Marilyn
Lenth Goodrich
1945-2005
Marilyn Lenth Goodrich was born September 12, 1945 in
Denver, Colorado and died June 23, 2005 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She
is survived by her husband of 37 years, Donald W.
Goodrich; her son, Christopher (and wife, Janice) and daughter, Diana
(and partner, JB); her mother,
Marjorie Holmes; her sister, Martha
Wills (and partner, Walter) of San Antonio, TX; and brother, Russell
Lenth (and wife, Jane) of Iowa City, IA; granddaughters Jamie, Sharon,
Karen, and Kari; and many other relatives.
Marilyn graduated from Highland High School (Albuquerque) in 1963
and earned a Bachelor of
Arts in Recreation in 1968 and an Associate in Electrical
Engineering in 1985 at the University of New Mexico. After a year at
Digital Equipment Company in Albuquerque, Marilyn enjoyed a
distinguished career at Sandia National Laboratories until her death.
She loved the outdoors; she was a Girl Scout, camp counselor, Girl
Scout and Cub Scout leader. Marilyn and Don built their cherished
second home, a log cabin near Mineral Hill in San Miguel county,
completed in 1977. She held the amateur radio call KB5DA and operated
as net control for the Duke City Marathon for many years. She was a
talented amateur cellist and played with the Symphony Orchestra of
Albuquerque and several chamber music groups; she recently began
playing the
mandola and dulcimer with the Apple Mountain Dulcimer Club.
Donations
in lieu of flowers should be directed to the National Kidney
Foundation, the CSICOP Center for
Inquiry, the All
Faiths Receiving
Home (Albuquerque), or the Fauna
Foundation (Chambly, Quebec).
Marilyn was the middle of us three children, and in a
broader sense she was the center of our family. It was Marilyn
that organized things, hosted holiday gatherings, and generally kept
the family glued together.
Marilyn did it all. She lived her life with enthusisam, and made
the very most of it, every day, in spite of the challenges of chronic
illness. She was the first of us to complete a college education,
and held good jobs at Harwood School and the UNM Medical Sciences
Library in the period after she married Don in 1967. She was a
stay-at-home mom while her son and daughter grew up. Then she got
more education and launched a very successful second career.
Meanwhile, she and Don built a cabin; she was an active volunteer,
especially with ham-radio organizations; she revived her interest in
music that had been latent since high school, and became very active in
that realm. I admire Marilyn and Don for their solid marriage of
almost 40 years (including a second wave of child-rearing for their
granddaughter Jamie), while all the rest of us had separations and
divorces.

One of my best connections with Marilyn in recent years has been
through our mutual interests in music. She played cello in a
number of
orchestras and chamber groups, later expanded to
folk and improvisational styles, and to more instruments (dulcimer and
mandola). Marilyn and I participated together in a summer chamber
music workshop in Montana (our old home state) in 2002. We had a
wonderful time there, but she could not return there on subsequent
summers due to the demands of dialysis. We played together for
Chris and Janice's wedding in July, 2004. Marilyn traveled to a
folk festival in Texas in the April 2005, and that same spring we
participated together in a reunion of the Albuquerque Youth Symphony,
two members of an incredible 175-piece orchestra. We had a great
jam session after the reunion, where we did a pretty decent job
improvising Autumn Leaves
(among other tunes) on mandola, horn, and Band in a Box software.
Memories of these experiences are real treasures.
Marilyn and I had many other kinds of good times together. And
one distinct category of our interactions is that sometimes, something
would just hit our funny bones, and we would find ourselves laughing
uncontrollably. These would be in response to odd situations, or
to one of Marilyn's famous verbal stumbles (e.g., "hindsight is
fifty-fifty").
Goodbye, Marilyn. Your life made ours so much richer. We
all miss you terribly.
Russ Lenth - July 4, 2005