Mary Margaret Wright was born on June 2, 1925, in Baltimore, Maryland. She was the fifth of seven children of Leolan B. Wright Jr. and Catherine E. Wright both children of Irish immigrants.
She recalled spending very happy times with her siblings John W., Dorothy M., Leolan B. III, Clayton M., all older and younger siblings Barbara C. (Sister St. Mel, IHM) and James F. at their home on Hilton Street in Baltimore. Soon after she was born her father began calling her the “Peg of My Heart” and the family always referred to her as Peggy. Her father began his career as a drug salesman from St. Louis Missouri but operated a pharmacy in Baltimore.
As a teenager Peggy got a part-time job with the telephone company to pay for her tuition at the local Catholic High School. Her fiancé Paul died in combat in the late stages of World War II. Soon after she felt called to religious service and became a member of the Daughters of Charity taking the name Sister Catherine.
As a member of the Daughters she was called to service administering an orphanage in Baltimore, teaching elementary school in Pennsylvania and teaching high school history and economics in several states. She enrolled in the graduate program and received an MA in History from St. John’s University in New York doing research at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park on Harold Ickes Sr., the Secretary of the Interior. Among her most famous students included John Ratzenberger a regular on the long running Cheers tv series (1982-1993) who would remember her with flowers on her birthday every year and members of the Biden family in Scranton.
In the early 1970’s she chose not to renew her vows and left the order and moved to Bowling Green to care for her ailing brother Clayton who was the Plant Manager for the Westinghouse Air Conditioning Plant. She started her second life as a historian, librarian, teacher and researcher at WKU. She began attending the Graduate Program in Library Science at Peabody College at Vanderbilt and received her Master of Library Science Degree in 1976 and joined the Department of Library Public Services at WKU which she would continue to serve in both full and part-time status until her 90th birthday in 2015.
As the Education Librarian she promoted research instruction, wrote the script for a film shown to all WKU freshmen, published a popular Walking Tour of the Libraries, and Launched the New Faculty Orientations for incoming faculty.
In the mid-1980’s she received a US Aid grant from the State Department to teach history classes at new University College of Belize in Belize City, Belize. She came to the attention of the Minister of Education who asked if she would train staff and organize the library at the Belize Teachers College and later at the Stella Morris School for the Blind. These successes led to an invitation to plan a new library for the new University College of Belize. Peggy worked with the architect and ordered and shipped the opening day collection for the new library from the United States. Two years later she was engaged to do a study of all Tertiary College Libraries in the country and published an official report for the Government of Belize.
After her return to WKU she trained a series of visiting Belizean librarians. She published three books and countless articles and reviews and was an active member of the American Historical Association, American Library Association and the International Reading Association in 1999 she conceived of the libraries’ first public lecture series” Far Away Places” in 1999 and a second series “Kentucky Live< Southern Culture at its Best” in 2002. She would help organize and plan more than two hundred public lectures held Thursdays at Barnes & Noble Bookstore through 2017. In her early 80’s she enrolled in the Graduate Program in Sacred Theology at St. Meinrad Seminary in Indiana becoming their oldest graduate and used her knowledge to counsel death row inmates at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville, prisoners at the Corrections Institute in Bowling Green and to teach classes for the Roman Catholic Churches in Bowling Green.
She made friends with a group of WKU Faculty Women in the 1970’s: Nancy Baird, Carol Crowe Carraco, Helen Crocker and Sally Ann Strickler who celebrated each other’s birthdays and special occasions for the next 40 years.
She traveled the world with trips to Russia, the Nordic Countries, France, Italy, the UK and to her ancestral home In Ireland and made more than ten trips to Mexico, Belize and Central America.
Last of all she loved to entertain and hosted countless dinners at her Park Street home before moving at the age of 94 to Arcadia Senior Living where she received wonderful care from the staff there. She was a most “unforgettable character” right out of a Reader’s Digest Column.
She was often heard telling people who inquired after her health, “if I was any better, I couldn’t stand it.”
She passed away on Friday, August 25 under Hospice care at the Medical Center, she was 98.
Funeral Mass will be at 12:00 p.m. on Wednesday, August 30, at Holy Spirit Catholic Church with burial to follow at St. Joseph Catholic Cemetery. Visitation will be held from 11:00 a.m. until service at Holy Spirit Catholic Church.
Funeral arrangements have been entrusted to Johnson Vau
