Margo Denison

On June 30, 2022, Margaret (Mellinger) Denison died in Corvallis, OR of COVID-19.

Friends and family are invited to post a remembrances below. To further honor Margo’s memory, her children will host a Celebration of Life on Zoom on September 25, at 2 pm PST. To participate, please email Margo@denison-johnston.net by September 23 to get the link. The family also welcomes donations in her honor to the Grace Center (http://www.gracecenter-corvallis.org) and the Corvallis Community Center via Friends of Corvallis Parks & Recreation (http://www.lovecorvallisparks.org).

Margo is survived by her children (and their spouses): Ford (Cindy), Tom (Elizabeth), Glenn (Shelley), and Rebecca (Daniel) and grandchildren, Sophia, Sarah, Carson, and Paul. Margo is preceded in death by her husband, William C. (Bill) Denison. 

Margo met Bill in 1945 at Oberlin College and falsely claimed she could make mincemeat pie, which led him (and two other men) to propose to her. They were married on September 11, 1948. They both loved nature, civil rights, and practical shoes. In 1962, before the Pan-American highway was built, she and Bill (a botany and ecology professor at Swarthmore College) drove to Costa Rica with 4 children (ages 6 months to 9 years) and a gaggle of grad students to study tropical biodiversity.

In 1966, the family moved from Swarthmore to Corvallis, where she obtained a master’s degree in education and taught elementary school, first kindergarten in Bellfountain and then three grades (at the same time) in Irish Bend. In the 1970s, she threw out her curlers, took her children to peace marches, moved to the country, fed her family on poultry and vegetables she raised herself, helped start the First Alternative Co-Op and the Corvallis Farmers Market, parented a dozen foster children and many of her children’s friends, and joined the volunteer fire department. In 1985, she retired, took up photography, and traveled with Bill to Bhutan to provide advice on mushroom cultivation as guests of the king. In the 1990s, she became an HIV/AIDS activist, speaking in churches, tabling at community events, visiting people in the hospital whose families had rejected them, and waking at 3 a.m. to take calls from the Valley AIDS Information Network’s 24-hour hotline. 

Margo instilled a love of music in all of her children, who grew up singing carols and The Golden Vanity (a sea shanty) in 5-part harmony around a tree lit only by live candles every Christmas Eve. In her 80s, Margo took up a new hobby playing piano “for the old people” at community center sing-a-longs. 

Perhaps the thing Margo loved the most was inviting children to discover the world and the many people who share it by teaching them to read. She loved reading to us when we were young, and loved being read to by us when she was old, but the one thing we were never allowed to request was the final chapter of “The House at Pooh Corner.” As children, we didn’t know why. She’d just tell us, “I can’t.” Now we know why… 

“Pooh, promise you won’t forget about me, ever.”

We promise, Mom. We promise.