LACONIA-----Margaret Rea Blodgett Alkema, 91, passed away of natural causes on Saturday January 16, 2021, at the Taylor Community in Laconia, NH.
She was born and raised in Cambridge, MA. She moved later in life to Meredith, and then to Laconia, NH.
During her youth her family spent several summers in Randolph, NH, and also traveled widely both in the US and abroad. She became comfortable driving long cross country trips and sometimes flying small planes with her father and mother. In the mid 1950’s, she went off on her own, on an Arctic trip to Baffin Island on the Hudson Bay Company supply ship. With her children she later spent every summer either flying together with her mother Isabel, a small plane pilot, around the entire US or driving around Europe to investigate country after country from the home base of her husband in Holland where she also lived for several years. She developed a special love for Scotland and made several long time friends there. She was game for any trip and along with visits to Big Sur California and beautiful national parks in the US she also traveled twice to China. Travel was a lasting feature of her life, her last trips being to Hamburg, Germany, in 2018 and to California in the winter of 2019 to see her children and granddaughter.
She didn’t do things half way, putting a lot of energy into finding out what there was to know about anything she was involved in. In the late 1940s and early 1950s she graduated cum laude from Bryn Mawr College, and then earned a Masters degree in History from Harvard. In the 1970s she returned to school to complete a Masters in Library Science at Simons College.
Initially an assistant librarian at Shady Hill School, she went on to work at the Boston Public Library and then to head the Children’s Services Department of the Malden Public Library. There she introduced a whole variety of programs for children, parents and schools including multi-media events, a new thing at the time. She was rightly very proud of having raised circulation by 50% within two years. She was dedicated to the staff as well, helping in the union organization of the library. She was an active member of numerous Library Associations and of children’s book review committees.
At family gatherings, which included many cousins, she loved to tell stores of family history. She loved to spend time researching the family, going through old letters she collected from previous generations.
In NH she had the immense fortune to find both good music and good friends within the supportive community of the Sanbornton Congregational Church. Originally attracted to the Church because of the high quality of its music, she immersed herself over the years in many aspects of the Church’s and the local community’s activities. She especially enjoyed being a driver for people in need of transport and got to know many people that way. She was also involved in Church finances and fundraising and very much enjoyed supporting Diane Farrell’s work for the golf tournament fundraising events. Working to win church members over to making the Church open and affirming was also important to her as she felt very strongly that no one should be excluded from being able to join the church and benefit from it as she had. She loved organ music and would never turn down an organ concert anywhere, but was especially fond of her own church’s organ and coral music.
She will be missed by her friends from Meredith, from the Taylor Community, and the Sanbornton Congregational Church, and by her many cousins.
She is survived by her son, Jonathan Alkema and her daughters, Marijke Alkema, of Hamburg, Germany, and Deborah Alkema, her son-in-law, Fergus Dagner, and granddaughter, Isabel Alkema Dagner, of San Francisco. She is preceded by her parents Isabel Arnold Blodgett and George Reddington Blodgett, and her sister Katharine Blodgett Gebbie.
Memorials are to be held at a future date when travel and gatherings are again safe for all.
Memorial donations can be made to the Sanbornton Congregational Church, UCC - Organ Fund, 21 Meetinghouse Hill Road, Sanbornton, NH 03269.
Wilkinson-Beane-Simoneau-Paquette Funeral Home & Cremation Services and 603Cremations.com, 164 Pleasant St., Laconia, NH, 03246, is assisting the family with arrangements. For more information and to view an online memorial, please visit www.wilkinsonbeane.com.