Condolence From: Rob Moir
Condolence: Draft Eulogy for Mom's Service Nov 17, 2018
Thank you all for coming to honor my Mom today. I know she would be grateful and want to shake the hand of every one of you. To look directly into your eyes and give your hand something Mom called a “mini-hug.”
My Mom was born Mary Jean Dangler in Chicago 1928. She was named for her maternal grandmother Mary Hughitt Frost. Mom came from a long line of strong women. Her mother, Margaret Frost Dangler was trained as a teacher and passed up on a teaching position at the Shady Hill School here in Cambridge to marry my GrandDad, David Dangler. Mom’s grandmothers Mary Hughitt Frost and Antoinette Corwith Dangler were granddames of Lake Forest Society. Mom’s great-grandmother, Belle Barrett Hughitt, was an orphan from Kentucky who married a man who became the railroad tycoon, Marvin Hughitt.
Mom was the fifth born of six children; David, Henry, who was called Pen, Nancy, Hugh, and younger sister Margaret. During the depression fortunes faded and the Dangler family was forced to rent out the big house. They moved to a little house on the other side of the tracks. This required family frugality, working together to make ends meet.
In 1928, the year of Mom’s birth and before the Stock Market crashed, the Dangler family purchased the oldest house built on Oyster Harbors on the shores of Cotuit Bay, Cape Cod. For plumbing the big summer house had a copper-lined cistern in the antic that received water from a wooden water tower and then gravity-fed throughout the house.
GrandDad had the latest high-tech electric water pump, installed at the wellhead. Water tower and cistern became obsolete. He took down the wood the tower and left standing a metal skeleton frame. From the circular base he pulled out a couple of the thick planks and built an oval dining room table to fill the room, complete with hefty two by four legs. He built a lazy-susan out of tower wood with a nail turning the top into a hole in a coffee can metal lid. The family tested the limits of how many chairs could fit around the dining room table. I remember this table as the heart of the house, beating with fellowship and conversation.
From the beach, GrandDad salvaged an old row boat, sawed off the back seat, and stuck it up on the roof next to the chimney. This served instead of a cupola or widow’s walk.
All the other houses on the water front had massive open porches overlooking trimmed lawns to Cotuit Bay. The Dangler house hid behind beach plum, scrub oak, and pitch pines with poison ivy that climbed trees. In the early evening, when others were sitting out on their porches having drinks, up on the roof top, sitting in a busted rowboat, could be seen the Dangler sisters, Mom and Margaret, having a beer.
Mom loved to sail. It was at the Wianno Yacht Club that she met my Dad, Ron Moir. They were told to sail together in one of the Wianno Juniors. Shy Dad was paired up with vivacious Mom. Marriage followed, I was born and then David in less than three years.
When David was 5 and I was 7 years old, Mom and Dad got their own Wianno Junior sailboat. With blue hull, varnished spars and white sails, literary Dad named the sixteen-foot wooden sailboat, Windhover, after the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem.
During the summer Dad worked weekdays at the bank in Boston while we stayed at the Cape. Mom with David and I and my grandmother. There were usually cousins, aunts and uncles, rotating through various families.
Mom took us sailing in all kinds of weather. Sailing is a most remarkable sport where one takes the power of the wind and uses it to move against and into the wind. By pulling sails in tight the boat will move forward obliquely to the wind direction. Steer too close to where the wind is coming from and the sails spill air and flap. The boat is then turned passing in front of the wind. Sails hauled in tight on the other side and the boat is steered as close to the wind as possible. By zig-zagging a windward passage is made. However, sometimes in narrow places, the wind, tide, or both are too strong. Despite many attempts the passage cannot be made. Therefore, we always sailed out to windward so that we could be sure of returning home again.
Returning Windhover to the mooring was another lesson that Mom taught us. Using only the wind, it takes great skill and finesse to bring the boat facing into the wind to a stop next the mooring buoy. At the time my brother and I had short arms so the boat had to be brought really close to grab the buoy, bring the mooring line onboard, and secure the vessel. Picking up the mooring is not optional, you cannot go ashore until the boat is moored. Overshoot or stall out before the mooring, and do it again, as many times as are needed. There’s no one else to blame or turn to. There were times when I swam and walked the shallow draft boat to the mooring.
Mom lessons, to sail a boat to windward through the narrows, tacking back and forth, and to sail a boat to touch a mooring no matter the wind speed, made me how I live my life. To go some places is very difficult. If you are not making headway, change course, change your perspective, and try again, and again, and again, until the goal is fetched or you decide it cannot be done. Tenacious persistence with heaps of patience may succeed in the long run. And if not, it was still valiant effort and a good run.
