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Margaret Ethel Shaw Nicodemus ’36

Margaret Ethel Shaw Nicodemus ’36, March 15, 2007, in California. Margaret attended Reed for two years. Following her sophomore year, she accepted a position at a newly formed Idaho Emergency Relief Administration. “This piece of luck was due solely to the fact that I had survived two years at Reed College—which strongly influenced the State Director, who had a vast respect for Reed,” she wrote in 1986. In 1935, she married Fred E. Nicodemus ’34. Margaret became Fred's secretary when he was elected to the position of lieutenant governor of Idaho. His next position, with the Social Security Board, took the couple to Hawaii for six years. Following the Pearl Harbor incident, Margaret worked as a cryptographer for the Signal Corps, and organized and taught classes in cryptography. The couple moved to Indiana, and then to Massachusetts, where Fred worked at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory, and Margaret worked in the Tufts College (University) library. She then took a position with the library of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, before the couple moved to Mountain View, California, for Fred's position with the Sylvania Electronic Defense Laboratories. Margaret spent 16 years caring for her parents, and lived in Maryland before returning to California. Fred died in 1997.

Appeared in Reed magazine: February 2008

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