Administrators at Kingsley Elementary School in Downers Grove didn’t know what to make of Mae Marvin when she first applied for a teaching job, her family said.
Mrs. Marvin, who graduated from Elmhurst College in her late 50s, had started her teaching career at an age when many teachers are looking to retire.
Hired as a substitute teacher, she took on a particularly unruly class of third-graders and managed her first day without incident. She stayed on to finish out the five-week assignment and was still teaching at Kingsley until her retirement in 1979. She continued as an English-as-a-second-language teacher into her 80s.
Mrs. Marvin, 97, died on Wednesday, Feb. 23, while under hospice care in her Downers Grove home, said her family.
Mrs. Marvin came to specialize in teaching English as a second language, said her son, David.
“She really believed in those basic American values, that if you work hard and have a few breaks, you can get ahead,” her son said. “At her (college) graduation ceremony, we were so proud of her. I had no idea when she got her degree in her late 50s that she’d still be teaching 25 years later.”
In 1986, Edward Chen was a 10-year-old who had just arrived in the U.S. from Taiwan when he attended Mrs. Marvin’s ESL class. His skills improved quickly under her tutelage, in no small part because she came to his family’s apartment on weekends and evenings to tutor him, his sister and brother.
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“She was the one who taught us English,” said Chen, 34, now a pharmacist in Hinsdale. “I’ve called her on Christmas and her birthday every year since I was 10.”
Students also visited Mrs. Marvin in her home, a two-bedroom house she and her husband built on five acres in Downers Grove in 1942.The Marvins’ parcel was surrounded by farmland in what was then a town of a few thousand people.
They started the house while still living in Chicago, driving out every weekend and working from plans they made up as they went along. They slept in a tent until they raised a roof, said her daughter, Anita Smith.
The couple were married 56 years, Smith said.
The former Mae Crawford, who grew up on the Northwest Side and attended Schurz High School, didn’t have the means to pursue her education as far as she would have liked when she was younger, said her son. Her father, a cabdriver who spent time between fares at libraries, encouraged her to read.
Mrs. Marvin sold audiovisual equipment to schools, took correspondence classes and attended night school at community college. She graduated from Elmhurst College in 1970, just two years after her daughter finished her undergraduate degree. She taught as a substitute in several school districts before settling in at Kingsley.
After their children were grown and her husband’s salary as a draftsman went a little further, the couple traveled to all 50 states in a camper. They also visited Europe as part of a Lions Club delegation, her daughter said.
Her husband died in 1993. Mrs. Marvin traveled to Panama and Portugal and, at 87, attended a grandchild’s wedding in Australia. She toured the country for a week afterward on her own, her daughter said.
“She kept a map in the hallway of the world, with little pins for all the places she’d been,” Anita said. “It’s covered in pins. They had a really great life.”
Her travels informed her teaching, Chen said.
“She told me once, the more you travel, the more you see the whole world as just one planet,” he said.
In addition to her two children, Mrs. Marvin is also survived by five grandchildren.
A memorial service is set for 11 a.m. April 30 in Toon Funeral Home, 5140 N. Main St., Downers Grove.