Maureen Ellen Cronin, who retired to North Truro in 2007, died peacefully at home on May 7, 2024 after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease that she endured with grace. She was 85.
The daughter of the late Mark Joseph Patrick Cronin and Marguerite Agnes (Reardon) Cronin, Maureen was born on Aug. 18, 1938 in Roxbury, where she was the eldest of three sisters. The family lived in a series of tenement-like apartments in an immigrant neighborhood near the Norfolk Settlement House.
Her father was “a jack of all trades,” Maureen’s sister Jeanne said. He worked in construction during the Kennedy administration, including on the former Littauer government building at Harvard. Her mother, whose family emigrated from Ireland to New Brunswick, Canada before arriving in Boston, cared for her three daughters with the help of her two sisters and her own mother.
“The women held the family together,” Jeanne said. “They worked hard, one even keeping her job during the Depression, and they controlled the family’s money.”
Maureen, her sisters, mother, and aunts all lived for a year with her grandmother Mae, with whom Maureen was especially close; for many years they lived less than a block apart.
Maureen was a “kind and loving daughter,” Jeanne said, who “idolized her dad.” She was also bossy and strong. Jeanne recalled how Maureen saved her from drowning once by holding onto the shoulder straps of her bathing suit just as she was about to tumble into a waterfall.
Maureen attended St. Joseph’s Grammar School and St. Joseph’s Academy, both all-girl Catholic schools. In high school she worked part-time in a local shop where she met Edward Richard Masters, who became her date at her high school prom.
She graduated from high school in 1956 and enrolled at Emmanuel College in Boston to study English literature. She left college in 1958 to marry Ed, but she was determined to finish her education, which took some doing.
Ed was a Naval officer who served 20 years, retiring with the rank of commander. After he and Maureen married, they settled in Newport, R.I., where their daughter Rebecca was born. Ed’s next posting was Athens, Ga., where daughters Kara and Rachel were born, and in 1963 he was posted to Naples, Italy, where daughters Serena and Renata were born — five daughters in seven years.
Kara remembers the years in Naples as idyllic.
“We had a lemon tree in the back garden and a giant sandbox that my dad made out of a bedframe,” Kara recalled. Maureen and her daughters learned to speak Italian.
The family moved to Arlington, Va. in 1969, and Maureen enrolled at Trinity College in Washington D.C., a sister school to Emmanuel in Boston.
“When Mom was studying at Trinity,” Kara said, “our ‘day care’ was the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum. I remember the excitement of striding up the giant steps, my brain buzzing about which collection I would study that day.”
One summer, Maureen’s daughters found an enormous green caterpillar, and she encouraged them to take it to the Smithsonian’s Insect Museum. It built a cocoon and eventually opened into a giant Polyphemus moth.
Maureen graduated from Trinity in 1973 — the first in her family to be awarded a college degree.
She went on to earn a master’s degree in English and American Literature from the University of Dayton and a Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Cincinnati. In 1988, she and Ed divorced.
Maureen returned to the University of Dayton and taught for 22 years in the English department, including a summer course in English as a second language for international students. That was her favorite teaching experience, as her international students and friends from all over the world would fill her long dining room table for Sunday dinners and Thanksgiving feasts.
Maureen taught her daughters to live lives of curiosity and passion and to love language. “We had our dinners with a dictionary on a stand to be consulted at will,” Kara said. “We thought that was normal.”
Maureen also taught her children always to set an extra place at the dining table, just in case another visitor stopped by.
It was in Dayton that Maureen found a connection to Truro. In 1992, while she was out roller blading, she met Peter Graham. “She looked like the happiest person that Peter had ever met, and they connected,” Kara said.
They married in 1996 and lived in Rockford, Ill. before moving to Cincinnati, where Maureen taught at Northern Kentucky University.
Peter’s aunt had some land in North Truro, though, and Maureen felt the tug of her Massachusetts home. As they approached retirement age, they bought land and built a house in North Truro, where they lived together for 17 years.
Maureen filled her life with books, volunteering, birdwatching, gardening, traveling, and welcoming family and friends to visit. She and Peter were engaged members of a memoir writers’ group at the Truro Community Center, and she self-published her memoir, full of evocative stories of her childhood in Roxbury, as City Mouse Roxbury Tiger in 2023.
Maureen is survived by her husband of 27 years, Peter E. Graham of North Truro; her sister, Jeanne Dorothy Cronin of Cambridge; her aunt, Elinor Dempsey Reardon of New York City; her five daughters, Rebecca Masters Pryor of Waynesville, Ohio, Kara Masters Siekman of Islesboro, Maine, Montana (Rachel) Lee Masters and husband Lance Lee of Oroville, Calif., Serena Cronin Masters Fossi and husband Rob Fossi of Washington, D.C., and Renata Quinlan Masters and husband Chip Hinnenberg of Oroville, Calif.; Peter’s children, Colby and Sibyl Graham; 15 grandchildren: Brian Roos; Amanda and Jason Pryor; Ian, Seana and Caroline Masters Siekman; Gabriel and Vincent Lee; Alexander, Nicole, Sonia, and Eamon Fossi; Sebastian Masters; and Blair and Eliana Hinnenberg; and four great-grandchildren: Chloe, Caiden, and Carter Roos and Lyra Gafford.
She was predeceased by her sister Anne Marguerite Cronin.
A commemoration of the life of Maureen Ellen Cronin will take place on Sept. 21 at an 11 a.m. Memorial Mass at St. Mary of the Harbor, 517 Commercial St., Provincetown, followed by a lunch reception.
The family is also organizing a celebration of readings and stories about Maureen to be held at the Truro Community Center. Contact Kara Masters Siekman at [email protected] for details.
