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Obituary
Marguerite Mason Anderson, 91, of Spartanburg, died Thursday, December 10, 2009, at White Oak Manor. Born November 23, 1918, in Spartanburg, SC, she was the daughter of the late Thomas Moore and Hattie Harris Anderson. A 1935 graduate of Spartanburg High School, she graduated from Converse College in 1939 and taught school in Spartanburg County and Great Falls. She then lived and worked in New York City for 35 years. The last 15 years she worked at NBC as executive secretary in the NBC sports department. She was a member of the Second Presbyterian Church of Spartanburg.
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Obituary
Marguerite Mason Anderson, 91, of Spartanburg, died Thursday, December 10, 2009, at White Oak Manor. Born November 23, 1918, in Spartanburg, SC, she was the daughter of the late Thomas Moore and Hattie Harris Anderson. A 1935 graduate of Spartanburg High School, she graduated from Converse College in 1939 and taught school in Spartanburg County and Great Falls. She then lived and worked in New York City for 35 years. The last 15 years she worked at NBC as executive secretary in the NBC sports department. She was a member of the Second Presbyterian Church of Spartanburg.
She is survived by two brothers, Carlos and Richard Anderson; and a sister, Polly Rhinehart.
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Aunt Margo was the oldest child of Tom & Hattie Weste Harris Anderson. She was born in the Spartanburg General Hospital, her parents lived between Reidville & Switzer on what is now Hwy 417. Her father Tom Anderson was the mail carrier for Moore, SC and her mother was the schoolteacher at Poplar Springs Elementary where she taught 6 grades in one room, she also lavished her educational attention on her first-born so well that Margo skipped the 1st grade & went straight into the 2nd.
In surviving letters to her sister Mella, Hattie Weste spoke of her oldest daughter being the apple of her father's eye, she was very pleased that he would spend so much time putting his children to bed at night, often plying them with bread & milk, or Margo's favorite chocolate, and talking to them for a long time, she said he was very patient with them. When they had a 2nd daughter, Happy, both were well-loved. They had 7 children in all between 1918 and 1931, but by the time grandmother got a hysterectomy, their financial situation had changed so drastically that her own Harris family took Margo & Happy to live with them in order to give them a proper upbringing and city education & to ease the financial burden on their parents. (There was also an undercurrent rarely talked about concerning Margo's father Tom's sexual behavior, I learned later that he had fathered a daughter by a teenager on his mail route and that his wife's family were worried about his inability to control his own behavior around women. This was something that Margo never mentioned, I learned it from members of the Harris family.)
Margo's father Tom Anderson was not good with money, nor was his wife Hattie Weste, in her letters to her sister, grandmother talks often about her worry about the big loan her husband had taken from the Federal Land Bank. Tom was not paying off the loan, on the contrary, the interest kept adding up during the 1920's. But Hattie Weste was not helping to pay it either, she was selling eggs & other foods she was growing herself, yet she never offered to give him any of the money to pay off the mortgage; instead she gave it all to churches for 'mission work'.
Hattie Weste's overriding characteristic was her extreme religiosity, she had grown up in the Baptist churches and attended frequent services at her husband's church Nazareth Presbyterian after they married, and later other denominations. She said she had married her older husband in the belief that he shared her desire to 'preach the gospel', he was already a Deacon of his church after all. But as time went by, they grew further apart in beliefs; Hattie Weste became more religious, and Tom became involved with the Masons whom Hattie Weste considered an abomination & irreligious.
Hattie Weste had found an ally early in her marriage in Tom's religious mother Ada Anderson, and in her sister-in-law Mamie Anderson, but Ada died, and her husband was contemptuous of her religiosity, so grandmother began to take to traveling the neighborhood, "preaching to the heathen". I am sure that had she had been born a man she would have become a preacher, probably a famous one, and if she had been Roman Catholic, she would probably have become a nun, her main interest in life was preaching the Bible. In one of her letters, grandmother recounts how her husband told her sister Julia's family that he was thinking of writing to Billy Sunday, then a popular preacher, to tell him that if his wife died & he Tom Anderson died, that Billy should come marry his wife Hattie Weste because she adored him. Grandmother was not amused; making fun of religion was taboo in her mind.
