Mary Hodge Frantz, 5/1/1923 – 7/22/2025
Mary Hodge Frantz died at Capitol Lakes retirement community in Madison, Wisconsin on Tuesday, July 22, 2025 at the age of 102. She remained alert and aware of loved ones and friends old and new until the very last.
She was born May 1, 1923 in Roslyn, New York to Philip G. and Muriel (Miller) Hodge and grew up on Long Island with her brothers Philip Jr. and Max. They enjoyed many summer days with cousins at their grandparents’ cottage on Highland Lake, Connecticut. She graduated from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and continued on to the University of Rochester Medical School in Rochester, New York. It was there she met her husband, fellow medical student John Arthur Frantz. They were married January 12, 1946. They went to Detroit for his residency, then to Denver where she finished medical school at the University of Colorado Medical School.
They practiced medicine together in Montrose, Colorado for a few years, then briefly served in student health at the University of Missouri, finally settling in Monroe, Wisconsin in 1955, where they both practiced internal medicine at the Monroe Clinic. She retired from medical practice in 2010 at the age of 87. She was well-known and loved as a compassionate and capable physician who spent time getting to know her patients and caring for the whole person. She was involved in the hospice movement as it was developing, and benefitted from hospice care in her last months.
Raising their five daughters was even more important to her than medicine, which she practiced part-time when the children were young so she could share quality time with them at home, teaching them homemaking and to love learning of all kinds.
Her many interests, avocations, and volunteer roles are impossible to list in detail. She was an avid gardener, accomplished musician, knitter of many complex and lovely items, devoted grandmother, volunteer teacher, school board member, and philanthropist. She and her husband took their family on regular wilderness outings to mountains, lakes and rivers.
John and Mary travelled extensively. When they still had children in school, they served two years in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan from 1968-1970, a rich and horizon-broadening experience for the whole family. Over the years they visited nearly every continent, often as volunteers and always with the goal of getting to know the local people in their everyday lives.
They moved from the solar home they designed and helped build in Monroe to Capitol Lakes in Madison in 2012, where they enjoyed the vibrant social and intellectual life of the community and benefited from the continuing care as they aged. They were members of Prairie Unitarian Universalist Society of Madison.
She is survived by daughters Barbara Brown of Portland, Oregon, Caroline Smith of Baltimore, Maryland, and Winifred Hoffman of Earlville, Illinois, along with 11 beloved grandchildren and numerous great-grandchildren, as well as many nieces, nephews and their respective children who she loved and kept up with.
She was preceded in death by her husband, John Frantz, in 2021, daughter Betsy in 1967, daughter Margaret in 1989, her brothers and their wives, several nephews and nieces including Philip T. Hodge and Martha Day, and great-grandchildren Silas Hoffman and Tikva Meister.
Mary Frantz was the last of her generation and left an incredible legacy of love, care, and interest in everyone — family members, friends, community members and even strangers at a bus stop.
Her body was donated to the University of Wisconsin, where she was a participant in a study of “super agers.”
Mary Frantz will be honored at the Community Remembrance Gathering on Friday, August 15 at 2:00 p.m. in the Grand Hall at Capitol Lakes, 333 W. Main St., Madison, Wisconsin. A memorial service is planned at Prairie Unitarian Universalist Society in October. Donations in her honor can be made to Agrace Hospice or Nature Conservancy.
