Marion Morse Hoffman, 87, passed on peacefully on Jan. 28 in her Manchester, Vt. home in the company of her husband of 64 years, Alexander Carr Hoffman, and her children Susan Duane Hoffman and Peter Morse Hoffman.
She is also survived by her three grandchildren, Alexander Rhys Butterfield and Luke Morse Butterfield, and Serena Skye Hoffman.
She was a person of exceptional kindness and compassion, traits you could see in her lovely smile and eyes.
She was a beautiful woman in every sense. Born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, she was a graduate of Northrop Collegiate School and Skidmore College, with a bachelor’s degree in music and piano.
She was a musician, artist and garden designer of great talent, and throughout her life she gave generously of herself to her family and many friends, as well as to her community and her country.
She taught piano, she taught in the church school of the First Congregational Church of Darien, served as president of the Garden Club of Darien and ran the junior tennis program at the Tokeneke Club, all the while being a loving and supportive mother to her children.
She was involved with the Manchester Music Festival in Vermont from its inception, and after moving to her Vermont home full time in 1992, she joined the Festival’s Board of Directors and served as its president.
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— an obituary from Shea Family Funeral Homes
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When her husband led the first delegations of American book publishers to exhibit uncensored American books in the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China in 1979 and 1981, she was a wonderful unofficial American ambassador to the tens of thousands of Russian and Chinese people who seized this first opportunity to hold such books in their hands, particularly the women of these repressed patriarchal societies. They would thank and hug her.
Throughout their long lives together, she and Alex traveled the world, and shared their joy in skiing, tennis, paddle tennis and fly fishing in the northern Maine and Quebec wilderness. In their eighties they added golf to their sports.
There will be a celebration of her life at First Congregational Church of Manchester at 2 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 27.
Memorial gifts may be made to the First Congregational Church of Manchester and to the Manchester Music Festival c/o Brewster & Shea Funeral Service P.O. Box 885 Manchester Center, VT 05255. To send the family personal email condolences please visit the funeral home’s website.