Margaret A. Woog

Peggy Woog walked the beaches of Florida and pedaled up and down the hills of Ireland, but seemed most satisfied when surrounded by friends and family at her Nisswa home – as long as they didn’t invade her kitchen space.

Peggy’s hospitality was always gracious – with a single, dramatic exception. When she was cooking, her kitchen was a no-fly zone, and you were to STAY OUT. The first offense generated a serious side-eye; if you didn’t take the hint, a verbal warning could follow. Sometimes it just got blunt: “Get the hell out of my kitchen,” daughter Missy Trees recalls hearing more than once.

Like most everything Peggy did, this territorial defense of her kitchen was a gesture of love. She wanted to cook for you. She wanted to set out snacks and fill your glass so you could relax and tell your stories. She wanted to hear about your day, tell you about hers, make you laugh. She wanted to help with any problems you chose to share, even though she likely wouldn’t bother you with her own. And the sooner you got the hell out of her kitchen, the sooner the work got done and the real sharing could begin.

Peggy died Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2025, at home, surrounded by her family, after a battle with cancer. She was 81.

She is survived by Tom, her husband of 55 years; her children, Natalie Woog-Elliott (Glenn), Annie Woog, Tommy (Lisa) Woog, and Missy (Bryan) Trees; siblings Kate Williams, Paddy Skwira (Greg), Mike Laughlin (Sue); and grandchildren Mike (Jennica) Elliott, Jessica (Scott) Snyder, and Elisa (Dylan) Livgard, Sam, Joey, Robbie Hendrickson, Emma & Isaac Trees, and Abby Woog. An older brother, Tim, died in 2022 and granddaughter Maggie Elliott in 2011.

Mass of Christian Burial will be held on Friday February 14, 2025, at 11:00AM at St. Christopher's Catholic Church in Nisswa with Father Tony Wroblewski officiating. Lunch will be served following Mass. Burial will be at Greenwood Cemetery in Nisswa following the lunch. Family are friends are invited to gather on Thursday February 13, 2025, from 5:00pm to 7:00pm at St. Christopher's, and also one hour prior to the service on Friday at the church. Flowers or Memorials are preferred. 

Margaret Anne Laughlin was born in Minneapolis on October 13, 1943, to Bob and Margaret Laughlin. She was named after her mother, but the name never stuck; it was always Peggy.

“Unless she was in trouble with mother,” said her younger sister Paddy. “Then it was Margaret Anne – or, if it was really bad, Margaret Anne Bernadette,” the confirmation name added for extra firepower.

The two sisters shared a room – peaceably on most days, although there were occasional declarations of war. “We drew a line down the middle of the room,” Paddy recalled. “I couldn’t go out the door, and she couldn’t go in the closet or look out the back window.”

After earning a degree in nursing from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Peggy worked briefly as a nurse in that city and then in Minneapolis. Then, in the late 1960s, along came Tom Woog, a strapping, handsome, piano-playing South St. Paul cop. They both lived in the Twin Cities, but met at a nightclub in Crosslake, an area where both their families owned property and spent weekends. The attraction was immediate, and it stuck; they were married a year later, in 1969.

Soon after their marriage, their mutual love of the north woods led them to Crosslake. Peggy worked in health care, and Tom, who had grown up working in the building trades for the family business, became a builder in the booming vacation area surrounding the Whitefish Chain. In 1993 they would move to Nisswa, to a house they had designed together and Tom had built.

The couple soon became a family. First came Tommy, then Missy. In 1974 the group nearly doubled in size when daughters Natalie and Annie moved north to join the family after the death of their mother, Tom’s first wife.

Tom loved building things, but at heart he was an inventor and entrepreneur. In 1989 his brainstorms and doodlings created Water Wars – a portable game he and Peggy would pull behind Tom’s pickup to weekend fairs and festivals. Combatants at two battle stations catapulted water balloons at each other – a perfect festival activity on a sweltering August afternoon. Water Wars eventually would become a manufacturing company that has shipped games to over 35 countries and most U.S. states, but in those early days it was a rolling weekend adventure for Peggy and Tom, traveling to fairs and festivals. After a busy week of nursing duties, Peggy spent many summer weekends filling water balloons and collecting water-soaked dollar bills from kids eager for another turn. For five years they ran a popular booth at the Minnesota State Fair. As the company grew, their travels expanded to trade shows and conventions across the country.

“They would always make an adventure out of their trips,” said Tommy, who now runs the company. “They stopped in Glenwood Springs [Colorado] on the way to the Fun Expo in Vegas for years. . . . They made some good friends in the industry along the way. Always made time for dinner and laughter.”

After various jobs in health care, Peggy found a home at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Brainerd, where she worked in discharge planning until officially retiring nine years ago.

