Samuel Marshall, known as "Marsh", was born July 22, 1903, in Chicago, Illinois. He was the first child of Samuel Parker McGough and Jean Gibson Donnell.

Our father, whom I shall always refer to as "Daddy", grew up in an upper middle class home. He was afforded the luxury of a private high school education at Northwestern Military and Naval Academy, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, then a prestigious prep school. (After one hundred years of operation it was dissolved to combine with St. John's Academy, Delafield.)

The summer before going to Dartmouth College he joined his cousin, Mike Fitch, in a Dartmouth led "Grand Tour" of Europe. The tour was for 88 days and included eight countries. Since the only way to travel to Europe in 1923 was to go by ship, twenty of those days were aboard ship. Before I left for my first trip to Europe, Daddy said, "Sometime I will get the things out from my trip, and we will have to compare notes." I am sad that we never took the time to do that, but after he died Mom asked if I would like the box that he always kept on a shelf in the closet. It was not only forty-year-old post cards and memorabilia, but also all of the letters between him and his parents while he was on this trip. In the trip's brochure it says, "a feature of the trip will be the ascent of the Matterhorn from Zermatt. The ascent is optional, of course, but there is scarcely a man who has not longed at some time that he himself might scale an Alpine peak, and the Matterhorn is most famous of them all." I had to laugh since I was sure that I knew one lad who had never had such a lofty yearning and was not at all surprised to read that Daddy, and two friends, elected to enjoy the famous mountain from afar. (Included herein is a letter he wrote during his first plane ride.) His first airplane ride was from Vienna to Munich. Luckily, he was very enthusiastic about flying, for while he was half way through the trip he learned that as a freshman at Dartmouth he was required to be on campus earlier than the trip's schedule had allowed. Therefore, he and another young man chose to fly from Paris to London in order to get an earlier ship home. For us in the late twenty... twenty-first centuries these trips seem rather common place, but when you realize that it had just been twenty years before that the Wright brothers had flown the first airplane and at that time most people had never even seen a plane in the air, this was exceptionally exciting to these young men.

Upon finishing college, Daddy worked for the Universal Atlas Cement Division of the United States Steel Corporation and later as sales distributor for Save Electric Company. When the Second World War broke out Daddy enlisted immediately and was crushed to learn that he was "too old." After trying every branch of service he briefly took a job at Studebaker's Aviation Engine Plant on the assembly line. In 1943 he went to work for the Chicago Ordinance District of the War Department. When it disbanded Daddy became the Middle West representative for the newly formed Washington Steel Corporation of Washington, Pennsylvania. An amusing "small world" story was told to me years later by the man who was the president of the company, Mr. Tom Fitch. He had asked a friend, "Who is the best person in sales that you know in the Chicago area?" The man answered, "Marsh McGough." The friend agreed to set up a meeting to introduce the two men without mentioning the name of the man who was coming to interview Daddy. Much to Daddy's surprise his future boss, as it turned out, needed no introduction. The President of Washington Steel, Tom Fitch, was a cousin and kid brother of the cousin with whom Marsh had gone to Europe.

Daddy was the Midwest Sales Representative for Washington Steel from 1945 to 1949. In February 1949 the family moved to Washington, Pennsylvania. Daddy was Eastern Sales Representative, a territory including the entire East Coast. As he had done in Chicago, he would leave early Monday morning and return Friday evening. By 1952 the company had grown to such an extent that they needed to break up the territory. Daddy was given the Choice of taking over the northern district and moving to Boston, or the southern district and moving to Atlanta. He chose the latter.

