Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - 9:18am

The LSA regrets to announce the death of Margaret Reynolds, who served the LSA for over thirty years in various capacities, concluding her service as Executive Director in 2007.  Read her obituary here, which includes details about a virtual funeral service on Saturday, Sept 26, 2020. In 2006, Reynolds was honored with the Victoria A. Fromkin Award for lifetime service to the LSA. This notice will be updated as we have a chance to collect further information about Maggie's many contributions to the LSA.

Remembrances may be posted in the comments box below and will be shared with Reynolds' family. Sympathy cards may be sent to Chris Reynolds, 11450 Asbury Circle, Apt. 124, Solomons, MD 20688.

Excerpts from the Fromkin award citation:

Margaret W. Reynolds, Executive Director of the Linguistic Society of America, is this year's recipient of the Victoria A. Fromkin Award for service to the field of linguistics. It is especially fitting that this award to Maggie bears Vicki Fromkin's name.  In her own service to the Society as President and as Secretary-Treasurer, Vicki worked closely with Maggie to expand the Society's horizons, a move that also greatly expanded Maggie's responsibilities.  For over thirty years now, Maggie has been the public face of the LSA, committing her energies and passions to the Society's well-being.   She has communicated with hundreds of members about Society business on a regular basis, inquiring about possible hosts for biennial linguistic institutes, passing along suggestions to various committees for useful projects, organizing program committee deliberations, working with local linguists to ensure the smooth running of our annual meetings.  During these annual meetings Maggie seems to be everywhere doing everything at once.  She personally welcomes attendees, making us feel like honored guests at an enormous social event she is hosting, but at the same time she participates in many committee meetings, consults with various members about Society projects, and also rides herd on hotel personnel to get chairs set up, projectors readied, coffee delivered, and the like.   Indeed, Maggie is highly skilled in crisis management of many different kinds at many different levels of complexity and challenge.  In the fall of 2004, for example, she managed to relocate  the meeting site from San Francisco to Oakland at the eleventh hour so that members would not be faced with picketing hotel employees.   Several other societies ended up having to shift their meeting locations hundreds of miles away from San Francisco or their dates by several weeks. Maggie's efforts on our behalf spared LSA members the considerable inconvenience and expense of such disruptive changes.  Most LSA members probably think of Maggie as tending exclusively to the internal affairs of the Society, but she also represents the Society to a wider public.  She is busy helping organize outreach  activities aimed at legislators and funding agencies as well as working with our sister scholarly societies on a variety of projects of concern to the profession.   And she even graciously replies to inquiries from a wide range of laypeople, ranging from 8th-graders curious about the origins of language to advertising folks who want assistance in creating effective brand names for the global marketplace, putting questioners in touch with relevant experts.   Margaret W. Reynolds has served the field of linguistics with distinction: this award is but a small token of our gratitude and affection. 

Comments

Submitted by areed@lsadc.org on Thu, 09/24/2020 - 9:02am

I first met Maggie when I was a member of the Executive Committee in the mid-1970s and voted on her appointment as Executive Director, which was recommended by then Secretary-Treasurer Tom Sebeok. At the time the LSA was subletting space from the Center for Applied Linguistics and when CAL moved to offices in the “car barn” on Prospect St in DC, Maggie alerted the Society’s officers of the financial risk of staying with CAL because of the balloon clause in their lease, including me when I was elected Secretary-Treasurer in 1983. Eugene Nida was already advising the LSA on financial matters, and convinced us to look into buying a condo in DC, and hold the mortgage ourselves, for which Maggie got Executive Committee approval, and we purchased the condo on 18 St NW in 1985. (I refer to this in my obituary article for Eugene Nida in Language.) Maggie joked that I might never get another chance to sign such a big check, and we made a note of the date when the mortgage would be paid off, so we would remember to celebrate the occasion. Throughout her career at LSA, Maggie strove to insure that she acted only on the actions of the membership and its committees, and particularly concentrated her efforts on supporting the success of the annual meetings and the Linguistic Institutes, and working with the members serving as LSA liaisons to the ACLS and its member societies, and later on with COSSA. She was particularly effective in selecting the hotels hosting the annual meetings, negotiating hotel room rates, and putting out the “fires” that would arise from time to time, most notably in the late 1990s (I don’t recall right now the exact year.) when the LSA was to meet in San Francisco in early January, and the hotel staffs throughout the city went on strike the previous fall. Within the space of a few weeks she managed to negotiate a comparable deal with a hotel in Oakland (where there was no strike, but where other organizations who had to move their meetings out of San Francisco were also looking), and many of us who were at that meeting felt that it was one of the best meetings ever.