“She was playful and enjoyed a good joke – whether it was on her or on other people,” said a good friend, who met Peggy in 1987 and whom Peggy trained in discharge management, the unit of the hospital that works with doctors to determine when patients are healthy enough be discharged. 

“She played pranks,” she said of her former supervisor. Like dressing a mannequin in business attire and putting it in the chair of a vacationing co-worker, to give the impression that someone else had been installed in her office.

One co-worker in the discharge unit was uncomfortable in the hospital’s mental-health ward and “hated to go up there,” she recalled. “Peggy made up a chart for a patient named Lorna Doone – as in the cookie – and told him to go up and evaluate whether Lorna Doone was ready to go home.” He went upstairs, opened the chart folder and found it stuffed with Lorna Doone cookies.

And the old artificial leg laying around the office that was used as a chip dip at an office party? That was Peggy’s idea too.

Peggy’s final retirement nine years ago was her third, her friend said. After retiring the first time, she got a big party – and a big ring as a retirement present from husband Tom. She came back twice more on a part-time basis because she liked the work and the hospital liked having her there. “We kept kidding her that this was why she came back to work,” her friend said. “Trying to get more rings from Tom.”

When she wasn’t caring for patients or helping with Water Wars, Peggy indulged her passion for cycling – and not just peddling casually around Nisswa, but taking hard-core cycling trips to Ireland, Vermont, Colorado and other hilly terrains. Many of those miles were shared with Pat Mangelsdorf, a lifelong friend since grade school.

And the hard-core cycling started fairly late in the game.

“She called me out of the blue and said, ‘Are you still crazy? Do you wanna go biking with me in Ireland?” Pat said. They were in their late 60s at the time.

“Six days, 60 miles as day” she said. “All the memories and the laughter, all through Killarney.”

Other trips took them up and down the hills of Vermont and Colorado. They also pedaled, in their 70s, from Miami to Key West.

In addition to cycling, Peggy loved her gardens and golf. Shopping was also a passion, and it occasionally became a game of hide-and-seek. “Mom was elusive while shopping,” Tommy recalled. “Slippery, we called it. If she wanted to disappear amongst the clothing racks, you would never find her.”

Peggy’s love of the north country did not, in her later years, extend to its frigid weather. She and Tom were annual visitors to Anna Maria, a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico off Bradenton.

“She loved the beach, loved the sun,” sister Paddy recalled.

On those Florida trips, Peggy traveled with a massive suitcase of hernia-inducing proportion, nicknamed The Coffin because of its size. It was almost as tall as she was. On one recent trip to the island, she was chagrined to discover upon arrival that she had forgotten to pack underwear. After a frantic trip with Paddy to the mainland to restock, the missing undies turned up tucked deep into one of the many pockets of the cavernous case. Well, said Peggy, I won’t have to do laundry.

Despite worsening arthritis, she stuck with her beloved gardening and, as recently as last fall, played golf weekly with sister Kate. “Neither of us was very good,” Kate said. “We didn’t care. We lost a lot of balls. We had fun.” 

There were never complaints from Peggy about the arthritis, or her worsening heart problems. “Peggy never complained,” Kate said. “Always in charge, always out to do things.”

But of all the things Peggy loved, the family came first.

“When I was young, we didn’t have much money,” Tommy said, “but mom always made sure Missy and I had good clothes, even though she never bought herself anything new for years.”

Her home was a haven for family and friends, and for those who needed a friend. “She took everybody in like they were her own,” Tommy said.

“She helped teach me how to be a mother to my brand-new baby,” said Lisa Woog, Peggy’s daughter-in-law. “She was selfless in the giving of her time, talent and treasure to her kids and her grandkids.”

And Peggy was quick to fill the void when Lisa’s mother died in 2017. “Without a word, she took on loving me even more deeply after my own mom died,” Lisa said. “She showed it in a thousand ways. She knew my mom never let my Christmas birthday be lost among the holiday. Every year since my mom’s death, she had birthday gifts and cake for me amongst all the holiday festivities.”

Peggy’s stories made you laugh. Sometimes she spoke her own language or embellished a story with a verbal flourish. A “slobola,” for example, was someone who needed to clean up his or her act. When a situation had devolved into a total mess, she might use a literary allusion (inherited from her mother) to describe it: It was like “the wreck of the Hesperus.”

Peggy and her siblings would remain close. “Peg was my best friend,” said Kate, who lives in nearby Crosslake. “We’d talk for two hours at night sometimes, especially in these last few years.”

When all the miles have been pedaled and the last golf ball has disappeared into the swamp and all the intruders have been rousted from the kitchen, it’s hard summing things up. But old friends have a way of saying it best:

“She was more than a friend,” said Pat Mangelsdorf. “In her heart there was nothing but kindness and caring and laughter. A wonderful person.”

Arrangements are entrusted to Brenny Family Funeral Chapel, Baxter.