Margaret Ellen Barrett, age 60, died Friday April 11. She was born on February 15, 1948 in the old Watts Hospital in Durham. She grew up in Chapel Hill and graduated from the Chapel Hill high School in the last class to graduate from the old high school downtown. She attended Brandeis University and later UNC-CH, obtaining first the B.A. and later the M.A.T. degrees. She had a variety of different employments over the years. When the Chapel Hill bus system was begun, she was one of the first bus drivers. Later, she worked as a pastry chef after first training as an apprentice in a small bakery in Lyon, France. For a time, she ran a sewing enterprise with a friend. For the last 20 years, she was employed as a teacher in the English as a Second Language program of the Burlington School System, in the course of which she became very attached to her students and their families.
Margaret Ellen had an astonishingly wide range of friends and made new ones wherever she went. The door of her home in Alamance County was open to all and she was unfailingly generous to all who came. Barriers of class and culture did not exist for her and she seemed able to pick up new languages effortlessly. Despite the amount of time she devoted to people, she was better read in several languages than most people are in one. She was larger than life and will be greatly missed by all who had the good fortune to know her.
Margaret Ellen is survived by her husband, J. Robert (Bobby) Barrett; her daughter, Mary Sophia (Sophie) Barrett; her parents, Wayne and Maryellen Bowers; her sister Ruth Bowers of Highland Park, New Jersey; and her brothers John Bowers of Ithaca, New York and Wayne Bowers of Sitka, Alaska.
Funeral arrangements are private; a gathering in her memory will be held at a later date. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to UNC Hospice, 480 Hillsboro St., Suite 800, P.O. Box 1077, Pittsboro, NC 27312.