Margaret
Margaret Munson
d. October 20, 2010
CALFEE MUNSON Margaret Calfee Munson 06/24/1918 - 10/19/2010 was not especially fond of eating seafood. She preferred prime rib and a piece of pecan pie. This would not be particularly unusual but for the fact that she and her husband were professional level anglers in the Florida Keys, fishing from their 40 foot boat the Margaret. They landed marlin, sailfish, mahi-mahi, wahoo, grouper, snook, trout and swordfish to name a few. They were renowned experts at angling for the elusive yellow tail snapper and often returned to the dock with scores of catches that kept their neighbors and enterprising pelicans, egrets and gulls all well fed. Peg, as she was known to friends, served New York lawyers, NHL players, Shreveport Louisiana singers, Chicago phone company executives, pilots, fishing guides, and college students feasts of fish, lobster, stone crab, and shrimp on an almost daily basis. Yet for someone who lived on and loved the sea as much as she did, Peg surprisingly claimed that cooking the fish killed her appetite forcing her to favorite choices like Key lime cake, Homestead strawberries, and Cuban bread. In the early 1970's Peg and her husband Jimmy built a vacation home in the Florida Keys town Islamorada where they entertained 100's of guests hailing from Toronto to Buenos Aires and from Montana to Romania. Jimmy was the captain and Peg the crew of their craft, which left Peg pulling the anchor for many years until she finally prevailed on the skipper to invest in a motorized anchor winch. She said she was no longer the winch wench. One of her favorite ocean adventures involved stalking the charter boat from which Paul Newman was fishing. It was rumored that Peg considered extreme action to gain the actor's attention but high wind and rough seas saved them both. Born Margaret Elizabeth Calfee she grew up on the college campus in Asheville, NC where her father, John Calfee was the president of a Presbyterian teacher's college for Appalachian mountain girls. Her mother, nee Margaret Elizabeth Ballantyne, and father met at Park College in Missouri. Peg graduated from the College of Wooster in 1939 and then attended the Katherine Gibbs executive assistant program in Providence Rhode Island. She worked in Washington, DC for an employment agency and the US Weather Service and later for the Service in Asheville. She married her college classmate, James Birger Munson, in 1940 and they lived first in Cambridge Mass. and then outside of Chicago. He was an officer in the Marine Corps from 1943 to 1945, serving in the war in the Pacific, and Peg returned to Asheville to live with her mother and have her first child. When the war ended they moved back to Chicago where Peg was president of the local PTA. 1955 they moved to Milwaukee where Jimmy started his own successful construction business. Peg was a master duplicate bridge player, bred champion Weimaraner show and field dogs, was an accomplished golfer, a member of the Service Club, and a borderline obsessive Packer and especially Brett Favre fan. Margaret is survived by her daughter Margaret Munson Carter and her son James Calfee Munson. Her grandchildren include Annie Carter, Ingrid Grove Munson, Elizabeth Tippet Munson, Garrett Calfee Munson, and James Birger Munson II. Great grand children are Elsie Grove Munson and Connor Daniel. She will return to the two things she loved best (along with the Green Bay Packers and Chicago Cubs), her husband and the ocean (which she loved for everything but dinner), when her ashes are scattered at sea to join those of her husband who died in 1987.
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