ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 2, 1996 TAG: 9605310029
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
WEST WARM SPRINGS - Miss Maggie's small piece of the Shenandoah Valley is overgrown now.
The irises and daffodils in the back yard are beyond tending.
Her old crippled cat, "Puss," still lingers around the little house with the patchwork wire fence. She paws carefully past scraps of lumber and aluminum siding, or sits in the tall grass.
If a stranger comes around, she slips under the foundation.
When she's left alone, Puss mounts the front steps, as if to wait.
Miss Maggie - Margaret Mae Bee - left her simple home in January for a world of modern conveniences she had lived without for nearly 97 years. It's a world from which the hearty old woman never returned.
She was reluctant to leave at all. Her husband, James "Jim Bowlie" Bee, built the three-room, white clapboard bungalow decades ago, but Miss Maggie lived in it far longer without him than with him.
It had no running water. Just a pump in the front yard. No central heat, just an old wood stove. For a bath, Miss Maggie used a cloth and a bowl.
Her outhouse still stands in the back yard, a monument to hard living. Rickety and weathered, it rests cater-cornered in the yard beneath a vine-covered tree, some 45 feet from the house. Inside, a white toilet seat is bolted over a crudely cut hole in a piece of aging plywood. Abandoned wasps' nests hang in the corner.
The house wasn't much, but Jim Bowlie built it, and it was Miss Maggie's home most of her life.
So when the Central Shenandoah Planning Commission came along with money from the state's Community Development Block Grant to build new houses for this tiny enclave of mostly elderly blacks, Miss Maggie said no, she just wanted hers renovated.
When the workers came to hang the siding and install the plumbing, the commission put her up in the nearby Roseloe Motel. Her room had heat, running water, a toilet and, perhaps strangest of all to Miss Maggie, a tub.
She had stayed with friends and used indoor plumbing and toilets before, and a social worker apparently went to show Miss Maggie how to work the faucets, but the tub was still foreign. For a week, she didn't set foot in it.
But early on Jan. 25, a Thursday morning, for what is believed to be the first time in her life, Miss Maggie ran herself a hot bath.
She undressed, lowered her wrinkled, child-sized frame into the steaming water, and scalded herself over 60 percent of her body.
Miss Maggie died two weeks later in the University of Virginia Burn Center.
Her friends and caretakers wince at the irony of her death - that a woman who survived in frontier conditions for so long could be done in by a device the rest of us take for granted.
Some cast blame.
"I can't understand why they would put her in a hotel and not show her how to operate the running water," says Renee - pronounced "Reen" - Anglin, who lives across the street from Miss Maggie's house. "If they had just put her in a nursing home and not a motel."
But most people just pine for Miss Maggie and the things she did for them.
Though she spent nearly a century on Earth, for those who loved her, Miss Maggie's death instills the kind of ache that comes with the death of a child, of someone who died too early.
`Totally unspoiled'
Most would say Miss Maggie's life was a hard one, but Maggie never perceived that it was. Her world was small and poor, but she mined it endlessly, finding beauty where few others could.
Miss Maggie's folk art objects, her Popsicle stick wagons, tongue depressor houses and paper flowers, made her a celebrity around Bath County. But it was her ability to project beauty and wonder onto the conditions of her own life that made her the love of all who knew her.
"Her house, terrible as it was, was wonderful," Suzy Cleek Schrey says.
Schrey was just an "asthmatic child" when she met Miss Maggie, who worked for Schrey's doctor, Jeanette Jarman. In the late 1980s, in her shop near The Homestead in Hot Springs, Schrey began selling the crafts Miss Maggie had been making for 40 or 50 years.
"I think every house around here has something she made," Anglin says. Atop the television in her new home is "a little U-Haul" Maggie gave her. The delicate wagon is yellow, made of Popsicle sticks, with cardboard wheels, a toothpick axle and a cargo of miniature flowers.
Miss Maggie made her art out of just about anything: wire, paper, the "tongue pressers" she used to get from Dr. Jarman, aluminum plates from Meals-on-Wheels.
