Margaret E. Smith
Margaret E. Smith, director emerita of Skidmore’s vocational bureau, died in August of 1959.
One of the original five founders of the Young Women’s Industrial Club with Lucy Skidmore Scribner in the early 1900s, Margaret served as head librarian for the club and for its later incarnation, the Skidmore School of Arts. She was also the faculty head of two dormitories, and she started and led Skidmore College’s Vocational Bureau, which helped new graduates find job placements.
Though she retired in 1940, Margaret resumed her leadership of Skidmore’s Vocational Bureau as a temporary replacement for Evelyn Nieman Akeley, who left in 1942 to take a war job. Long after her permanent retirement, Margaret continued to receive letters from her former students, some of whom called her “Mama Smith.”
Her survivors are unknown.