Charlotte Sagoff, was activist against pollution in Acton; 92

Charlotte Sagoff began raising her voice in protest when it was just a gurgled cry.

"She was on the picket line before she could walk," her daughter, Ruth Perry of Cambridge, said of the demonstrations Mrs. Sagoff attended in New York City with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. "She was bundled on her mother's back."

"I'm a trade union baby," Mrs. Sagoff told a Globe reporter in 1996.

More than 60 years after those early experiences, she turned her attention to Acton's water supply, which had been polluted by W.R. Grace & Co.'s chemical manufacturing, and found herself on the line again. She spoke at meetings, organized a civic group, and put together the town's first Earth Day celebration.

Mrs. Sagoff, who had moved to Cambridge in 2001, died of heart failure April 23 while taking a nap in her son's home in Mount Vernon, N.Y. She was 92 and to the end had asked friends to recommend books to feed her unrelenting appetite for reading.

Nine years ago, the New England office of the US Environmental Protection Agency presented an Environmental Merit Award to Mrs. Sagoff, lauding her for being "a leader in the environmental community for more than 20 years. . . . Regardless of the issue, Sagoff's ability to motivate others into action and her long-term commitment to preserving our environment are unwavering."

In the late 1970s, she helped found Acton Citizens for Environmental Safety and served as president of the organization, which often went by its acronym ACES.

"She was what we call the queen of ACES," her friend Pam Kelly said by phone. "She was the queen bee -- not because she monopolized the conversation, but because she helped link people together so they could collectively make a difference. That was Charlotte's style."

Born in New York City, she grew up living in all five boroughs with her mother, Betty Lewis, a single parent and a worker and shop steward in the ladies garment industry, who turned her apartments into labor organizing posts.

"It was just the two of them," Perry said. "She describes how her mother's friends would come over and stand on the table playing the violin and arguing into the night."

In high school and at Hunter College, from which she graduated in 1933, Mrs. Sagoff worked as a beautician to cover her expenses, though beauty wasn't always the result.

"In those days we did marcels and finger waves," she told the Globe, adding with a laugh, "I was just a rotten hairdresser."

After college she taught biology in night school in Harlem and met Marvin Opler in an anthropology class she was taking during the day. They married in 1935 and she assisted him as he researched the Ute Indians in the Southwest.

They moved to Portland, Ore., where he taught at Reed College. The couple also worked as teachers and advocated for those detained in a Japanese internment camp in California during World War II.

In the late 1950s they moved to Buffalo, where he taught at the college that later became the State University of New York at Buffalo. She went back to school, training at the university as a counselor and working there for about a dozen years. The Oplers divorced in 1970. He died in 1981.

She was visiting her daughter in Massachusetts when she read "ShrinkLits," a book by Maurice Sagoff that summarized classic works of literature in light verse.

"She thought it was charming and wrote him a postcard," her daughter said. "He called her and said he was impressed by her use of semicolons."

They married in 1973 and moved to Acton where, after renovating the house they had bought, the couple became politically active. Mrs. Sagoff helped found the Acton Food Co-op and served on the town's board of health. She also worked as a counselor at Wheelock College and Simmons College until reaching the mandatory retirement age.

And she became involved in the fight to hold W.R. Grace accountable for its pollution, which resulted in a site of about 260 acres being added to the federal Superfund list.

In the 1996 interview with the Globe, Mrs. Sagoff recalled that some residents initially resisted when Acton Citizens for Environmental Safety called attention to how two town wells had been polluted with chemicals.

"We were Acton's communists," she said. "They didn't want to hear it. We were going to destroy the value of people's homes."

More than 20 years after Mrs. Sagoff began battling the company, W.R. Grace is still cleaning up the site.

"Charlotte was a remarkable woman, someone who truly cared for her community and who worked tirelessly to make Acton, and our world, a better place," Mary Michaelman, the organization's current president, wrote in a tribute to her predecessor. She added, "Charlotte was an inspiration to me and to so many others."

Much as her mother's apartments were a place for union activists to gather, Mrs. Sagoff's Acton home "always felt like the hub of the community," said her friend Heidi Strickland, a former Acton resident who now lives in Athol. "People came to her all the time."

And not just because of political causes.

"I think what's really unique about Charlotte was that she was a very diverse woman," Strickland said. "She was interested in everything. She was interested in knowledge. She was interested in people."

That was borne out in her reading habits, which were legendary wherever she lived. Susan Paju, the reference librarian at Acton Memorial Library, wrote in an e-mail that Mrs. Sagoff "read widely, which is not to say that she read indiscriminately -- she knew how to skim a book and set it aside if she found it not worth her time so that she could move quickly on to one that was."

Maurice Sagoff died in 1998, and Mrs. Sagoff moved to Cambridge three years later but she stayed in touch with her friends in Acton.

In the autumn of 2002, Mrs. Sagoff sent Paju a note:

"I am eating my cherry cake and drinking vanilla-flavored kefir and just getting ready to get into bed to read. What could be more heavenly?"

In addition to her daughter, Mrs. Sagoff leaves a son, Lewis Alan Opler of Mount Vernon, N.Y.; a stepson, Mark Sagoff of Bethesda, Md.; a stepdaughter, Sara Mitter of Montpelier, France; six grandsons; and four granddaughters.

A service will be held June 24 at a time and place to be announced.