Margaret Mary Boyles, long-time resident of Rapid City, South Dakota, passed away peacefully, Tuesday, May 27, 2025.

Margaret was born August 24, 1921 in Otter Creek township, just outside Waterbury, Nebraska on the Surber farm her father rented. She grew up in rural Cedar County, Missouri where she graduated as salutatorian of her class from Stockton High School in 1939. She attended Springfield State College part time while teaching at rural schools in Cedar County, Missouri. During WWII she worked two years at Remington Arms munitions factory outside of Independence, Missouri. Around the clock shifts inspecting shells was tiresome work and she subsequently took a civil service job as a war service appointee, working in the landline communications office on the 21st floor of City Hall in Kansas City receiving flight plans and arrival reports from base operations at surrounding air bases. This experience was to take her to the CAA at Stapleton Field in Denver as a teletype operator for two years where she developed an interest in weather forecasting. Taking a course in aerology at Denver University, she subsequently joined a radiosonde station in Lander, Wyoming where she made weather observations and launched weather balloons.

In 1949 Margaret entered the US NAVY as a WAVE (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). She attended boot camp for 10 weeks in Great Lakes, Illinois as a seaman, then trained in airman's school in Millington, Tennessee, finally graduating in 1950 from aerographers mate's school in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Her NAVY career took her to duties at Patuxent Naval Air Station on Chesapeake Bay in Maryland as weather observer. She lived in Arlington, Virginia a few months later during the Korean War, where she worked on a manual of latitude and longitude of ships at sea at the Naval Air Office in the Pentagon under the Chief of Naval Operations.

She and Harvey Alger Boyles were married in Winchester, Virginia in 1950. She was discharged from the NAVY in 1951, and Harvey’s career as technician with the Civil Aeronautics Authority was to take them through Kentucky, Indiana, Missouri, and finally to Rapid City in 1955 where Harvey took his career position with the Rapid City Weather Bureau as Chief Electronics Technician. In 1956, they moved into their North Rapid City home, clearing the yard of tumbleweeds and rocks and planting rows of Bolleana poplars on the fairway, a home in which they raised their children, David and Julie. Margaret was a loving, devoted housewife and mother, as well as an avid gardener, growing Pacific Hybrid delphiniums, irises and roses, among other plants from starts given by friends and relatives over the years. She and her family enjoyed camping with both tent and travel trailer, traveling alternate summers west through Montana and Wyoming to Harvey's mother's home in Gooding, Idaho and to Margaret's folks in Cedar County, Missouri.

Never one to complain, Margaret met the challenges of life with resolution and a moral courage indelibly inspired by female figures of former generations in her family. Her life was grounded by the gentleness and kindness of her mother, Stella Reform Austin Marquis, and the unflinching stamina of her grandmother, the freethinker Kate Cooper Austin. Margaret, like they, was champion of the downtrodden and the underdog. Her otherwise unassuming rural upbringing was augmented and informed by her love of reading. Among works of classic literature by Emerson, Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde, and Romain Rolland to name but a few, as well as poetry--everything from Dorothy Parker to Paul Laurence Dunbar--her bookshelf included popular British authors Rosamunde Pilcher and Penelope Lively. She read Zola’s “The Ladies' Paradise” in her 90s and suspense novels by her nephew, Samuel Marquis, when in her 100s. Her enjoyments also included Jeopardy and the daily crossword in the Rapid City Journal--and cheering on the Kansas City Chiefs.

Margaret was a friend of many, active in Horace Mann PTA, First Presbyterian Church’s Women’s Circle, the Korean War Veterans, and a volunteer in elections as well as with the Rapid City Hospital Volunteer Auxiliary where she worked in the hospital gift shop. She lived in her own home from 1956 until the last 5 days of her life.

She was preceded in death by her beloved husband Harvey A. Boyles, and her younger siblings, Austin Marquis of Denver, Colorado, and Jennie Louise Marquis Barritt of Eldorado Springs, Missouri.

Mourning her passing are her children, Dr. David A. Boyles of Rapid City and Julie E. Gard of Hill City, her grandchildren Douglas and Amy DeWaay and great grandchildren Isaiah and Iris of Tucson, Arizona, and her nieces and nephew, Celia Snapp, Marcia Osborne, and Samuel Marquis.

Her family extends special thanks the VA Home Health and VA Home Based Primary Care caregiver teams, Monument Health care teams, the RCFD EMTs, Meals on Wheels Western South Dakota volunteers, her friends at First Presbyterian Church and her wonderful neighbors. Margaret very much enjoyed connecting with her friends and close and distant relatives on Facebook using her Kindle, another window onto the world for her in her later years.

Margaret requests no services. Funeral arrangements and cremation are under the direction of Behrens-Wilson Funeral Home with burial in Pine Lawn Memorial Cemetery next to her husband of 51 years, Harvey A. Boyles.

Memorial donations in her name may be made to a charity of choice.