A memorial for Hermosa Beach theater maven Maggie Moir will be held Saturday, Oct. 11, from noon to 3 p.m. at the Hermosa Beach Kiwanis Club, 2515 Valley Drive, Hermosa Beach. Moir passed away August 8 at age 93.
“Growing up with my mother was kind of nuts,” son Brendan Moir recalled. “One week we were having lunch with Tim Leary at the San Francisco Airport, another week we would have beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti crashing on our couch following a poetry reading at the Hermosa Community Theater. During the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, we had a troupe of Israeli actors sleeping in our two living rooms. She was a ‘Yes” woman. A tornado in a dress.”
Maggie Moir was born in Los Angeles on Valentine’s Day in 1932 to Harry and Dahlia Austin. Within a year, Dalia had divorced Harry for “drinking and gambling away the baby’s milk money.”
Maggie fell in love with the theater at South Gate High School, where, in a pattern she would repeat for the rest of her life. She took on multiple roles in every production, and became the school’s first female stage manager. She attended Pepperdine College on Vermont, studying journalism, theater and photography while continuing to work in school and community theater productions.
Shortly after college, Maggie married Roy Moir, an electrical engineer. They met at a community theater production. He was the lighting technician.
The couple lived briefly in Hollywood and Santa Barbera before moving to Manhattan Beach in the early ‘60s. Moir served on the Hermosa Beach Arts Foundation for 16 years, and helped bring numerous theater productions to the Hermosa Community Theater, including popular children’s puppet shows..
In the early ‘70s, she and partner Bonnie Anderson started South Bay Jr Programs. They teamed with Dr. Bob Haag at El Camino College’s Center for the Arts to bring children’s programs to Marsee Auditorium. In addition, they produced the Nutcracker Ballet at El Camino every holiday season for 25 years.
Maggie worked as the entertainment and dining editor for Easy Reader during the mid ‘70s, as well as working in public relations for Los Angeles County community theater programs. This led to a public relations position for two large New Age events at the Pasadena Convention Center in 1978: the Rainbow Rose Festival and the World Symposium on Humanity. She also managed public relations for famed African American artist Alonzo Davis’s Brockman Galleries in Lemert Park, all while producing theater in her spare time.
Maggie raised five children and three stepchildren, instilling her love for the arts in all of them. Her oldest became a professional ballet dancer, her second child became a professional wild animal trainer with Ringling Brothers, and her youngest became a theatrical electrician and sound engineer before working in broadcast television.
Maggie spent a good part of her last decade taking her grandchildren on trips to Broadway and the West End at the start of every theater season. ER
