Margaret Peggy Galdston Frank

Margaret ("Peggy") Galdston Frank, 91, died peacefully on January 3,2022. Peggy was a loving and devoted mother to Nathaniel, Jeremiah, Lisa, and Peter, and mother-in-law to Licia, adoring grandmother to Julian, sister-in-law to Joan Galdston, aunt to her nieces and nephews, Sarah, Rebecca, Joshua, Benjamin, and Susannah, beloved cousin to many. She treasured and maintained many life-long friendships, some of these relationships spanning more than 80 years. Peggy was born June 3, 1930 in Brooklyn, NY. She was one of 26 grandchildren of Russian immigrants Abraham and Molly Goldstein. Her father was Iago Galdston, MD, a psychiatrist and public health educator, who served as an officer for the New York Academy of Medicine for 34 years. Her mother was Theresa Wolfson, PhD, a labor economist and college professor, who was an early champion of child labor laws, the 8-hour workday, and the minimum wage. She was educated at Vassar College and the Columbia University School of Social Work. Her early career was devoted to the care of children and families, at the Jewish Board of Guardians and the Jewish Family Service, in New York, and at The Judge Baker Guidance Center, in Boston. Later, she served as a Professor of Social Work at Smith College and was the Clinical Director of the graduate program. She taught graduate level courses and seminars at various institutions, New York University, Rutgers University, Simmons College, Columbia University, and Boston University. Later in her professional life, she spent several weeks each summer teaching courses to graduate students in Northern Ireland on the treatment of emotionally traumatized children. She had a busy private practice spanning her career. Peggy served several stints with the Peace Corps as a consultant and discussion leader in urban community development and social welfare in Columbia, Venezuela and India in the 1960's. She served in a similar capacity with the Vista Training Program, Head Start, and the Follow-Through Program in the U.S., where she worked to develop programs to benefit socially disadvantaged children and their families. She had an adventurous streak, sometimes to her parents' dismay. During her college years, she spent two summers working as a ranch-hand at a dude range in Montana, interned for a marine biologist from the Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute collecting sea sponges in the Caribbean, and travelled through Europe for several months with a friend by bicycle and train. As a young social worker living and working in New York in the mid-1950s, she spent weekends at Stowe Mountain in Vermont skiing by day and working as a hostess in a restaurant/bar by night. She claims to have taken hallucinogenic mushrooms for a study with Timothy Leary at Harvard in 1962 (although her recollections of the study were understandably hazy). Peggy was a fiercely competitive Scrabble-player. She was an avid museum-, concert-, and theatre-goer. She adored Handel's Messiah, and always stood in her seat at Boston's Symphony Hall and cheered for the Halleluiah Chorus, even if she was the only one standing. She was an accomplished skier (she skied Tuckerman's Ravine on Mount Washington!), a skilled skipper of beach stones, and a cultivator of exceptionally lush and exuberant home gardens, especially the one on her beloved "hill" in Truro, Massachusetts. For her family and friends, she will always be remembered in this way: squatting in her Truro garden, her childhood friend and neighbor Judy Shahn sipping coffee at the picnic table, her boys roaming the hilltop searching for wild blueberries, a blue floral kerchief on her head, Birkenstock sandals on her feet, soil under her finger nails, a garden trowel in one hand and a purple petunia ready to be planted in the other. In her later years, dementia and physical frailty robbed her of much of what she loved in life, and of many treasured memories. Until her last days though, she retained the capacity for giving and receiving love with her family, and connecting warmly with her favorite staff members at the nursing home. She had a certain "twinkle" in her blue eyes for which she was known throughout her life, and this never faded, even at the end.