Hartford
But, congregants and friends agree, Pastor Margaret wasn’t always an easygoing vicar of Christ.
In fact, her stubbornness was as legendary as her big singing voice.
“Margaret said it like it was. She didn’t hide anything,” said Bob Ammel Sr., a trustee of Greater Hartford United Church of Christ, where Stoddard was pastor from 1977 to 1987. “You always knew where you stood with her.”
“She was very strong-willed. Margaret spoke her mind,” said Pauline Bartlett, a longtime member of the Hartford UCC congregation.
“When Margaret made up her mind, you knew it,” said church member Peggy McDerment.
Stoddard, 31 years after she stepped aside from her official pastoral duties for the Hartford church, died March 3, 2018, at her home in Wilder. She was 95.
A breast cancer survivor who had also earlier received a new heart valve transplant, Stoddard succumbed to a recurrence of leukemia after declining last fall to pursue a new course of medications because of the side effects, said her longtime friend and neighbor Luna Ricker.
Stoddard spent her last day on Earth softly humming songs from the hymnal she knew by heart, Ricker said, carrying her love of music with her to the end.
Although she served her entire life working in and around churches and church organizations, Stoddard did not become an ordained minister until she was 53, after she returned to Andover Newton Theological Seminary, where she had first earned a degree in religious education decades earlier.
Growing up in Elizabeth, N.J., the daughter of a banker and homemaker, Stoddard had studied musical education at Trenton State College before moving to New England to work for the Massachusetts Council of Churches, teach weekday classes and head education programs at churches in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
At the outset, twin gifts distinctly emerged in Stoddard: musical talent — she was accomplished at hand bells — and leading groups of youths in religious and cultural education.
Whether it was vacation bible schools, organizing camping expeditions at her cabin on Newfound Lake in New Hampshire or shepherding rambunctious teenagers in overseas church exchange programs, Stoddard’s enthusiasm for kids was full-bore.
“She would take groups of young people from her parish all over Europe. She had all kinds of endurance,” said Mildred Bauer, who became lifelong friends with Stoddard after first working with her in a church-affiliated social welfare organization near Boston in the 1950s. “The kids called her ‘Sarge’ because she ran a tight ship … You can’t take a gang of young people and have no discipline.”
Deeds, Not Words
The gospel wasn’t merely a social philosophy or theoretical exercise that Stoddard preached, Bauer said.
“She didn’t talk Christianity,” Bauer said. “She would be it.”
After ordination in 1975 and becoming an associate pastor in Holden, Mass., and serving at the City Missionary Society in Boston, Stoddard was hired as pastor at the UCC church in Hartford in 1977.
“We were given names and interviewed her and she was very outgoing,” recalled Ammel, who was on the church’s search committee for a new pastor at the time. Physically striking — Stoddard was 6’ 6” tall and had a size 14 shoe — Ammel said he was impressed by Stoddard’s willingness to get her hands dirty — literally.
“She knew how to handle a chainsaw and use tools, too,” he marveled.
(She built her own shed behind her home in Wilder where she stored her tools).
One of the first things Stoddard did upon arriving in Hartford was to build up the church’s youth education and Sunday school program, which had lagged in the prior years. She had no compunction about enlisting the service of church members to help out, regardless of their experience.
“She put me with the Sunday school kids and it was kind of like I’m-not-sure-what-I’m-doing,” related Hartford UCC member Winnie Perkins. But Stoddard encouraged her to stick with it and eventually the church had 50 kids enrolled in the Sunday school program, organized a vacation Bible school and Perkins was made superintendent.
“I learned as I went,” Perkins said.
Stoddard was never shy about letting people know she had a particular way of doing things, whether it was scrupulously sticking to the church’s lectionary for pairing Old and New Testament scripture passages for Sunday readings or how the music should be played to accompany the hymns sung during the service.
But she could take pushback with grace and humor.
Lester Gibbs, who was baptized in the Hartford UCC church in 1940 and learned to play the organ there and filled in as the church’s organist, recalled how Stoddard was able to set aside differences of opinion when it came to fostering a congregation.
Gibbs, a staff sergeant in the Army at the time, remembers coming home for a visit one long weekend and being told by his parents — who were active in the church — that he would “have to be careful around the new pastor, she’s very anti-military.”
So Gibbs, when attending that Sunday’s service, decided to put on his “dress blue” uniform and “a whole brace of medals” to make it clear where he was coming from.
“That was how Margaret met me,” said Gibbs.
But a couple of days later, Gibbs said he was surprised to get a phone call from Stoddard, who explained that the regular church organist was away and it would be possible for Gibbs to substitute.
After the service at which he played, Gibbs recounted, Stoddard apparently wasn’t happy with his style of organ playing and said, “if you play here again, this is how I prefer you play.” Gibbs hesitated — even the Army Chaplain didn’t drill him in how to play the organ.
“Look, pastor,” Gibbs replied, expecting an unhappy ending to the conversation. “When I tell you how to preach, you can tell me how to play.”
Stoddard paused, as if momentarily surprised by Gibbs’ cheekiness, then coolly replied: “Touche.”
