‘Smart as a whip’: Concord Monitor matriarch, Marily Wilson, dies at age 88

In a world where front-page headlines dominate, Marily Wilson was a behind-the-scenes leader with a quiet charm and a dry wit.

Born Mary Emily Dwight and always called Marily, she was a sturdy pillar of her family’s news company and its fleet of local papers across New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts, including the Concord Monitor. She served on its board of directors for about 50 years, many of them as its chair.

Wilson died on July 3 at the age of 88.

“If people like the paper, they should thank her,” said Carol Bagan, a close friend of Wilson’s for decades. “She was the wind beneath the wings.”

In the summer after she graduated from college, Laura Dwight was a photo intern at the Monitor and lived with her aunt and uncle, Marily and George Wilson, the newspaper’s publisher.

While the Wilsons seldom talked shop at the dinner table that summer, Dwight said, their commitment to local, independent news was an undercurrent of it all, from their politics to their humor.

“We were steeped in local newspapering as being the highest value in newspapers,” Dwight, still a photographer, said of her upbringing, “That direct family control meant that no other forces were operating on you, and you had the freedom to really be there for the community.”

She became a Concord resident 1961, when George began his career at the Monitor.

Marily kept enduring friendships in the city in addition to her family bonds and mission. A voracious reader, she was a frequent flyer of the library who kept her English degree in high gear by reading any British mystery she could get.

She was serious but never solemn, as Bagan puts it, with a subtly wry, even silly bent. She was an active member of organizations supporting women and children, including Planned Parenthood and the League of Women Voters. She was a dedicated parent to three children, Abigail, Elizabeth and Geordie. She wasn’t so into the hiking or sailing passions of her husband or the biting New England winters, but she was always game for an adventure.

Wilson “always knew the right thing to say, wrote gems of letters and was an unsentimental realist,” wrote her son-in-law, Aaron Julien. “Imagine a mashup of Dorothy Parker and Madeline Albright.”

Julien is also the current chair of the board of Newspapers of New England and a past President and CEO of the company.

Marily Wilson’s family roots were in Holyoke, Mass., home of what was the Holyoke Transcript-Telegram.

While Marily was a lone daughter with two brothers, she was also the darling of her grandmother, one of the country’s first female publishers. The “redoubtable” Minnie Ryan Dwight, as described in Wilson’s obituary, remained at the head of the Transcript-Telegram from 1930 to her death in 1957.

Marily met George Wilson over a game of cards in Washington, D.C. Working at the time for the Congressional Quarterly and out on a walk, she came upon a group who needed more hands for their bridge match. Both Marily and George took them up on it. As Bagan will confirm, Marily was a “demon bridge player.” George was not. But he made up for it in charm.

The couple moved to Concord in 1961, the same year the Dwight family bought the Monitor. George’s father-in-law gave him a job as an ad salesman, but by 1974, he had risen to publisher.

Bagan met Marily at their daughters’ nursery school, finding they both knew the words to the same campfire song that none of the other mothers seemed to know.

The two were neighbors, as well. When the Bagans moved to the end of School Street near Concord Hospital, the Wilsons “came with the house.”

Bagan, asked what there is to know about her friend, hauled out three cardboard boxes full of what can only be called house fly memorabilia.

For years starting in 1976, the two exchanged the same birthday card – with its pun on house flies and plane travel – adding their own little poems or riffs twice a year until they ran out of space. She signed everything with her full name, Mary Emily, and Bagan with hers, Carol Augusta. A card became songs, poems, comic clippings, pop-up books, toys and knickknacks, snowballing into an inside joke now in its golden anniversary.

“To the people who knew her, she was very proper, very ladylike, properly dressed. She didn’t use bad language, was smart as a whip,” Bagan said of her friend. “But she was also very good fun.”

George Wilson died in 2011 from Alzheimer’s disease. Marily had been a diligent caregiver who every morning sat and read him the paper.

“I know what that’s like,” Bagan said. “I’ve just seen the same movie, and it’s not easy.”

Marily, too, passed away from Alzheimer’s.

When George Wilson died, longtime Monitor Editor Mike Pride eulogised him as someone motivated by the idea that “a good newspaper was also good citizenship and good business.”

Marily had found the perfect partner, Bagan said, as she lived the same.

“She found what worked for her, which was not to be a central figure,” said Dwight, her niece. “Which was to be in the background, but always very clear about what her values were.”

Dwight, who later in life would serve on the board for the Monitor’s parent company,  pointed to Wilson’s resolve to maintain the family-owned nature of Newspapers of New England, which today owns seven local papers.

“At one point, newspapers were hot properties, and companies were buying them up, and there was a lot of money to be made,” she said. “The family made the decision not to go down that road, and she was a big part of that.”

Julien, the board’s current chair, said his mother-in-law was the company’s moral center for decades, whose sense of duty extended not just to her family and its company but to the people it employed and the communities it served.

Last week, Bagan waded through her box of flies, picking past her copy of “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly,” a pinwheel with spinning iridescent wings, a signed photo “To Marily…” from George H.W. and Laura Bush, and a beanie-baby that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a spider. She grabbed a few small, sturdy winged figurines and brought them with her to visit the Wilsons’ grave at Millville Cemetery.

“Her word was good, and she was very thought out,” Bagan said. “She was just herself… She was kind. She didn’t make any kind of a fuss about it.”