Joseph Smagorinsky - Family Life

Family Life

Smagorinsky was married to Margaret Frances Elizabeth Knoepfel from May 29, 1948 to his death at age 81 on September 21, 2005. They met while taking classes at New York University, where Margaret was preparing for a career as a meteorological statistician. Margaret soon became the Weather Bureau’s first female statistician. The couple had two wedding ceremonies. One was a Catholic ceremony at Margaret's mother's insistence; the other was a civil ceremony in the Georgetown garden of Judge Fay Bently. (Judge Bently was later removed from the bench, declared incompetent, and confined to a mental hospital.) This ceremony was attended only by the required 2 witnesses, Jerry Moss and Margaret's sister Alice Williams. Joseph and Margaret considered this smaller gathering to be their official wedding, given the ways in which his Jewish family and her Catholic family opposed the union. Following their marriage, Margaret chose to stay at home and raise their five children, Anne, Peter, Teresa, Julia, and Frederick. Margaret wrote several pamphlets featuring traditions at Princeton University, including:

• The Regalia of Princeton University
• Some Legends & Lore of Princeton University
• The Tigers of Princeton University

At the memorial gathering at Guyot Hall, Princeton University in October, 2005, following Smagorinsky's September death, he was honored with the following story of his life, sung to the tune of Ervin Drake's "It Was a Very Good Year":

When I was seventeen, it was a very good year
It was a very good year for Stuyvesant High
My future was nigh
Working in Dad’s paint store
But I wanted more
When I was seventeen.

When I was twenty-four, it was a very good year
It was a very good year for matrimony
I wed my Maggie
We lasted 57 years
We had five little dears
When I was twenty-four.

When I was twenty-seven, it was a very good year
It was a very good year for babies in pink
And diapers that stink
I didn’t mind at all
'Cause Margaret changed them all
When I was twenty-seven.

When I was twenty-nine, it was a very good year
It was a very good year for Washington, D.C.
A lab director I’d be
Our computers were fast
And our impact was vast
When I was thirty-one.

When I was thirty-eight, it was a very good year
It was a very good year for the General Circulation Model
It was lightning in a bottle
It took two whole chalkboards
It predicted weather in fjords
When I was thirty-eight.

When I was forty-four, it was a very good year
It was a very good year, to Princeton we moved
My colleagues were behooved
To join GFDL
I think it went pretty well
When I was forty-four.

When I was fifty-nine, it was a very good year
It was a very good year to retire from the lab
My pension I'd nab
I led the AMS
And finally got some rest
When I was fifty-nine.

When I was sixty-eight, it was a very good year
It was a very good year to be a granddad
'Twas 8 that we had
They all knew me as Gramps
I paid for a few summer camps
When I was sixty-eight.

And now my days are done, it’s been a very good life
It’s been a very good life because of my wife
With love she was rife
She gave me a family
They write songs hammily
It’s been a very good life.

His beloved wife Margaret died on November 14, 2011 and was buried with him in Princeton Cemetery. On December 29, 2011, a memorial service was held for Margaret Smagorinsky at the Nassau Inn in Princeton, at which many of Dr. Smagorinsky's colleagues and their wives honored her role as "mother hen" of GFDL during his tenure as founder and Director.