The article “An Authentic Woman,” about my mother, Margaret Mary Costello Ritzer, was so well received that I thought I would share more information about Margaret from photos and articles, displayed at her wake, that my sister had found in a box. Learning things about Mom at her death, in our older ages, that we never knew, gives us an even greater appreciation for her life.

Facing the Future

All that would be Mom would emerge from the young woman pictured in the splendid black-and-white, college-senior photograph above. Next to the photo in the College of St. Catherine’s 1950 yearbook appeared the following: “As president of the senior class, Margaret is kept busy planning and working. She is on the Executive Board, schedules senior activities, and is a ‘jack-of-all-trades.’ Margaret spends her spare time sewing and avoiding cooking.”

That gives rise to a certain fascination. The photo is so singular. It is just her, just Margaret. All alone she gazes into the unknown at the end of her college education, in the process of leaving home and family years before she would join Jim Ritzer in creating their own. Latent lie her intrepid early working years, her marriage, motherhood, grandmotherhood, old age, and passing. Latent too, in a down-to-earth example of marital dying to self, lies the cooking she avoided in her single life, perpetual cooking, of good meals, for a family that would grow to nine people, day in and day out, through a course of decades: no small sacrifice there. All that was to fill, mold, develop, and shape her, and those whose lives she would touch over seventy-six more years on earth, are to the photo’s subject and the surrounding world unknown. Known now to us we can look on that face and wonder.

All that was to fill, mold, develop, and shape her, and those whose lives she would touch over seventy-six more years on earth, are to the photo’s subject and the surrounding world unknown. Known now to us we can look on that face and wonder.

“What a Gal”

It is fascinating to find out from her St. Paul, Minnesota, Harding High School newspaper, the Beacon, article “What a Gal,” of 6 June 1946, how Margaret was viewed by her peers at that time with words like: “modest,” “a tall Irish brownette with a ready smile and quick wit,” “has endeared herself to everyone,” “admirable,” “efficient and charming,” “dependability,” “winning personality,” “intelligence,” “a little shy,” and “a good leader.”

We, her children, did not know that Margaret had been named Outstanding Senior Girl (which thrilled her) and Most Likely to Succeed in high school. I was surprised to see how involved she was: “president of the Scribbler’s Club, secretary of the National Honor Society, and editor of the Beacon” (“the greatest thrill in my life”). (That requires a correction to her obituary: the weekly high-school newspaper, of which she was editor in chief, was the Beacon, not Saga. Saga was the yearbook, but she also served on the art and editorial staff of it. Paul Haller—the fellow who possessed the qualities she admired in a boy “a sense of humor, and a nice personality”—was one of the three editors of Saga.) And she was “also a member of the Spanish Club.” We never knew Mom studied Spanish, Latin yes, but not Spanish. Was that to accommodate plans for travel abroad? We do not know. We also did not know that “girl smokers” were “her pet peeve,” especially since she was smoking up to three packs a day (as I remember it) some eleven years later when she quit cold turkey, throwing her cigarettes into the fireplace, at a party at my father’s house, before they were married. She had related many years ago that the girls of her age thought Peter Lawford pretty special. I seem to remember that my dad, more a Jimmy Stewart fan, did not have much time for him.

And who was the “big, handsome football player” from Grand Meadow who drew sighs and a smile? Was he the fellow to whom Margaret was engaged to be married when she was seventeen? Was he the “Ralph” whose photograph was in an old locket and who appeared with her in photographs of a formal in her college freshman yearbook? Apparently so. I learned of this earlier engagement decades ago, when she told me that she had been engaged when she was seventeen and had considered relinquishing her scholarship and dropping out of college to get married. She was grateful that her father had discouraged the plan by saying that he thought an education was so important. She added about her father’s advice and her taking it, “Thank God.” This prompted me to ask about her prior fiancé, “Why, was he a bad guy?” “No,” she made clear, “he was a very good man, but he wasn’t your father.” Though thus summarized unceremoniously decades later, the breaking of an engagement could not have been at the time easy, trivial, or devoid of emotion.

My father, Jim Ritzer, Margaret would not meet until she was twenty-eight and marry when she was twenty-nine, a fairly advanced age for marriage at that time. Did she ever wonder if she had made the right decision about breaking up her earlier engagement during the intervening single years? She told me once that a priest she had consulted during those years had said that the single life was itself a vocation, which suggested that she had considered that she might never meet the right man to marry. But, of course, she did meet Dad and they were married at St. Michael’s church in Stillwater, Minnesota on 27 December 1958. And because she would marry in Minnesota in December (partly to take advantage of all the beautiful flowers and decorations ornamenting the church during Christmas) she sewed her wedding dress, and her bridesmaids sewed their dresses (green while they held bouquets of red), out of corduroy, providing another example of how, fundamentally traditional though she was, she was never one to be constrained by convention when common sense or practicality recommended a better way.

