved snow skiing in Aspen/Snowmass where she and Tom summered during retirement.
Although an avid Buckeye Football fan, she always pulled for the underdog in social justice issues: minorities, immigrants, the homeless, the queer community, etc.
She loved her family and is survived by her 3 children: Tim (Jane) Snider, Ted (Annie) Snider, Terry (Jennifer) Snider; 6 grandchildren: Chris (Nicolette) Snider, Katherine (Weston) Pierce, Ainsley Snider, Oliver Snider, Sebastian Snider, Desmond Snider; 2 great grandchildren: Weston Pierce and Vivian Pierce; sister Charlene (Dennis) McDonald.