Margaret Roberts Yerger

YERGER, Margaret Roberts, 93, died Thursday, January 3, 2008 at her home in Princess Anne. She was born April 27, 1914 at the home of her parents, John Baker Roberts and Helen Watts Roberts, known as "Boxwood Garden" in Princess Anne, Md. A graduate of Washington High School in Princess Anne, where she was 15 years old, she then graduated from lthe Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr, Pa. in 1932. 55 years later, she was recognized by Baldwin as the recipient of the annual alumna award. The theme of her address was "Meeting Challenges", and her advice was, "If you have a job to do that you think you can't possibly do, just begin." She was one of America's first 100 women pilots, the first woman parachute rigger in Maryland and the 3rd in New York State. Margaret Yerger went to Mount Holyoke College, and in her 4th year there, attended the Simmons College (Boston) graduates program. She worked with Strawbridge and Clothier in Philadelphia as assistant training director and managed her father's lumber mill in Princess Anne in 1941. She was one of the first 10 WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) officers assigned to duty in Washington D.C., where she planned and executed the assigning of 80,000 enlisted women to duty. She was Ensign, a rank she obtained even without going through basic training. After the Navy, she covered the territory east of the Mississippi for National Cash Register, doing public relations work with department stores. She married Merton Stanleigh Yerger in 1946, who predeceased her in 1999, and they lived in Downingtown, Pa., where she became interested in gardening, landscaping, and especially daffodils. She is credited with the first successful hybridization of miniature poeticus daffodils, having worked in conjunction with hybridizers in New Zealand, Holland, England, Tasmania and Northern Ireland. She worked tirelessly to produce over 100 cultivous, which she has registered. In 2006, she was honored by the Somerset County Garden Club, of which she was one of the founders in 1961, and was instrumental in the annual daffodil show. She was a regular contributor for the Garden Writers Association. She was a life member of the PA Horticultural Society and was an accredited judge for the National Council of Garden Clubs. In Princess Anne, Margaret Yerger was a member of the Manokin Presbyterian Church and the Shoreland Club. She is survived by her brother, John Watts Roberts of Richmond, Va.; a niece, Joan Roberts Cates of Chapel Hill, N.C.; and a nephew, John Martin Roberts of Richmond; grandnieces and grandnephews include John Pinckney Pope and Deborah Cates Knighton of Richmond, and David Norford Pope of Concord, N.C. She is also survived by nine great- grandnieces and great-grandnephews, Grace Louise, Ryan, Patrick and Kathleen Pope, Charles Watts and Henry Sands Knighton, Kate Parker and Jane and Dylan Pope; her godson, John Harris of Stevensville, Md.; and her closest of friends, Shirley Anderson of Princess Anne. A funeral service will be held Monday at 11 a.m. at Manokin Presbyterian Church in Princess Anne. Rev. William Shackleford will be officiating. Friends may call at the church one hour prior to the service. Interment will follow in the church cemetery, where she will be buried in a plot containing a 100-year-old holly tree that stood just outside the window of the manse where her father and mother lived when they were first married in 1910. The manse was demolished 75 years ago to make room for the Manokin Presbyterian Church (founded by Francis MaKemmie, father of Presbyterianism in America) Education Building and expansion of the graveyard. Arrangements are being handled by Hinman Funeral Home in Princess Anne. In lieu of flowers, memorial donations should be made to a charity of your choice.