Marjorie D. Teitelbaum, a social worker who had visited Hiroshima after the bombing and later served as executive director of the Planned Parenthood Association of Maryland and as president of the League of Women Voters of Baltimore, died of pneumonia Saturday at Keswick Multi-Care Center. She was 86.
Marjorie Danford Shively was born and raised in San Mateo, Calif., and was a longtime resident of Mount Washington.
After earning her bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1937, she was a caseworker for the California Relief Administration.
With the coming of World War II, she moved to Washington, where she was a statistician with the Australia War Mission from 1941 to 1942.
She joined the American Red Cross and was sent by troopship to the South Pacific, where she served as an assistant field director in Australia, New Guinea and the Philippines. At the end of the war, she was sent by the Red Cross to Kyoto.
"Japan is certainly the most interesting and fascinating country I have ever seen," she wrote in a 1945 letter to her family.
"This was the big adventure of her life," said her daughter, Joan T. Goldstein of Potomac. "She visited Hiroshima with several friends, ignoring orders not to go there, and brought back a partially melted green bottle that had been destroyed as a remembrance."
Mrs. Teitelbaum returned home and earned a master's degree in social work from the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration in 1947. That year, she married Dr. Harry A. Teitelbaum, a former Army physician whom she had met in Australia during the war.
In 1948, the couple settled in Baltimore, where she raised her two children.
A lifelong Democrat, Mrs. Teitelbaum joined the League of Women Voters of Baltimore and served as the organization's president from 1959 to 1961, and as a director from 1961 to 1962 and from 1965 to 1966.
"She was a person of very high ethical standards and values and deeply cared about other people," said June S. Wing, a former president of the league.
"She was a very firm and outspoken person, and didn't know how to be devious. She was always a gracious host in any encounter," she said.
During her tenure as president of the league, she was instrumental in obtaining the league's and community's support for the reform of the city's magistrate courts. During her administration, the General Assembly passed the Municipal Court Bill.
"She was bright, very pleasant and entirely competent. She was quiet and got things done," said James H. Bready, a retired Evening Sun editorial writer.
She served as executive director of the Planned Parenthood Association of Maryland from 1969 to 1970, and as executive director of the Child Care Coordinating Committee for the State of Maryland from 1970 to 1975.
She was a member of the Academy of Certified Social Workers. As a member of the National Association of Social Workers, she was chairwoman of the committee that selected the state director of welfare in 1962 and a delegate to the human rights assembly.
She retired in the 1970s.
No services are planned.
In addition to her husband of 54 years and her daughter, she is also survived by a son, Paul S. Teitelbaum of Baltimore; a sister, Evelyn Gough of Belmont, Calif.; and two granddaughters.