Smith, Margery W.

Dr. Margery W. Smith

Education

Margery Smith's parents stood behind her and, at age 16, she followed others in her family, and entered Syracuse University. In 1950, she was graduated from the Syracuse University College of Medicine. This was in an era when only 5 percent of American doctors were women.

Death

Garry
Married Nov. 28, 1953
Harry
The SInging Farmer
June 21, 1909 - July 22, 2004
Margery W. SMith MD
Jan 23, 1926 - Aug 8, 2012
Woodlawn Cemetery

Dr. Smith died on Wednesday, August 8, 2012, at the Chase Memorial Nursing Home in New Berlin, N.Y. She was 86.

Obituary

By Melissa Hale-Spencer

BERNE — Margery W. Smith was the quintessential country doctor. “She was all about family…” said Charles Garry, her eldest child, at her memorial service on Sunday. “She considered everyone in this community her family,” Dr. Smith died on Wednesday, Aug. 8, 2012, at the Chase Memorial Nursing Home in New Berlin, N.Y. She was 86.

For nearly half a century, she tended to the medical needs of the Hilltowns. At one end of the age spectrum, she was the school physician for Berne-Knox-Westerlo. At the other end, she oversaw patients at the nearest nursing home, in Guilderland Center. She knew the medical as well as the emotional histories of the families she cared for. Dr. Smith gave particular care to those who needed it most. She made house calls to patients who could not leave their homes. And, concerned about battered women who had no safe haven, she was instrumental in setting up a safe house for them in the Helderbergs.

“If you went to Doc Marge with a problem, she was no nonsense; she’d lay out a path,” said her daughter, Judge Elizabeth Garry. “She was that way with her own life. She’d follow the path she set with tremendous courage.”

In 1979, Good Housekeeping magazine named her one of the country’s top family doctors. Dr. Smith belonged to and led many community and professional organizations, serving as president of the New York State Academy of Family Physicians in 1984 and the American Medical Society of the County of Albany from 1980 to 1982.

“She believed you needed to put your case in front of the powers that be,” said Charles Garry.

“Good chemistry”

Dr. Smith’s journey to the rural Helderberg Hilltowns was an unexpected one, made out of love.

She was born on Jan. 23, 1926 in Port Washington, N.Y. Her mother, for whom she was named, Margery Weyrauch Smith, was the head of a nursing department at Bellevue. “She was a forceful, educated, intelligent woman,” said Judge Elizabeth Garry of her grandmother, who had been a college athlete.

Dr. Smith’s father managed construction projects, and his wife and two daughters would sometimes leave their Long Island home to travel with him, for example, when he built a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Adirondacks. Dr. Smith’s sister, Mary Jane Smith, became an industrial psychologist, and lived in Manhattan.

“He didn’t make the big bucks, but he got the job done,” said Charles Garry of his grandfather. “He knew the right end of the shovel. He had the respect of the working guys.”

Mr. Garry described his mother’s girlhood home as shingled, sitting on a hill, with “a nice porch — the kind you sit and sip lemonade on — with bay windows all the way around.” The front entry had a parquet floor and there was a beautiful fireplace and staircase that Mr. Smith had designed and built.

“Her dad would come home; they would have dinner, and he would sit and read or listen to the radio, pipe in hand, in a big easy chair,” said Mr. Garry. This was a stark contrast to the life Dr. Smith married into. Judge Garry described a picture she had recently come across as she assembled a collage of her mother’s life. It showed Dr. Smith as a newlywed in front of a trailer that was her first Hilltown home. “It was a tiny little trailer with concrete block steps,” said Judge Garry. “What a remarkable leap of faith she took for the love of this man.”

Harry Garry relished telling the story of how he wooed and wed Dr. Smith. Their marriage lasted more than 50 years, ending only with his death in 2004. A Hilltown neighbor of his, Marie Swanson, had been a nurse in World War I, he said, launching into his story. She had trained at Vassar in a close-knit group and the women in that group, after the war was over, had agreed to hold a reunion every five years at one of their homes, he said. In 1953, it was Marie Swanson’s turn to host the reunion, and she asked Harry Garry, who had gained a reputation as The Singing Farmer, to entertain the group of aging nurses. A psychiatric nurse at Bellevue in New York City, Margery Weyrauch Smith, brought along her daughter, a physician, who was completing her pediatric residency in Albany.

“She wanted to show off her doctor daughter,” Harry Garry said, with a glint in his eye. He said that, as soon as he laid eyes on Dr. Margery Smith, he knew she was the one for him. Harry Garry looked directly at her as he sang, “Some enchanted evening, you will see a stranger. You will see her laughing across a crowded room…And somehow you’ll know….”

