As a senior at Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa, Margaret Huyck (formerly Hellie) pondered her college choices and decided that “I would go somewhere no one else went.” She’s been forging new pathways ever since, most notably through her scholarship and activism in making the world a better place for older adults. 

While her high school classmates clustered at other colleges, Margaret set out for Vassar. She was not completely alone, however. Another Roosevelt grad, Tom Huyck, also went east, to Dartmouth. In high school they had been in the cast of “The Curious Savage,” what Margaret terms “a terrible play.” That experience seeded a relationship that blossomed in college and led to a long and happy marriage until Tom’s death in 2015.

Margaret and Tom moved to Chicago in 1961, where both were enrolled at the University of Chicago, Tom pursuing a law degree and Margaret a doctorate in human development.  She charted several new pathways while in graduate school. Although many of us remember the ‘60s as a decade of social change and progress, that was less true for women in academia—especially married women. Margaret was a student in U of C’s Committee on Human Development, a multidisciplinary program that was itself a pathbreaker. “It was wonderful in the sense that they took a lot of women students,” Margaret recalled. “But most of them were single, or they were older. It was one thing to be a female—my problem was that I had my first child just as I was getting my master’s degree. When I told my mentor I was pregnant, she said, ‘Well, of course you know we can’t give you a fellowship. We don’t support parenthood.’ She assumed that I would be like everybody else and drop out.”

The mentor assumed wrong. Not only did Margaret not drop out, but after the birth of her second daughter, she devised an ingenious way to get around the system and continue her Ph.D. studies: “I would go to the dean every quarter and beg for tuition to take one course for credit. And I would seriously audit another course, going to class and doing all the reading. Then I would spend time thinking about it in the park with the kids, which was actually a nice way to do it.” Margaret’s two daughters, Elizabeth and Karen, were born 18 months apart. “So we all grew up together,” she said with a chuckle.

Ph.D. in hand, in 1969 Margaret joined the faculty at the Illinois Institute of Technology, specializing in adult development and aging. She enjoyed a 40-year career of teaching, research, and service in the school’s department of psychology, as well as its multidisciplinary InterProfessional Projects program. Her work was recognized by the Gerontological Society of America, where she was a Fellow from 1969-2011, the American Psychological Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She also spent a year as a Visiting Scholar at the Norwegian Institute of Gerontology at the University of Oslo.

Beyond the Campus
Margaret’s work in the field of aging extended well beyond the halls of academia, work that continues today. In 1989 she was asked to help organize the Hyde Park chapter of the Older Women’s League (OWL), an organization she would go on to lead as its national president for 10 years. OWL engaged in activism grounded in solid research that was published in an annual Mother’s Day Report to the White House and Congress. “We were absolutely focused on ‘What do you do about it?’ Here’s the policy that we are recommending. Here’s what needs to be revised within the panoply of Social Security, for example. Here’s how you should make it better for women, who tend to be poorer than men, and live longer.”

 As national leader of OWL, Margaret made the tough decision to close down the organization as membership declined. “What we heard again and again is that women would say, ‘I’m not joining any organization that says I’m older. So I figured, okay, the baby boomers are going to have to form their own organization, because the issues have not disappeared. . . you have to prepare as a young woman and make decisions that protect you when you’re older. We’re gonna live a long time, and we pay a huge price for caregiving. I don’t want women to stop caregiving, because we’d really be in bad shape if we did that. But there has to be a more equitable way of making sure it’s not such a financial penalty.”

It didn’t take long for Margaret to find and take a leadership role in a new movement for older adults of all genders. In 2010 she joined the organizing committee of Chicago Hyde Park Village (CHPV), part of a national movement to foster community among older adults. CHPV’s mission is to “create a community of ‘neighbors helping neighbors’ on the south side of Chicago by providing opportunities for social engagement, educational programs, and facilitating volunteer support services and referrals to foster vibrant healthy aging.” Fellow founder Susan Alitto says, “Margaret has helped CHPV grow and thrive by serving as president and as chair of key committees, as well as being a major donor.”

Currently Margaret is sharing both her scholarship and her practical knowledge of aging by helping CHPV develop a series of workshops on end-of-life planning and caregiving. After four sessions, participants will have finished a document that not only lays out the necessary legal and financial information, but also addresses the mundane but essential details that caregivers need to know. “The little things matter,” Margaret says, “Who’s going to feed the pets and water the plants?”

Her experience with Hyde Park Village added a new and happy dimension to Margaret’s life when she met a new partner, Mike Wichura. And, she joined the Hyde Park Sounds Good Choir in its inaugural season. It’s likely Margaret has known its co-founder and artistic director, Jonathan Miller, longer than any other chorister. “Jonathan’s parents were in a playreading group that Tom and I started, so I knew Jon when he was in high school. He was known as the Boy Wonder of the neighborhood” [for his extraordinary music and mathematics skills]. When Jonathan told Margaret about the choir he and Sandy were launching for older adults, she invited him to present the idea to Hyde Park Village, and a number of villagers joined. 

Unlike many Sounds Good choristers, singing is not something Margaret came back to as an adult. Rather, it was something she added to her busy life when she and Tom joined the choir at the First Unitarian Church of Chicago. “Tom was having so much fun, I thought I should join the choir. But I’d never sung in a choir, and I’m not musically literate. So I was not recapturing something from my youth.” Asked what SoundsGood has added to her life, Margaret’s one-word response is “joy.” And, she has made new friends.

At age 85, Margaret continues to explore new pathways. She has completed three rounds of interviews and testing with University of Chicago’s “Study to Uncover Pathways to Exceptional Cognitive Resilience in Aging (SUPERAging)” at the Healthy Aging and Alzheimer’s Research Care Center. “SuperAgers” are defined as adults over age 80 who have the memory abilities at least at the level of individuals 20 to 30 years younger. Whether or not she qualifies for the research program, Margaret Huyck is already a SuperAger in so many ways. Her friend and colleague  Jonathan Miller describes her as “having a true servant’s heart. Margaret got into the field of aging way before it was cool; a trailblazer, she brings an international perspective, an intense curiosity, and a big heart to all of her professional and community work.”