Friends remembered: Mary Frances Pappalardo Shields

Margaret Frances Pappalardo Shields, 100, of Woburn, Mass., died Oct. 14, 2016. On Dec. 30, 1929, at the age of 13, she saved a girl from drowning after the girl broke through the ice atop Middlesex Canal in Woburn. “It all happened so fast,” Shields told a correspondent for the Herald-Tribune in Sarasota, Fla., in 2004. “I don’t know how I was able to get my hands under her arms, but it was very hard. She was wearing such a heavy coat.” The Carnegie Hero Fund Commission awarded Shields the Carnegie Medal in October 1931. Shields and her husband operated a cottage colony and café on Cape Cod, Mass., and later lived in Port Charlotte, Fla., according to the Herald-Tribune story. She was buried at Oak Grove Cemetery in Medford, Mass.