Dr. Smith had just 17 days left from that Saturday, the 30th of June in 1953, before her stint as chief resident of pediatrics at Albany Medical Center would be over. Harry Garry said he knew he had to move fast. He asked her to a square dance at Pat’s Ranch on Gun Club Road in Altamont the next Saturday; she accepted. Later, he decided that was too long to wait and took her dancing mid-week at the old DeWitt Clinton Hotel in Albany. “We danced, we talked,” he said. “And, when I took her to her apartment, I said, ‘You know, Marge, I’m going to marry you.’ She laughed like hell.”

Dr. Smith returned to Long Island, perhaps to pursue the career she had envisioned, as an urban pediatrician but, according to Judge Garry, Harry Garry wrote her every day, sometimes more than once. The differences between them seemed large: He was 44; she was 27; he was Catholic, she was Episcopalian; she was a highly educated physician, he was a self-schooled, philosophical farmer. Dr. Smith was not limited by expectations. As a teenager, she knew she wanted to be a doctor, although she was told at school that was impossible. Her parents stood behind her and, at age 16, she followed others in her family, and entered Syracuse University. In 1950, she was graduated from the Syracuse University College of Medicine. This was in an era when only 5 percent of American doctors were women.

“She wanted to be a doctor with a driving passion,” said her daughter. “She worked hard; chemistry did not come readily… She was a pioneer.” By the end of the summer of 1953, Dr. Smith was determined to marry Harry Garry. Dr. Smith’s mother was “not keen” on the match, said Judge Garry. “Her mother said she wouldn’t come to the wedding,” said Charles Garry; Dr. Smith replied calmly, “I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll miss you.” He concluded, “My grandmother showed up at the wedding and became very fond of my father.”

“He completely won her over with his character and his tremendous devotion to my mother,” said Judge Garry. “My father was not an easy man. If my mom had been any less strong of a woman, he would have steamrolled her. She was strong in her own right, and he took great pride in her work.”

“They were an unlikely couple — the farmer, performer, and once-upon-a-time rake and this Long Island girl who was a doctor,” said Charles Garry. “They had good chemistry.”

Parenting was “a team effort”

The relationship between his parents, Charles Garry said, served as a good model for their children. Speaking of his own wife, Anina Lacour, a highly regarded veterinarian, Mr. Garry said, “Anina says I came well trained. She has kept her professional name and I support her work.”

Charles Garry, who now runs the family’s Hillcrest Farm in Berne, described the essence of his parents’ marriage this way: “The hay has to come in. The cows have to be milked. The phone rings in the middle of the night when you’ve got a sick patient.” His parents were able to adapt to the immediate needs and demands of their work and support each other, he said.

“So many times, if you’ve got a professional and a laborer, there would be a competition. But, with them, everything was equally important. I believe that’s come down to all of us kids; we all have long, stable marriages.”

His parents, Mr. Garry said, would work out their differences in rational ways, and, when it came to raising their children, he said, “They were exceptionally good at letting us fail without recrimination….

“Education was a big deal for my parents and they were pretty devout Catholics,” said Mr. Garry, so the children attended Vincentian Institute in Albany. Harry Garry would drive them to school and Dr. Smith would bring them home. “It was a team effort,” he said.

He also said, “My mom was extremely focused at all times, mostly on being a doctor…I don’t want to imply we were second; it was an equal thing,” said Mr. Garry. “She read to us at night, and spent serious time with us…. She was always reading, if not to us kids, she was reading a medical journal. She almost never had down time.”

When she did, Dr. Smith enjoyed playing the piano or listening to her husband perform. She also liked hiking with her children.

“You always knew what to expect with my mother,” said Judge Garry. “She was practical and entirely reliable.” And, although she was disciplined, Dr. Smith would intervene, Judge Garry said, “to make sure we kids had some fun.” This intervention from toil on the farm might be as simple as going out for ice cream, she said.

Doctor to the core

The family lived modestly. Charles Garry remembered living at first in a small trailer that was just eight feet wide, and how an addition was built on — a doctor’s waiting room and office. He doesn’t remember ever being scolded for getting into mischief with medical equipment; neither were his siblings. The boundaries were clear in the small space and there was respect for his mother’s profession.

“The office opened onto my parents’ bedroom,” he recalled, and he and his brother, Franklyn, had bottom beds in a small room while his sister, Johanna, had a pull-out top bed. (Elizabeth, the youngest, hadn’t been born yet.)

“In 1957,” he said, “My dad ran himself over with the tractor and was in a full-body cast for six months.” Dr. Smith managed the farm, their children, and her medical practice.

More space was added in 1960 and, finally, in 1968, the trailer was pulled out, Mr. Garry said. The family was never wealthy. “My mother never had a color TV,” he said. “The first new car she bought was in 1965, a standard family sedan. We drove that car so long.”

He recalled that the car had “MD” license plates and once, when Dr. Smith was driving to Clarksville with her eldest child as a passenger, she was stopped by the police. Charles Garry clearly recalls the officer saying, “I thought the plates were stolen; a doctor wouldn’t have a rusty car like that.”

