Peggy M. Brown

Peggy McArthur Brown -wife, mother and a longtime teacher in Pinellas County schools - died at her home in St. Petersburg, Fla., on Oct. 7, 2016. She was 89. Peggy Sue McArthur was born on Valentine's Day, 1927, in Augusta, Ga. She was the third of four children and the youngest daughter in her family. She outlived all of her siblings. In 1945, she graduated at the top of her class at Emily Tubman High School. Midway through her first year at Augusta College, her father died. She was the only child living at home at the time, and quit school and went to work to help support her widowed mother. She performed a variety of jobs over the years, including filing 78 rpm records and showing visiting musicians around town for a local radio station, and occupying a lifeguard chair at a city pool even though she could not swim. The job she recalled most fondly, however, was assisting in time-and-motion studies in local textile mills. In 1955, she married William C. Brown, whom she had known since childhood, and in short order became mother to three children. In 1957 the family moved to Florida, where she was a PTA member, room mother, and volunteer for the American Cancer Society and American Heart Association. Mostly, though, she was a fulltime and accomplished mom. In 1966, when her children were old enough to fend for themselves during the day, she made good on a promise to herself and went back to school -- at St. Petersburg Junior College and then the University of South Florida, where she earned a bachelor's degree with honors in Elementary Education. She taught for two years at Pinellas Central Elementary School in Pinellas Park, and then spent the remaining 18 years of her career as a Language Arts teacher at Azalea Middle School in St. Petersburg, where she earned a reputation as a tough but fair teacher. While teaching, she went back to USF in the evenings and earned a master's degree in Elementary Education, also with honors. After retirement in 1991, she worked briefly as a consultant for textbook publishers, but mostly she and her husband enjoyed entertaining in their homes in St. Petersburg and North Carolina, going out with friends, and traveling. By herself, she also enjoyed patronizing garage sales on most of the weekends she was in town. As years passed, the infirmities of age - particularly Alzheimer's disease -gradually made the couple's world smaller. They reveled, though, in becoming grandparents for the first time, years after their peers enjoyed that special status. Mrs. Brown's husband, William C. Brown, died in 2013.Thanks to his foresight, she had the means to live out her years in the familiar surroundings of her home, attended to by loving nurses, and by her son and daughter, who lived nearby. Mrs. Brown is survived by two sons, Marc (and wife, Jessica), of Newark, Calif., and Stuart, of St. Petersburg; a daughter, Lisa Bigham (and husband, Danny), of St. Petersburg; and a granddaughter, Zoe, of Newark, Calif. A memorial will be private. In lieu of cards or flowers, the family asks that those who wish to express their condolences make a donation in her name to the Alzheimer's Association, www.alz.org