Margaret thomas buchholz biography
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A book signing at the New Jersey State Library, Trenton.
Margaret Thomas Buchholz
Born in Manhattan, she was brought by her parents to Long Beach Island, New Jersey, just in time to be evacuated by the Coast Guard during a northeaster. She started her education in a one-room school in Barnegat Light. After graduating Cedar Crest College, she and her husband purchased The Beachcomber, a Jersey Shore weekly newspaper. He died two years later and she published it seasonally for 35 years.
She married architect Guenter Buchholz and lived in New York City, Princeton and Philadelphia. After a divorce she spent winters in Marin County, CA and Philadelphia, where she indulged her passion, Greek dancing. Buchholz joined a troupe and performed from Washington DC to Boston.
After her children were grown, she roamed the world: from Europe, to Cuba and Central America, to Fiji and New Zealand and the Middle East, including Yemen, Jordan, Syria and the North Afr
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Click on images to enlarge
Jo, left, and her friends in the Tidal Basin, Labor Day 1918. The land has since been filled.
From a review by Pat Johnson for Jersey Shore Newsmagazines:
When Buchholz visited the National Archives for records from the production department of the War Department, where her mother worked, she found letters Jo had typed, recognizing her initials. "Some of the buildings she described were gone but I followed up on all the places she mentioned and saw how they had changed. I also did a lot of general reading about the war. I'm big on details."
Jo joined other young women volunteering at Walter Reed Hospital to visit wounded soldiers, and at Neighborhood House, a settlement house set up by a philanthropic organization. Social work had its start in these gathering places.
Despite the horror of the war injuries the young woman sees, she learns to take it in stride. With gallows humor, she writes about feedin
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EXCERPTS
On February 21, 1918, Jo went to work at the War Department’s massive three-story temporary building on the köpcentrum. It faced B Street, now Constitution Avenue. Until the end of May, when she was transferred to the shell-loading division as a private stenographer, she maintained a hectic schedule and rarely stayed home more than one evening a week. Jo always funnen time to write in her diary, however, and often typed both entries and letters at the office. She inserted the long letters into her diary, and sometimes apologized to the recipient for the carbon, explaining that she needed a kopia for her diary.
A few days later, my mother transcribed her diary into along letter to her parents, who, unknown to her, passed it on to her former boss at the Sentinel. He wrote a patriotic introduction and gave it page one space: “Thousands of American girls are flocking to Washington to do their part in the winning of the war. To many of them, the experienc