Judge Garry has a vivid childhood recollection as well. She went with her mother to visit her grandmother at the nursing home in Guilderland Center, and was troubled by the experience. She asked her mother, “How can you stand this week after week?”

She recalls her mother, who was the medical director at the nursing home, answering, “God has a plan, and I don’t know what that plan is. My role is to help people the best I can.” Dr. Smith, during her lifetime, had expressed a similar philosophy about her son, David Michael Garry, who was born with disabilities. Although he couldn’t swallow, she kept him alive much longer than experts thought possible, because she learned to feed him by massaging him. He died on his third birthday. But Dr. Smith said, philosophically, that the experience allowed her later to help the mother of a patient who suffered from the same malady.

After Judge Garry’s first year away at college, she spent the summer as the receptionist for Dr. Smith. “That was when my eyes were opened,” Judge Garry said. “I had known her as Mom. She was always available; it might take a minute, but she was there. That summer, I got to see how hectic that was. Until then, she had just been in the back of the house.”

Her daughter that summer got to witness Dr. Smith “providing the highest possible level of care…That level of devotion was stunning,” she said. “She was a great mom, but the central core of her was being a doctor.”

Dr. Smith retired from her practice at age 71. “Medicine changes quickly,” said Judge Garry, “and she was clear eyed in seeing where she was.”

“A life of integrity”

Each of Dr. Smith’s four children spoke at her memorial service Sunday at the Helderberg Evangelical Lutheran Church in Berne.

Johanna Halsey, a math professor, stood before the congregation with her family at her side; both of her sons laid a comforting hand on her as she spoke about the death of her mother being the end of a generation. She said her mother had led “a life of integrity,” connected to family and community.

Franklyn Garry, a veterinarian and professor, said it was “staggering” to listen the day before during calling hours at the funeral home to all the people his mother had helped. “You know, your mom saved my daughter,” one person told him.

Dr. Smith, he said, was a woman in a man’s world in the 1950s, and took on rural health needs with “tremendous grace.” She also helped a sometimes “clumsy” farmer, he said and was “the backbone of the family.” Judge Garry said, “My mother was the toughest, strongest person I have ever known.” She also described Dr. Smith as “completely practical” and said of dementia, “This disease that took her was pitiless, merciless.”

Charles Garry’s siblings credited him with keeping their mother in her home on the farm in Berne as long as possible. “By the time she came to live near me in a nursing home,” said Judge Garry, “she was not in pain. Her death was peaceful, surrounded by family.”

She had said earlier, “My mother had a very deep faith. She did not fear death. She saw death clearly.” Judge Garry related how Dr. Smith, as the medical director at the nursing home or when called to the scene of an accident in the middle of the night, “had to make these pronouncements” about death.

Dr. Smith stayed at her home on the farm in Berne until May 2011 when she moved to Atria Guilderland’s Memory Care Unit, where she was joined by her sister. This June, she moved to a nursing home near Judge Garry.

“Being a doctor was central to her identity and life purpose,” said Judge Garry. “In her final days in the nursing home, we advised the staff to call her ‘Doc Marge.’ That is who she was.”

“If someone has a worthwhile life, it’s a time for sadness but it’s also a time for celebration,” Charles Garry said last week. “My mom and dad taught me, you can sit around and be sad or you can work at being happy.”

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Dr. Margery W. Smith is survived by her four children and their spouses, Charles J. Garry and his wife, Anina Lacour, DVM; Franklyn B. Garry, DVM, and his wife, Ragan Adams, DVM; Johanna M. Halsey, MM, MA, and her husband, Mark Halsey, Ph.D.; and Judge Elizabeth A. Garry and her wife, Betsy Cahill. She is also survived by her grandchildren, Justin and Trevor Halsey; Sam, Garry, Bonnie, and Jacob von Mechow; and Nathaniel Garry.

Her husband, Harry Garry, died before her, as did her son, David Michael Garry, and her sister, Mary Jane Smith.

A memorial service was held at the Helderberg Evangelical Church in Berne on Sunday. Arrangements were by the Fredendall Funeral Home of Altamont. Online condolences may be left at www.fredendallfuneralhome. com.

Memorial contributions may be made to the Foundation for Upstate Medical Center, 750 East Adams St., CAB 326, Syracuse, NY 13210, to be used toward a scholarship fund that Dr. Smith established for an aspiring family doctor.

Additional Media

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  Proud parent: Dr. Margery Smith, in 2009, holds a scrapbook she compiled about the career of her daughter, Elizabeth, who had just been named a judge in the state’s Appellate Division. Dr. Smith was equally proud of her other children — Charles, who runs Hillcrest Farm in Berne; Franklyn, a professor at Colorado State Veterinary College; and Johanna, a math professor at Dutchess Community College.

Sources

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