Marie Champion, 81; was admissions officer at Harvard

Marie Champion at Wellesley College during the 1940s.

Marie Champion of Cambridge, an educator and former admissions officer at Harvard University who died June 12, gave her children two major pieces of advice.

"She always said you had a choice," said her daughter, Katherine Champion Murphy of Cambridge. "You could make it a good day, or a bad day, and you had to take responsibility for however it went."

Mrs. Champion softened her edict with another bit of philosophy: "Clean sheets and a good night's sleep will make everything better."

"She was highly practical, yet at the same time, she had a broad vision of how life should be," her daughter said.

Mrs. Champion died at the Neville Center for Rehabilitation in Cambridge of complications from Alzheimer's disease. She was 81.

Mrs. Champion died less than two months after her husband, C. Hale Champion, 85, who was the first executive dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and was her chief caregiver after she began suffering symptoms 10 years ago.

They met in the late 1940s at Stanford University while Marie was earning her master's degree in education and Hale was finishing his undergraduate degree in English following service in the Army.

Mrs. Champion was born Marie Tifft in Chicago and grew up mostly in Westfield, N.J. She was the daughter of Ozine Tifft, a music teacher from Quebec, and Thomas Tifft, an engineer. She earned her bachelor's degree in chemistry from Wellesley College in 1948.

After marrying in 1952, Mrs. Champion cared for her family while her husband's career in newspapers and politics took them to more than a dozen homes in seven cities over a span of 40 years.

Throughout the moves, Mrs. Champion worked as an educator and volunteer. She taught in parochial middle schools in Washington, D.C., was a Cub Scout den mother in Sacramento, and a Camp Fire Girls leader in St. Paul.

In 1965, while living in Sacramento, Mrs. Champion and her husband were crime victims. Two fugitive convicts kidnapped the couple and their daughter Katherine, who was then 19 months old.

They were random victims and were held hostage for 24 hours until a shootout led to their release, according to news accounts. Mrs. Champion was physically unharmed. Her husband, who was working in California Governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown's administration, suffered a superficial gunshot wound.

Mrs. Champion always downplayed the incident, her family said.

"She was not fearful before, and she was not fearful after," said her son, Thomas of Somerville. Nine years older than his sister, he was asleep in the home at the time and was unharmed.

"Her courage was just a given for everybody in the family," he said. "The episode simply confirmed her belief that you did not flinch from life."

Publicity surrounding the kidnapping brought a new opportunity to Mrs. Champion. The American Association of University Women approached her to run for the Sacramento Board of Education. She won in 1965 and was a member of the majority backing the school system's first desegregation plan.

Moving back to Cambridge in the 1970s after an earlier stint in the 1960s, Mrs. Champion taught science at Buckingham Browne & Nichols. She later worked as an admissions officer at Wheaton College and at Harvard University's School of Education.

Mrs. Champion's can-do attitude helped carry her through the loss of two children at birth and two battles with breast cancer, her family said.

She was a member of St. Paul Catholic Church in Cambridge and was on the Parish Council when the church built its Parish Center, which was dedicated in 1991.

Retired Bishop John P. Boles, who was St. Paul's pastor in those years, said, "She was an extraordinarily good mother, good wife, devout Catholic, and solid member of the Harvard community and Harvard Catholic community."

Mrs. Champion was also a fierce tennis player and continued playing into her 70s. A chemist at heart, she approached cooking as alchemy. She loved making dishes from the Betty Crocker cookbook as a young wife and later mastered French cooking, discussing recipes with her neighbor Julia Child, according to her son.

Family dinners were held with a small library of reference books nearby.

"If there was a question of fact, you looked it up, but everyone was entitled to their own opinion," her daughter said.

Mrs. Champion liked to recount a friend's remark made about her during the height of the women's movement. "You've always been liberated, Marie," the friend told her.

In addition to her son and daughter, Mrs. Champion leaves a brother, George Tifft of Alabama; and grandchildren Molly and Joseph Murphy of Cambridge and Sarah Champion of Somerville.

Services have been held. Burial was in Cambridge Cemetery.