Margaret had four grandchildren: Phil & Lara Hall (Yvonne's) and Aaron & Kevin Richardson (Betty's).  She ADORED them.  In her eyes, they were the smartest, most clever, cutest and most fun children in the world.  She never hesitated to take care of them or help her daughters raise them.  The camps were their playground and Margaret's as well.  And if everyone wasn't at camp, then the house on Legion Street once again became a place for games, puzzles, backyard barbecues and any "event" Margaret dreamed up.  She also had one grandchild, Simone (Kevin's) who she marveled at in the last two years of her life (see photos).

 

Her life wasn't without huge, heartbreaking upheavals or monumental things to overcome but she weathered them with an amused defiance and still found joy in even the smallest thing.  She was a great life teacher (when the going gets tough - eat chocolate) and reminded us all that humor is a great salve, as is love.

In Westlake she met and married the most handsome man around, LeRoy Benoit.  They moved to Lake Charles to start a family.  But it took a while.  True to her take-no-hostages style, LeRoy found himself hauled out of hot tub baths (heat lowers sperm count) and undoubtedly subjected to dietary improvements, in Margaret's quest to become pregnant.  Dennis Earl, Elizabeth Renee (who later insisted on being called Betty), and Yvonne Claire followed.  By 1953 the family unit was set and ensconced in the newest subdivision in an old rice field in east Lake Charles (now between 1st and 4th avenues and 8th street to Oak Park Blvd), in a house that had a very long screened in porch that was the children's play room.  LeRoy was an operator at Conoco Refinery and Margaret was a reporter for the Lake Charles American Press, until she and some fellow reporters staged a walk-out in objection to the publisher's white washing of a local official's record. She then became a reporter for the Beaumont Enterprise and a stringer for the Shreveport Times and other papers.  She was a rabid contest entrant and won many prizes for her clever limericks and rhymes, including a pony when she submitted the winning name of Pony-matic for an automatic transmission vehicle campaign. Regrettably, Yvonne recounts, she took cash instead of the pony. However, the children did all get new bikes.

 

A few years later, Michelle Anne was born (yep, a happy accident!) shortly after Margaret covered the devastation of Cameron Parish by Hurricane Audrey.  In 1961, LeRoy died as a result of an explosion at Conoco and Margaret became a widowed single mother.  Undaunted, she raised her family while balancing jobs and was voted "Reporter of the Year" by the Shreveport Times for her coverage of the Wilbert Rideau murders in 1961. In 1966, her son Dennis died in a car accident.  Eventually, Margaret became librarian at Oak Park Junior High School where she ran a vigrous library club and was renowned for her strict discipline during study halls which she didn't feel belonged in her library.  At other times, she breached protocol by burning incense.

 

Margaret was an avid world traveler and visited over 24 countries, sometimes in conjunction with study abroad progams as she accomplished her M.A. plus 30.  In the 1970s she purchased two fishing camps on the West Fork of the Calcasieu, on South Perkins Ferry Road.  Those camps became her sanctuary and a place of many festivities for families and friends.

Margaret and her twin sister Mary were born at home in Mansfield, Louisiana.  Richard Reed Braswell, her father, was a dentist who was also a speculator, meaning he invested in a few financial ventures here and there.  Mary Nevel Fincher (May), her mother, was his second wife and was a devout Baptist who taught Sunday school.  The family, including older brother Edwin and younger sister Dorothy, moved around north Louisiana (Haynesville, Arcadia) where "Daddy" set up his dental office and "Mother" presided over a household that was often visited by the local officials like the coroner or the visiting pastor.  Margaret went to many tent revivals as a child and said she was raised on a religion of "hell fire and damnation".  Later in life, the outdoors became her sanctuary and claimed "under any tree is my church."  As a teenager in Arcadia, she and her best friend got dressed up when the coroner invited them to be the first to view the bodies of Bonnie and Clyde before the bullet-riddled corpses were propped up in the picture window of the local furniture store for the rest of the public to see.  The notorious bank robbers had been killed in an ambush in nearby Gibsland.  Margaret was the first female valedictorian at Arcadia High School.  She attended Louisiana Normal (now Northwestern State University), a teaching college in Natchitoches, LA.  Barely twenty years old, she graduated and moved to Westlake, LA to teach 5th grade.