Margaret Elizabeth Gray

    "Miss Gray"

Excerpt from the special "Margaret Gray" section in My Darling Anna

                    The Final Curtain Call - Part I

Margaret Gray stood in the wings as the company took its final curtain call to wildly enthusiastic applause.  This operetta,  Kismet, had been a grand success like most of the operettas in all of the years back to 1938.  That was the opening year of a striking new and modern Bellingham High School.  The operettas had begun that first year with Victor Herbert's, The Red Mill which began a long and unbroken succession of operettas performed on the stage of Bellingham High’s 1,735 seat high school auditorium. Margaret was fond of telling her budding thespians, “their house was larger than most of the theaters on New York’s Broadway.”

 Margaret Gray was a large and matronly woman wearing an old fashioned gown which hung to the floor and draped her ample frame.  Her gray hair was tastefully tied back in her customary bun and she presented her usual mien of inner peace, dignity and almost motherly interest in her students. 

 She had been a teacher in Bellingham schools for 45 years,  first at Lowell, then Fairhaven High School, then after the fire that destroyed Fairhaven High, the two over-crowded years at Whatcom, and finally for the last 20 years at the consolidated Bellingham High School. 

 This 1958 production, Kismet was to be her last ,as she would retire at the end of the school year.   She would be 65 on the upcoming April 16th.   Margaret Elizabeth Gray had become an icon, “Miss Gray”, the drama teacher:  “Miss Gray”  the beloved and respected councilor to all who aspired to the stage, who respected the language, who loved the theater:  “ Miss Gray,” who each year gathered the talented and interested young people in the High school who dreamed of dramatic glory or simply responded to the beauty of language and theater, who were beginning to find in themselves a talent for singing or speech or performance. She was beloved for nurturing their budding talents with her skill, wisdom and grace.

 For a moment as she watched her young wards taking their bows her thoughts drifted back to her father, long gone these thirty-six years.  Her father Dr. Will Gray, who had always loved theater.  She knew that he would have been proud of the legacy she had created, and for passing his love of drama on, through her, to those hundreds, no, thousands of young students that she had taught. She thought of her mother, Anna, whose career as a teacher had nurtured her own passion for the profession. 

 As the waves of applause flooded the stage the realization that this would be her last curtain call overcame her. She grasped the heavy folds of curtain beside her and closed her eyes.  The passing of time and years and lives and the story of her family replaced the happy sounds around her. 

Margaret Gray Special Edition
of My Darling Anna

Margaret Gray Tribute and Remembrances

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