Biography

Margaret Ann Holloway was born on a farm outside Marion in the spring of 1941, the third of five children, and she liked to say she learned to read before she learned to ride a bicycle — which was true, and which she considered the correct order of things.

Ray

She met Ray Holloway at the Marion County Fair in 1961, near the livestock barns, and told her sister that night that she'd met the man she was going to marry. They married two years later and stayed married for fifty-five years, until Ray passed in 2018.

Thirty-four years at Grant Elementary

In 1965 she walked into a second grade classroom and stayed there for thirty-four years. She read aloud every single afternoon, and she did the voices — all of them, badly, with complete commitment. Generations of Marion children learned that a book was something that happened to you, not something you got through.

She kept a drawer of granola bars for the kids who came to school without breakfast, and she never once mentioned it to anyone.

"Nobody is slow. They just need a different door."

The house on Elm Street

At home there were three children — Susan, Michael, and Dana — a tomato garden that got out of hand every August, and a kitchen that produced more pie than any one family could reasonably eat. The excess went to neighbors, to the church, to new mothers, to anyone who'd had a hard week. She sang alto in the choir at First Methodist for over forty years, mostly on key.

After the classroom

She retired in 1999 and immediately started volunteering at the public library, where she ran the summer reading program until she was eighty-one. She stopped only because her hands got unsteady, and even then she kept coming to hear the children read.

Peggy died at home on a Tuesday morning in November, with her daughters in the room and the window open, which is how she wanted it. She leaves three children, seven grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and several thousand people in one Ohio town who can read.