Though thus summarized unceremoniously decades later, the breaking of an engagement could not have been at the time easy, trivial, or devoid of emotion.

Patrick Edward (Ed) Costello (born 1889), Margaret’s father who had encouraged her to finish her education rather than drop out and get married, had himself dropped out of the College of Saint Thomas in the early 1900s to start a newspaper, had later received a field commission to lieutenant during World War I, and had been saved from participating in that war when it ended before he shipped out. The crucifix he carried in his rucksack hangs on the wall in the room in which I write this. He had been the “Irish son” (my mother’s term) who had returned to run the family farm for his widowed mother, until she passed away, and then courted and married my grandmother, Vera Odell, when he was thirty-eight in 1927.

Vera (born 1895), whose ancestry Margaret traced back to a Matthew Camfield (somewhere down the lineage it was changed to Canfield) in Massachusetts in 1631, had known her share of tragedy. Her father, Herbert (Bert) Odell, a Methodist (if I remember right), had been a professional hypnotist. (His father was Francis Marion Odell, apparently named after the Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion of South Carolina, which I find intriguing considering that I remember some tradition about the Odells coming up from Tennessee at some time, though I know of no record of it.) Bert had also been an alcoholic who had taken “the cure,” which would make one seriously unwell (physically and mentally, as I understood it) should he ever take another drink. Someone encouraged Bert to take that next drink at an Independence Day celebration in 1899, and he went home and shot himself in the head. (I suspect that both Bert and Vera may have been afflicted with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, unknown at the time. Please pray for his soul.) Vera, not yet four years old, was in the house at the time, and no one knew what she witnessed. (A babysitter locking her in a closet when she was little was referenced as the reason she was claustrophobic and would not ride elevators.) Every year after her father died, his brother and his wife would visit from Michigan to make sure Bert’s widow was all right until she, Sarah Margaret (Calvin) Odell, married Catholic Joseph C. Schierts in 1904. Sarah, Vera, and Vera’s sister, Bess, converted to the Catholic Church. Apparently Mr. Schierts was a successful businessman which led to the family enjoying a standard of living, including an automobile, that was a good deal above that known to the average citizen of Kellogg, Minnesota. Vera graduated from Minnesota Normal School and taught school for four years before going to work in her stepfather’s office.

Margaret discovered in Vera’s later years, as her father had when he sought to marry her, that Vera had been previously married and divorced. She had been engaged to a young man who had gone off to World War I. When he returned, they were married and embarked on a two-week honeymoon. Upon their return home, Vera was in a state of emotional and psychological turmoil that led to a divorce. Apparently Vera had succinctly said that “the French women had ruined him.” When Ed Costello courted her years later and she told him she was not free to marry because of the previous marriage, he said, “Oh, I think that can be annulled.” It was annulled after the man’s sisters testified that he had not been baptized.

After leaving the farm, Ed worked in various roles in towns in the Mississippi River valley. He ran at least one grain elevator. Margaret remembered experiencing some degree of ostracism in one town because her family did not speak German as the locals did, those locals did not always take kindly to their produce being rejected by her father due to moisture content, and she was moved ahead a grade because she was completing her schoolwork so expeditiously. When she suffered an accident on the playground (flying off the merry-go-round, if I remember correctly), the other students rallied around her and treated her with kindness, and she began to feel more at home. Eventually Ed and his brother ran a general store in Weaver, Minnesota, but he left the business during the Great Depression because it was not making enough to feed two families. A woman years later told my mother that had the brothers collected all the credit that they had extended to people during the Depression, they would all be “living on Easy Street.”

Her sister, Pat, also a librarian, used to laugh that when she would recommend a book and a patron would ask if she had read it, she would reply, “No, but my sister did.”

But they were not living on Easy Street. Instead they had been living at an aunt’s summer home while Ed was unemployed. When he mentioned the name Billy Hamms in a story about his time in the army, I believe it was that aunt who said something to the effect, “Ed Costello, you know Billy Hamms and you are sitting here unemployed. You sit down and write him a letter and let him know you need a job.” Grandpa did so, and some weeks or months later at a board meeting of Hamms Brewery in St. Paul, when the retirement of the grain buyer and the need for a replacement was announced, Billy Hamms said, “I know just the guy.” Grandpa went from being unemployed to having an excellent job, and the family moved to St. Paul. Grandpa worked at that job until the day before he suffered a stroke and slid under the table at dinner and died a day or so later in the hospital at the age of 72 in 1961, just three months after I was born. The Hamms job had provided for the family and would provide for my grandmother until she died with just enough left over to cover all her funeral expenses. Providence. Providence. No surprise for a man who daily prayed his rosary. My mother said that, when he was in his chair with his rosary, he was not to be disturbed. My paternal grandmother said of him, “Mr. Costello was such a dignified man.” Vera keenly felt his loss ever after.

