Mary Margaret McBride was born to a Missouri farming family in 1899. Her earliest education was “disorganized” because the family often relocated, but she entered a preparatory academy at the age of six and at 16 entered the University of Missouri; she earned her journalism degree by the age of 19.
Having reasonable success as a “girl journalist” with the Cleveland Press, she moved on to the larger New York Evening Mail (1867 – 1924) & did quite well contributing freelance pieces to periodicals. With the Depression hundreds of writers found themselves unemployed, and McBride was among them. She was now in her mid-thirties her writing career essentially over, but getting a hunch. Her Mars on the 7th house cusp in Aries is the 90-degree turn she took in life when she went from newsprint to WOR-radio in New York City. She went for a radio audition and stayed on the air for the next forty years.
Her ascendant is opposite the electric Mars in her sixth house shows her knack for metal, electronics and radio waves, as well as indomitable work spirit. She tackled everything and by the 1950’s put out a series of Mary McBride Cookbooks as she was renown chef.
Her Ascendant at 19 Libra — “a gang of robbers in hiding the symbol of a woman’s freedom of spirit and soul as she deviates from the normal impulses of others” — opposes that lone Mars creating a T-Square to the Midheaven in Cancer 22. This not only suggests her warm effusive interviewing style but symbolically is all about her being able to swallow her pride and change careers. We have a link to her interviewing actress Carol Landis here, #543 in the Jones 1000. Her musical director was Paul Whiteman aka “The King of Jazz” and Jones # 965.
Her see-saw is definitely an odd shape, but oppositions, while nice, are not required. The one to her ascendant does not count according to Dr. Jones.
Her Line of Vitality (Sun aspecting the Moon) is absent (Jones in Essentials misstates that as being in opposition)¹. Remembering that this line does not portend a long life, because it is not an update to the hyleg, instead it is about how she embraces life. Her it shows that she tended to be freewheeling regarding her abilities (second house) and where her opportunities may occur (ninth house). Her biography supports that for she moved like her parents did where-ever the corn was growing highest — and did not let weeds dictate her circumstance.
McBride died at 76 years of age in West Shokan, Ulster County, New York about 22 miles west of Kingston on the NYS Thruway in the Catskills. A fuller discussion of her career can be found here on Patrick Murfin’s site.
Footnotes:
- Jones, Marc E., Ph.D, Essentials of Astrological Analysis, pg. 117 gives her along with General Francisco Franco as an example of the sun and moon in an opposition aspect.
- FWIW, we prefer the time and Ascendant below for McBride. It does not change her Line of Vitality nor really her placement of Mars except to move the latter closer to the eighth house and making that essential ruler give her the strength to make the proverbial lemonade out of lemons.
