Margaret 'Peggy' (McMaster) Eesley

Peggy McMaster Eesley married Will on June 20, 1942 and raised four children with him in Columbus and then Marietta, settling into the 7th Street house that would be Grandma Peggy’s house in the next generation’s memory.

She is the figure who turns out to have done the most to shape the next two generations of Eesley life, not from any public role but through the sustained, patient practice of long-term investing. Chuck’s eulogy for his father puts it most simply:

“It was her wisdom, far-sightedness and patience in investing that inspired him to become a stockbroker, funded my grandparents’ travel in retirement, and paid for a large part of my education. Phone calls with dad always included an update of how the stock market was doing recently and a request that I use my education to make it go up again soon.”

Her dark, dry sense of humor went directly to her son Charlie, who passed a more diluted version to Chuck. “I failed to inherit the full dose of the wicked sense of humor my dad got from my grandmother,” Chuck said in the eulogy. “That’s why I had to become a professor where the bar for being funny is sufficiently low.”

In her final days her son Charlie would come from work to her house on 7th Street and feed her dinner himself, every day. The eulogy treats this as the quiet evidence of who they had been to each other.

The McMaster and Anderson lines on Peggy’s side — Robert Thompson McMaster the civil engineer, Alice Anderson McMaster the schoolteacher, Gilbert Clement and Margaret Thompson McMaster, Rev. Abraham Ramsey Anderson and Nancy Jane Shaw, plus Donald A. McMaster who ran the northeastern U.S. communications power grid in WWII — are documented in Bean’s 1985 register and queued as future entries.