After she retired, Stoddard could be found in her favorite pew at the church — in the last row of the sanctuary. That way, congregants said, she was in the right spot to greet members as they walked through the door.
In fact, some thought Stoddard had a hard time letting go of her official pastoral duties and this occasionally became an irritant with the church’s subsequent pastors. The reluctance was even noted during Stoddard’s memorial service at the church which was held on July 12, which would have been her 96th birthday.
The Rev. Pamela Lucas first got to know Stoddard when Lucas began serving as a pastor in Bridgewater around the same time Stoddard had arrived in Hartford. She went on to serve with her on numerous Vermont fellowships and conferences, and recalled the time they were talking and Stoddard suddenly remarked, “I need to tell you that I have a deep abiding resentment of your asking me to ‘back off’ from interfering in the ministries of the ministers” who followed her in Hartford.
“My role is to mentor them,” Stoddard told Lucas.
And that, Lucas noted, was going to be how Stoddard approached it with Hartford ministers “whether they wanted it or not.”
Overcoming Obstacles
If Stoddard had a tough skin at times, it was perhaps because her life in key respects had been one of continually facing challenges and overcoming them, her friends and relatives said.
Although Congregationalists had ordained their first female minister in 1857, there were still only a few hundred female pastors among the denomination’s more than 5,000 churches in the country in the 1970s.
“When Margaret was getting out of college in the 1940s, making your way in the world wasn’t all that easy for a woman,” said her cousin, John Stoddard, who later accompanied Margaret on several trips to England where they burrowed through parish records as they pursed her hobby in researching the family’s genealogy.
John Stoddard’s sister, Phebe Hyde, agreed, noting that “Margaret went to school for the ministry at a time when a lot of women didn’t do that. She paved the way.”
Stoddard’s decision to return to seminary in her 50s was because “that’s where she wanted to go,” Luna Ricker explained. “At the time the only way you could get your church was to be ordained.” (The UCC now allows pastors who are licensed but not ordained to lead parishes).
Such obstacles never blunted Stoddard’s kindness and empathy, her friends and relatives said.
Hyde remembers the time when she was driving in New England with her cousin when they saw a turtle crossing the road. Stoddard stopped the car and held up traffic to “escort” the turtle to safety.
Bauer relates how Stoddard would hunt for old quilts in thrift shops and sew them together with a zipper on the side to make bedrolls that they would sleep in when traveling so as not to disturb the sheets of their hosts and save them an unnecessary load of laundry.
“That was really thoughtful of her,” said Bauer. “She did favors for people. That was her love shining through.”
Still, although Stoddard had many friends and legions of grown-up kids who adored her — Luna Ricker said she is still replying to the more than 350 Christmas cards her friend received last year — there was a hint of having missed out on some ordinary things, friends said.
Luna Ricker’s sister-in-law, Beverly Ricker, a church member, said she threw Stoddard a surprise birthday party at the church for her 90th birthday. Her pastor was overwhelmed at the gesture.
“She was really taken aback,” Beverly Ricker said. “She said he never had had a birthday party. I don’t know if her life was that great growing up.”
Stoddard fell in love with the small towns and back roads of rural New England and had a passion for road trips, said Luna Ricker, the next-door neighbor who in Stoddard’s later years became responsible for her friend’s care.
Luna Ricker recalled how Stoddard would unfold a map of a New England state, look the other way, and then plop her finger down on it. Whatever town her finger landed on, they would get into Stoddard’s maroon color station wagon and visit.
After nearly half her life in suburban and urban environment, “she had enough of the city,” Luna Ricker said of Stoddard.
She also liked cross-country treks: Bauer accompanied her for three consecutive years when Stoddard was in her 80s on road trips to winter vacations in Florida.
Stoddard drove until she was 92, when a mishap in the parking lot of the Hartford ended her time behind the wheel.
She didn’t take it well.
“None of us wanted to tell her that she had to give up her license,” Luna Ricker said.
Yet, even through two bouts of cancer and a heart operation, Stoddard was indefatigable, summoning reserves of strength and mental clarity that left her friends and associates amazed.
Len Brown, executive director of the Bugbee Center in Hartford, said Stoddard continued to serve on the senior center’s board until 2016, when she was 93. Detail oriented, she had a sharp eye on the financial statements, often expressing concern when the balance sheet didn’t add up to the exact penny because the bookkeeping software rounded off the line items.
Forewarned before his first financial review with the board that Stoddard would likely be seeking reassurance about the reason for the inconsistency in figures, Brown tried for levity by jokingly deadpanning when he got to the bottom line: “And of course you are all aware of the ‘Stoddard Effect’ in the QuickBooks program which results in a $2.00 imbalance at the bottom of the page.”
Brown saw Stoddard shoot him an cold glare while the room fell silent and he thought, “Uh, oh. This is not a good time to be a wise guy.”
“Then she let out this ‘hoot!’ of a laugh,” said Brown, and he felt a wave of relief wash over him as Stoddard clearly relished the good-natured poke.
“She came across many times as gruff and abrasive, but she had a big heart,” Brown said.
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
