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Wayne and I got together a few times at their home in the Tucson Mountain foothills after Marge was moved. He and I rummaged through her notes, trying to collect them into some sort of order and to date them as accurately as possible. The notes were sparse, and most of them reiterated ideas that she had formulated many years before. Her personal letters were not shared with me. Wayne intended to read through them first and then pass along those that he thought would be relevant to the anthology. Regrettably, he passed away less than a year after Marge died, and the selection of letters was never made. Her personal memorabilia are now in the estate that was left to her family. But I feel that nothing new would have been revealed in those letters. Marge was not inclined to write down or even to discuss personal issues, and she scrupulously avoided gossip, though she was well aware of disagreements, frictions, jealousies, and peccadilloes among her colleagues and students over the years.
H’Doubler’s notes that I did collect were, typically, handwritten on a scrap of paper, then cut out and pasted within a previously cut window in an ordinary sheet of lined, three-ringed notepaper. Her intention was to collect these notes, to put them in a clip binder, then to record further comments in the margins as she read and re-read them. These notes are, in fact, mottos; very similar and in some instances identical to the mottos that head up the chapters in her 1940 book, Dance: A Creative Art Experience. My interpretation is that, from about 1975 until 1980 when she ceased to jot down her notes in this fashion, H’Doubler summed up her long and productive career, and indeed her life, in a collection of ten or twelve mottos. I believe, further, that she was in the process of prioritizing those mottos, trying to get to “the beginning and the ending of it all” as she so often said (Chapter Seventeen, “Margaret H’Doubler’s Mottos in Context,” enumerates those mottos at length).