Margie Hoffman

Marjorie Gwinnett Hoffman was not a relative. But she was a special person in our family.

My grandmother died when she was 59 years old. Margie’s husband died in 1967, so he must have died at around the same age.

My grandfather, Ralph Wellons and Margie Hoffman were a couple for a couple of decades... the last decades of his life. They never married. She did not give up her home, which was on a small farm west of Anderson. They never moved in together. They just saw each other almost every day and went out on the town most nights. Dinner. Or Dinner and a show. Or a visit to the kids.

Margie was always there for a few hours for Christmas with our family in mom and dad’s new house outside of Huntsville, Indiana after we moved to Florida.

She was amazing. And she was the perfect woman for a fun guy like my grandfather, who didn’t have much formal education, but liked to travel and keep active. She actually was a graduate of Lapel High School. For an older lady, she was very proper, but then would laugh along with the rest of us even when my brother Jay would tell risqué jokes he would pick up from the Bob and Tom radio show or from his factory coworkers. That combination of dressing and acting very proper and yet being able to joke around with my grandfather’s grandkids was endearing. Just what he was looking for.

He would do odd jobs at her house, which he would have missed since he sold his house and moved into a single wide mobile home.

Margie lived a very full life and died at age 97, several years after her special friend, Ralph Wellons, had passed.

In the picture are Beverly Wellons, Bob Wellons, Mary Alice Dixon, Jerry Dixon, Ralph Wellons and Margie Hoffman.