Pamela Palmer MacGahan died on July 20, at a hospital near her home in Chevy Chase, MD. She was 79. Pamela, known all her life as Penny, was born in Philadelphia, on April 12, 1939. Christened Pamela Biddle Palmer, she was the daughter of Marianne Kathryn Stetzer and William Henry Palmer III. She married Peter Huntington MacGahan, in 1968, and was the mother of three children, William Palmer MacGahan, Elizabeth MacGahan, and Thomas Alexander MacGahan.
Penny was raised in St. Davids, PA, and graduated from Radnor High School in 1957, at which time she was awarded a Certificate of Merit by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation. After high school she attended the University of Pennsylvania and received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering in June 1961.
In the fall of 1961 she joined the Naval Research Laboratory's Intercept and Signal Processing Section. She continued to work at NRL until 1980. Thereafter she continued to work in the industry until 1983, when she and her family moved to the Netherlands for the next four years. After the family's return to the US, in 1987, she resumed working for the Navy briefly.
Her professional life came to an end, however, when the family once again moved to Europe, in 1995. After a two-year stay in Brussels, she and her family returned to the Netherlands for eleven more years. The 15 years in the Netherlands were extremely happy years. In addition to her love of family, Penny discovered a love of all things Dutch and became fluent in the language. She volunteered for the University of Leiden and in the community of Wassenaar, where she and her family lived. She and her family traveled extensively in Europe and were generous hosts and enthusiastic tour guides for family and friends. She was an avid cyclist and delivered meals on wheels to the elderly on her bike.
In the last years of her life, she and her husband Peter returned to the Washington, DC, area to be near lifelong friends, great music, and favorite restaurants.
Although Penny was preceded in death by her eldest son, William, she is survived by her husband, Peter, her daughter, Elizabeth, her son Thomas, and her grandchildren, Margaret and Aodh Channon. She will also be sorely missed by her sister Marianne, by her husband's, brother Jonathan, her husband's, sister Aileen, and by numerous nieces and nephews. A funeral service will be held on Wednesday, August 01, 2018 at 12 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 12621 Old Columbia Pike, Silver Spring, MD 20904. The interment will follow at the church cemetery.
