Near the end of her tenure as director of classified advertising at the Globe a dozen years ago, Marilyn Won Short sensed that the Internet could have a disruptive impact on her department, which was a powerful revenue engine for the newspaper.
“Although none of us at the time knew just what that would mean for us, I can tell you that Marilyn was an early adaptor and she was someone who urged us to embrace the Internet and not do battle with it,” recalled Mary Jane Patrone, former senior vice president and chief advertising officer at the Globe.
By that point in Mrs. Short’s career, facing a significant challenge head-on was hardly a new experience. She had grown up in a single-parent household in New York City, raised by a mother who cleaned homes. The daughter of a black mother and an Asian father, she watched her mother deal with discrimination at work and later experienced it first-hand in a career that included social work and governmental positions before Mrs. Short arrived at the Globe.
“She was soft-spoken and humorous, but could be steely and strong,” said her husband, Joe Short, who formerly was president of Bradford College in Haverhill. “Marilyn really rose at a time when she had to disarm a lot of potential difficulty for her.”
A pioneering black female executive at the Globe, Mrs. Short died in her home Dec. 26 of complications of pulmonary fibrosis. She was 71 and had lived in the South End for 38 years.
Her management role was so distant from her childhood of limited financial means that “most of the people at the Globe couldn’t imagine that would be her background,” her husband said. “She was so beautiful and stylish, with a wonderful voice and diction. I think few, if any, were aware of her beginnings.”
Marilyn Won – the name she used professionally – was born in Harlem Hospital. Her father, Leo Won, was from China. Her mother, the former Dorothy John, was from Bermuda, and her ancestors were from Africa, the Caribbean island of Montserrat, and Antigua in the West Indies.
Mrs. Short spent her early years in Harlem, “where she had a sizable family of uncles, aunts, and cousins,” her husband said. Then her immediate family moved to West 17th Street, and she was in her early teens when her parents divorced. Her father moved to Hong Kong and her mother became an inspirational single parent.
“Her mother was a very strong person,” Joe Short said. “Marilyn had many of the strong-willed characteristics she had.”
Mrs. Short’s mother often worked three part-time jobs to provide for their financial needs and to send her to Cathedral High School, an all-girls private Catholic institution whose graduations are held in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
As a black woman with a high school education, Mrs. Short’s mother faced numerous barriers. Help-wanted ads often called “for light-skinned black women for domestic work,” Joe Short said. “Her mother was very dark and faced discrimination, and Marilyn saw that. She was very shaped by what she observed in her mother’s life.”
He added that his wife “grew up identifying as a black person of West Indian heritage, with kind of a fierce sense of the injustice that her mother had experienced, and which she did, too, to some extent.”
Her mother, meanwhile, was determined that her only child would have good education opportunities. “She was very lucky to have a mother who had a clear vision that she would go to college,” Joe said.
Mrs. Short graduated with a bachelor’s degree from City College of New York and with a master’s in social work from Columbia University. Initially, she was a psychiatric social worker. Many of her clients lived in single-room occupancy residences in the Upper West Side.
In the 1960s she met Short, a program officer at the Africa-America Institute in New York, at one of the evening gatherings the non-governmental organization periodically hosted.
“I grew up in the segregated state of Oklahoma,” he said, and they became an interracial couple at a time when laws in his home state would have prohibited them from marrying. They married in New York City in 1968, the year after the US Supreme Court, in the Loving v. Virginia case, invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriages.
“Marilyn was terrified when we went to Oklahoma to meet my parents,” her husband recalled, “but she was, as she said, swept up in love by my family and all of my friends. There wasn’t even a hint of a negative experience.”
He, meanwhile, “was swept up in Harlem and the Bronx and her family, and got to go to many places where I would not have been as welcome without them.”
They arrived in Boston in 1977, when he became executive director of Oxfam America. The city was still on edge racially because of school desegregation and court-ordered busing. “Boston was not a popular place for black people,” Joe Short said. “When Ebony and other magazines ranked the places you would want to live, it was not Boston.”
They settled in the South End, where they raised their son, Erich Won-Short, who now lives in Rochester, N.Y.
Mrs. Short worked for AT&T and for Mayor Kevin White’s administration before getting a master’s in management from Simmons College and going to work in advertising for the Globe in the 1980s. Before becoming director of classified advertising, her husband said, she started out selling retail ads to “jewelers, furriers, and other local merchants.”
She rose into management and he became president at Bradford College, which closed in 2000, two years after he stepped down. “She could not be the traditional spouse of the president that small colleges like. I made that clear and the board really embraced it,” he said. Instead, he added, she offered the example of her own career achievements, which was an inspiration, particularly to the college’s female students.
Failing health prompted Mrs. Short to retire in 2004, but for many years few knew she had pulmonary fibrosis. “The ’90s were when she really was carrying a very heavy load, and she carried it with grace,” her husband said. “She was a super professional, a super supporter of her husband’s profession, and a super mom.”
A service has been held for Mrs. Short, who in addition to her husband and son leaves three grandsons.
“Marilyn was extremely elegant. She was always impeccably dressed, she was perfectly coiffed, she spoke carefully and thoughtfully, and at the same time she had this mischievous and sly sense of humor,” Patrone said. “The juxtaposition of this cool elegance and this wicked wit was completely disarming for her colleagues and for her customers.”
She added that Mrs. Short “was one of the rare people that I’ve known in my career who always brought out the best in people around her. People wanted to be as good as they could be for her.”