All this would not make a good home for a child, which I'm sure is one of the reasons Hattie Weste's family took in the 2 oldest girls at the beginning of the Depression after they lost their mortgaged land. I asked Happy once what was her strongest recollection of her younger childhood with her parents in the 1920's before she was taken in by her grandmother's family about 1930, she thought a moment, then said it was of coming home from school hungry, wet & tired to a cold, empty house, of having to start up a fire to warm the house & cook a meal to prepare for supper for the family because her mother was out preaching to a neighbor somewhere, and after her father came home from delivering his mail route, she & her father would go out in his car looking for her mother, usually after it got dark.
After Margo was taken from her parents to live with her grandparents & aunts at the Harris farm near Spartanburg, she said her life changed tremendously. At her parents' home, there had been little discipline, but at the Harris house there were so many rules to obey. One could not sit on the beds, beds were for sleeping only. One had to keep busy, productive activities were the only activities encouraged, nothing wasteful was allowed, everything had to have a good purpose, no daydreaming & no puttering around the house doing nothing. "Idle hands are the devil's playground" was drilled into them, and everyone was expected to pitch in & do the daily chores; At her parents' house in her earlier life they had had 2 servants, a Negro cook and her daughter who cleaned. Margo's life changed tremendously when she was uprooted without any say in the matter, but after the initial shock, she said she adapted and it became second nature to her.
Margo was drilled in the social niceties by the Harris's, she was expected to dress carefully in fashion & to take care of her toiletries every day, her hair & clothes had to be well-fitted and groomed, she was given formal social etiquette lessons, elocution and dancing lessons, and she was told what was acceptable to say & not say, how to be a genteel southern lady. Her grandmother Hattie Gentry Harris was the daughter of the former Sheriff, she was raised in top Spartanburg society and had been sent to Cooper-Limestone Institute, a higher school of learning for girls (later Limestone College) and she made it clear that she expected all her family to go to college & become valuable members of society. She was also a member of First Baptist Church in Spartanburg, the largest church in town, and all the family always went to church regularly unless they were sick.
Margo said it was like day & night the difference between her parents' home & the Harris home, and at first she was miserable. She told me she cried for weeks, tears just ran silently down her cheeks. But like most children, she became used to the new routine, and later she couldn't remember why she had ever cried. Margo was a dutiful daughter, and she became a very fashionable and proper young lady as was expected of her. She studied hard, graduated from Spartanburg High School and even played the lead in the senior year school play, then she graduated from Converse College in 1939. She went to Great Falls, SC & taught English & Latin. But she found teaching was not her forte, so Margo got a job as the secretary for the director of WSPA TV & Radio station in Spartanburg, the 1st station in South Carolina, where when I asked her what she did, she laughed and said "everything and anything" that needed to be done. Margo had become a very beautiful and accomplished woman with masses of raven hair and a voluptuous figure like her mother, she gave the weather report on TV if the weather girl wasn't there, she wrote news articles, her English was impeccable and so was her demeanor. Margo dated a few guys, she said a few wanted to marry her, but she was not interested in them. She was living with her single aunt Mella, an English teacher, and when she got an offer from Nancy Welch, a local TV celebrity who had her own local morning TV show for women to travel to New York with her for a year as her secretary while she was the President of Women In Broadcasting, Margo took the secretarial job and left small-town Spartanburg behind for the Big Apple.
After Nancy Welch's one year term as President was up she came back to Spartanburg, but Margo stayed in New York & got a job working for ABC's Grant Tinker, and she kept it until Tinker was transferred to Washington, DC. He wanted Margo to go with him but Margo told me she visited Washington and it was NOT a place she wanted to live, she said there was no housing for the middle class there, everyone was either very rich or very poor, so she hit the streets of New York looking for a new job in middle age. And she found one with NBC, and stayed there until she retired in the early 80's. She was happy in New York City, "the city that never sleeps", she said she loved the city life and all the different things available to do, even though she was mugged one day, they knocked her down and broke her forearm when he wrenched her purse off her arm. She made several close friends, she had a small one-bedroom apartment on E 18th Street, and when it went condo a rich friend helped her to buy it by purchasing half. She sold it when she retired and came back to Spartanburg to live out the rest of her life, still single. Her aunt Mella had recently died and as her only heir Margo had money to spend, she stayed with her cousin Marjorie Jameson for a year and then bought a house close to Duncan Park Lake & with the help of her nephews Edwin & Julian Foster furnished it well. She spent the rest of her life entertaining friends & family & trying to help teach the next generation as her aunt & her grandmother had done for her. She never cut ties with the friends in New York, sometimes they would come to visit and once she got a VCR tape from one with several TV shows, one of them an episode of "Keeping Up Appearances", the British sitcom that reminds me so much of Margo that today when I see an episode I can't help but notice all the similarities between Margo's fastidiousness about appearances and the same in the lead character Hyacinth Bucket.
