Nathaniel I Magin, 95, most recently of Canton, Massachusetts, passed away on October 4, 2024. He was born on June 18, 1929, to Rae (Brooks) and Louis Magin in New York City. He was the second of two children. Nat became interested in music early and purchased his first instrument at age 13. He ended up playing the clarinet and tenor saxophone. Music served him well. It was while playing at a Catskill hotel during the summer of 1949 that he met a beautiful, young woman named Carolyn Richman. They would marry in June 1952. In 1951, however, it was his saxophone that helped him secure stateside service during the Korean War. He had been inducted into the Army in early 1951, and in November of that year he auditioned for and was accepted into the 7th Hospital Band at Valley Forge Army Hospital in Pennsylvania. Those hospital bands were active for only a year, and he ended his army service, fittingly, as a finance clerk, but the assignment with the hospital band left him with fond memories and at least two lifelong friends. Nat had studied accounting at the City College of New York, and he worked in Manhattan for A.S. Beck. In 1963, he accepted a job in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, with a small company named Town & Country, which operated a regional chain of department stores. In 1970, he was hired as comptroller for a slightly larger corporation – Kinney Shoes, which was also located in Pennsylvania. Kinney would eventually start a new division called Foot Locker. That position with Kinney took him all over the country and to many places around the world. And because of Foot Locker’s connection to the sporting world, Nat and Carol were fortunate to attend some noteworthy sporting events, most notably the 1980 “miracle on ice” hockey game between the United States and the Soviet Union at the Lake Placid Olympics. Nat remained in that position until he retired in 1994. Nat and Carol started their married life in an apartment in Flushing, NY, then bought their first house in White Plains in 1959, before the move to Pennsylvania. Upon his retirement, they bought a condo in Brewster, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, but eventually built a house in Brewster in 1995. That house was often full of their adult children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and friends. In 2017, Nat and Carol left the Cape to live in a senior community in Canton, where they were eventually joined by one of Carol’s sisters and by dear friends from the Cape. For a number of years while living on the Cape, Nat volunteered to keep the books for the Brewster Ladies Library, which is the free public library for the Town of Brewster. He never lost his love for swing music and played for a while with a jazz club on the Cape. He also loved playing tennis and traveling. Nat and Carol both loved to travel, and, to the extent that they could, they instilled that love of travel in their two daughters. They also liked to plan surprise trips or birthday parties for each other. Nat was also something of an amateur poet, and he would often write a poem in honor of Carol’s birthday. One of those poems he wrote in one line on a very long strip of paper that was not more than a half-inch tall, which he then folded and placed inside a small porcelain “box” shaped like a fig. The fig box with the poem inside has remained on a shelf in their last living room. Nat was predeceased by Carolyn, who died in 2021. He leaves his daughters Debra and Elizabeth (Ray Denenberg), grandchildren Jenny (Ben Donaldson) and Greg (Betsy Polan), and great-grandchildren Lyra and Julian. His sister Zelda died in 2007, but she and Carol’s sisters left Nat with an extended family of nieces, nephews, grand-nieces and grand-nephews. A memorial service will be planned at a future date. Donations in his memory may be made to Hadassah or the Jewish National Fund, both of which he and Carol generously supported.
Leave a Condolence