This last year, Mom’s favorite story was the night she took David and I for a moonlit sail. I think I was eleven at the time. With moonlight on the water, we sailed Windhover without any lights. One night, Mom steered the boat too close to a dock. The big piling caught the boat’s starboard stay, one of four that hold the mast in place. The boat moved forward, the stay pulled back, and the mast broke. It fell into the boat with sail softening the fall. Mom may have instinctively pulled it in to keep the sail dry and mast out of the water. Fortunately, no deliberately, the mooring was directly downwind of us. Mom calmly steered the boat, hull pushed by the wind. I was able to grab the buoy before it passed and secure the boat.
The next morning, Mom was up early. She telephoned the boat yard for a launch to take Windhover for repairs. Then she whisked David, I, and her mother into the car to go on an errand. She did not want us, and mostly her mother, to see what she had done to the sailboat with children in the dark of night. Mom succeeded, we never saw a de-masted sail boat in the light of day.
When I was in elementary school, Dad would go to work in Boston. David and I went to school. Mom worked out of the house for the Frontier Nursing Society. I believed Mom was helping midwives saddle-up to ride horses out of the hollows and over the hills of Kentucky to deliver babies. Actually she was fundraising. Nonetheless, at age 9, my suspicions were confirmed when Mom took us to Wendover, Kentucky. We rode horses with midwives. My horse was named Kimo. We had high tea with Mary Breckenridge, the founder. Mrs. Breckenridge came from England and so she had two corgi dogs. On the tea service were two plates, one with cookies, the other with dog biscuits. The joke was we children were not to take from the wrong plate. The truth was David and I waited to be offered a cookie by Mrs. Breckenridge. Mom had taught us to take just one.
Sometime after our trip to Kentucky, Mom flew to California and brought home Aunt Ginny, Mom’s mother’s sister. Aunt Ginny was confined to a wheel chair and had no funds for assisted living. Every evening, Mom would turn her study into a bedroom for Aunt Ginny, folding out the bed. For years, David and I would come home from school for tea in the study with Aunt Ginny, many a card game of bridge or gin rummy followed. Mom was a remarkable caregiver, always with good cheer.
In Bermuda, Mimi Rankin told me about her days working for the Bermuda Philharmonic. Being on an island, they were challenged to complete the orchestra with visiting instrumentalists. Mimi said: Tia hosted many of the visiting instrumentalists over the years and not one of them ever complained about their accommodations at Commonland Point! They always had a great time and Tia drove them wherever they wanted to go. They never passed up an opportunity to come to Bermuda if Tia offered to host them.
Mom loved working with people at environmental education centers, schools, the arts and music to overcome challenges, make things better and for the greater good. When the HVAC system in a school’s brand new theatre was found to disrupting the quality of sound and the overall theatre experience, Mom quickly gave the funds to fix it.
When Daniel Pearl’s sisters proposed a musical evening to remember the slain journalist and launch a foundation in his memory, Mom recognized the expenses of the program would consume much, if not all, of the funds raised for that evening. Mom paid all the expenses and gathered her family around in the front row of the Old South Meeting House.
Mom was also steadfast in her support of favored causes. In 2005, Mom was one of a small group of private funders dedicated to environmental education. They gave generously to the campaign for environmental literacy. Work over the course of a decade resulted in creation of the U.S. Department of Education’s Green Ribbon Schools award program that recognizes the highest performing green schools in the nation. Many players cooperating at many levels made it happen, beginning with seven funders and a man with a vision.
Mom was the most generous and authentic person I ever knew. She greeted every person with eyes bright and a warm handshake, no matter one’s stature in life. In the supermarket, she would greet managers and march right up to grocery baggers to shake their hands.
When Mom was 83, Chips Norcross and I climbed Bermuda’s Gibbs Lighthouse all 185 steps. Mom flew before us; we huffed and puffed to keep up. Back at the house, Chips and I gratefully took seats. Mom dashed over to Betty Lambert who was cleaning house explaining: “We just climbed Gibbs Lighthouse!”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Lambert, “I’ve always wanted to do that.”
“Great,” said Mom with much sincerity and feeling no pain, “Let’s go climb it, tomorrow.”
Mom was 83 then. No arthritis. Dr. Mary Butterfield said she knew sixty-year-olds in worst shape than Mom.
Monday, Nov 19th would have been Mom’s ninetieth birthday. Monday, we’ll lay Mom to rest in Chicago in the Marvin Hughitt plot with of Belle Barret Hughitt, Grandmother Mary Hughitt Frost, mother Margaret Frost Dangler, and Aunt Ginny.
I believe Mom is so blessed that sometimes her feet are not touching the ground. It is the only way to explain how Mom can be eating breakfast cereal in the kitchen one moment and then on the other side of the window out trimming a wayward branch on a bush before taking the next bite of breakfast.
One of Mom’s greatest gift to all who knew her was her spirited unflappable can-do attitude. It was contagious. Greeting everyone with a cheer, Mom lived life to the fullest. I love you Mom. Know that we are still tacking to windward, doing our best despite the wind, waves, tides and stormy weather. Lending hands, steadfast compassion, and with a cheer. Sail on!
Sunday November 11, 2018