Margo loved to entertain, she would often call me and say I was to come to dinner or lunch, when I was sick one day she took me home and insisted I stay and she plied me with soup and aspirin in her spare bedroom. She was lonely in that big house all by herself, but she stayed busy, always keeping the house and grounds in tip top shape. She went out of her way to welcome the family, once she showed me a new single bed that was extra-long she had prepared just for my cousin Todd who would stay overnight on his way down from VA to FL, and she had added a cushioned trunk at the end of the bed for Todd because he was so tall his feet hung off the bottom of the regular size bed. She loved to prepare elaborate meals for guests, especially on holidays, she had spent much of her money on furnishing the house and her cousin Edwin helped her get the house ready for occupation and she obviously looked forward to spending her declining years as the family matriarch on the order of her grandmother's role. She brought a few things back from New York, I remember Margo had an old small early model TV set from New York, she sat it in the den on a stand and I asked her if it worked, she said no, it was just a conversation piece that a repairman who lived near her apartment building in NY had offered her when she first moved to the city and didn't have any furniture for her small apt. It had a round curved screen about 10" in diameter and a wood cabinet with gold trim. She also had several of her aunt's antiques she had inherited that had belonged to her grandparents, her house was full of old and new.
Margo didn't go to church but rarely on holidays, but she kept a Bible and sometimes read it by herself, she was raised by an overly religious mother and a skeptical father and we never talked religion, but the few times I talked to her mentioning religion she seemed to be neither for nor against what her mother taught. I found an old childhood Bible she had thrown out once, when I expressed a desire to keep it she seemed surprised, but she didn't object, she said she had a newer one. I think that was one of the things I liked most about her, she was middle-of-the-road, she wasn't so gullible as to fall for religious nuttery, but she was a good person and a practical person in life, you couldn't find a more decent human being and friend.
Margo used to correct my English, when I told her I didn't mind she gave me an English textbook to study. She would often encourage me to dress better, she once offered me a dress she had had made in New York in the 60's when I needed something for an afternoon wedding party at the Piedmont club, and when I expressed interest in accessorizing a new gray dress, she dumped a jewelry case in my lap & told me to take it all. It was silver jewelry in the case, her favorite color, she said she'd decided not to wear silver anymore, which surprised me, but she insisted. She was gracious in everything, always carefully dressed & always with a perfectly made-up face, every morning she would clean & treat her face with Elizabeth Arden facial treatments, and they must've taught her well because when she died her face was still as tight as a drum. She went to the beautician once a week without fail and kept her hair colored her natural jet black when it started getting gray. Her walk-in closets were color-coded & well-organized, she knew where everything in the house was, and she cleaned her house fastidiously, hiring a maid when she got too old to do it herself.
Margo was always willing to help others in need. In the early 60's when her sister Happy left her abusive husband, Margo took her into her little apartment in New York & paid for a psychiatrist & an art studio. Happy's husband had ridiculed her art & burned all her paintings in Florida, so her therapist recommended she start back painting. Margo thought she could get Happy to conform to her well-organized lifestyle, a product of the instruction they had been given under the Harris tutelage instead of her mother's untidyness, but it was not to be, Happy ran off with a married musician from New Jersey, which hurt Margo's feelings very much, she shunned Happy after that & told me that she had "washed my hands of her". I think Margo could not understand why Happy could not live the life she lived and be content. They were very different people. It is noteworthy that Margo lived to be 91 yrs old, Happy only lived to be 59. Happy was more like her mother who was disorganized & had ADHD. Margo tended to take the attitude that work solved all problems, when she was starting to feel bad, she simply got busy; Margo was in control of her life, she made the life she wanted and believed everyone else should do the same.
When Margo fell on a freshly-mopped linoleum kitchen floor & broke her hip in her 80's, she went to Skylyn Place retirement home in Spartanburg, she was there for over 5 yrs. She was transferred to White Oak when her money ran out & she died shortly thereafter. Her mind had been disappearing slowly for many years. She was always well-behaved and proper in her demeanor, she never did anything that would have embarrassed her family or herself. I think she was happy or at least content with her life, she did what she knew to do and what was right, and she did nothing bad. She had lived a proper, Southern, genteel lady's life, she was gracious to all, kind and generous, always welcoming to her family and friends, a rock of stability. I miss her.
--Jennie Rhinehart, niece |
