Martha Wood Kongshaug, 93, died at her home in Rye, N.Y., at first light on April 15, 2024. Her oldest and youngest sons were at her side. Her middle son, two daughters-in-law, and four grandchildren all made the trip to Rye during her last weeks to say goodbye.
Born on August 9, 1930, in Richmond, Va., she was the only child of Madge (Kessler) and Dr. Alpheus Hartley Wood.
In the summer of 1951, immediately following graduation from The College of William and Mary in Virginia, she attended the Radcliffe Publishing Course in Cambridge, Mass. The program was founded by literary agent Helen Everitt who would invite friends and colleagues to lecture. One of those guest lecturers was Cyrille Abels, the managing editor of Mademoiselle magazine, during its literary heyday, who asked Martha to come to New York and take the job of her assistant.
Recalling that watershed transition as a nonagenarian, Martha said, “So that was part of the big change, South to North, that was permanent for me, but that I always intended.”
After a brief stay in Catherine House, a residence for young women, Martha settled with two roommates on Gay Street in Greenwich Village. It was there she met her future husband, Olaf Kongshaug, a recent arrival from Copenhagen, Denmark. They were both regulars at Louie’s Tavern on Sheridan Square.
Olaf and Martha married in 1958. In summers, they rented a shack in the dunes of Lonelyville, Fire Island, which they filled with friends. Martha stopped working in 1959 with the birth of her first child. And, in 1969, with three children and just two bedrooms, the family decamped from Manhattan to Rye.
Always active and involved, while her children were in elementary school she launched and co-taught an afterschool Great Books program, served as a Cub Scouts den mother, and was a member of the PTA. Once her children were in middle and high school, she returned to freelance magazine writing. Her sons fondly recalled the time she brought them with her to Beacon, N.Y., for an interview with Pete Seeger, whose songs they had listened to from an early age.
Once she had seen her sons safely off to college, she returned to work full time as a writer and editor at the national headquarters of the March of Dimes Foundation in White Plains, N.Y. She retired in the mid-1990s.
Martha and Olaf Kongshaug shared a love of the beach. They chose the house in Rye because it was walking distance to Oakland Beach. Year-to-year, for a week in the off-season, they booked the same room in Kennebunkport, Maine, where they ate lobster rolls on Parsons Beach during the day and more lobsters for dinner at Noonan’s Lobster Hut.
Olaf Kongshaug died in 2019, also peacefully at their home in Rye. Some of his ashes are scattered in the surf at Parsons Beach, where some of Martha’s ashes will now join his.
Martha Kongshaug is survived by her sons: Nils of Brooklyn, N.Y., Lars and his wife Caren of Bellingham, Wash., and Erik and his wife Heidi of San Pedro, Calif.; four grandchildren: Sophia, Arlo, Elijah, and Noel; and two first cousins, Hartley Campbell Fitts and Lynn Campbell Pugh.
