Margaret Archambault, whose late husband ran Stewart-Warner Corp., was active with a number of civic and charitable organizations and in 1987 received a presidential appointment to the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Mrs. Archambault, who went by Margot, died of heart failure Sunday, April 4, at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, said her daughter, Michele, who asked that her mother’s age not be given. Mrs. Archambault lived on North Lake Shore Drive in the Lakeview neighborhood.
Mrs. Archambault came to Chicago in the mid-1950s when her husband, Bennett, was recruited to run Stewart-Warner, a diversified manufacturing company headquartered here.
She became part of a tight-knit group of social and civic leaders in the city, her daughter said. She was a chairman of the Women’s Board of the United Service Organization in Chicago and also served on the USO’s World Board.
“She’d light up any room she walked into,” said Mary Galvin, a colleague of Mrs. Archambault’s on the USO and Kennedy Center boards, and wife of former Motorola chief Robert Galvin. “She was a very good worker for charities.”
Born in Butte, Mont., where her father owned a saloon and hotel, the former Margaret Morgan moved as a young girl to an 88-acre alfalfa farm her dad bought in Southern California. Her mother died when she was a toddler, her father when she was 12, and she was raised after then by siblings.
She worked as an actress and model in California and was briefly engaged to entertainer Rudy Vallee, her daughter said. She continued modeling in New York, where she met her future husband, then an executive with M.W. Kellogg Co. They were married in February 1948.
Among the Chicago organizations she was involved with were the Women’s Board of Northwestern University and the Brookfield Zoo.
Bennett Archambault died in 1996.
She is also survived by another daughter, Suzanne Archambault Briley; and three grandchildren. A son, Steven, died in 2000.
Visitation is set for 4 to 9 p.m. April 14 at Drake & Son Funeral Home, 5303 N. Western Ave., Chicago. Graveside services will be at 3 p.m. April 16 at Graceland Cemetery, Clark Street and Irving Park Road, Chicago.
