Margaret Marie Madigan

1870s–1890s

Born 17 October 1879 in Portland, Oregon, to Irish immigrants Cornelius Madigan and Anna Murphy, one of nine children. Went to work by sixteen, and from 1897 packed brooms at Zan Brothers.

1900s

Became the woman of the house on Flanders Street when her mother died in 1901. First president of Division No. 2 of the Ladies' Auxiliary of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in 1908.

1910s–1920s

Married John Baptiste Leineweber on 15 February 1911 and raised five children, Peter, Jim, Pinky, Tom, and Peggy, in the Flanders Street house, which she shared with her father, sister, and brother-in-law.

1930s–1940s

Moved to NW Glisan Street in 1932 and was active in the university mothers' club and the Cathedral Altar Society. Widowed in 1939. Filled Red Cross ditty bags during the war.

1950s

Lived with her son Jim's family and then in a nursing home near Gresham, where she died on 25 September 1959.

An Irish Portland Girlhood

Margaret Marie Madigan was born on October 17, 1879, in Portland, Oregon, to Irish immigrants Cornelius Madigan and Anna Murphy. She was one of nine children and the eldest daughter. Her twin brothers, Jack and Joseph, were born the year before her; Joseph died as a small child, her oldest brother, Thomas, died of appendicitis at six, and Jack died of tuberculosis in 1915. The younger ones were Sallie, James, Peter, Kate, and William. From 1897 the family lived at 547 Flanders Street, which would be Margaret's home, on and off, for more than thirty years.

She finished the eighth grade, and by 1896, at sixteen, she was working as a nurse, probably a nursemaid looking after children, at a house on Ella Street. From 1897 to 1900 she packed brooms at the Zan Brothers broom factory on Front Street, where her sister Sallie also worked, and in 1900 she was a dressmaker. She also worked for a time as a cook for a Dr. Tucker, and when an infection nearly cost her an arm, it was Dr. Tucker who saw her in the hospital and saved it. When her mother died in 1901, Margaret, then twenty-one, became the woman of the house, a responsibility the family said made her a very practical, hard worker. As a young woman, her son Peter was told, she was thin and angular, five foot nine or ten, with dark hair and dark blue eyes.

The Hibernian Ladies

Margaret threw herself into Portland's Irish Catholic social life. In 1908 she and Sallie sold tickets for the city's St. Patrick's Day celebration, and that September she was appointed the first president of the new Division No. 2 of the Ladies' Auxiliary of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Its younger members, the Erindell Girls, held dances at Murlark Hall, whose maple dance floor was built on springs, and Margaret was on committee after committee to organize them. In March 1910 she was secretary of the shamrock-sale booth at the Meier & Frank department store to benefit the Oswego orphanage, and in July, when the Hibernians held their national convention in Portland, she helped plan it and rode to Vancouver, Washington, with Sallie on the committee that met the arriving delegates' train.

Wife, Mother, and Manager

On February 15, 1911, Margaret married John Baptiste Leineweber, a salesman for a plumbing-supply house, at the Cathedral parish. Their children were Peter (1911), Jim (1913), William, known as Pinky (1914), Thomas (1917), and Margaret, called Peggy (1919). From 1913 they lived in the Flanders Street house, together with her widowed father, Cornelius, and her sister Sallie and Sallie's husband, Magnus Hansen, while her brothers ran the Madigan Brothers Transfer Company out of a garage and warehouse attached to the house, using the family's home telephone as the office line. Around 1928 Margaret also took in Bridget Lyons, an eccentric old woman who had run a farm stand in Garden Home, after the last of Bridget's six sons died.

Her son Peter remembered her as a great manager and a fatalist whose answer to bad luck was "what will be, will be." She held the family's money, and everyone handed over what they earned for her to give out as needed. She had her husband put about forty percent of his salary into life insurance, which, Peter said, paid off well when his father died young. She "had a heart as big as all outdoors," he wrote: "Anyone that looked hungry, tired, or cold, she fed them if she could and sheltered them. During the depression there were many knocks on the kitchen door by passing down-and-outers." In the evenings the family played rummy, and at church card parties Margaret chose "500" over the more fashionable bridge, reasoning that since each game had the same prizes, the less popular 500 gave her a better chance of winning.

The family took summer holidays at a cottage in Tioga, Washington, in 1914, at The Rolfe in Long Beach, Washington, in 1921, and at Seaside, Oregon, in 1931. In 1932 they moved into a house at 2155 NW Glisan Street, bought from Margaret's cousin Mary Elizabeth McFeely for $7,500. With her sons at Columbia University, later the University of Portland, Margaret was active in the mothers' club through the 1930s, running the 500 games at one of its card parties, and she worked for the Cathedral Altar Society and the Catholic Youth Organization.

Later Years

John Baptiste died at home on Glisan Street in September 1939. During the war, after her son Tommy wrote from Guadalcanal that the Red Cross's ditty bags of toothbrushes, sewing kits, candy, and playing cards were badly needed and much appreciated, Margaret, her sister Sallie, and her daughter Peggy took his letter to the Red Cross office on Alder Street and stayed to help fill them. After the war her son Jim and his new wife, Mary Alice, lived with her on Glisan Street for a time, and in 1950 she was sharing the house with her brother Jim and her cousin Mary McFeely.

Around 1950 Margaret went to live with her son Jim's family, and by about 1954 she was in a nursing home near Gresham. She had Alzheimer's disease in her last years. She died at the Ideal Rest Home in Gresham on September 25, 1959, at seventy-nine, and was buried at Mount Calvary Cemetery in Portland.