Marge Dunton-Reida, 83; bought inn to help alcoholics reclaim sobriety

Early on, Marge Dunton-Reida sent her 16-year-old son off to fetch alcoholics who had lost their grip on sobriety and drive them back to a country inn she had bought on a lake in Ashburnham, where they could dry out in the company of others who faced the same temptations.

"The original concept was a retreat," said her son, Dr. Edwin C. Dunton Jr. of Somerset. "Her description used to be, 'I was bootlegging drunks.' She was tapering people off alcohol."

Hundreds of visitors reclaimed sobriety at her old country inn, which became Naukeag Hospital, and many returned again and again as they continued their struggles with alcohol. The hospital is now McLean Center at Naukeag.

Mrs. Dunton-Reida, who faced down her own addiction to alcohol even as her struggles with depression continued most of her life, died in her son's house May 2 after a period of declining health. She was 83 and had lived in West Dennis until moving in with her son 18 months ago.

"She knew addiction, she knew recovery, and she knew that people could get well," said the Rev. Susan Suchocki Brown, the minister of First Church Unitarian Universalist Leominster, who had worked with Mrs. Dunton-Reida. "Seeing her work her magic with people was just amazing."

Introduced as a child to the ravages wreaked by alcohol, Marge Hurley was the youngest of five sisters and grew up in Somerville. Her father was a pharmacist whose anger would flare when he drank.

"She had a somewhat traumatic upbringing because of a father with a violent temper," her son said. "She would tell stories of the police coming . . . and he would stuff all the bottles of alcohol under the mattresses because the police would never bother the five daughters."

She was 19 in 1943 when she married Edwin C. Dunton. They remained married for 16 years, and she held jobs at Raytheon, St. Johnsbury Trucking, and Pepsi, among other places, her son said. Depression and drinking prompted her to seek medical help, but the treatment wasn't beneficial.

In a newspaper interview two decades later, she said she had been prescribed a combination of amphetamines and barbiturates and underwent shock treatments.

"I was sick from the alcohol, but I became 10 times sicker after the drugs," she said in the interview, according to the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester.

"By the time she was in her early 30s, she realized she had an alcohol problem," her son said. "So she joined AA in 1957, and she just got this idea of a retreat for alcoholics that were sober."

While Alcoholics Anonymous helped her become sober, her marriage did not survive.

"I'm sure my father and mother, the reason for the eventual split was the alcohol, even though she had been sober for a while," their son said.

Meanwhile, she used a $2,500 loan from her mother to buy an old Ashburnham inn, close to Upper Naukeag Lake, that her son said was built in 1815. Initially a place where those participating in Alcoholics Anonymous could gather to spend time with others working to stay sober, the inn evolved, and Mrs. Dunton-Reida began welcoming alcoholics who had fallen off the wagon.

Attractive and forceful, she was a powerful speaker who used her own experiences to inspire others.

"She was a hardliner. She was tough. No nonsense," said Ed W., a recovering alcoholic on Cape Cod who adheres to the Alcoholics Anonymous practice of using a first name and initial for a last name in interviews. "She was very fastidious in her younger days, a very good-looking woman who kept herself immaculate, but had a sense of humor."

"I had never met anyone like her," said Suchocki Brown, who met Mrs. Dunton-Reida in the mid-1970s. "I was impressed at her warmth and her ability to make people feel very comfortable, and at the same time really listen to what people's needs were.

"There are just some people who just have charisma," Suchocki Brown said. "She just walked into a room, and all heads turned to Marge. She had the presence of a princess, the poise and grace. She was breathtakingly beautiful. She had an outstanding smile and kind of twinkly eyes. You felt like she was about 7 feet tall, when in actuality she wasn't that tall. She could make you feel, even in a room full of people, like you were her most important person at that moment."

Mrs. Dunton-Reida's son said she was married three more times, to Dr. Alvah Reida, who died in 1975; to Joseph McMahon, from whom she was later divorced; and to Clarence Jackson, who died in 1985.

After selling the hospital in the early 1980s, she worked as a consultant, then retired to Cape Cod. Mrs. Dunton-Reida continued to battle depression in retirement and was occasionally hospitalized, her son said. She also traveled around the United States and to foreign countries.

"She was always seeking; she was always seeking for truth," Suchocki Brown said of Mrs. Dunton- Reida, who she said tended to the body, mind, and spirit of each alcoholic she brought to Naukeag. "She didn't care that there were tons of religions. She always thought that they crossed over, one into the other. She was looking for ways to improve humanity."

In addition to her son, Mrs. Dunton-Reida leaves a granddaughter and three great-granddaughters.

A graveside memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. on Aug 4 in Oak Ridge Cemetery in South Dennis.