Rebuilding the Library

Ed Costello was still living, though, when Margaret returned to Minnesota to settle in Stillwater. There, only months after accepting the job of librarian of Stillwater High School, she was tasked with rebuilding the library after the high school burned down on 3 December 1957. According to the article in the Stillwater High School’s The Pony Express issue of 7 February 1958, “It’s A Big Job, But New Library’s Off To A Good Start:” “The huge task is underway, and in the capable hands of SHS’ cheerful librarian, Miss Costello.” The article thereafter details some of the extent of the job before her that is expected to “take about three years.” Margaret would bring to that task her broad knowledge of literature. Her sister, Pat, also a librarian, used to laugh that when she would recommend a book and a patron would ask if she had read it, she would reply, “No, but my sister did.” Unbeknownst to her at the time, Margaret would not be there to oversee the end of the three-year library rebuilding process. Three years from the publication of that article, Margaret would be over two years married, have two young children, and have just lost her father, Ed, who passed away on 5 February 1961, two days after he turned 72.

Warm Memories

It was at Eastside School in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, that Margaret would again don the mantle of librarian in 1976, at the age of forty-seven, when her youngest was starting second grade at Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary School. And it ought to be noted that Margaret did not want to return to work outside the home. Margaret wanted to be home, as she stated clearly to me just before she returned to work from her summer break one year. At the end of summer for some, if not all, of her years at Eastside, she pushed through a bit of a crisis. But push through she did in her sacrifice for the family, as the economy and culture of the late 1970s made it increasingly difficult for families to make it on one salary. In 1975, the labor-force-participation rate for women with children under eighteen years of age was 47.4%. By the next year, when Margaret reentered the work force, it had risen to 48.8%, and she and Jim had not one, not two, but seven children under eighteen. By the time she retired in 1991, it had climbed to 66.6%. Though, as much as Margaret would have preferred to be at home, she committed herself to her work, gave it her best, and enriched the lives of those whom she served and with whom she worked in a meaningful way.

Her love of children and literature and of forming children through good books, exercised in her reading and making books available to children, and her interaction with parents and peers, had so inspired those peers that they had invested no little time, talent, and effort in collaboration to create a thoughtful, meaningful, memorable, practical, and nostalgic work that kept her warm, body and soul, against the cold of the world till the very moment she left it.

The thoughtful article “Teachers turn quilters to honor librarian’s 15 years,” from Sun Prairie’s The Star of 23 May 1991, illustrates how Margaret’s peers and students valued her and her work at the time of her retirement fifteen years later. It would take no little regard for “teachers, principals both old and new, and other Eastside staff” to bring out “their paints, appliqués, and their needles and threads” to create “an extra large quilt featuring their favorite children’s stories, that Ritzer has read in tireless fashion to class after class” “in an effort to celebrate Margaret Ritzer’s 15 years as librarian at the school.”

Among the items depicted are The Velveteen Rabbit, The Little Prince, and a Beatrix Potter illustration. Margaret mentions favorites like The Secret Garden and Miss Rumphias, about a librarian who travels the world and settles by the sea and, to fulfill her grandfather’s directive that she make the world more beautiful, throws lupine seeds into the wind, which then grow and provide a playground for the children to whom Miss Rumphias then tells her stories. Margaret would read such stories to the students for their first three years at the school until they could read well themselves. The children were “the best part of her job,” and she enjoyed that she was able to work with all the students in the school every year rather than just one class each year. She always took very seriously the importance of reading to children, and having children read, good literature.

At Sentry, Sun Prairie’s main grocery store, young people working at checkout or carryout would often remember her fondly from their grammar-school days. As the article points out, when one young man found out that she would be retiring, he reflexively responded, “Who will read to the kids?”

The Star article thoughtfully concludes:

Having traveled and told her stories, will she make the world more beautiful? Well, if all else fails, a grateful third grader recently presented her with a packet of lupine seed. Now, all she needs is a little wind.

