Hanover, NH – Mary Jenkins, who died April 7, 2026, was born in Hanover, in the old Mary Hitchcock Hospital on November 8, 1921. She was the daughter of Dartmouth professor, John M. Mecklin and Hope Davis Mecklin. Her younger years were spent skating and skiing (badly); watching Orozco create his extraordinary murals in Baker Library; acting as a penguin with several other 12 year olds, to pull a sled bearing a newly selected Dartmouth Carnival Queen to her coro-nation; tap dancing, with friends, in “The Red Mill” and “The Gondoliers,” Dartmouth musical productions and playing an angel in the Christmas Mystery in Rollins Chapel. After Hanover schools, Mary graduated from the Stoneleigh-Prospect Hill School (now Stoneleigh Burnham) in Greenfield, MA and, in December 1943, Skidmore College (class of 1944).
Two months later, February 1944, Mary married former Dartmouth student, John M. Jenkins, whom she met in the summer of 1942 when he-like most of his classmates-was accelerating his studies so he could graduate before the WW II draft caught up with him. For the next two years Mary accompanied John to Army Air Force Bases in Kansas, Colorado and Louisiana.
After the war Mary and John lived in Glendale and Kirkwood, MO (St. Louis suburbs), for eight happy years, and Mary had her first political experience when she left a League of Women Voters board position to go door-to-door for Adlai Stevenson.
Back east to New Canaan, CT, 1955, where Mary was LWV president and, later, co-chaired a committee organized to turn back a petition seeking to remove fluoridation from town water. (Petition denied.) In the summer 1961 Mary received a three week grant from the West German government to visit seven West German cities interviewing German women in politics.
After two years in Ft. Wayne, IN., 1962-1964 the Jenkins again returned east, this time to Westport, CT where they remained until 1999. Mary served seven years on Westport’s Planning and Zoning Commission before she was elected, (1975), to the Westport Representative Town Meeting (a body that met monthly, had the power to overturn zoning regulations and had to approve all town expenditures over $10,000). She chaired the Finance Comm. and in 1977 was elected the RTM’s first woman moderator, a position she held for nine years. During those years Mary taped a discussion of early New England town meetings for Voice of America.
In 1987 Mary was elected to the Westport Board of Finance. She served one term before retiring from town government in 1991. Along the way Mary co-chaired Democratic Headquarters during two presidential elections and co-founded the Westport-Weston Nuclear Forum (speakers and discussion groups). John and Mary traveled world- wide and Mary wrote travel stories for regional magazines. In the early 1990s she made two citizen-exchange trips to the Soviet Union with Bridges for Peace, a Norwich, Vermont organization
John and Mary came to Kendal in 1999. Mary served on many boards and committees, including chairing the committee that brought beer and wine to Kendal dining rooms. She also brought the idea of Employee Scholarships to the Residents Council-the Council unanimously endorsed the idea and the Administration followed with their own immediately thereafter. Mary was the sole editor of the Kendal Times weekly news for six years, was a member of the Board of Editors of Kendalights, a literary quarterly, and was one of the seven editors of “WW II Remembered,” a collection of resident war memories that sold over 10,000 copies.
She also wrote nearly a dozen stories for the Valley News about growing up in Hanover. Within Hanover, Mary served on the Board of the Upper Valley Hostel and on an ILEAD Travel Comm.
John died in 2020. Mary is survived by her children, Patricia J. Brenner, Shelly (David Kirk), John Jr. (Nancy Stiles) and Robert (Sharon Gleason); six grandsons (4 granddaughters –in-law), two grand-daughters, and six great-grandchildren.
An on-line guestbook can be found at rand-wilson.com.
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