She'd listen to Twins games on the radio while gardening rhubarb and hostas. At Olive Garden, she'd treat protégés to lunch, boxing up that oversized order of chicken Alfredo. She'd save fabric scraps from garments, because who knows when a dinner party may call for a cloth napkin?

A Southern transplant charmed by weekends in Duluth, Kadue died of natural causes on July 29. She was 96.

A lifelong home economics teacher who picked cotton as a teen, Kadue prepared for the freak chances.

She grew up on a Mississippi farm as one of nine siblings during the Great Depression. She graduated from the Mississippi State College for Women and spent most of her career at Jordan Junior High and Roosevelt High schools in Minneapolis. She then raised her family in the Bryn Mawr neighborhood before retiring to Minnetonka.

Sewing, taught by her mother, was a craft she preserved. Sales for "20 percent off" were like a siren's calling. A metal box stored her coupons in tabbed folders: Bisquick, coffee, dip; any Old El Paso product for 15 cents off.

She shrunk to 80 pounds during her final days yet still penned handwritten notes, adding observations about weather or family.

"It was perfectly straight, extraordinarily legible," her son middle son, David, said of his mother's cursive.

She also left details out: her broken hip or arm, or the tumor forming behind one of her eyes, clouding her sight.

"She never complained about pain," David said. "She was one of the most other-centered women I've ever known, but I suppose most people say that about their mothers."

Her family's farmhouse once burned down during the 1930s, David thinks.

"I don't think she had what you'd call a 'happy childhood,' " David said. "That's one of the reasons she wanted her kids to have a happy childhood, which is kind of depressing."

Kadue met her husband, Arnold, while inspecting munitions during World War II. She'd rejected his company's parts as defective.

"He seemed to be smitten after that," David said.

In little time, they wed.

Kadue outlived Arnold, who co-owned rubber manufacturer Precision Associates Inc., and took care of him for six years as his body and mind deteriorated with Alzheimer's disease.

The couple didn't conceive daughters, so she found them.

"For so many of us younger girls back then, she taught us life skills," said Robyn Colbert, one of her former high school students who later studied human services and speech communication.

Her teacher planted aspirations, asking questions such as: "What do you want to do when you get older? What kind of dreams do you have?"

Colbert visited her aging teacher three times a week before she died. "A lot of people lose the art of wanting to learn from elderly people," she said.

Kadue also was an epicurean. She relished trips with friends, especially Helen Nelson, a classmate from graduate school and a colleague at Roosevelt High.

"She begins as a queen, and she goes up from there," Nelson said.

After Nelson's first husband died, Kadue introduced her to her second. "She became my Cupid," Nelson said.

A photograph of the four wearing leis commemorated a trip to Hawaii. Once, on a mission to find pearls, Kadue found her ideal length and price on the island.

Kadue hosted her brother Paul Moore, 89, on his second honeymoon. On the agenda: a Twins game, a show at the Chanhassen Dinner Theatres and a trip to the lake.

"When you go see Marjorie, you're going to stay a week. She's already going to have it planned," said Moore, a retired radiologist. "You don't have to worry about it. Maybe you didn't want to do that, but you did."

David Kadue now works as a lawyer in Los Angeles.

When he pays a gardener, he thinks of her. When he hires a "pool man," she's shaking her head. When he uses valet parking, she's in his head.

"Or any of the other hundred things in L.A.," he said. "Do I feel guilty about it."

She raised them that way.

Besides her son David, Kadue is survived by sons Richard and Paul, six grandchildren and many great-grandchildren. Services will be held at 11 a.m., sharp, on Sept. 3 at the Woman's Club of Minneapolis, 410 Oak Grove St.

Natalie Daher • 612-673-1775

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Natalie Daher

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