She found that wind at their home Reverie just north of Menomonie, Wisconsin, to where she and Jim retired in the late 1990s. There the lupine flourished in the pasture just north of the house. Their children and their children and the children of other relatives and friends were encouraged to enjoy them in their walks on paths Jim mowed through their prairie and trekked through their woods. Inside the house, around table and hearth, family and friends gathered and told and retold and heard and enjoyed stories of people and places and experiences from near and far. And at the end of the day, when all nestled into their beds, Jim and Margaret would drift off to sleep in the warmth provided by the storied quilt that lay over them.

It was “whispered” with awe by those who witnessed the attention and care given my mother by her children and their children who often visited her and spent time with her, and now and then spent time with those who so whispered.

As the years passed the gatherings eventually grew smaller, and Margaret and Jim let us all know that they could only host one family at a time. Then they could host none, and they moved from Reverie. Jim had said, when they bought Reverie, that if they could have ten years there it would be well worth the move. They had over twenty. Jim died within months, on St. Patrick’s Day, at eighty-nine. Margaret pressed on to ninety-six. As she relinquished earthly possessions in successive moves from Reverie to Croixdale to Boutwells Landing, the quilt always made the cut. As her spaces got smaller and her things fewer the quilt was always there atop her bed to keep her warm, and under it she passed from this world to eternal life. Her love of children and literature and of forming children through good books, exercised in her reading and making books available to children, and her interaction with parents and peers, had so inspired those peers that they had invested no little time, talent, and effort in collaboration to create a thoughtful, meaningful, memorable, practical, and nostalgic work that kept her warm, body and soul, against the cold of the world till the very moment she left it. No small thing to consider when you sit down with a child to read a book.

Conclusion

I was originally motivated to write “An Authentic Woman” to share my mother’s life story after reading accounts of authentic womanhood versus feminism by Substack contributors Elisabeth Stone, Abigail Austin, and others. As our culture still throws up manifold temptations and seductions of women (and men) away from authentic womanhood (and manhood), I wanted to bolster those who choose authenticity and struggle against all the attacks and stumbling blocks the self, the world, and the devil throw in their way. And I wanted to present those who have no experience or concept of authenticity with a depiction of it lived out. Given my mother’s recent passing, I wanted to show how authentic womanhood is lived out, and how it ends.

How it ends. That deserves no little consideration. My youngest sister, Kate, regularly visited my mother in her time at Croixdale and Boutwells Landing. She would customarily take Margaret down to a favorite spot by the large fireplace where they would enjoy a cup of tea and visit. Every now and then Kate would hear from other residents they would pass, or who would be sitting in the same vicinity, in the stentorian whisper of the elderly, “She has seven children.” It was not shouted or hissed as from some bitter misguided overpopulation doomsayer. It was “whispered” with awe by those who witnessed the attention and care given my mother by her children and their children who often visited her and spent time with her, and now and then spent time with those who so whispered. It was spoken with reverence by those whose circumstances at the end of life continually whittled away the superfluous to expose the essential; the important; what truly and only matters; what truly makes one rich when material possessions fall away; what mitigates or keeps at bay the abject loneliness, emptiness, spiritual poverty in which too many of our elderly languish unto death no matter how lavish their physical surroundings. Children, loved into being by God and spouses, raised in that sacramental love by parents, however imperfect, in a family, prove to be a true treasure that enriches the bare existence of those being stripped of health, vigor, and worldly possessions in preparation for eternal life or punishment. That reality, so understood by those to whom it is made abundantly clear at the end of life, lends great credence to the value of an authentic life like the one lived out by Margaret Mary Costello Ritzer and women like her. That reality also serves as a blessing to those who, though they themselves may have had no children of their own because they never married or they took vows of celibacy or their marriages were not blessed with children, lived authentic lives open to love and life. And all of that, in our brief span of life on earth, is worthy of no little consideration.

(Please also see these relevant articles: “The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It;” “One Big Family;” “Truth Pierces the Veil of Propaganda;” “Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Mark Steyn, Ronald Reagan, and Paul VI on Demography, Life, and Murder;” “Nature, Control, and Sin;” “Psychology, Communication, Love, Communion, and Sacrament (Not Necessarily in that Order);” “Sexual Morality, Hope, and Healing;” “Compelling Observations about Human Procreation from Roseanne Barr, Tucker Carlson, and Calley and Casey Means;” “The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death;” “In Vitro Fertilization and Transhumanism as Illuminated by Nicole Shanahan and Mattias Desmet;” “‘A Truly Human Civilization’ vs. the F-Word Culture;” “Fear, Control, and Death;” and “Making Room and the Courage to Love;” and please see also “The War on Women and Population Control,” and “Godzilla Plus Redemption.”)

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Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

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