Ed Forry of the Reporter with honoree Margaret Stapleton.

Margaret Stapleton arrived in Boston from County Tipperary in July 1955, then settled with cousins in Scituate. She accepted an entry-level job with the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co. and earned BS and MBA degrees by taking evening college classes over more than a decade’s time. She has been a longtime volunteer at Pine Street Inn and plays an active role with Irish organizations including the Eire Society, Charitable Irish, and the Irish Pastoral Centre.

The early years in Ireland
Margaret Stapleton’s parents emigrated to the states in the 1920s. Although they both hailed from County Tipperary, William Stapleton and Mary Anne Lyons first met in New York, married, and settled down there to begin their family. Mary Anne gave birth to a girl and then a boy just as the Great Depression began.

Her parents became naturalized American citizens, and, says Margaret, her mother loved her life in this country. But her father struggled to find work, so in 1933, the parents boarded a ship and headed back to the Emerald Isle with their children. Three years later, Margaret came into the world.

“My father wanted to come back to Ireland and my mother had inherited a small farm from her uncle,” Margaret said in an interview as she recalled some of her family’s history. “My father wanted to return but my mother did not – she was very happy in the states and she wanted to stay here. My brother Bill was two and Mary four when they returned. It was my mother’s family farm near the village of Burn Court in the butt of the Galtee mountains in south Tip. Two years later I was born and then later it was my brother James.”

Margaret lived her early years on that family farm in Tipperary, but her father wanted to move back to his old home area, and in 1945 he bought a farm in north Tip, just outside of Thurles, and the family moved again.

As a girl, did Margaret work on the farm? “Yes, I did! No doubt about that. In those days there were a lot of mixed farms of all kinds – with livestock, it was chickens, geese, milk cows, calves, horses, pigs; for crops it was wheat, oats, turnips, potatoes, and sugar beets.

“There was a sugar beet factory in Thurles – one of four in all of Ireland – and sometimes I would go to town to bring the crops, and just to get off the farm. It was a great expedition, a great adventure.

“Through World War II, we lived with lots of rations, but living on the farm we did have enough for ourselves. I do remember them at school telling us there may be planes flying over, don’t you dare point a stick towards them or anything that would look like a gun. At home, my father would get the newspapers and read them aloud to us, so we kept up with how things were going in the war.

“I remember, too, in the mountains we had what we called whorts – small bushes with berries. We would go up in the hills and pick those berries and bring them down to the little store and they shipped them over to England for the soldiers. We used to snare the rabbits because they wanted the meat for the soldiers, and the fur for their boots. That’s what I remember about the war.”

Did she ever catch any rabbits to bring home? “Yes, in those years in the country in Ireland you know, there was no refrigeration. You had salt bacon every once in awhile, and we would tire of that. We were in the country and not close to the ocean so we couldn’t get fish; maybe a few in the stream, but that was it. So we would bring the rabbit into my dear mother and she would stop whatever she was doing so she could skin the rabbit and we would have fresh meat – that’s right. What a treat!

A mother’s yen for education
“My mother wanted her girls to be educated. She said to me, ‘You are going to get an education because you are not going to inherit the farm.’ My sister went to a boarding school. But when I came along, I guess money was a little tighter, so they bought me a bicycle and I would bicycle five miles each way to Thurles for secondary school. In the winter it was dark all day; you would leave for school that began at nine and be home after four. In Burn Court it was a two-room classroom and later in Thurles it was a one-room classroom.

“We were left to study on our own in secondary school, and we had one nun for all four grades who was amazing. Her name was Sister Rosaria, and she was from the Mercy order. There were ten girls in this class: A couple (of them) dropped out for whatever reason, six of us passed the civil service exam, one became a teacher, and one became a nurse.”

Sister Rosaria’s tutoring paid off: Margaret was one of six girls in her class to pass the civil service test, and at age 17, she was offered a job working at a post office in Mayo; later she was transferred to an office in Carlow .

“There were jobs for one female and for five boys. We were post office clerks. We trained on the telephone; in those days the post office had the telephone. It had the old crank phone and you had to be careful because if you weren’t careful it could blow your ears out.

“I sorted mail, dispatched the mailmen, recorded them in when they returned, sold stamps, and gave the old age pensioners their checks. I learned Morse Code and transmitted weather information up to Dublin. But I wasn’t very good at it, I must admit, and I think it was the Morse Code that drove me from the post office.”

When she was age 18, Margaret recalls, she reflected on her life at that point: “I was in the post office and behind the counter, and I thought to myself; ‘Am I going to spend the rest of my life behind this counter? Doing this or what my mother spoke so fondly of: life in the states?’ So I went home for Christmas and mentioned it to mom.”

Her mother quickly wrote to her Boston cousins and asked them to look after her daughter when she arrived in Boston.
“So I quit the post office,” said Margaret. “I sent in a resignation notice, and I got a letter back accepting my resignation, and in the letter the last words were, ‘Don’t come back.’ I guess the letter had been written by someone in Dublin, a civil servant, I suppose, who was irritated with having to write this letter. The idea was, ‘We invested all this money and training in you, and you’re quitting on us.’ It was the best decision I ever made!”

“Mother’s last words to me were, ‘No, you’re not going to take a ship; you’re going to fly over because you can get there faster and you can get to work faster.’”