Jackie Haines started delivering meals to Miss Maggie 12 years ago. It was Haines who first asked Schrey to try selling some of Miss Maggie's art.
Miss Maggie bought herself a piece of carpet for her living room and a chair with the first money she made, Haines recalls.
The Highland and Bath Recorder wrote stories about Miss Maggie's art and ran a picture of her when, last year, she voted for the first time in her life.
But Miss Maggie never sought the attention. The simplest things pleased her.
"I'm as happy as a coon in a cornfield when the dogs are all tied up," she used to say.
She was eternally child-like, even in stature - well-under 5 feet, weighing no more than 90 pounds.
Her shoes, Schrey says, were "like the shoes they put on life-size dolls." When Miss Maggie wanted an Easter bonnet one year, Haines bought her a couple of children's hats and dressed them up with artificial flowers.
She was "totally unspoiled," Haines said. Miss Maggie once picked up a stone in Haines' yard and said, "Miss Jackie, isn't this beautiful?" It was an ordinary piece of driveway gravel.
A part of the family
After nearly 97 years, Miss Maggie's mind had become like a scrapbook that had been dropped and gathered back up in a hurry. All the memories were there, but not necessarily in the right order.
She was born Margaret Mae McDowell in Brownsburg, W.Va., on April 21, 1899, the youngest of four daughters and five sons.
Not even Miss Maggie was quite sure when she moved to West Warm Springs. But Ethel Massie, who is 90, says she met Miss Maggie when she moved to Bath County 71 years ago.
Miss Maggie worked as a nanny. Her husband, Jim Bowlie, worked as a caddy, probably at the nearby Homestead resort, and did odd jobs.
He left Maggie a young widow when he went out hunting one day and never returned. His drowned body was found in the creek behind the bungalow he had built.
After Jim Bowlie died, Maggie shared the house with her sister, Minnie.
"Minnie ruled the roost," Haines said.
They didn't have a television, because Minnie didn't want one.
The two passed the days reading to each other, usually the Bible or the Recorder. Sometimes they listened to the radio or Maggie played the guitar on the front porch.
"She sang some blues and she sang some hymns," Renee Anglin remembers.
Minnie fell ill and moved to a nursing home about 10 years ago.
"I remember taking Maggie to visit Minnie," Haines says. "They would sit and hold hands and look at each other" without saying a word.
After Minnie died, Maggie made some changes. She got a television and cable TV, for one thing.
"She played channel 2 all the time," Anglin said. That's a community bulletin board channel with no pictures, just white letters on a blue and red background and a radio station playing.
Maggie gradually gave away Minnie's numerous cats, too.
"She didn't particularly care for cats," Anglin said, "but her sister did, so she cared for them for a while."
Old Puss she kept, though, because the cat was crippled and Maggie didn't have the heart to let her go.
Miss Maggie never had children, but she loved everyone else's, especially Joshua, Haines' grandson.
"I remember her sitting in the rocking chair with Joshua, just crooning to him," Haines said.
Miss Maggie's only remaining relatives are Richard Wright, a great nephew in Lexington, and Earl McDowell, a nephew in West Virginia. Anglin said Miss Maggie wrote to McDowell every week.
Over the years, Miss Maggie became part of Haines' family. She spent holidays with them, and Jackie would take Miss Maggie and her friends to Kmart once a month.
Even after she moved to Arizona, Haines brought Miss Maggie out several times to visit. They took her other places, too, like Las Vegas and Seattle.
Once they took her on a boat ride - Miss Maggie's first - on Puget Sound.
"She was scared at first," Haines says. "Then she gets out on the front and we couldn't get her in."
They also took her shopping. Miss Maggie had tons of clothes when she died.
"She matched her clothes up pretty good," Anglin said. "She went on a shopping trip in Lexington the day before she got in the tub."
Worried about her home
The West Warm Springs rehabilitation program had been going on for two years. With money from the state, workers would build new homes for the residents next to their old ones. When the new ones were complete, the old ones were demolished.
Renee Anglin beams when she shows you around her new home, though the indoor plumbing still hasn't been installed.
