Margaret Anne Whitfield
Built from the photographs below, with music, and downloadable in HD to play at the service.
Peggy Whitfield grew tomatoes she refused to sell and gave away by the crate, taught four hundred children to read, and could not walk past a piano without playing eight bars of something. She was born in Fairhaven, the middle of five, to a mother who kept bees and a father who mended radios. She met Tom at a dance in 1962 — he asked her twice and she said no the first time, a detail she enjoyed repeating for sixty-one years. They married the following spring and raised three children in the blue house on Alder Street, where the back door was never locked and there was always one more place at the table. She taught second grade at Fairhaven Elementary for thirty-one years. At the memorial, please expect to meet grown adults who still call her Mrs. Whitfield and can still recite the poem she made them learn. She is survived by her children Susan, David and Claire, seven grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and the garden, which the family have agreed to keep. She would like you to take some tomatoes.
Services & gatherings
Visitation
Come as you are. Peggy would not have wanted anyone buying a suit.
Celebration of Life
Followed by lunch in the garden. Bring a photograph if you have one — there will be a table for them.
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In lieu of flowers
The Fairhaven Elementary reading programme, which she started in 1979
Make a donationTheir life in pictures
A real page shows the family's own photographs here — as many as they like, in whatever order they choose.
Guest book
Mrs. Whitfield taught me to read in 1981. I am a librarian now. I never told her that and I regret it every day. I am telling her family instead.
Forty years of borrowing her ladder and never once returning it on time. She always said take it, take it, and never once said bring it back. Thinking of Susan, David and Claire.
She brought us a casserole the week we moved in and stayed two hours. That was 1996 and we have not stopped being neighbours since. There is a hole in Alder Street.