WESTFIELD – Mary P. Hartdegen died Wednesday, December 4, 2013, at home surrounded by her children.
She had celebrated her 96th birthday on Armistice Day.
Mary Payson, the first of two daughters born to Harold Chase and Madeleine Fuller McDowell Greene, was born in New York City but the family moved to Bronxville, in Westchester County, and she grew up there with her sister, Betty, who predeceased her in 1977.
Mary Payson was educated at the Westover School and Vassar College and worked in The City at U.S. Rubber (later Uniroyal) prior to her marriage in 1947 to Carl Hartdegen III, a U.S. Naval officer. She lived with her husband near various naval installations until 1956 when he resigned his commission and began a career as an oceanographic acoustical physicist working at a research station operated on a U.S. military base in Bermuda under the aegis of Columbia University.
While a guest in Bermuda with her family, Hartdegen worked as a confidential file clerk as needed at the research station and was active in local charitable efforts.
She organized the first island-wide Halloween collection on the UNICEF model in the late 1950’s which benefited the Lady Cubitt Compassionate Association and the Committee of 25. She was active in other organized Bermuda charities such as the Pink Ladies and Sterling Stitchers of the Ladies Auxiliary of the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital.
After 25 years in Bermuda, the research station moved to Florida in 1981 to operate from the Naval Air Station at Cape Canaveral so Mary Payson and her husband bought a beachfront condominium on Cocoa Beach.
In Florida she worked as a freelance wordsmith and continued to volunteer her time and energy, delivering Meals on Wheels and working on efforts to keep the beaches clean where she perfected her technique of unobtrusively picking up litter she encountered and carrying it home, both on the beach and later on the streets of her Holland Avenue neighborhood.
Hartdegen was widowed in 1991 but stayed in Florida until she moved to Westfield in 1998 to be closer to her children.
In Bermuda Mary Payson had sung with The Bermuda Philharmonic Society and she continued her avocation in Florida singing with the Brevard Community Chorus, the BCC Concert Choir and the associated International Cathedral Music Festival Chorus, participating in three of the chorus’s European tours singing in venues such as Canterbury and Salisbury cathedrals in Great Britain and in Italy.
In Westfield, Hartdegen continued to sing, participating in the Westfield State College Community Chorale, the Greater Westfield Choral Association, the Church of the Atonement choir and The Friendly Visitors.In Bermuda, Hartdegen worshiped with her family at St. Paul’s Anglican Church, in Florida she was a communicant at St. David’s by the Sea Episcopal Church and she was a member of the Church of the Atonement in Westfield.
She is survived by her children; Ann Burden Hartdegen of Chicago, Ill., Carl E. Hartdegen of Westfield and Cynthia Payson Hartdegen and her wife, Kate Deviny, of Westfield; her grandchildren, Raylene M. Demorest of Pleasant Gap, Penn., Zachery H. Naldrett of Tempe, Ariz., and Sophia N. Hartdegen of Windsor, Conn.; her great-grandson Cyrus E. Holt of Pleasant Gap, Penn., her sister-in-law Georgianna Booth of Willington, Conn., grandsons-in-law Matthew and Daniel Schlotte, out-laws Michael Naldrett and Sean Holt, her devoted caregivers during her final years – Jane Sevigne, Wendy Burke, Joann Foley, and Alicia Bean – and several nieces and nephews.
The family will receive visitors at 30 Day Ave. on Saturday, December 7, from 4:00-7:00 p.m.
Memorial contributions may be made to the Lady Cubitt Compassionate Association, P.O. Box HM64, Hamilton, HMAX, Bermuda, the Space Coast Feline Network, P.O. Box 624, Cocoa, FL. 32923 or the Greater Westfield Choral Association, P.O. Box 1968, Westfield. MA.
Her remains will be interred at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge at the convenience of the family.
