The Dash Between: Maggie Terry cooked her way to Oberlin students’ hearts
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Maggie Terry, who ran the Lord-Saunders Dining Hall at Oberlin College’s Afrikan Heritage House, endeared herself to students by cooking their favorite comfort foods, designing costumes for dance programs and offering motherly counsel.
She reached out to them beyond the walls of the AHH cultural center and after their years as students.
“Maggie was instrumental with many, many black alumni — feeding them in her home, lending money to them when in need, or just being that mother to them while away from their own mothers,” Margaret Robinson, a college staff member, wrote on a campus Web site after Maggie died of renal failure on Jan. 25, 2010, at age 62.
Students and faculty honored Maggie for her service at the college’s first Black History Month Image Awards in 1996.
More photos below.
“She started here when she was 21 years old,” said Rick Panfil, general manager of Campus Dining Services. “I think she worked at just about every single dining hall that was on campus at some point or other.
“She was a very conscientious worker that really cared about the students. She was a skilled chef. She could out cook a lot of the chefs that were on campus.”
| The Dash Between: About this feature |
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The dates of birth and death that appear like bookends on a tombstone do not matter as much as the dash between those dates: The life that a person lived.
 Alana Baranick The Dash Between is an obituary feature written by Alana Baranick about regular folks from Lorain County and adjacent areas. Baranick wrote her first obit in 1985 when she was a reporter for The Chronicle. She wrote obituaries for Cleveland’s Plain Dealer from 1992 through 2008.  "Life on the Death Beat" She is the chief author of “Life on the Death Beat: A Handbook for Obituary Writers” and director of the Society of Professional Obituary Writers. She won the 2005 American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award in the Obituary category. Today, Alana Baranick examines The Dash Between December 31, 1947, when Maggie Terry was born in Demopolis, Ala., and Jan. 25, 2010, when the Oberlin College food services supervisor died at Life Care Center of Medina County at age 62. The Dash Between is scheduled to appear in The Chronicle every other Sunday. To suggest a story or make a comment, contact Baranick at abaranick@chroniclet.com. Read more:
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As a supervisor, she adapted to new technologies, trading pen and paper for computer keyboards and printers to handle orders, menus and other paperwork previously done by hand.
She knew how to get the most bang for the college’s buck.
“She was excited to work on menus,” said Adenike Sharpley of AAH. “The kids ate fabulously. Our plate costs were low, but the food was fabu-lous. Maggie was not only an excellent cook. Her food looked beautiful. It was garnished, and it tasted so good.”
She developed a special seasoning for her fried chicken, which Sharpley described as “Even better than my mother’s,” and used sour cream to en-hance her potato salad.
Maggie created menus around beans, ham hocks and greens for designated Soul Food Nights and was known for cooking Southern foods.
She was born Maggie Allen Edwards, the third of six siblings, on Decem-ber 31, 1947, in Demopolis, Ala.
Her parents, Ezekiel and Carrie Edwards, had been farmers in Alabama. When they moved to Oberlin in 1964, Maggie stayed with an aunt in De-mopolis until she finished high school.
As a teenaged single mom, she attended Lorain County Community Col-lege with intentions of becoming a nurse. Instead, she took a job in food ser-vice at Oberlin College in the late 1960s to support her two children, Tonya and Marvin Edwards.
“The managers really loved her,” said Mary Francis, a fellow food service worker. “She knew her job. She knew what to do and how to do it. They could depend on her.”
Maggie liked to have fun with the kitchen staff, but getting food prepared and served took priority. She was known to bark at her workers, demanding that everyone work fast, hard and efficiently.
“Sometime people misunderstood her, because she was a straight shooter,” Sharpley said. “She didn’t put up with any monkey business.”
She ran a private catering business and worked as a seamstress on the side. Maggie, whose brief marriage to Jim Terry ended in divorce, did alterations and made dresses for entire wedding parties.
“If you were to call her and say, ‘I’m getting married next month,’ she would sew dresses and cater it,” her daughter said.
She had an eye for colors, textures and fabric.
“She could sew without a (store-bought) pattern,” said Sharpley, who asked Maggie to create costumes for dance programs and fashion shows. “If I could tell her what I wanted, she took newspaper and cut a pattern out.”
Maggie did most of her cooking, sewing and relaxing at home in front of a television showing an episode of the “Law and Order” franchise. She even had the program playing while she slept.
“She watched ‘Law and Order’ all the time,” said her daughter’s fiancé, James Camel Jr. “When she wasn’t watching ‘Law and Order,’ ‘Law and Order’ was watching her.”
She took matters into her own hands when she saw her niece, Donna Lawson, heading down a path of alcohol and drug abuse that could put her at odds with the law.
“My Aunt Maggie said, if I couldn’t get clean and sober and become a good mom, she would take my kids,” said Lawson. “She took full custody of my kids. I never got my kids back legally.”
When Lawson got sober and returned home in 1999, her son was grown and Maggie continued to raise her daughter, Shaqwé, who is now a student at Notre Dame College in South Euclid.
“I wanted my daughter back, but I realized I had messed up,” Lawson said. “I was grateful for what my Aunt Maggie did. My kids needed that extra help, and she stepped up to the plate.”
Maggie often talked to friends at work about her family.
“She wanted to take care of her niece, nephew and grandchildren,” Panfil said. “The way she took care of her family was an inspiration to me.”
Contact Alana Baranick at (216) 862-2617 or abaranick@chroniclet.com.
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