Margaret (Marge) Neilson

Margaret (Marge) Neilson was born in Arlington General Hospital in Washington State to German immigrant parents, Katchen (Kate) and Martin Mayer. Her parents met and married in Seattle and owned a small dairy farm where Marge grew up as the fifth child and only daughter. Sadly, Marge’s mother died when Marge was eleven years old. From that point forward, she lived with various family members and friends including her much loved third-grade teacher, Mrs. Reeves.

Marge began and ended life as an independent woman fending for herself from the age of 16. She found a job right out of high school with People’s National Bank where she was one of the first drive-up tellers in Seattle. In 1964 she married John Kolodzie (later divorced) and was forced to quit her job because company policy did not allow married couples to work at the same institution. She continued on to study banking at the American Institute of Banking and landed a job at Lincoln First Federal Savings and Loan in Kent, Washington where she worked as a teller and bookkeeper before transferring to the company’s Seattle Branch.

Eventually she moved to Bainbridge Island on a sand spit overlooking the Puget Sound. That place became her “soul” home. Marge loved looking out over the water, so much so, that she didn’t even mind her 85-mile-a-day commute, partly by ferry, to Tacoma where she worked as a liaison to Pacific First Federal Savings and Loan.

In 1974, she was attending a Savings and Loan Conference, and met a handsome, witty man named Ralph Neilson. She and Ralph hit it off right away and became close friends. By 1980, it became clear to her that she had found the love of her life. Later that year, they married at the same Savings and Loan Conference where they had met, held this time in Las Vegas. Their colleagues remarked at the time that their marriage was “the only decent deal made that year.”

Despite the fact that the Pacific Northwest would forever remain her emotional home, Marge decided that Ralph, her best friend and play mate, was worth moving to Salt Lake for and relocated in 1980. She went through a period of culture shock. People kept asking her if she was LDS, a term she wasn’t familiar with and asking her how many children she had. Even though the transition was difficult at first, she managed to create a remarkable life with Ralph in Salt Lake City. She spent ten years lovingly restoring a 1929 pseudo-tudor house on Windsor Street where they lived before moving to Newberry Street in 1990 to a house situated between Emigration creek and the 1st hole of Bonneville golf course, a location she fondly referred to as “over the river and through the woods.” At the time, both she and Ralph were avid golfers and members of Willow Creek and Cottonwood Club where they made many friends.

Marge volunteered for several non-profit organizations, including Neighborhood Housing Services where she assisted with the layout of their newsletter. She also participated in fundraising efforts for the Utah Association for Childrens’ Therapy (UACT).

But these are mere facts about Marge Neilson’s life, a life that was far greater than the sum of its parts. If you were lucky enough to know Marge, you got pulled into her orbit of positive energy and generosity. She had a vigor for life that was never dampened by age. For example, in the summer of 2002, at the age of 62, she took up stone sculpting. She learned the craft from visiting Shona sculptors from Zimbabwe who were teaching at Red Butte Gardens. Marge’s father had sculpted wood as a hobby so Marge came by her talent honestly. She was a remarkable stone carver best known for her beautiful leaf sculptures and whimsical animal sculptures. Marge had a wonderful sense of humor and loved puns, which manifest in her work like her sculpture of two squirrels on a rock which she titled, “You’ve already got a mink coat, what else do you want?” Or, the two-sided sculpture featuring a rabbit on one side and an owl on the other that she aptly named, “Thump, Thump, Where’s Who?” She produced over sixty works in stone cataloguing them in a book and recording the number of hours she spent creating each one.

Marge viewed life through the lens of numbers, whether it was the sixty voles her cat Woody caught in 2012 or the dozens of errant golf balls she and Ralph retrieved from their back yard or the number of Sudoku puzzles she completed. This mental precision came to her naturally and she could recount these statistics from memory. Part of her bedtime ritual was to name all the states in alphabetical order and then recite the alphabet backwards.

Ralph’s death was a tremendous blow to Marge. It was hard for her to keep going after he passed, but she did. She enrolled in an exercise program, took classes at OSHER life-long learning, continued to socialize with friends at the Cottonwood Club and invited anyone with even a modicum of interest in stone to come over and carve in an area of her backyard affectionately known as “The Pit.” She was generous with her heart and her time, introducing several people to the joys of stone carving, including her friend Elaine and the four Jenson children who were her neighbors and friends.

She managed to maintain a positive outlook on life, even in the throes of dealing with bladder cancer. She nurtured friendships with people of all ages, some, like her dear friend Margaret Shields, went back to the day they were born. She was also open to allowing new friendships to bloom. Her life was enriched and enlivened by having Roberto, Lucia and their kids with her until the end.

Marge is preceded in death by her parents, her husband Ralph, her stepson, Lauritz (Chris) Neilson and her four brothers, Martin, William, Melvin and Ludwig Mayer. She is survived by her good friend, Lila Neilson, stepdaughter, Jennifer Neilson (La Jolla, CA), step-grandchildren Katherine Neilson (Davis County, UT) and Christopher Blackstone (Phoenix, AZ) and her handpicked grandchildren, Jane Downes (Hawaii) and Zachary Downes (Salt Lake).

Marge didn’t want a funeral because, as she put it, “I can’t be there.” In lieu of flowers, she requested that donations be made to Best Friends Animal Shelter where she found her beloved cat Woody, after reading this description of him, “smokes a pipe, wears a tweed jacket and is currently working on a novel.”