Margaret Kennedy

While the gentle lilt in her voice remained forever grounded in North Carolina, Margaret, known as “Mott” to many, lived for nearly sixty years in New York City, arriving in 1957 after having completed her graduate degree in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley. She had returned to Charlotte in the spring of 2015.

Margaret was a gifted chronicler who cherished and maintained family history while also breaking from society’s traditions with a career in publishing in the 1950s. Research and writing assignments led her around the globe and resulted in articles in Fortune, Saturday Review, Foreign Affairs, and Life magazines. Her writings include an unfinished memoir centered mostly on the 1950s that she was writing in her later years and an unpublished 1961 novel that brings to life the months leading up to a southern city’s school integration.

She earned her undergraduate degree in English from Duke University, where she was an Angier B. Duke Scholar, was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society, graduating magna cum laude (though, as she notes in her memoir, she “would have been a summa if it weren’t for that ‘C’ in fencing”).

During her college years, she joined fellow Charlotte Country Club debutantes on the July 9, 1951, cover of Life magazine, describing it decades later in her memoir: “Twenty-one debs, decked out in their white finery, with white gloves up to their elbows, convened on an estate on a hot day in June…For whatever reason, I ended up in a prominent spot on the front, lower left corner of the group. I was sitting on the grass, my dress hiked up in back, no doubt looking as uncomfortable as I felt, what with the heat and bugs crawling up my legs…I was miserable and wanted the whole world to know it.”

Her publishing and communications career took her to Doubleday and Co., Time Inc., CBS, where she compiled the company’s history for the 1979 memoir by CBS founder and then-chairman William S. Paley, and the Columbia Journalism Review. At Fortune Magazine, she traveled extensively in the U.S. and abroad to gather material for major articles on business, sociology, and politics.

In 1970 she co-founded the Manhattan Theater Club, a major producer of Broadway plays and musicals. In 1980 she co-founded the Center for Communication, a media nonprofit that connects college students preparing for media careers with industry professionals and enhanced learning opportunities.

Combining her appreciation of the fine and performing arts with her love for her friends and family, she instigated many outings to shows, concerts, museums, Central Park, and lunches out, and many afternoon snacks of Brie and crackers, peanuts and M&Ms, and a glass of white wine or Coke.

She was a devoted daughter to her late parents, Frank H. Kennedy and Margaret Letzer Kennedy; a loving sister to the late Philip H. Kennedy and Mary Hunter (Kennedy) Daly; sister-in-law to the late Eugenia Daly Palmer.

Margaret is survived by nieces, Anna Daly (Bill Bachrodt) and Sarah Kennedy Unger (Michael); nephews, Franklin Kennedy (Jim Zuckerman) and Newell Daly (Meredith); great nieces, Caroline Unger, Emma Gray Bachrodt, and Mary Whitten and Sarah Dalton Daly; great nephews, Andrew and Christopher Unger and Hunter Daly Bachrodt; cousins, Joan Higdon (Charlie), June Houck (Doug), Joy Young (Bill), Lynn Grant; sister-in-law, Laura H. Kennedy and brother-in-law, George Daly; extended family members, Mary Ellen and Jim Haddox, John Palmer, George Palmer, and Julian Larabee.

The family extends heartfelt thanks to the staff at Southminster, whose care and dedication provided Margaret with great enjoyment of life and comfort.

Service will be held at a later time to be determined.