Submitted by traugott@stanfo... on Thu, 09/24/2020 - 11:45am

I was fortunate to get to know Maggie in the early 1970s as a member of the Executive Committee and to work with her for many years after that. She would alert us to intolerable hostile environments in certain cities at the time, for example, potential threats to gay participants of the community, and would ensure that the LSA would not meet in such a city. Maggie was a gracious hostess on our behalf at our meetings and somehow made everything feel effortless. This was especially true in the whirlwind of activities associated with summer institutes. She nurtured ties with sister organizations such as the MLA, ensuring that they understood and paid attention to our mission. She inspired us to look across borders and to think whether we could help create a linguistic museum designed to celebrate the diversity of languages in this country, in the pioneering way in which the Portuguese Language Museum in San Paolo, Brazil was imagined.

Submitted by bjoseph@ling.oh... on Thu, 09/24/2020 - 11:12pm

Maggie was fantastic to work with -- knowledgeable, friendly, helpful, but also firm about deadlines and obligations, in short, the prefect administrator; she figured prominently in my two stints of LSA service during her tenure: directing the 1993 LSA Institute and serving as editor of LANGUAGE. Her guidance brought me through every step of the Institute, and I know I would not have made it through my first year as editor (maybe not the full 7 years even) without my nearly daily calls to her for advice. She richly deserved the Fromkin Award and deserves all the encomia and words of praise being offered about her now. She will be missed.

Submitted by ray.jackendoff@... on Sat, 09/26/2020 - 11:20am

It’s a shock to learn of Maggie’s passing, even after all these years of her absence from the LSA scene. I got to know Maggie during my years on the Executive Committee and as President in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As others have said, she was the face of the LSA both to the membership and to the world at large. She was as well the Society’s institutional memory, and she had her finger on the pulse of everything that was going on. At once self-effacing and steely, she always managed to get what she wanted, but with ultimate tact, and always in the best interests of the Society. When, as President, I had only the faintest idea of how things worked, she gently coached me through what I had to do and shielded me from the things I didn’t need to do. I especially remember with gratitude how, when I was a complete failure at running the business meeting, Maggie quietly took over from the front row, using me as her puppet. What can I say? Maggie made the LSA a gracious place to be.

Submitted by bspolsky@gmail.com on Mon, 10/05/2020 - 4:05pm

My first association with Maggie was when I served as chair of the Program Committee that changed the Annual Meeting from a single mass session to topical sessions, adding to the complexity of organization that she handled smoothly. Later, when the newly founded American Association of Applied Linguistics spent its first years sheltering under the wing of the LSA, it was Maggie who provided the administrative support we needed. She will be missed.

Submitted by ssteele@redshift.com on Mon, 10/05/2020 - 4:47pm

I have to add my name to the long list of people that Maggie gently guided through their responsibilities to the LSA. In 1987, out of the blue, when I was at the University of Arizona, I got a call from Maggie asking me whether we would consider hosting the 1989 Institute. I reminded her that Tucson could be warm in the summer, but she didn't think that would pose a problem. The Linguistics Department at the University of Arizona did host that Institute and, under Maggie's tutelage, I served as the director. (Although it might not seem shocking from today's perspective, the heat wave that hit during the Institute kept temperatures hovering around 110 for many days.).