Marion Craig

Marion Craig delights in her close-knit family. She was the youngest of four children, none of whom married except one of her two brothers. Now as the only survivor in her family, she still lives in the home they all moved into in 1942.

As young girls, her older sister would take her to the Sugarhouse library to check out books, then leave her in the basement where she taught herself to read before starting school. Marion dreamed of becoming a librarian. On graduating from Granite High School she went on to the University of Utah, but that was interrupted after two years by WWII, six years working in San Francisco, a job at the Salt Lake Stamp Co. addressing envelopes, and then a job at Fort Douglas where she did everything from accounting to checking military personnel in and out of their quarters, including the general himself.

During this time she managed to finish college and went on to teach the third grade at Morningside Elementary School for 27 years until her retirement in 1986. She earned a master's degree along the way, and insists that she loved teaching even though it was not her first love.

She is still active in Delta Kappa Gamma, once a national, and now an international, women's teachers organization that advocates improvements in education. She has served as president of the chapter in the Granite School District.

She has always been a humanist, although her parents were Presbyterians from Scotland. They moved to Ogden in 1906 because of some cousins there, and then moved on to Salt Lake City. Her father would take the children to the Congregational Church occasionally, but more often than not they would take the streetcar to Fort Douglas to hear the band concerts on Sunday afternoons, and hike in the hills looking for fossils. He was a cabinet maker, but was interested in geology and the other earth sciences.

Her brother Allan moved in with her from Washington DC toward the end of his life. He was a member of Humanists of Utah until he died in 1997; indeed, it was the only organization he ever joined.

Now she is traveling, visiting Europe and especially Scotland. And she reads. Oh, how she reads. Life is "sweet," she says, and always has been.

--Earl Wunderli