Reunions & Events

Graham Hovey, Margaret DeMuth Remembered: Exceptional Lives in Service to Others
—By Charles B. Fancher, Jr. ’82 & Diane Brozek Fancher ’82

Graham Hovey, KWF Director Emeritus Photo by Jay Zelermyer

We were honored to have been asked to play a role in connection with the 25th annual Graham Hovey Lecture on September 10 by offering a tribute to the late Graham B. Hovey, for whom the lecture series is named, and the late Margaret DeMuth, the Fellowship’s program assistant for 16 years.

Graham, who directed the Fellowship from 1980 to 1986, died at 94 on February 20, just weeks after Margaret, who passed away on January 2 at the age of 83. Those of us who knew them are confident that our lives were immeasurably enriched by the association.

We can say with absolute certainty that we have known few other individuals with greater personal integrity, zest for life and love for their fellow humans than Graham and Margaret. Both were blessed with the rare ability to make new acquaintances feel immediately at home and to be genuinely interested in the thoughts and opinions of others.

KWF's beloved Margaret DeMuth <Photo by Phillip Dattilo

And as much as they seemed to enjoy the company of each new class of Fellows, Graham and Margaret were at their best when they were with their respective spouses, Mary Jean Hovey and George DeMuth—both of whom became good friends of each new class.

In our remarks before this year’s Hovey Lecture, we sought to remind former Fellows of what made Graham and Margaret special and to introduce them to others who missed the opportunity to be touched by their exceptional lives.

In Graham’s case that meant, among other things, a look back at an extraordinary career in journalism that began at the Waterloo Courier in his home state of Iowa, took him to Detroit as a sports reporter and to Europe to cover World War II. With a few other stops along the way, Graham eventually made his way to The New York Times, where he joined the storied editorial board led by John B. Oakes. He later covered foreign affairs for The Times’ Washington bureau.

Graham even had a brief fling with broadcasting, notably with his “Letters from Italy” show, a weekly program on U.S. public radio stations affiliated with the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, a forerunner of NPR. He broadcast the show while living with Mary Jean in post-war Rome as the recipient of a Fulbright research grant.

He also had a serious academic career at the Universities of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, and even in retirement in Allentown, Pennsylvania, he taught at a local college and conducted an annual lecture series, “New Challenges for U.S. Foreign Policy,” at Luther Crest, the retirement community where he and Mary Jean lived.

Margaret was neither a journalist nor a professor, but she lived a life of service. She was active in her church as a deacon and as an elder, and she served as president of a group called International Neighbors, which reaches out to foreign women who live here to offer friendship and support.

She and George raised four children, including Leslie, a successful artist whose oil painting, a wedding gift from Margaret and George, hangs in our home. Besides the vast administrative duties she tirelessly managed, Margaret also brought a quiet vigilance, a watchful eye, to the program, ever on the lookout for signs that a Fellow might be troubled, and she would always have words of wisdom to help him or her through any crisis.

Graham and Margaret were people of genuine accomplishment, but in our view their greatest achievement can be measured in the scores of former Fellows who have completed the program feeling that their lives have been enriched, not only by their exposure to the academic offerings of the university, but also by the outstanding experience the two of them provided.