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Pieces of Seven: Remembering Rosalie Maggio, A Beloved Sister

In her book “Pieces of Eight: Still Best Friends After All These Years,” Rosalie Maggio shared stories told through the voices of each of the eight Maggio siblings and their favorite memories of growing up in Fort Dodge.

With the Sept. 18 death of the woman who was a world-renowned author, the oldest of one of the city’s best-known and closest-knit families, there are now seven Maggio siblings to share her legacy.

“We all miss her terribly,” said her brother Mark. “As our eldest sibling, she set the tone in so many ways in our family, and she was so important to all of our development.”

Said another brother, Frank, second-born to Rosalie by 14 months, “She and I were best buddies in Victoria (Texas) as Mom and Dad started out with the two of us. As we grew, she developed into this person with great compassion for literally every person she met. Her mission is now completed.”

This woman with the family nickname “Punky” (no one recalls its origin) was the “leader of their band,” to paraphrase Dan Fogelberg’s classic 1981 song. Her blood runs through their instruments and her song is in their souls, and yes, they are living legacies to the leader of the Maggio Band that comprises, in birth order, after Rosalie:

• Frank (nicknamed Ciccio), who worked in the investment industry in Michigan, Indiana, Puerto Rico and Texas before moving to New York City with Smith Barney. He retired in 1995 and lives with his wife Mary Claire in the village of Quogue, New York.

• Patrick, who has practiced law for 47 years in Pueblo and Colorado Springs, Colorado, and lives with his wife Cynthia in Colorado Springs.

• Kevin, who practiced government law for 20 years and worked in the private business sector and the nonprofit sector for 17 years; he retired to Mexico.

• Mary, who is retired after directingtheater plays for years at the high school level and also volunteering her time in helping new Americans; she lives with her husband Mike Pliner in Minneapolis.

• Paul, who practiced dentistry for 36 years, retiring in 2016, and lives with his wife Terry in Madison, Wisconsin.

• Mark, who is a retired professor, teaching at Iowa State University, George Mason University and Des Moines Area Community College in Boone, Carroll and Ames, and now a part-time farmer near Story City.

• And the youngest, Matt, who has lived in Fort Dodge with his wife Laura since 1986, when he began his dentistry practice, initially working for 12 years with his father, Paul, who practiced for 60 years before retiring. The age span between Rosalie and Matt is 16 years.

In her 77 years on this Earth, Rosalie Maggio left a large footprint.

She was on the forefront of popularizing inclusive language and women’s quotations as author of hundreds of articles and 24 books – including “How to Say It: Choice Words, Phrases, Sentences & Paragraphs,”a 3-million-copy bestseller written, she said, “for busy people, people who were quite capable of writing great letters if only they had the time.”

Her 1988 work, “The Nonsexist Word Finder: A Dictionary of Gender-Free Usage,” was one of the first, if not the first, practical guides to using inclusive language. Its latest incarnation in 2015, “Unspinning the Spin: The Women’s Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language”, had a posthumous online relaunch in mid-October, a month after her death, fulfilling Maggio’s desire for her work to be accessible to everyone and easy to reference.

“It is bittersweet to launch this new language resource without her,” said Julie Burton, president and CEO of the Women’s Media Center. “She knew that every word mattered, and that language is a powerful tool to fuel women’s equality and the work of the feminist movement.”

Maggio produced eight published collections of quotations from famous women, adding women’s voices back into the historical record with sayings from biblical times to the present and published as “The Beacon Book of Quotations by Women.”

More recently, Maggio was the resurrector of the long-forgotten French daredevil, athlete, and pilot Marie Marvingt, who set the world’s first women’s aviation records, with her 2019 book, “Marie Marvingt, Fiancee of Danger: First Female Bomber Pilot, World-Class Athlete and Inventor of the Air Ambulance.”

An anonymous reviewer once wrote this: “Rosalie Maggio is a fast-talking, choppy-sentenced, witty, successful woman. Her subject matter of gender-correct language is important, but I was much more struck by her person. She is a woman’s woman.”

Fame never got to her head, said her sister Mary: “I’m not bragging, but it’s hard to find a braggart among my family and friends who grew up in Fort Dodge. The example foremost in my mind was my sister. Rosalie was simply unable to brag. I’d have to drag things out of her. You worked with Gloria Steinem/Lily Tomlin/Geena Davis?! You won what award?! You sold how may copies?!

