Long time Acton resident Marion Maxwell is probably best known for the Senior Citizens Newsletter, a weekly email that, until recently, went out to over 800 Acton seniors and “pre-seniors.” After a successful 10-year run, Marion recently brought the newsletter to an end. The Acton Exchange sat down with Marion to tap into her deep well of memories and insights.
Over her fifty-seven years in town, Marion Maxwell has served Acton in many capacities. She’s widely known for her participation on town boards such as the Board of Appeals and the Acton Council on Aging, and for her active membership in the Acton Woman’s Club and the League of Women Voters. But her great love has always been to use her gifts as a writer and organizer to bring people together, inform citizens about the town, offer ways for people to make friends and support one another, and, ultimately, make Acton a better place to live for all its residents.
The Acton Minuteman
Marion’s first venture into local journalism began in 1973 with the Acton Minuteman, an upstart rival to the Acton Beacon. “When my kids were growing up, I started going to Planning Board meetings and writing about them for the Acton Minuteman,” Marion says. “But in 1975, I got to cover Gerald Ford’s visit to Concord on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the battle at the North Bridge.” Before Ford arrived, she recounts, some people were afraid there was going to be a riot, so she decided to check out the potential troublemakers. “I went over to the hillside at the Buttrick House in Concord and sat with the kids overnight. They turned out to be just a pot-smoking, good-natured group. No riot!” she laughs.
A senior newsletter
“For the past fifty years, I‘ve been involved in the Town on various committees,” explains Marion. “As I talked with seniors, I realized that they had no idea what was going on in the town. I started thinking about ways to get people involved in town government. Acton is important to me, and I wanted it to be important to other people, and I wanted to draw them in.”
In 2007-2017, Marion was a member of the Council on Aging Board and on a committee to choose a new location for the senior center. “The public was very interested in what was going on,” she notes, and she offered to send people an email update on each meeting: the list grew to 65 people. Then she realized that there was an even more pressing need for information sharing.
“I realized that seniors really like to know what’s going on, and we love to gossip!” she quips. Through word of mouth, her email list expanded; more and more people sought out everything from notes on Town board meetings to a calendar of Town events. But it really expanded during Covid. “We weren’t getting out of our houses, so we needed to have something to keep the community together. And we were so frightened about Covid.” She began publishing information on where to get vaccines and other Covid-related information people needed. Then she incorporated cartoons. “We needed a lift during those two years!” she exclaims. “More and more people got onto the list because it was useful, and because they wanted to laugh; in fact, some people only wanted it for the laughs,” she jokes.
After Covid subsided, Marion continued with the senior newsletter, offering information about Town government and Board agendas, interspersing cartoons with civic information. Her senior newsletter lasted ten years, ending with a final readership of 800 seniors.
Helping to found the Acton Exchange
“I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to write the senior newsletter forever – I’m 88 now – and I asked myself what was going to happen when I had to stop,” she notes. As a member of the League of Women Voters, she pushed for the League to support the creation of a nonprofit newspaper for Acton. The League took it up as a cause; soon there were one hundred people at a planning meeting, and then a self-selected Board of Directors. “We spun our wheels for the first year,” she says, “and then little by little, we discovered that we had a really good group with a variety of talents – a leader, editors, technical people, and doers – and these are the mainstay of today’s newspaper.”
Marion felt that when the Acton Exchange gained traction, she would be able to retire her newsletter because the Exchange would pick up the information she’d been offering. “And they’re doing it!” she exclaims. “It’s wonderful, and it gets better all the time. In the beginning, I didn’t think the premise of an “exchange” of writing was going to work. But it has! There have been one hundred different people who have written articles.”
The future of the Exchange
Ever the pragmatist Marion knows the Exchange will need more money in the near future. “We’ve been doing this on a shoestring,” she says. “We got started because I ran a GoFundMe campaign and asked seniors for money to start the newspaper. They came up with almost $7,000, which we used to create the Acton Exchange website.”
But to ensure the future of the paper, more resources are needed. The Acton Exchange needs to hire one or two people to keep the paper strong. “Ideally, we hope initially to raise $100,000 or more so we can hire one or two salaried professionals,” says Marion.
But she also looks to the paper’s individual readers. She reminds us that anyone can donate at the paper’s website (www.actonexchange.org/donate/). With support like that, all of Acton – residents, seniors, families, town officials – will benefit from Marion Maxwell’s dream for a strong local independent newspaper that helps everyone in town stay informed and connected.
Martha Rounds is an Acton-based writer.