Mary Ann Siegfried
Mary Ann Siegfried, who volunteered at the Springs Library for nearly two decades after retiring from the Asia Society in New York, died on Friday after a brief illness. She was 85.
Ms. Siegfried grew up in Ohio and set off to see the world with the American Red Cross not long after graduating from Oberlin College, where she majored in fine art. “I signed up to be a recreation worker,” she told The Star in a 2003 interview.
It was the mid-1950s, just after the Korean War, and she was sent to South Korea, where American troops were still stationed. “Seoul was in ruins. People were lying in the streets,” she recalled in the interview. “It was a fascinating time to be there. There were still older people who wore traditional things like horsehair hats.”
She was posted to the countryside outside Seoul. “We lived in a compound of tropical Quonset huts. . . . There were still mines, and you were always told to stay on the path.” She looked after soldiers who were recuperating from minor injuries, playing cards with them, arranging for visiting performers, and even taking them to the racetrack.
After two years, she returned home to Ohio via freighter and soon set out for New York City, where she landed a job with the Asia Society. The nonprofit’s mission was to introduce Americans to Asia, “since most people didn’t even know where it was,” she told The Star.
Through editing the society’s newsletter on Afghanistan, The Afghanistan Forum, for more than 25 years, she became an expert on that country. She traveled there extensively as well as to India, Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, the former Soviet Union, and many other destinations.
She began visiting her mother and stepfather in East Hampton in the mid-1960s and settled here after retiring. In the 1990s, she brought her research and information-gathering skills to bear on that hamlet’s history, putting together The Star Shines on Springs, a monthly Springs Historical Society newsletter featuring items of interest culled from past decades of East Hampton Stars. She also put together a number of booklets on the hamlet and its landmarks.
She became a fixture at the Springs Library, drawn there by her love of reading (mysteries were her favorite). “You’re never sure if you’re interfering, but if you hang around and look as if you might be useful, they eventually get used to you,” she told The Star.
Ms. Siegfried had collected playing cards since she was a child, when her interest took root while she was recuperating from a bout of polio, and her knowledge of cards was “extraordinary in its breadth and depth,” her family wrote. She contributed to and edited a number of national playing card collector newsletters.
She also loved crossword puzzles and was devoted to her pets.
Ms. Siegfried was born in Ashtabula, Ohio, on Sept. 18, 1931, to Rudolph Robert Siegfried and the former Mary Elizabeth Smith. She grew up in Ashtabula, a small city on the shore of Lake Erie, and graduated from high school there before going on to Oberlin.
She is survived by a first cousin, Anne Smith Colin of California, a number of extended family members from New York and Arkansas, and her good friends Heather Anderson of Springs and Chris Brunner of New Jersey.
She will be buried at Chestnut Grove Cemetery in Ashtabula.
Donations have been suggested to the Springs Library, care of the Springs Historical Society, P.O. Box 1860, East Hampton 11937.