“There was a humility about Rosalie that you didn’t realize until you left the conversation. She was always more interested in you than you could be in her. Her selflessness showed in her interest in people. She’d rather know about you than talk about her. She was humble, generous in spirit and a person of endless energy and vitality.”

Patrick Maggio believes his sister’s bout as a child with rheumatic fever, when she was a seventh grader at Corpus Christi School, may have set the stage for her career. He explains:

“In 1901 Fort Dodgers, with a lot of foresight, sought and received $30,000 from Andrew Carnegie to build a magnificent library on First Avenue North. In my Corpus Christi grade school years, it was my job to go to the library each week and pick up Punky’s weekly selection of books. Usually six to eight books. I’d often spend lots of time at the 3×5 index card catalog cabinet researching some of the subjects Punky had requested. Punky was suffering from rheumatic fever and was confined to home.

“When I returned home with her books, she always gave me a sucker and complimented my hard and wise work. Punky was energizing and building my self-esteem. She never missed an opportunity to compliment her siblings -even when they hadn’t done such a good job.

“Her rich interaction with the Fort Dodge Public Library was no doubt a significant component in her development which resulted in her becoming a world-class author and a very special person to all who knew her. Her helping me to develop self-esteem may be a factor contributing to my successful 47- year law practice.”

Rosalie Maggio’s love of books stayed with her until the very end, when she succumbed to pancreatic cancer, said her husband of 52 years, David Koskenmaki, of La Crescenta, California, who added:

“Her legacy: the tens of thousands of quotations by women that she unearthed, always from the original sources. She found and rescued many obscure and forgotten women who had important things to say. She read thousands of books. Even toward the end she was still borrowing and reading books from the library at the rate of five to 10 per week.”

Rosalie was born Nov. 8, 1943, to Irene and Dr. Paul Maggio, in Victoria, Texas, where her father served as an Army dentist. She and brother Frank moved in 1945 with their parents to Fort Dodge where they and their six Fort Dodge-born siblings (all born at Mercy Hospital) were raised, first in a house on Second Avenue South and 12th Street and then to a new house in the Savage Addition.

The Maggio family has deep roots in Fort Dodge. Mark Maggio said that in 2016, George Mason University sent him to Sicily where he was a visiting professor at the University of Palermo. “It was a great pleasure for me and they were really great students. The students were fascinated with the idea that my grandparents emigrated from there 106 years earlier, landing first in Boone, then Fort Dodge. Then this guy returns as a professor, whose family has kept the traditions and connections (including three families of cousins) to Sicily alive. They helped me with my Italian language, which Rosalie and I both spoke, and thus we laughed a lot. She encouraged me to learn Italian in my late 50s, which I am still studying. I am so glad she did.”

After graduating from St. Edmond High School in 1961, Rosalie majored in French at the University of Saint Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota. She moved to Chicago to work as an editor for a surgical publication and it was there that she met David Koskenmaki, a student at Northwestern University who is now retired after a career as a metallurgist.

“Rosalie and I met when two of our friends had recruited us to help move a sailboat from Waukegan harbor to Chicago harbor in June of 1968,” he said. “Although both of us had previously been lined up in blind dates with others, this outing was definitely not meant as a date. It was entirely unplanned. Our friends thought we would never hit it off – we were too different in terms of interests. I was outdoorsy and athletic, studied science and engineering. She was intellectual, studied art, philosophy, literature, languages and such. But in a way we complemented and appreciated each other. I quickly recognized her ability to empathize with others, her graciousness, her intelligence, her passion, and her love of life.

“We spent that sailboat trip talking and by the time we reached Chicago three hours later I knew I wanted to spend as much time as possible with her and I hoped she felt the same way about me. By that fall we planned to get married and did.” They were married Dec. 28, 1968, in the chapel of the Marian Home in Fort Dodge.

After a move to Ames where David earned his PhD at Iowa State University, the couple moved to Middletown, Ohio, for six years and then to St. Paul in 1979. The family lived there until 2001 when they moved to California.

Their three children all live in California: Liz, a veterinarian at an animal hospital in Burbank, married to Anthony Ausgang; Katie, director of station relations and communications for Independent Television Services in San Francisco, married to Jason Middleton with one child, Margot; and Matt, who composes music for reality TV (Survivor, American Chopper) for Vanacore Music in Los Angeles, married to Nora with children Zoe and Evy.

