May 09, 2008 11:35 am
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The first woman mayor of Gainesville and a well-known activist in restoring the Gainesville community died Thursday.
Margaret Parx Hays, 95, of whom an apartment-style dormitory was named on the North Central Texas College Cooke County Campus in 2005, was mayor of Gainesville from 1981-83 and left behind a legacy of public improvements and inspired lives, officials said upon news of her passing Thursday afternoon.
She left Gainesville in 2002 to live near relatives in North Carolina, and died peacefully at a hospital, according to friends. An obituary is set to appear in Friday’s Register.
“She was involved in several things in our town for many years,” Loch said. “One I can remember from the ’70s, she was one of the ones to get the Heritage Society going, and getting the funding together to revamp the Depot, once we got it back.”
According to the Dec. 19, 2001, Congressional Record, Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Rockwall, read a statement on the closing day of a session of Congress honoring Hays for her work in restoring the Santa Fe Depot.
“This would be a better world, with more kindness and caring, and more success in the healthy growth of a city or area, if we had Margaret Parx Hays in each of our cities,” Hall said from the flood of Congress. “She is, other than being a wonderful person, a great asset to the city of Gainesville — and all who live there who want and expect to have gracious living. Margaret brings this to the table of public service because she cares.”
Loch also noted her involvement in setting up a mental health care facility in Gainesville in the early-to-mid-’70s.
County Judge Freeman, a Justice of the Peace while Hays served as mayor in the early ’80s, said she was influential in preserving much of Gainesville’s heritage.
“Margaret was invaluable to the preservation of our history here in Gainesville and in Cooke County,” he said. “She was instrumental in many of our restoration projects that occurred in our county, and she’ll be greatly missed, especially by the ones who are working on trying to keep our county’s history preserved.”
Ron Melugin, chairman of the Cooke County Heritage Society and a professor of history at North Central Texas College, noted Hays was the first recipient of the F.M. Hemphill Distinguished Alumni Award in 1995.
Melugin noted her efforts to save the historic Gainesville firehouse and restore it to become the Morton Museum of Cooke County, located on the corner of Pecan and Dixon streets downtown. A room is named for her, where several mementos are permanently stored, from her name plate as mayor of Gainesville to a fuzzy green hat in a glass display case.
She was director of the museum as it developed, and during that time wrote several grants including her last two efforts to save the historic Santa Fe Depot and the Jones Farm near Lake Ray Roberts.
“She was truly a modern woman,” a brief historical sketch on the North Central Texas College Web site read, commemorating the naming of a dormitory after her.
In her long and varied career, Hays taught in higher education and served in the U.S. Foreign Service — laying the foundation for her community service later in life.
Prior to her career, according to the NCTC site, the Gainesville native took four college classes in her senior year at Newsome Dougherty Memorial High School, graduating in 1929 from high school and from Gainesville Junior College a year later in 1930.
By going to school in the summers, according to the site, she received her Bachelor of Arts degree from North Texas State Teachers College (now University of North Texas) in 1931. Hays spent the next 11 years working for North Texas in secretarial and guidance counseling capacities, and later earned a Master of Arts in Education degree from University of Michigan in between her breaks from her campus job.
When World War II was starting up, Hays entered the Department of Foreign Service, starting off as a code clerk in Buenos Aires during the war.
“That was in 1943, with World War II in full cry, and in Argentina whose leader, Juan Peron, was more than suspected of harboring Nazi sympathies and German agents,” wrote Bob Parker, one of her neighbors at the Carolina Meadows assisted living center in Chapel Hill, N.C., who wrote a brief biography of Hays for the center’s newsletter “Touch of Gray” in the April/May 2005 edition.
“Margaret recalls a morning when a colleague at the Embassy called her at home to warn her that women staffers should not report for work that day,” Parker wrote. “Peron’s followers had scheduled a demonstration before the Embassy, and identifiable Americans might be at risk. Margaret recalls: ‘I stayed with my colleague’s wife. We got reports all day about Peron coming in. My colleague, who had been working all day, came in that night after he had worked for 24 hours. I went to the code room and I worked for 24 hours straight. That was the way we did things then.’”
Back in Washington D.C. after her Buenos Aires tour, Parker wrote, with no permanent appointment in the State Department and no immediate job prospects, Hays was advised to check in with the Department’s Personnel office.
“They wound up offering me a position as vice consul,” Hays said, according to Parker. “I knew that if I got a position as vice consul I would get responsible work. So I wound up as a vice consul in Bogotá, Colombia.”
After five years of service, Margaret was eligible to take an oral examination for appointment as a Foreign Service Officer. Nearing the end of her Bogotá assignment, she received a phone call from a political officer in the Embassy to offer her a job in Rio de Janero, Brazil, where she picked up the Portuguese language from a friend during her 30-minute lunch breaks.
That stint led her being promoted to Second Secretary and Consul, with posts including Mexico City, Manila and Hong Kong.
As a diplomat, she oversaw the signatures of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, as well as Queen Elizabeth for Hong Kong and President Ramon Magsaysay of the Philippines.
Her career progressed easily until a brush with a strong anti-Socialism movement nearly halted her advancement. According to Parker, an unknown person placed a warning in her personnel record in the U.S. Department of State suggesting Hays may have been a Communist sympathizer. This came on the heels of Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s famed hunt for “un-American activities” in all levels of federal government.
“Margaret met the charge head on with a denial of its truth,” Parker wrote. “She felt that the existence of the charge may have delayed her getting a security clearance — essential for any responsible foreign assignment — but otherwise did not impede her career.”
Hays’ next assignment was in Manilla, Parker wrote, where she developed an interest in 12th-century Buddhist ruins at Angkor Wat, Cambodia.
“The only hotel facility was a wooden house, dusty as it could be,” she recalled in Parker’s article. “I wasn’t going to sit around that dusty hotel, so I went out and found a fellow pulling a rickshaw. I loved it. He pulled me all over town.”
Hays was also fond of a time when she studied tribal cultures in the Phillipines.
Her retirement from the State Department in 1966 opened up a world of opportunities in Cooke County, where locals benefited from a world of experience.
“She was very involved in the city, was a very capable woman. She leaves a legacy,” Loch said. “She’s one of those people you never think about leaving this earth.”
Reporter Andy Hogue may be contacted at andyhoguegdr@ntin.net
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