Marjorie D. English

Marjorie Louise Dixon English, a beloved wife, mother, grandmother, and member of the Perrysburg, Ohio, First United Methodist Church, died in the very early hours of February 1, 2015. She was born January 21, 1914, in Londonderry, Ohio (then called Gillespieville) to Blanche Heath and Harry Jones Dixon, a descendant of Simon Dixon, a prominent Quaker pacifist in North Carolina during the Revolutionary War. With her great sense of humor, strong grit, and huge determination, Marjorie lived through happy and sad times, two World Wars and the rest of the 20th and early 21st Centuries. Her father lost his farm during the great Depression of the 1930s. She was present when rural electrification and telephone service came to Southern Ohio. She hand pumped and carried water to wash laundry, hung it out to dry, brought it in sun-kissed in spring, summer, and fall and frozen stiff in the winter. She ironed with “sad” flatirons that she heated on a coal stove. She went from riding to school in a horse-drawn wagon to jetting across North America and Europe. At age 14 she contracted scarlet fever, resulting in a loss of hearing that left her profoundly deaf. Her first hearing aid was a heavy battery pack worn on her back; she progressed to two powerful in-ear aids. She benefited from the great inventiveness of Americans all her life, and did her part to make the world better for others. After her childhood and youth in Londonderry, with her older brother Thomas, her younger siblings Mary and Joseph (all of whom she outlived), she met Malcolm “Pete” English, who worked at an insurance agency in Chillicothe, Ohio. They married in Covington, Kentucky in 1934 and she joined him at his family home near Chillicothe. It was a double, two-story log house on a hilltop; two cabins connected by a covered breezeway. Her first three children (Charles Dixon, Mary Elizabeth, and Nancy Ellen) were born in Chillicothe. Her fourth child, Thomas Francis, was born in 1947 at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Toledo, Ohio. Mr. English joined a Toledo insurance company in 1943. Marjorie and the children followed, settling in a small rental house on Roachton Road near Perrysburg, where in later years she helped him establish and run his own agency. Accompanying the family to Roachton Road was a beloved small terrier mix dog named Rags, who lived 19 years. Marjorie and her husband “Pete” ― son of the Methodist Minister Charles Francis English who served numerous churches around southern Ohio for many years ― became pillars of the Perrysburg First Methodist Church. Raised a Quaker, Marjorie was baptized at age 30. She served her church faithfully, including as kitchen supervisor for countless celebratory luncheons and dinners. She and Mr. English also volunteered each year as voter monitors, welcoming voters to the polls and delivering ballots to the Wood County Election Board at the end of each Election Day. Marjorie sewed for herself and her children, planted huge vegetable gardens and canned and froze food to feed her growing family. Her flower garden was her pride and joy and solace. She shared her produce and cuttings from her flowers with her friends and family. Many of these prosper in her children’s gardens in Seattle, Washington, and Silver Spring, Maryland. Her roses flourished near her filled bird feeders. A voracious reader, her bookmark still rests in the novel she was reading the day before she died, with just a chapter to go. Her love of history and pride in her forbears led Marjorie to donate a number of personal and family items to several museums. The recently opened Perrysburg Area History Museum was the recipient of “A History of the 13 Colonies ©1898, several items of doll clothing and a ceramic doll head once owned by her mother in the 1890s, photos from that era, a velvet dress up suit that her husband wore c.1908, and several domestic items including large copper washing pots, wooden bowls, a butter churn and other things. She also donated items to other collections including the Cincinnati Museum Center, The Archives at The American University in Washington, D.C., The Ross County Historical Society, The Way Library in Perrysburg, and elsewhere. Marjorie’s husband, Malcolm “Pete” English, died in1987. She lost her first born, Charles Dixon English, to ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) in 2007. The rest of her children, Mary English Johnson, Nancy English Bleil and Thomas Francis English, are retired. She also left six grandchildren, nine great grandchildren and five great-great grandchildren, all of whom loved her deeply. It is impossible to meaningfully condense the life of this “ordinary woman,” as she called herself, who lived 101 years and 10 days. We, her family, join her many friends to wish a devoted wife, mother, and grandmother a fond farewell, confident that she is at last in the welcoming embrace of the loving God whom she sought to serve all her life, and the loving arms of those who have gone before her. NOTE: Viewing will be from 4 -8 p.m., Saturday, February 21 at the Witzler-Shank Funeral Home, 222 E S Boundary St, Perrysburg, OH 43551. The funeral will take place at First United Methodist Church in Perrysburg, Ohio, 43551, at 1:30 p.m., Sunday, February 22. The family asks that gifts in memory of Marjorie Louise Dixon English be given to the church.