She got the new house on a five-year forgivable loan. Basically, it's a swap for her old house. She just has to stay in it five years and she owns it outright.
But Miss Maggie didn't want a new house. She was adventurous in her old age, but only because of the secure feeling of being able to return to the home she'd known so long.
Miss Maggie was supposed to visit the Haineses again in April, to celebrate her 97th birthday, but Jackie Haines says said Maggie wasn't as excited as usual.
While back East to see her son in Harrisonburg, Haines visited Miss Maggie in her room at the Roseloe Motel.
"She seemed uneasy about flying this time," Haines said, recalling how Maggie's little feet swung nervously above the floor as she sat on the edge of the bed. "I don't think she liked leaving her house while it was being worked on."
Maggie asked about Haines' grandchildren, especially Joshua, and then Haines went on her way.
A week later, Miss Maggie took her bath.
It was early in the morning, probably before sunrise, on a cold, January day. Whatever lessons Miss Maggie got in operating the faucets didn't stick with her. Some say she forgot to put in the cold water. Some speculate she was insensitive to pain in her old age and couldn't tell how hot the water was.
She wasn't in the tub long when she started feeling nauseous. Probably weak from the heat, she crawled back into bed for a while. Still unaware of how grave her own situation was, she called the rescue squad about 7 a.m.
With third-degree burns over nearly two-thirds of her tiny body, she was airlifted to the University of Virginia Medical Center.
"I was afraid of going up on the burn ward," said Mary Hodges, who delivered Meals-on-Wheels to Miss Maggie. But she found Maggie in fine spirits.
Holding up her bandaged hands, she told Hodges she looked like "a little boxing bear."
But when another friend visited, Maggie asked her to please take her home.
On Feb. 8, Miss Maggie died in her sleep.
After a funeral at Piney Grove Baptist church, Miss Maggie was buried in West Virginia.
Missing Miss Maggie
In a gesture typical of her generosity, Miss Maggie bequeathed her entire estate to Bath County Meals-on-Wheels and to the county's Senior Citizens' Center.
Work on Miss Maggie's house stopped for a few months after her death, until questions about her will could be resolved. The renovation has since been completed, but because the grant that financed the repairs on Miss Maggie's house is forgiven at 20 percent a year, her estate technically may not own her house again until 2001.
Miss Maggie had little else to pass on. What is left is stacked in the house or bulges from a broken Amplers Pedigreed Poults panel truck parked nearby.
"I finally got the nerve to drive up there again the other day," Mary Hodges says. "And there was that spastic, spooky cat of hers asleep on the front steps." The neighbors have been feeding Puss on Maggie's porch every day.
Suzy Schrey says she's feeling better about Miss Maggie's death of late.
"With people in their 90s, you usually rejoice for them that they have moved on, but with Maggie, you didn't feel that way." But at her funeral, Miss Maggie was revered as an elder as much as she was missed like a child. "That helped me to feel that she wasn't ripped from us," Schrey said.
Jackie Haines' feelings are less complex.
"I miss her," she said. "I miss her a lot."
LENGTH: Long : 249 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. ``If they had just put her in a nursing home and not aby CNBmotel,'' says neighbor Renee Anglin. Miss Maggie cradles Jackie
Haines' grandson, Joshua, in this family snapshot.
2. "I remember her sitting in the rocking chair with Joshua, just
crooning to him"
3. "I think every house around here has something she made"
4. Miss Maggie never had children, but she loved everyone else's
The Lombard family has "eight children, so Maggie loved to go visit
them," said Jackie Haines of the photo she supplied. 5. "Her
house, terrible as it was, was wonderful"
6. Miss Maggie's mailbox (above) in front of her house in Warm
Springs toppled over during the winter renovations. Even after the
Haines family moved to Arizona, they continued to include Miss
Maggie in vacations. 7. The family snapshot at right shows Miss
Maggie in the Haineses' motorhome just before an outing.< CINDY
PINKSTON Staff 8. map of Bath County. Staff . color. KEYWORDS: PROFILE