HANOVER — Marcia Colligan did not let anything stop her from achieving what she wanted or needed to do. She wasn’t boisterous, but she got things done and never looked for credit, and she valued her family above all else.

“She just was a very strong person, a real leader, and once she decided on a plan of whatever sort it was, she would do it,” Carol Keenhold, Colligan’s friend and neighbor of more than 60 years, said. “There was no, ‘I can’t do it; I need help with that.’ She did it and did it well.”

Colligan lived in Hanover for over 60 years before moving to an assisted living community in Durham, N.H., where she died of natural causes on Jan. 7 at 93 years old.

Though she may be most well-known in the Upper Valley for co-founding the chamber music nonprofit Classicopia, Colligan only started the organization after retiring from a 28-year career at Dartmouth College and, most importantly to her, raising six children in Hanover. Colligan had three daughters and three sons, 18 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren, all of whom she was extremely proud of.

“She was a force to be reckoned with, a good force,” Colligan’s daughter, Julia Luteran, said. “She was always just trying to make things better for everybody.”

Born in Troy, N.Y. in 1931, Colligan, then Marcia Walsh, was one of four girls and was described by her children as a “precocious child.”

She began school at 4 years old, and even as a young girl was known as a killer bridge player, a testament to the keen intelligence she would maintain throughout her life.

Colligan met her husband George on a blind date as a teenager and married him when she was 19. The two moved to Hanover in 1962, where George was a dean and professor at Dartmouth’s Thayer College of Engineering.

George was Colligan’s “one and only forever love,” Luteran said. Colligan “never considered another person in her life ever.”

The couple were married for 26 years before he died in 1978. They loved the “Peanuts” comics and going to Dartmouth sports games. They were social and enjoyed hosting their famous St. Patrick’s Day “Irish Coffee Party” every year.

They took their family of eight to church at St. Denis Parish in Hanover every Sunday at 9 a.m. They took up nearly an entire pew and always sat in the front row before heading home for scrambled eggs. Most of all, the Colligans loved their children.

“They danced and they laughed; they both had a good sense of humor,” Paul Colligan said of his parents.

In the 1960s, Colligan was a “typical stay-at-home mother,” her son, John, said, though she was very active in the Hanover community and was a strong personality at every age.

She volunteered with Hanover Youth Hockey, the St. Denis Parish church, the Hanover Selectboard and on other boards and committees.

Colligan was “the boss” who ran a tight ship at home and kept all of her children in line; throughout her life everyone knew “don’t mess with Marcia,” as Paul put it. But she was also funny, kind and fun-loving and made sure to make every one of her children feel seen. She and George instilled in their children the sense that they could do anything they set their minds to.

She put that mantra into action herself after George was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the late 1960s.

In addition to caring for George and their six children for about a decade, Colligan went back to school. To supplement a business degree from the State University of New York at Albany she had earned in 1952, she obtained a Master of Arts and Liberal Studies degree from Dartmouth and later an MBA from the University of New Hampshire.

Colligan started as an administrative assistant to the dean of faculty at Dartmouth College in 1974 before being promoted to assistant to the business manager and eventually serving as Dartmouth’s director of business affairs until her retirement in 2001.

During her 28 years at Dartmouth, Colligan was often the only professional woman in the room. She quickly rose through the ranks at the college.

While her full-time career began as a way to support her young family and get through the heartbreak of losing her husband, “whatever she would do she did with great passion, so it became far more,” Luteran said.

Colligan did not set out to be a trailblazer for women at Dartmouth and in the professional world, but it was what she became.

Colligan was a “risk taker” and her determined nature and insistence on not taking no for an answer during her career likely came from her years advocating for George through his illness, Luteran said.

While she was undeniably a trailblazer for women at Dartmouth, “it wasn’t so much that she was trying to be on this mission for women, it was just that she was trying to live her best life and she was trying to do her very best work,” John said.

Even outside of her professional career, Colligan was driven by her determination and strong sense of self.

“There wasn’t anywhere that she didn’t think wasn’t OK for her to be,” Paul said, recalling a time that Colligan attended a party at his Dartmouth fraternity during his college years in the mid 1980s.

“I wasn’t surprised,” Paul said. “She comes downstairs, goes behind the bar, opens the tap, pours herself a beer and starts having a conversation.”

In 1988, Colligan became one of three of the first women ever to join the Hanover Rotary Club after a Supreme Court decision made it possible.

“I broke the sound barrier,” Colligan joked in an interview with the Valley News at the time.

Colligan “got a kick out of joining” the Rotary Club, Luteran said. “She was never intimidated by men. Frankly, I think she charmed them.”

Instead of being held back by men, or anyone, telling her she couldn’t do something, “she would quietly go about figuring out how to do it and do it better than all the guys,” Luteran said.

Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in the age of feminism, Luteran was always inspired by her mom. She went on to study architecture, which at the time was also “a man’s world,” but she “had no qualms about it because I had seen what she had done to blaze a trail.”

Colligan was always “definitely her own person,” Pat Appleton, her friend and neighbor of over 50 years, said.

Colligan’s uniqueness and independence were always clear to others, whether that was through an identifiable pair of black speed skates she always wore to skate circles around her family on Occom Pond or the “trademark” blue streak she put in her hair in 2014 and had “forevermore,” as Keenhold put it.

Shortly before retiring from Dartmouth in 2001, Colligan set out to learn piano, unintentionally launching into a second career managing the business affairs of Classicopia, a role she maintained until she was 90 years old.

She looked out for a piano teacher, and that was how she met Dan Weiser. All Colligan wanted to do was learn to play Chopin, he said.

As her teacher, Weiser was able to convince Colligan to practice music by other composers “reluctantly,” “but she always came back” to the Ballade No. 1 by Chopin.

“Whenever she was feeling down, she would call me up and ask me to play that for her,” Weiser said. She “... was just someone who loved to be around music.”

After a few lessons, Colligan came up with the idea to host a group of friends to learn about the music and hear piano at her home; that became the first Classicopia event.

With Colligan’s business expertise, Weiser’s talent on the piano and their combined passion for music, the two “worked so well together.” Even after her retirement from Classicopia in 2021, Colligan continued to get to “any concert she could.”

She was also known as a kind and reliable friend and neighbor.

Keenhold and Colligan raised their children side by side and “had a wonderful life together.”

They would cross country and downhill ski together, play bridge and attend parties.

In their later years, they often sat on Colligan’s back deck — which she famously loved and called her “Tahiti” because of the many plants — “whiling away a couple of hours.”

Colligan’s dedication to her neighbors, no matter how well she knew them, never let up.

When Jacqui Marcus and her family moved to the neighborhood in 2016, the move-in process “was just all types of chaos.”

Though Marcus is still not sure how Colligan knew that they were struggling, Colligan had a friend deliver hamburgers, french fries and milkshakes to the Marcuses’ new house.

“It really just helped me feel better about the decision to move here and the neighborhood we were in,” Marcus said. “That just sort of epitomized Marcia, she was a little bit of the matriarch of Rayton Road.”

Colligan and the Marcuses developed a close relationship, but the Marcuses never knew about many of Colligan’s accomplishments, and she likely wanted it that way.

“She didn’t bask in the limelight and want to take credit for all these things and have ticker tape parades in her honor,” Marcus said. “She just wanted (to) and got things done, and we all get to benefit from it.”

Clare Shanahan can be reached at cshanahan@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.