Marion Anna Offer-Cashman

1911- 2011

Marion Offer-Cashman was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the only child of Arthur E. and Claudia Rebecca Offer. From her earliest years she was fascinated with the violin and started lessons at age twelve.

Her first teacher, Marie Nichols, an instructor at Sarah Lawrence College, was impressed with her talent and facilitated a scholarship for her to attend SLC. Marion declined and instead attended a Seventh-day Adventist school. She had an opportunity to play at the New England Conservatory of Music and while attending Atlantic Union College for a year was asked to conduct its orchestra.

Although she was a frequent soloist on the violin, she also learned to play the piano, organ, vibraphone, and marimba and was often featured as a soloist on all of these instruments in meetings held by well-known Adventist evangelists.

Beginning in the 1940s Offer became a Bible instructor for the New England conference. She subsequently moved to the Florida Conference in 1947 to continue in that work, and eventually served as secretary to the president of that conference for eight years.

In 1951 she married Charles F. Cashman, whom she had met years earlier as a teenager in Massachusetts. They were living in Orlando when he died in 1979.

Offer-Cashman served as church organist for the Central SDA church in Orlando for over 25 years, retiring from that position in 2000, when problems associated with macular degeneration made it impossible for her to read music. She was living in Winter Park, Florida, when she died at age 99.

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Sources: Andrews University Focus, Fall 2002, 30; The Atlantic Union Gleaner, 15 October 1968, 22; Southern Tidings, December 1979; Social Security Death Index.