Mrs. Anna Margaret Graff Fairchild graduated from Perryville High School in 1941. She grew up with four brothers and three sisters on the family farm near Lithium, Mo.
Mrs. Fairchild graduated with honors with a nursing degree from Missouri Baptist Hospital in St. Louis in 1945. Following graduation, she was a nursing supervisor and instructor in obstetrics and gynecology at Methodist Hospital in Gary, Indiana. It was there that she became engaged to marry her future husband who was attending medical school at Northwestern University in Chicago.
Mrs. Fairchild married Dr. James F. Fairchild on Dec. 25, 1951, at the First Baptist Church in Perryville. She and Dr. Fairchild had five children: James (Joy Hoeh), Margaret (Rick Gebhardt), Scott (Lori Martens), Peter (Sandra Polk) and Andrew (Denyse Porter). They also had nine grandchildren.
They moved to Perryville in 1954 after completing post-graduate training at Missouri Baptist Hospital in St. Louis.
Mrs. Fairchild was a member of the Perryville School Board for 21 years, and served as board president for several years. She was very active as a Girl Scout and Cub Scout Leader and served several summers as camp nurse at Camp Cherokee Ridge in Southeast Missouri. As a Girl Scout Leader, she organized the cleanup and trail construction at Legion Lake Park in the 1960s; Legion Lake Park stands as an historical legacy of the National YCC program of the 1930s.
She and her fellow Girl Scouts initiated some of the first newspaper recycling efforts in Perryville to raise funds for scouting. Mrs. Fairchild was presented with numerous service awards from the Southeast Missouri Otahki Girl Scout Council.
She later shifted her energies from raising a family to working in eldercare as a nurse at Perry County Nursing Home. Her hobbies included gardening, tennis, bird-watching, cooking and family.
Mrs. Fairchild passed away on Oct. 28, 1992. That year, her classmates, friends and family established the Anna Margaret Fairchild Memorial Scholarship Fund at Perryville High School to support students pursuing higher education in health-related fields. To date, 16 students have been presented this scholarship and continue to honor her memory by working in the health-care field.