Remembrance: Longtime Wellesley resident Marguerite Helen Velte Hasbrouck

Marguerite Helen Velte Hasbrouck — some family and friends knew her as Marguerite Helen, others as Mugs — died June 4, 2023, at the nursing home in Newton where she had been in hospice care since August 2021.

Marguerite was born in Lahore, Punjab (today Pakistan), where her father was a professor at Forman Christian College. When she was three years old, her parents brought her back to the U.S. in search of better treatment for tuberculosis and osteomyelitis in her legs. A year later, she was told she should give up hope of walking unaided. “That’s what you think”, she told the doctor, sticking out her tongue at him. She cast off her leg braces and crutches, became a strong walker, swimmer, and paddler, and continued to delight in defying anyone who underestimated her strength, endurance — or wit.

Due to her illness, she didn’t start formal schooling until eighth grade, but graduated from high school at sixteen and went on to earn a degree in comparative government and religion at Barnard College.

Marguerite moved to Wellesley in 1959 and lived in Wellesley Fells and much later at the Phillips Park apartments. Her three children – “each very different, and each of whom I helped to be their different selves”, she would say proudly – all graduated from Wellesley High School.

As co-chair of the Bates School PTA, Marguerite co-founded the Bates Pumpkin Festival, which became an annual town institution that has continued for more than fifty years. After getting involved in Wellesley town politics through the League of Women Voters, she served as an elected member of the Town Meeting and the School Committee and an appointed member of the Advisory Committee.

Marguerite worked at a variety of administrative, editorial, and legal jobs including at Wellesley College, where her role included representing the college to the Wellesley Chamber of Commerce. In 1987, as administrator of the Arlington Street Church in Boston, she testified at a Congressional hearing on break-ins at churches that offered sanctuary to refugees from U.S. wars in Central America. She spent the last decade before her retirement as a paralegal at the Nature Conservancy, where she took special joy in being able to help protect the place she felt most at home, Lake George in the Adirondacks. She most wanted to be thought of as a writer and a musician. She studied the piano and organ, sang in choirs and choruses, and served on the board of the Old West Organ Society.

Marguerite was a member of the Wellesley Friends Meeting (Quakers) and a regular attender for almost thirty years of the Friends Meeting at the Mass. Correctional Institution at Norfolk, which she had helped organize in response to a request from one of the incarcerated men. She was one of the founders of the Mass. Criminal Justice Policy Coalition, facilitated Alternatives to Violence Project workshops at prisons throughout New England, and received a lifetime achievement award from the Mass. Department of Correction for her volunteer work.

Marguerite was active in Quaker witness for peace and social justice, including as clerk of several committees of the Wellesley Friends Meeting and the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends, as a contributor to “Peacework” magazine and a volunteer at the New England office of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and as a member of the national board of directors of the AFSC.

As a legal worker, Marguerite served on the board of the Mass. Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and worked as a volunteer with the NLG Military Law Task Force and the GI Rights Hotline.

Marguerite is survived by her partner of more than 30 years, James C. Casteris of P.O. Box 783, Winterport, ME 04496, and his family, son Robert D. Hasbrouck of Boxborough, daughter Dorothy J. H. McDonald and son-in-law Bob McDonald of Sudbury, son Edward J. Hasbrouck and daughter-in-law Ruth Radetsky of San Francisco, grandson Kyle A. H. McDonald of Concord, NH, and sister Lois Carstens of West Brandywine, PA, in addition to cousins, nieces, nephews, and many friends.

Marguerite willed her body to medical teaching and research through the Tufts Anatomical Gift Program. A memorial meeting in the manner of Friends (Quakers) will be held under the care of the Wellesley Friends Meeting at a date to be determined, in person in Wellesley and online.

Donations in Marguerite’s memory may be made to the AFSC.

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