Mary Freeman ("The Muse") was born November 11, 1943, and is a native of North Parsonsfield, Maine, where her family lived for eight generations until 1973.  She holds a doctorate in literacy education, teaches the mentally ill, and is a mother of nine children.

Mary has written plays, a novel, and numerous articles of the educational kind.  In her own words, Mary is "more of a scholar of anthropology and English literature than education, despite the degree."  All Mary knows about education has come from raising and teaching her own children over the last thirty-five years (having home-educated six of them over a period of twenty years).

The Kids!

One of Mary's daughters, Donna, has a web page at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.  Another daughter, Erika, has her thesis online at this web page.  As the other of Mary's children get web pages, their URLs will be added as well.

Mary enjoys playing the violin, painting, and tree climbing.  Education is her vocation, but writing her avocation.  Mary also was a finalist for the Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award for 1995 of the International Reading Association.

Her partner is Michiko Furuta, a calligraphy artist and teacher in Nagoya, Japan.

"The Muse" also has a community of friends and family members who offer their own commissioned services, from wood carving (specializing in canes) to professional works of art.

Michiko Furuta was born in Konan City, a suburb of Nagoya, Japan, where she has lived for forty years.

In 1980, Ms. Furuta completed study at the Nippon Shodo Senmon Gakko (Japanese Calligraphy Specialist School); since that time she has been an instructor of both adults and children in this traditional art.  In addition, Japanese businesses have employed her to address envelopes, testimonials, certificates of commendation, and letters of appreciation (etc.) in fine lettering, a skill still highly prized in that country. 

It was not until 1987, however, when Michiko Furuta and Mary Freeman became pen-pals as part of an international exchange between their respective students, that she became a partner and co-conceptor of "The Muse," featured in Glamour Magazine (September 1990).  The concept was to create original poems for customers suited to specific occasions and purposes, composed by Freeman and lettered in both Japanese and English by Furuta.  In 1989, Ms. Furuta was recommended to become a director of her calligraphy association Gyokushin-kai.  Most recently, the advent of electronic mail has greatly facilitated the twelve year course of correspondence between the partners as they struggle to render poetry composed in English into accurate and artistic Japanese translation.

Constance Ruggli (Leavitt) Hanson died April 8, 1998 in Portland, Oregon.  She will be greatly missed by her family and friends, who will always remember her humor, her love of travel and politics, her zest for romance, adventure and enterprise, her fine writing, her active patriotism, and her lifelong enjoyment of tennis and swimming, sports she pursued well into her eighties.  Her grandchildren always found her a willing partner in adventure, a sympathetic listener, and, above all, a personal advocate.  Scorning convention, she generated excitement in new, self-conceived plans and in the face of obstacles presented an almost inexhaustible optimism.  She responded to disappointment with imagination, courage, and a great sense of humor, the lasting impression of which, on all who knew her, being perhaps her greatest legacy.  Her response to natural beauty was in itself moving and memorable to those who observed it.

A native of Parsonsfield, Maine and a direct descendant of North Parsonsfield's first settler Amos Blazo, she lived in the house she inherited from her ancestors, still standing, opposite Parsonsfield Seminary at what is historically known as Blazo Corner, for 66 years, until she sold it in 1973, not without considerable regret.  Her grandchildren were the eighth generation to live on the land and the sixth to live in the house; her cousins, also descended from the Blazos, still live in the house across the road next to the little one-roomed schoolhouse, the Blazo School.  While she lived, it remained her dream to someday return to her home in North Parsonsfield.

the house in Parsonsfield
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Daughter of Harvard botany professor Robert Greenleaf Leavitt and Ida (Ruggli) Leavitt, Radcliffe, '01, she was herself a perennial student, attending Harvard Summer School, Pembroke, Simmons, the University of Oregon, University of Washington, and the University of Virginia in pursuit of a Bachelor's degree, and the University of Maine in Orono for a Master's degree in English history.  Her thesis, being published this year, compares the ideas of John Preston, a 17th c. English Puritan minister, with those of Hocking and Jung, disclosing Preston's belief that political action is a religious duty.  Certainly she more than considered this idea theoretically, for she regularly partook of political activism herself.  A self described arch-conservative, she boldly tore down SDS banners and signs at Harvard during the student riots there in the late 60s, the very prototype of a "little old lady in tennis shoes."  Earlier, in the 50s, she had enthusiastically waged war on communists, socialists, liberals, and other "fellow travelers" wherever she found them, though she resigned from the John Birch Society, of which she was an early member, disenchanted with the organization by the mid 60s.  Always an avid advocate of free enterprise, she attempted in the early 70s to start a small, fresh-water mussel operation on her land on the Ossipee River in Porter, with an AAUW grant.  Though it failed, her effort was remarkable and typical of her -- she was in her seventies at the time.  A fourth generation Unitarian, her religious liberalism seemed at odds with her political conservatism to all but those who understood the complexity and strength of her personal convictions.

She was married twice, both times to Hodge Jackson Hanson, landscape architect for the National Park Service, who died in 1997.  The couple married first in 1934, and again (after a thirty-five year hiatus) in 1988 when she was 80 and he was 84, residing briefly in Islesboro and Monroe, Maine before moving out to Oregon to live near their son.  They were married a total of thirty years.

She is survived by her son Robert Jackson Hanson of Portland, Oregon, who was with her when she died; and daughter Mary ("Mimi" Hanson) Freeman, of Monroe, Maine.  She leaves ten grandchildren, Robert's son Joshua Hanson of Portland, Oregon, and Mary's nine children:  Eve R. Wentworth of Brookline, Massachusetts, Rachael (Wentworth) Eastman of Chatham, New Hampshire, Donna Wentworth of Somerville, Massachusetts, Erika Wentworth of Richmond-upon-Thames, UK, and Steven Wickham, Joseph Wickham, John Wickham, Andrea Wickham, and Margaret Wickham, all of Monroe, Maine.  She also leaves one great grandchild, Alix Louise Wentworth Kalaher, of Richmond-upon-Thames, UK.

the family at the service
on West Pond, Parsonsfield
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She was interred on July 4, 1998 in the family cemetery in North Parsonsfield, Maine at Blazo Corner, where a service was held by her family members, relatives, and friends.