Kansas City’s Peggy Baker ‘was one of those kids who would play with everybody’ | Opinion
At age 4, Peggy Gramlich “was one of those kids who would play with everybody,” said Nancy Tobin Schorgl, her friend since they met as kindergarteners at Visitation, just days after Japan’s formal surrender on the USS Missouri officially ended World War II in 1945. And I know that never changed because Peggy G. Baker, who died on Aug. 7 at 84, was the first person to ask me to come out and play when I arrived in Kansas City in 2017.
Her daughter Bridget Baker says that one reason she walks with confidence in this world is that there are few places she can go, and not only in Kansas City, where somebody doesn’t know her mother. “Either she babysat you, played tennis with you, led a group you were in, or sat next to you on a plane: ‘You’re staying in a hotel? Oh no, just stay with us; my husband will love it! LOL.”
Peggy’s father, J. Russell Gramlich, always said he danced on the bar at the Peanut at 50th and Main when Margaret Ann, the first of his six children with Mary Dorothy Scurry Gramlich, was born. She became one of Missouri’s first licensed physical therapists — lucky number 13, actually — then earned an advanced degree in gerontology and later helped many of her three children’s friends navigate the end of their parents’ lives.
She was a constant Catholic, someone who as a girl would run over to Visitation, very near where she grew up in Brookside, and help the priest get ready for Mass. She also became a nun because she wanted to serve, and when she left the convent after a decade, stayed forever connected to and inspired by the women in her community. Peggy was the kind of person anyone would want to come and sit by — an intent listener, avid reader, joyful presence and devoted Royals fan. She was a friend who showed up, not only when it was convenient.
In the ‘80s, she and her friend Patti Schugel owned and ran the successful Corinth Square sorority store The Lady Bug, though they had no experience in either Greek life or retail. In her later years, one of her main missions was promoting the cause of formerly incarcerated women through the nonprofit Journey to New Life.
Another of her great loves was St. Teresa’s Academy, where her grandmother, mother, then she and her sisters, her own two daughters and now three and soon to be six of her 10 grandchildren were and are students. And yes, if you’re counting, that is five generations of girl power.
‘She roared her way through school’
Nancy Schorgl was with her at St. Teresa’s, too, as part of the Class of ‘57. “We were the dragon women,” her friend said, “born in the year of the dragon, 1940, and Peggy roared her way through school,” playing on every athletic team and making a big impression in the blue convertible that her dad got her for her 16th birthday, in part so she could help get her five younger siblings where they needed to go.
She left the car behind that same year, though, and joined the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in St. Louis. That’s where she met her friend Jane Pitz in 1957, when they were two of the 57 novices joining the order that year.
I’ve known Jane since I was in college and Jane was in campus ministry at the University of Notre Dame, which is how Peggy knew I might like to meet someone in my new town. Fifty-seven entering in one year, wow. “This was right before the Peace Corps, and an underlying consideration was you could belong to something bigger than yourself. We were idealistic young women” who wanted to contribute and did.
Breaking ‘The Grand Silence’
Her first impression of her lifelong friend? Peggy and the other novice from Kansas City were younger than Jane, who’d already had a year of college, and since the other young woman did not yet know how to wash her own hair, because her mother had always done that for her, “there was an impression of Kansas City girls.” Pretty soon, though, Jane and Peggy became aware of one another as kindred spirits. Not rebels, exactly, but not taking such things as the nightly Grand Silence — no talking between 9 p.m. and morning prayer — with the greatest seriousness, either.
Each bed in their dormitory had curtains around it, and on their first New Year’s Eve in religious life, they drew little notes that said, “Happy New Year!” and tossed them over the curtains onto each sleeping woman at midnight. “The postulant mistress, Sister Lucilla” said another young woman should be the role model, and certainly “not Peg and Jane.” Or rather, as they were then known, Sister Marilyn Joseph and Sister Armand Marie. “This poor woman had to accommodate us to the community and the community to us.” In her 10 years in the convent, Peg also became deeply committed to social justice and civil rights, and supported her sisters who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma.
