Martha Stewart

Martha died on December 10, 2009. Her family included this simple statment in her obituary that really sums up who she was: Martha avoided drawing attention to herself. She could never quite believe how beautiful she was.

What's in a name? Apparently nothing, as Juliet tells us, for a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. And yet one must wonder, since the Westport, Connecticut, Martha Stewart of crafts and television fame is like, although but a pale reflection of, our own Martha Stewart, that gentle woman who serves refreshments each month after our general meeting. You name it and our own Martha Stewart can not only do it, but probably does. She makes leaded glass creations that she contributes to the Unitarian Church's "action auction" each year. She makes her own Christmas (Winter Solstice?) Cards with linoleum blocks. She paints with oils and water colors, and she does the calligraphy on our membership cards.

She and her entire family are multi-dimensional. She graduated from LDS High School, where she learned in her theology classes that she was not of the faith. She went on to the University of Utah where she was editor for five quarters of The Pen, a literary magazine, and graduated when she was not quite twenty with high honors in art and English. She broke her contract as a teacher at Davis High School to marry Justin Stewart on New Year's Eve in New York City. Justin was at Columbia working on a master's degree in adult education. He was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the Signal Corps during WWII and was the first to bounce radar off the moon, and eventually went back for his law degree and set up his own law firm. During the course of his life's journey, Justin served as chairman of the Democratic Party in Utah and died six years ago; there was no apparent relationship.

Meanwhile, her son Peter, a mechanical engineer, has retired from Boeing; her daughter Polly teaches at Salisbury College in Maryland; and another daughter Heather lives next door, teaches Adult Education at Granite District, and is married to a Welshman who teaches English at Westminster College and writes plays for BBC radio, like last November's play on Frank Lloyd Wright. Martha herself eventually returned to work at the Salt Lake City library for eleven years, then for the circulation library for the blind and physically handicapped for five years, and finally as a reference librarian for the Utah State Historical Society for ten years, retiring in 1980. She has since served as a docent at the Museum of Fine Arts at the U, and in the manuscript division of special collections at the Marriott Library at the U. But best of all, says her daughter Heather, Martha has enchanted generations of children with life-like butterflies and birds snipped magically out of construction paper.

Can the other Martha Stewart top this?

--Earl Wunderli