“During my entire life I had wanted a horse,” daughter Liz said, “but we could never afford one. When I was in vet school, specializing in equine medicine, my mom received her very first royalty check. With it, she bought me my first horse, Spotlight – a 3-year-old Arabian gelding, who lived to be 30. Her book ‘How To Say It’ put me through veterinary school, and covered the tuition for my sister in Yale and then Columbia University, and my brother at Berklee School of Music. My dad was able to retire from his position as a research metallurgist at 3M so he could pursue his love of the outdoors–kayaking, rock climbing, hiking, skiing, and snow shoeing. He was finally able to fulfill his dream of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada. That’s how mom was with her money, give-give-give, before herself.”

Matt Maggio said his sister credited her Fort Dodge roots for all the opportunities afforded her.

“She had a wide circle of friends, a strong faith community and many extended family relations,” he said. “Through our parents’ friendship with the Glaser family, Frank, Pat and Kevin each worked at Gus Glaser Meats during the summer in high school. Punky also worked for the Glaser family, but as a babysitter. Pat Glaser recalls that Rosalie was always ready with an original story or activity to entertain the children. And she could stir gravy and give the baby a bottle at the same time. Apparently, Rosalie learned a lot from her mother who was caring for eight of her own children.

“The Heddingers were neighbors in Savage Addition and Rosalie was their favorite babysitter. Joyce Hedinger noted that she always called for Rosalie first as she was the one her children requested. Little did these families know that Rosalie invented and practiced her stories and activities ahead of time on her siblings at home.”

Roxie Bunda Kaminski was a good friend of Rosalie’s during their elementary school days. “Punky always had a stack of books in her room and would often be reading several at one time. She had a wonderful quick wit and was always happy and making us laugh when we were there.”

Frank Maggio recalled that he was always two years behind Rosalie in school, from first grade through senior year at St. Edmond. “You must understand that she was an A+ student and always obedient. I often heard, Your sister never did that!…Your sister always completed her homework…Your sister got 100 on every test – and so on, for 12 years!

“I received a football scholarship to the College of St. Thomas. If it were not for her encouragement and insistence, I would not have gone to college. During my freshman year, she was in the same dorm at St Catherine’s as was my future wife. She set us up on a blind date. After 55 years of marriage, I still thank Rosalie for that introduction.”

The leader of the Maggio band never hesitated to encourage her siblings to try new things, Kevin Maggio recalled.

“For Punky’s going-away dinner for her freshman year of college, we went to Tony’s. She noticed a new side dish on the menu: oyster stew. Punky’s motto was: try everything life has to offer. I was six years younger and not as adventurous, but she convinced me to try the stew. Finally, I took a bite, gagged, ran to the rest room and spit it out. When I returned to the table white as a ghost, she fondly smiled at me and said, ‘Well, at least you tried!’ Six years later it was my turn to go to college and that meant a trip to Tony’s for spaghetti and meatballs, breadsticks, pickled herring, Marcella, and no oyster stew.”

Asked what were her mother’s Top Ten loves of her life, Liz responded: Family, Travel (France and Sicily were tops), Reading, Writing (children’s stories were her passion), Working towards social equality of all (not just women, but all under-represented groups around the world), Correspondence with friends and family throughout her life, Her roses (she nurtured her rose bushes and loved each one), The ocean and looking for treasures in the sand, Her office and surrounding herself with beautiful things that she loved (she collected inkwells, tea sets, and old, old books), and Piano playing.

The family had no inkling when it celebrated Christmas 2020 that it would be its last with Rosalie. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in July 2019, had successful surgery followed by chemotherapy and doctors felt that her long-term prognosis would be good. “We thought she had years,” Liz said, “she was doing so great. It wasn’t until June of 2021 that she started to experience pain. She was diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer in August, and died a month afterwards. She had tremendous pain, but hospice was able to help her manage it.”

The family got Rosalie home from the hospital two days before she died so she could be in familiar surroundings. In her final hours, Rosalie was surrounded by her husband and three children and sister Mary. They played her favorite songs, shared a bottle of French champagne, told favorite stories until she took her last breath.

Ever the writer and communicator, Rosalie spoke by phone to each of her brothers and sister to say goodbye weeks before her death and wrote a farewell letter to each of her children and to her husband. In the letter she wrote to Liz, Rosalie said:

“I have packed an awful lot into these years, and if I’m happy with what I had, you should be happy, too. I’ve loved every minute…Some people have unfinished business with someone who’s died. I don’t think we do. Talk to me about it. I’m still around, you know. You just can’t see me. Unless that weirds you out. I will be truly truly pissed if you and I don’t get to meet again in the next world. I’m looking forward to it.”

Her family plans a memorial for Rosalie next June in California and will live-stream it for those who cannot attend.

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