New country, new life
In that summer of 1955, Margaret boarded a Pan Am plane in Ireland that stopped to refuel in Gander before touching down in Boston after a 14-hour flight. The city was in the middle of a July heat wave as her mother’s relatives greeted her at the airport. She had never experienced such hot weather. Her cousins drove through the Sumner Tunnel (on the wrong side of the road!), and emerged into the city, where she had her first view of the tall buildings “all clustered together.”

“I’m not in my country anymore,” she recalls thinking to herself.

Then it was on to Scituate, where her cousins, Mary Pearl Ritterhaus and Josephine Murphy, made room for her in their home.
Two weeks later, the teenage Margaret Stapleton went to work in her first job in America as an entry-level clerk at the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance company. The position paid $8 a day.

“It was a whole different culture,” she recalled. “It was exciting. I was just 19, and I was working within two weeks. I went in and I did well on the exam and I got a job in the securities department as a clerk, working in the Berkeley building. I had never been in an elevator before and I was never that high up before, either. But I had a job to do – at $40 a week.

“It seemed like a lot to me coming from Ireland, but basically it wasn’t. Because I was living with my cousins, I didn’t have to worry about how much money I had because they were good to me. Basically they drove in [to Boston] and took me with them. The job was easy to learn because it was numbers and I had worked with numbers in the post office. We had to do numbers in school and we trained at the post office with numbers so I knew numbers. Numbers were no problem to me.”

Margaret took to her new work with gusto, and, she says today, the work helped her to quickly learn about her new country: “I learned the geography of this country by the municipal bonds, the tax-exempt bonds that they had. In those early days you could get a promotion if it was a woman’s job –the lesser jobs, as a clerk (not as a supervisor.)

“I remember a young man came in and I trained him and the manager came down to me and said there’s a supervisor’s job open and he’s going to get the job. Because, the manager said, ‘he’s a young man and he’s going to get married. I know that you can do it but he’s going to get your job.’ ”

What did she think of that? Did her Irish come out when she heard those words? “Yes, yes it did – but what can you do about it? “ She later applied for other positions, and eventually won a job in the research department, where she would hone her skills with numbers by doing statistical analysis of public utilities.

“Then, in July 1964 do you know what happened? Lyndon Johnson signed the Equal Employment Opportunity Act.”

The new law opened doors for her and other women in the company. “There were a couple of women ahead of me, also sidelined for promotions. Women then had the opportunity to be equal and from there I did work hard and I had some wonderful people – male and female – who were really willing to help me. I tried to focus on the job and we became a team and that’s what it was.”

Enter Rev. James Woods, SJ
After work hours, Margaret enrolled in the evening program at Boston College, headed by a Jesuit priest who would become a guiding force in her life, Rev. James Woods SJ, her longtime friend and mentor. After earning a degree at BC in economics, she enrolled in the night school at Babson College, where she earned her MBA.

In the mid-1970s, Margaret advanced to a role as team leader, and later she became the first Irish-born woman at John Hancock to join the ranks of senior management when she was appointed a vice president and senior investment officer, a role she held until her retirement after 46 years at Hancock.

“At St. Mary’s church in Scituate, there were three groups that used to go up to the Pine Street Inn for volunteer work. One of them would actually bring meals and the other two would serve meals there. I joined one of those groups. We donated money and they would buy the food for them.

“In Ireland, we had had what they called- with that politically incorrect term ‘the Tinkers.’ Now they’re called the Travelers, and they would come and my mother always felt that we have to share (with them). She would give them potatoes, eggs, bacon and whatever other vegetables. The group would be the same each time and they would always come back and they would know us and ask how the family was. It was almost like a community. Being Catholic, (we were taught to be) willing to share with people who don’t have anything. It was part of giving. Pine Street was a wonderful place to share, so I got involved in that.”

Margaret joined Pine Street’s board, and after her retirement in 2001, she became a regular volunteer, and a champion for building a shelter for women adjacent to the main facility in the South End.

“Lyndia Downie [Pine Street Inn president] is a marvelous person, and she wanted to see if they could house people and give them a new start, then work with them on programs to help them improve themselves. There was a three-story building next to the Inn on Harrison Avenue, and they were building a lot of condominiums across the street. I said to myself, ‘One day you know they’re going to take this building as a condominium.’ I went to Lyndia and I handed her a check as seed money for that house.”
Pine Street converted the building into an 11-room home for homeless who have been on the street for 10 years or more. When the facility opened in 2007, it was dedicated as the Stapleton House, in Margaret’s honor.

At the opening, Downie told the Boston Globe that Margaret’s generous contribution helped the Pine Street generate many more donations, and, she added, the facility would not have been possible without her. “These are people who slept on the street, and now they have their own beds. Margaret helped create a home, in the best sense of the word,” said Downie.

Margaret has remained a constant supporter, volunteering weekly for the women: “I’m not doing heavy lifting. They have a lottery system for the beds and I hand out the lottery numbers and I tell him that this is your lucky number and they laugh.” And she adds, she has made many friends with the residents.

Margaret Stapleton then reflected on her upbringing in Ireland, and the example that her family set for her. “We are standing on the shoulders of people who were deprived, on the shoulders of people who had nothing,” she said. “My grandmother worked the farm all her life. Going up the hill with the sheep and all, that’s hard work. No matter what your circumstances are, to prove yourself all you have to do is make up your mind that you’re going to do the work and be honest and faithful. And also think about all the people around you that may not be as successful as you are and help them.

“To me, that is what our history is, and that’s what we should be all about.”