At age 26, the way Peggy always told the story, she was taking a shower one day and thought, I think I’d like to get married and have a family. It wasn’t that she was in love, or had even met anyone, Jane said, though that soon changed. “So she told the Mother Superior,” according to Bridget, “who said, ‘Take some time to think about it.’ And she said, ‘No, I already called my dad and he’s picking me up.’ ”
‘We climbed over a fence’ where Peggy met Jack
She stayed on at her physical therapy job in St. Louis, though, and was living in a one-bedroom apartment there when she invited Jane’s mom, who needed cancer treatment, to come and stay with her after her surgery, while she was getting radiation. So one day when Jane was visiting them both, “I had one of Peggy’s bathing suits, we climbed over a fence” and met some guys who were Peg’s neighbors at the pool. One of them was Jack Baker, who according to Jane, Peggy may or may not have already known. Either way, they were married two years later, on Sept. 6, 1969, at Visitation, of course.
He is quiet and she was not, but what made them work as a couple, as Bridget sees it, is that “my mom was a strong personality, and my dad is a man born in 1941, so they gave each other a run for their money.” Back in Kansas City, they had two daughters, Megan and Bridget, and a son, Sean. Peggy ran her own home health physical therapy business, and constantly pushed doctors to get their patients off so many drugs. She also had an interior design business called Pidge Interiors, and along with many other volunteer projects, spent several stretches in El Paso working at a shelter for immigrants at the border.
The joke in their family was that even as they’d be opening presents, Peggy would be calling out, “Seton Center!” meaning that they had enough shirts or toys already so the new ones, however cute, were getting donated.
‘Boxers with Greek letters on the butts’
“What was fun” about The Lady Bug store she and Patti Schugel ran for 10 years, her former business partner says, “was that neither of us were sorority girls – I went to Northwest Missouri State and Peggy was in the convent — but we decided to buy this little gift shop that was predominantly a sorority shop. We took forever learning the Greek alphabet, and what were the top ones” — especially at KU — “so when they came in we could talk the talk.” Sometimes, they’d have to duck into the back and look something up, but the business took off anyway.
Through a Dallas friend of Peggy’s, they were first in the Kansas City area to sell Vera Bradley bags, and also first to sell “those flannel boxers and long pants with Greek letters on the butts. They were a hit. We were known for those.” On one buying trip to Chicago, they went to a filming of “Oprah,” took her some gifts, filmed themselves — talk about ahead of their time — and then rented a giant TV and showed the episode where they were in several crowd shots in their store, where they held a sale and served wine and cheese.
They also had trunk shows and happy hours. When I told Patti that Bridget had mentioned that they “kept the boob- and penis-shaped suckers behind the counter,” she said, “She’s telling on us! Those were for bachelorette parties.” But then she added that their earrings made of sequined condom packages were also big sellers, even if both owners were skittish about those. “We had a marvelous time.”
‘Peggy got sick, but she never got old’
Peggy Baker moved with purpose, drove too fast, and other than the years when she was ferrying kids around in a Dodge station wagon — Dodge “may have been less a brand name for that car and more of an instruction” to others on the road, her daughter Bridget says — she always had a convertible.
She threw her own Irish wake — a tea for her friends from the Class of ‘57, says her friend Nancy, who also got to say goodbye at KU Medical Center, where Peggy, who died of leukemia, was still introducing everybody: “Peggy got sick, but she never got old.”
On what would have been her 85th birthday, Aug. 25, her family will celebrate her “full, fabulous” life at Curé of Ars Catholic Church in Leawood, where there will be a rosary at 11:45 and Mass at noon. Naturally, she planned her own going away party, and told her children, “I don’t want you guys getting up there yammering on forever and making everybody cry.” Her strict instruction, Bridget said, was that each of her children should speak for no more than two minutes and remember that what she wanted was to celebrate life itself.
She asked that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to either JourneyToNewLife.org, or StTeresasAcademy.org, where her family has just started the Peggy B Award for Service and Leadership, which will offer tuition assistance. Her family also asks that we honor her memory by showing up for one another, and “loving our dear neighbor without distinction.”
This story was originally published August 20, 2025 at 5:10 AM.