In October of 1952 Marsh and Milly moved into their home in Druid Hills, a short distance from Emory University. Daddy covered all of the southern states east of Texas. In December of 1953 he was hospitalized in Emory University Hospital which, thanks be to God, was one of the leading heart centers in the Country. When he got to the hospital they never let him know how critically ill he was. But when Mother arrived with some overnight things the doctor told her that Daddy's blood pressure had never been recorded as high and that he did not expect Daddy to live. He told her that there was a very new medicine that had recently come out and so far was working on forty percent of those taking it. They asked her permission to give it to Daddy. She agreed and then his blood pressure began to lower. She was told that under no circumstances was Daddy to learn how ill he was, and for that reason she could not tell us. The doctor said that Daddy was very alert and having us come into his room earlier than he expected us would raise his anxiety and his blood pressure, so that it would be "tantamount to being hit by a Mack truck." A friend met our trains when we arrived home from school that memorable Saturday and explained the situation. We knew that Daddy was in the hospital but had no idea how ill he had been or what Mother had gone through. They said that it would still probably be weeks before he could be released, but he was doing so well that they called early Christmas morning and said that he could come home then. Next the doctor said that he should retire. Daddy was just fifty with two children in school and he told the doctor that it was not a possibility and to come up with a better plan. The doctor agreed to six months of complete rest and that he would get a car with a recent invention, automobile air conditioning! Mother went out and bought our first T.V. in order that he might stay sane since his work had always been his life and he had never developed any kind of outside interests. Fortunately, Daddy reacted to the medicine even better than the doctor had anticipated and Daddy was allowed to get a new air conditioned car and go back to work in six weeks, rather than six months.

Daddy continued in his original routine until the fall of 1957 when he was called back to Washington, Pennsylvania, and made the Director of New Product Development. From then on all of Daddy's traveling was in and out of the Pittsburgh airport. His business took him in and out of certain cities so frequently that he was investigated by the F.B.I. after the Brinks robbery. I don't know how they knew to make the connection, but the office received a call asking if Mr. McGough had a reason to be in Boston on certain dates. Fortunately Daddy was scrupulous regarding both his expense account and his reports to the office, so they could tell the government exactly where he had been every moment of every day. I know how higly regarded Daddy was in the steel business because I happened to be in an elevator in New York City one day and overheard two men discussing Marsh McGough in the most admiring terms one might imagine.

It was not unusual for him to call and say that the plane could not land and that he would be getting a bus to Pittsburgh from one place or another. He would have to go to the airport to get his car to come home. There were may times when Mother would have ridden the bus to the city and they would spend a night or two in Pittsburgh to see a play or go shopping. She knew to check at the desk to see if they would be having a late dinner.

One of the uses that the metalurrgical department had developed for the Washington Steel cold-roll process was that of a very heat resistant type of stainless steel. It was used on at least one of our space ships. A product that did not do as well was stainless steel razor blades. Daddy gave me a carton and I shared a box with a current boy friend before I tried them. He called to tell me that he had almost cut his throat and, my father notwithstanding, not to use them. I did save a box, and years later my husband, David Veal, said that they worked well for scraping small amounts of paint off glass. The last product that I was aware of was colored sheets of stainless steel for the covering of buildings, a sensationally successful product of Washington Steel.

Each year Daddy and Mother attended a major national steel meeting. In June of 1967 the meeting was held in Key Biscayne, Florida. They decided that after the meeting they would spend a few days on vacation. Daddy had been told that when he returned he would have to reitre. He asked his kid sister, Nancy, to join them following the meeting. For the first time in years, Daddy lived the life he had been forced to give up. They stayed out late, danced and even played golf, whcih he had not done since the nineteen thirties. The third morning he and Nancy went down to the beach. It was while Daddy was in the water that he suffered his final heart attack and died a few hours later. Three weeks before that trip, while Mother was visiting Don's family in Fontana, Wisconsin, I drove home to spend the weekend with Daddy. I had never seen him look as ill. He talked about the upcoming convention and reminisced at length about past trips they had had. I will always wonder if, when Daddy invited Nancy to be with them, he didn't actually plan to force the attack. Maybe it was just providential that Mother was not alone. But I can understand, knowing how ill he was and how he dreaded retirement, that he might choose to die as he had lived... a very fun loving, vibrant, special person.