Bio

Mary Magee grew up in Fordyce, Arkansas.

Our rural educational system was rich with caring, dedicated, bright teachers who inspired in us a love of literature and the arts. By third grade, I was writing poems for Mother's Day, short stories for fun, and articles for our mimeographed school paper.

Mary graduated high school at seventeen, married at eighteen, and, following the path of her mentors, began teaching elementary school at nineteen. While teaching she earned a BS in Education (1961) at twenty. She taught elementary students in Arkansas (Sheridan and Little Rock) before moving to Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1967.

My writing birthed a bunch of teaching aides. There were poems to teach phonetics, short stories to teach ethics, and limericks for studentsʼ birthdays.

Seeking strategies to help low achievers, Mary returned to college for an MS in School Psychology (Oklahoma State University, 1979) and a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology (OSU, 1984).

In addition to and apart from my OSU classes, I studied with Dr. Reuven Feuerstein, an Israeli psychologist making advances in testing and teaching mentally challenged children. Dr. Feuersteinʼs research resulted in programs with new assessment techniques and methods to train thinking skills. Feuersteinʼs methods became the cornerstone of my work.

After seventeen classroom years, Mary became a School Psychologist.
Following thirty-three years of public school work, she opened a private practice, diagnosing and treating learning problems. Along the way, she had one daughter, later divorced, and much later married her second husband and his two daughters.

Since retiring, Iʼve helped write one biography (Devotion to Duty; The Memoirs of Gen. Jimmy D. Ross, Library of Congress CN2007937358, 2008) and authored another (RED:Beyond Football, The Legacy of Coach Jimmy “Red” Parker, ISBN-1-930-709-64-1, 2007).

Mary lives in Tulsa with her husband. She enjoys writing, reading, golf, yoga, travel and her seven grandchildren.