“He was a remarkable man….brilliant beyond belief…..expert in at least a half dozen fields. He gave himself to people.”  Dale Ogar, student and colleague. 

In the Summer of 1964, I saw an ad in the housing office on the UC Berkeley campus that offered reduced rent for a student willing to do dishes, Monday through Friday, for a family on the north side of campus. That’s how I met the Margens and left a shared room in a house on the southside of campus for an apartment overlooking San Francisco Bay. I’d been looking for a more congenial atmosphere to begin a new relationship and there it was: up Euclid and across Cedar in the greenery of the Berkeley Hills.

At about 6:30 every weekday evening, I climbed the stairs of my new abode (kitchen/living room, bedroom and bath) on the ground floor of a beautiful four-level home to the kitchen where the Margen family’s dinner dishes waited for me. Soft light still filled the dining room while the family regathered in the adjoining living room.

Dr. Margen was a leader whose research was used as a foundation for many of the dietary guidelines listed on our foods. He helped establish minimum daily requirements for a healthy diet. He may be best known by the public for co-founding the Berkeley Wellness Letter, a publication offering consumer-friendly practical advice about staying healthy at a time when there wasn’t yet a lot of general information about nutrition.

In the Fall of 2004, Dr. Margen took part in a ceremony that named the Sheldon Margen Public Health Library at UC Berkeley in his honor. During the Summer of 2018, it joined two other libraries to combine as the Bioscience, Natural Resources, and Public Health Library. Dr. Margen’s sizeable contributions to the field of public health will continue to be acknowledged with a plaque placed at the entrance to the Public Health library and an annual Sheldon Margen award given to the student “who best exemplifies Dr. Margen’s voracious curiosity and ability to draw upon his knowledge of multiple disciplines to address health problems of society’s most vulnerable.”

Dr. Margen, his wife Jeanne Scholtz Margen, and their sons made me very comfortable in their majestic residence in the Berkeley Hills. On Sunday nights music flowed down through floorboards to my apartment, Jeanne on the piano and one of their sons on cello, creating a magical mood throughout the house. My friend and I spent many beautiful days and evenings in that lower floor apartment of the Margen home.