School Story:
“She projected something that she really wasn’t,” said one of her good friends. Marge matured early and with a figure that and a flirtatious friendliness that ignited fantasies in boys and won her few friends among the girls. Perhaps because of a strict home regime, Marge felt she could or should test her charms. Jim McKinley remembers that one day she came to St. Boniface wearing lipstick and scandalized the nuns, one of whom took sandpaper to her lips. Another classmate says, “Even in high school she was often the butt of vicious teasing and jokes by other girls . . . particularly in the gym locker room. She was a good-looking girl and woman, in a rather flamboyant style -- the Marilyn Monroe/Gina Lollobrigida model -- and that made her a target of resentment.” And resentment led to cruelty. It started in Glenwood School where one classmate remembers stealing her falsies and flushing them down the toilet once and nailing them on a tree in the schoolyard another time. In Sea Cliff Kay Parks remembers when girls one time pushed Margie out of the locker room onto the gym floor in only her underwear when they knew the boys were waiting in the bleachers above for their turn to use the gym floor.
Margie grew up in a very traditional Italian Catholic family. Her father worked in construction and knew the hazards and pressures a girl like Margie would face. He was strict and protective. Margie never had a boyfriend during the school years. Yet a close friend says, “She absolutely adored her father.” His death was one of the most devastating events in her life.
Margie left Sea Cliff and attended Oswego and New Paltz State Teachers Colleges. She married George “Gus” Hauser who had first come to Sea Cliff in summers with his parents. They had a daughter, then a son. George and a friend ran the Harlequin Restaurant in Sea Cliff for a few years. When Margie began teaching in Glenwood Elementary, one of the girls who harassed her in Glenwood had children in Margie’s classroom. She went to talk to Margie and told her, “I am so sorry.” Margie’s reply was a friendly, “We were kids.” Jim McKinley says that when “Marge was your friend, she was always your friend.”
When the children were young George and Margie divorced. The following years were often hard for her, and classmates who met her around town said she seemed lonely and sometimes adrift. Another friend during these years says, “She had tremendous pride. Even when she hit bottom you would never ever have known she was depressed, which she was.” She weathered the storms, met a man and moved to Florida. We know little of her life there with certainty except that she died there.
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