Marjorie Ellen (Peterson) Marshall (1923-2007)

MARSHALL, PETERSON, CHALMA, OBER, LEO, BOULTON, MILLAR, RAIMBEAU

Posted By: Ames Tribune
Date: 12/16/2007 at 10:55:10

THE AMES TRIBUNE, Ames, Story County, Iowa, Sunday, December 16, 2007.

Sept. 29, 1923-Nov. 24, 2007

Marjorie Ellen (Peterson) Marshall, 84, died Saturday, Nov. 24, at Bethany Manor in Story City. Half of her ashes will be buried next to her parents in the churchyard of Trinity Lutheran Church in Ellsworth. In accordance with her wishes, the other half will be scattered on Doolittle Prairie. Services have been postponed until summer when her closest family members will be able to attend.

She was born Sept. 29, 1923, on a farm near Ellsworth, to Perry and Nellie (Chalma) Peterson. Marjorie grew up in Ellsworth, graduating from Ellsworth High School in 1940. She attended State Teacher's College (now University of Northern Iowa) in Cedar Falls, but when World War II started, she joined the Womens' Army Corps (WACS). After training at Fort Dodge, she spent the duration of the war in San Diego until she was honorably discharged in 1945. She then attended the University of Iowa, where she graduated in 1949.

For the next 38 years Marjorie followed a unique life journey that began as a photographer's model in New York and took her to Paris, where she spent five years as a mannequin for Coco Chanel. In Paris she gathered with American ex-patriot writers including James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, and noted artists such as Tristan Tzara, a Romanian founder of the Dada movement.

In 1958, she returned to New York, married John Marshall, and had two daughters, Esme and Phoebe, named for characters in writings of J.D. Salinger. With her modeling career over, she became one of the literary editors of The Provincetown Review. She divorced John Marshall and moved with her daughters to Greenwich Village, where she became active in the War Resister's League and the anti-war movement of the 1960s. In nurturing her children, she developed a passionate interest in radical progressive education. When her children were school age, she brought them back to Ellsworth to live with their grandparents and attend the local school while she began her formal study of education at Iowa State University. Later she returned with her daughters to the east coast where she worked in art galleries and again entered the Bohemian world.

Marjorie was living in France in the mid-1980s when she learned that her parents were seriously ill. For a year or so, she lived with them in Ellsworth and began to renew her love of the landscape of her childhood. In 1987, when her parents moved to Bethany Manor in Story City, she moved into Cedar Place across the street. This marked a new development in her appreciation of the expanding culture of rural Iowa and a reconnection with the people and places of her youth. Her varied activities included daily visits to residents of Bethany Manor, providing a series of travelogues and a film series to the residents, working at the Story City Chamber of Commerce and the Bertha Bartlett Public Library, helping plant trees along Broad Street for Trees Forever, gathering seeds at Doolittle Prairie, writing a weekly column for the Story City Herald, holding literary salons, writing frequent brief letters to the editor of the Ames Tribune, and publishing a volume of short poems in the spring of 2007. Even in her last few months she was mentoring young people and arranging for the publication of a volume of poetry by a friend in New York.

She is survived by three sisters, Jean Ober, of Story City, Neva Leo, of Dysart, and Mary Beth Boulton, of Medina, Ohio; two daughters, Esm� (Geoffrey) Millar, of Bakersfield, Calif., and Phoebe (Bertrand) Raimbeau, of Seiches-sur-Loir, France; six grandchildren; and numerous other relatives and many close friends.

She was preceded in death by her parents and her brother, Wendell Peterson.

Marjorie cared passionately about promoting peace and was active in protecting the environment. She requested that any memorials in her name be made to Greenpeace.

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