Mary Rockwell, Widow of Americana Painter

STOCKBRIDGE, Mass. —  Mary Punderson Rockwell, a schoolteacher who was 65 when she married Norman P. Rockwell, the painter of Americana, died Saturday. She was 88.

Known as Molly Rockwell, she died in the Stockbridge home she shared with her husband until his death in 1978.

She founded and was president for many years of the historic Old Corner House in Stockbridge, where a collection of Rockwell originals was kept.

Mrs. Rockwell was born in West Stockbridge, attended local schools and was a Radcliffe College graduate. She taught on Staten Island, N.Y., and then at Milton Academy in Milton, Mass., from 1921 until her retirement in 1955.

After retiring, Mrs. Rockwell returned to her hometown and met the artist, who had been widowed a year earlier, at a poetry class she was teaching.

When he enrolled in the course the second year, “She thought, ‘Well, this is more than casual interest,’ ” said a close friend, Katherine Herzog of Milton.

The romance “was fairy stuff, just like Rockwell’s illustrations,” Herzog said.

The couple were married a year later. It was the artist’s third marriage.

In 1968, Molly Rockwell became involved in a crusade to save the Old Corner House, an 18th-Century building threatened by demolition, and she and others put the building to use as a home for her husband’s paintings.

The museum contains about 500 Rockwell originals and is the only collection of the artist’s paintings.