On a crisp winter’s day, 100-year-old Peg Logan sits in her favorite wingback chair in the living room of her Harpswell home.
She flips through the pages of an oversized gardening book and muses about the vegetables she’ll plant in the spring. And the books she’ll read. And her favorite pastime: browsing the internet on her iPad.
“I’m always planning for the future. I can’t stop,” she says with a grin.
Margaret Elizabeth Miller Logan became a centenarian on Dec. 5. Two days later, she was feted at a birthday party at Elijah Kellogg Church, not far from the Neil’s Point Road home she shares with her son, Robert.
Peg also has two daughters, Heather Logan, director of the Cundy’s Harbor Library and a Harpswell resident; and Alice Logan, who lives in Salem, New Hampshire.
Peg was born in 1924, the only child of Harry and Alice Miller. The Millers were an upper-middle-class family in Burlington, Vermont. Peg’s grandfather founded and co-owned Vermont Maid Syrup, a maple syrup business.
“They went out and met with these farmers and bought up the syrups. Great vats were set up on the factory floor. The syrup was boiled to solids and stored,” Peg recalls.
Peg and an aunt, who were close in age, delighted in climbing into heavy cardboard boxes and whooshing down the factory’s conveyor belt. At the bottom were reconstituted bottles of maple syrup waiting to be packed and shipped out.
She still remembers the telephone number at the maple syrup factory, 947; and at her grandparents’ home, 814.
Vermont Maid Syrup is still available but has natural and artificial maple flavoring.
On this cold day, Peg sits a hair’s breadth from a warm fireplace, cozy in a cable-knit top and pants that complement her gray hair.
She thinks back to her 11 months and 20 days in the U.S. Naval Reserve’s WAVES — Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service.
She had finished her sophomore year at the University of Vermont. “As I was walking down the street, the war was practically over, and I went into the recruiting office and I signed up,” she says.
Relatives had served in the Army, but she chose the Navy because she preferred the blue uniforms. “I never looked good” in Army green, she says.
She was assigned to the Medical Corps and Chelsea Naval Hospital, Boston. That’s where she met William “Bill” Logan, who was recuperating from rheumatic fever.
“He had a very nice pair of bedroom slippers at the foot of the bed,” she recalls. “He was the only one reading a book.”
They were married in May 1946 and moved frequently. Bill had started college before World War II and graduated from Boston University after the war. Peg went with him and earned a degree in economics in 1948.
The couple didn’t have much in the beginning. They rented rooms with shared bathrooms or lived with Peg’s family in Vermont, where Peg worked at a paper company to help pay the bills.
After early pregnancies ended in miscarriages, the couple decided to foster a child. By then, Bill had been a Fulbright scholar, earned a master’s degree and begun teaching.
“I put my name in and pretty soon I was asked if I’d take a 2-month-old,” Peg says. “They brought her to the back door of our house. They handed me the baby and a paper bag with two bottles of formula and diapers.”
Alice was adopted by the couple. Peg later gave birth to Heather and Rob.
Bill went on to a long and distinguished career in education. He taught in New York and Vermont schools and was named Burlington superintendent of schools in 1956.
In 1964, he was chosen as Maine’s commissioner of education. He joined the U.S. Department of Education as regional commissioner in 1970. Later in life, he returned to teaching as a substitute in Brunswick-area schools.
The couple bought their first home for $5,000 on 2 acres in Newport Center, Vermont, in the early 1950s, when Bill was principal of the local school.
Peg joined garden clubs wherever they lived. She volunteered as a flower arranger at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In Wiscasset, Maine, she was president of the library. When they moved to Brunswick, she arranged flowers at First Parish Church and volunteered at Parkview hospital.
She is especially proud of pulling together a group of Brunswick professionals in the 1960s to talk about what she says was a burgeoning drug problem.
“We didn’t know anything about it. I decided we needed to know more,” she says.
Peg and Bill moved to Harpswell in the 1980s. When Bill died in 2008, the couple had been married for 62 years.
Today, Peg wears hearing aids and gets around with the help of a wheeled walker.
“I get my own breakfast and lunch. I still wash the dishes,” she says.
She reads the print edition of the Sunday New York Times from cover to cover. She is concerned by the divisiveness in America.
“I don’t think hope is enough,” she says. “We really have to work at this. I’m sorry I won’t be here to help.”
At the end of the day, she wants people to know she’s had a good life. “I had a lot of love. I gave it and received it.”
She wonders about heaven. “The thing that bothers me is that there won’t be anything to do up there. Do I just float around? I don’t think God is a person. God is love. The way most people feel, it’s going to be an awfully crowded place.”
In the meantime, her advice? “Just keep being curious. If you stop being curious, what’s the sense of being around?”
