Margaret Gantzler was told she wouldn’t see her children grown because she wouldn’t live past 30.
But Gantzler, who had scarlet fever as a child, made her own rules. She lived to see even her great-great- grandchildren before dying at age 88 on Dec. 27.
Gantzler didn’t just survive — she flourished. She had three children, held jobs, danced and, because she couldn’t sit idle, made hundreds of baby blankets for hospitals and a like number of lap robes for nursing-home patients.
The crocheting started when she heard several years ago that a new mother left the hospital with her baby wrapped in newspaper because she had no blanket, said Gantzler’s daughter, Margie Hersey of Westminster.
“That story touched her so much,” said Hersey, that Gantzler started making the blankets, and when she’d done about 10, all in pastel colors, she’d take them to St. Anthony North Hospital. She asked nothing in return but to visit the hospital nursery when she made her deliveries, Hersey said.
Gantzler also made baby blankets for her children, grandchildren, greats and great-greats, as well as kids and grandkids of her friends.
Then she began making the lap robes for nursing-home patients. She was still doing both after moving to her son Fred Gantzler’s home in Williamsburg, Va., in the last few years of her life.
“She made them constantly,” said a 60-year friend, Eathel Higginson of Englewood. “But she never wanted anyone to know what she was doing.”
Margaret L. Colman was born in rural Douglas County on March 7, 1919, and was reared in Englewood.
She and several members of her family got scarlet fever in the early 1920s. As a schoolgirl she went to gym class but could only watch as others played.
“But she was bound and determined” to live her own life, said her daughter.
She had some health struggles along the way, once surviving when doctors said she was “literally dead” after being given some pain medicine following neck surgery.
Margaret Colman met Fred Gantzler at a dance at Bivens Hall, on South Broadway (it no longer exists), and they married May 29, 1936.
They lived in Abilene, Kan., for three years, where she had a job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They returned to Englewood, and she worked for J.C. Penney for a while.
“But she was a home person,” said Higginson.
The Gantzlers and several other Englewood couples gathered every week to play cards or dance “every Saturday night,” often to the music of Fred Gantzler’s family’s band, Higginson said. Fred Gantzler died in 1990.
Margaret Gantzler made baby blankets until near the end of her life.
“I think she learned to sew from her father, Peter Colman,” said Higginson. “He did beautiful embroidery and bead work.”
In addition to her son and daughter, Gantzler is survived by another son, Richard Gantzler, also of Williamsburg, Va.; eight grandchildren; 13 great-grandchildren; and eight great-great-grandchildren.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
