By Steve Landwehr
Everyone's life has a story. In "Lives," we tell some of the stories about North Shore people who have died recently. "Lives" runs Mondays in The Salem News.
PEABODY — It isn't far from where Marion (Newhall) Spurr lived most of her life to where she worked most of her life. Easy walking distance, really. That's not just the way she liked things, it was her view of the natural order of the world. She didn't mind letting you have it, either, if you didn't see it that way.
"When I moved to L.A. — oh my God," daughter Edith said, rolling her eyes. Even daughter Marjorie's move to much-closer Georgetown was greeted with disapproval.
Spurr, probably better known to her thousands of customers as Tillie the florist, died Sunday, June 22, at the Rosewood Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Peabody. She was 90. She opened Tillie's Flower Shop on Lynn Street next to the Newhall family farm in South Peabody in 1940, and worked there until 1998.
Born Oct. 16, 1917, she grew up at a time and in a family where men ruled the roost. Yet oddly enough it was her mother who encouraged her to start her own business, and in many ways Spurr would turn out to be a thoroughly modern Tillie.
She got that nickname after graduating from the Stockbridge School of Agriculture in 1937, one of only two women in her class. A florist she worked for right out of college had a sister also named Marion, and to avoid confusion, he began calling Spurr, Tillie.
The florist never believed her when she said she would have her own shop one day. He would be one of the many people who would learn that when Spurr said she was going to do something, you could bank on it.
Edith and her sister, Marjorie, are convinced their mom chose to use the nickname the florist gave her for her shop as if to say to the doubting florist, "How 'bout them apples?"
Work and play ethic
During World War II, Spurr felt it was important her family contribute to the effort and since her brother was needed to help run the farm, she enlisted in the U.S. Army. But the scarlet fever she contracted at 16 had left her completely deaf in one ear and 75 percent deaf in the other, and she couldn't be posted overseas.
She served her time in San Francisco as part of the forces on the lookout for weather balloons carrying bombs the Japanese were launching toward the West Coast.
The Newhall farm once encompassed most of South Peabody, including the land where Spurr and her husband of 49 years, Lawrence Spurr, would later build the home they would live in the rest of their lives, a stone's throw from her parents and even closer to her grandparents.
When she decided to build a greenhouse and open a flower shop at the farm, she had to go to her grandfather to get the deed to the land, and it wasn't a gift. She had to pay for it.
Like many people of her generation, Spurr strongly valued her family and work. Marjorie said she believed families should stick close so they could help each other out, like her brother did by taking over the flower shop when she retired. She was troubled by the number of splintered families today.
She was by nature and belief a hard worker, but you couldn't call her a workaholic. There were vacations abroad, and every year the family spent a week on Cape Cod right after the Fourth of July, a slow time for florists.
She was a lifelong Bruins fan and season ticket holder for many years who had at least one sports regret. Spring is the busiest time of the year in a flower shop and Spurr could seldom attend Bruins' playoff games. So it was Marjorie who was in the stands the night Bobby Orr scored the most famous goal in the history of the National Hockey League in 1970, flying through the air into immortality.
And if it was summer, you could bet the radio was on in the store, tuned into the Red Sox game.
"I can still hear Curt Gowdy's voice," Marjorie says of the legendary announcer.
All in the family
Edith said her parents were united by their devotion to family, but had radically different personalities. Dad was gregarious and outgoing, mom tried to stay out of the limelight.
"She would never have believed all the people who showed up the last two days (for the wake and interment) were there for her," Edith said.
Marjorie married a man who already had a couple of kids, and Spurr treated them as if they were her own flesh and blood, right down to bossing them around like the rest of her brood. Spurr, who didn't like being called Tillie when she got older, had Alzheimer's the past couple of years, but she had her family on her mind until the end.
"The last thing she said to me was, 'How's that baby?'" she said, asking Marjorie about her daughter's grandchild. "You're taking care of that baby, aren't you?"
Staff writer Steve Landwehr can be reached at 978-338-2660 or by e-mail at slandwehr@salemnews.com.
