Longtime nursery schools leader Marilyn Knight was civic volunteer, helped launch The Ark

Marilyn Knight, who helped conceive The Ark and served in leadership and consulting roles at the Belvedere-Hawthorne Nursery Schools for more than 35 years, died of breast cancer May 24 at her Tiburon home. She was 91.

Knight spent 18 years as a director at the nursery schools from 1968 to 1986, including the last five years as executive director. She introduced the first pre-kindergarten program in Southern Marin with Hawthorne Pre-K when she first started, said longtime friend and onetime colleague Annelies Atchley of Belvedere. After stepping down as executive director, she continued consulting for the school until 2004. Some of the curriculum she developed is still in use today.

Kathleen Walker Parker, the current head of school and a former executive director at Belvedere-Hawthorne, was hired by Knight in 1984. Parker said the best way to learn in early childhood education is by example, and Knight “did just that.”

“She knew how to lead by example and how to teach best practices with early childhood education,” Parker said. “She was a natural at storytelling and getting down at children’s levels to share.”

Knight was deeply involved in the community beyond her work at the nursery schools, with decades of volunteer work with religious organizations, social services and civic groups.

In 1972, the idea for a new community newspaper emerged at Knight’s Hill Haven home when a group of Tiburon Peninsula residents was making last-minute signs and banners for the Ayala Day picnic at Angel Island. They began venting their frustrations that the existing paper, the Ebb Tide, refused to run a news announcement.

“The idea just popped out. I don’t even remember who said it first,” Knight told The Ark for a 40th anniversary retrospective article in 2013. “We thought, ‘Why couldn’t we just get the group of people together and do it?’ We wanted a paper of the people and by the people and for the community.”

Knight became the first subscriber when the first of two 1972 sample editions was laid out on her and late husband Jeff’s kitchen table ahead of The Ark’s first formal issue Jan. 10, 1973.

Knight was born Marilyn Valerie Sanchez-Corea on Oct. 6, 1933, in San Francisco to dental surgeon Antonio Sanchez-Corea and teacher Helen McCarty. Her father was born in Guatemala and moved to the U.S. at age 10, later bringing his dental practice to Tiburon about 1960. Her mother was raised in San Francisco and was of Irish descent. Knight was the eldest of four children, including Antonio II, Rosalyn and Marc.

She grew up in San Francisco and attended Covenant of the Sacred Heart High School, an all-girls Catholic school, where she was a classmate of future U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein. She graduated Sacred Heart in 1951 and earned a bachelor’s degree in child psychology from Stanford University in 1955. In the 1970s, she received a master’s degree in early childhood education from the University of San Francisco.

During her senior year at Stanford, Knight met Fred Geoffrey “Jeff” Knight on a blind date. He was working in the furniture business and already knew her brother Antonio.

“He was so entranced with her that she told him when they got engaged that he had to become a Catholic if he wanted to marry her,” said daughter Jocelyn Knight Cacciatore, a former longtime freelance photographer for The Ark. Her father converted, and the Knights married in 1955 and had two children, Jocelyn and Geoffrey. They remained together until Jeff’s death in 1997.

After graduating from Stanford, Knight worked as a grade-school and substitute teacher in San Francisco. When the Knights moved to Tiburon in 1963, she taught in Marin City before taking a job at the Belvedere Nursery School.

Knight was always fascinated with how children learn, Jocelyn said, maintaining an entire home library dedicated to childhood education and psychology. Parker said Knight encouraged her and others to expand ideas within early childhood education, calling her a mentor to everyone at the school. A trip Knight and her husband took to the East Coast led to her developing a learning unit on whales, which is still taught today, her daughter said.

Not only did Knight “feed our minds and our souls,” Parker said, but also literally fed others, making salads that Parker called wonderful. Cooking was a favorite activity of Knight’s, both her daughter and longtime friend Joan Foster of Tiburon said. Foster added that Knight helped her with food preparation following the death of Foster’s husband.

Her work in the community included volunteering at the Belvedere-Tiburon Library when it was located at the current post office on Beach Road and with St. Hilary Catholic Church. She volunteered for parish and other organizations, including the St. Vincent de Paul Society, for whom she made bagged lunches that would be delivered to those in need. She also served on the board for nonprofit Marin Homeless in Action, gave parent-education classes in Marin City and was a dame of Malta in the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a Catholic lay religious order.

“She always wanted to be of service,” Jocelyn said. “She always felt very grateful that she had a lovely home, a wonderful husband, a great education and she always felt that she had to give back.”

Knight loved to entertain others and host friends and families. Jocelyn said her mother would always welcome people who didn’t have a place to spend Thanksgiving dinner and insisted on baking birthday cakes for all her children and grandchildren.

“She never wanted anyone to go hungry — and usually you left with a care package,” Jocelyn said.

Foster met Knight while Foster was preparing to have her first child, and the two became good friends. Foster said the Knights celebrated every holiday and welcomed everyone, from Marin County supervisors and town councilmembers to plumbers and bricklayers.

“We were such a mix of people all interested in Tiburon and what a wonderful place we lived in,” Foster said, later adding Knight “brought people together.”

“Just like she held families together, she brought people together from all walks,” Foster said.

Foster said Knight exemplified family and what it means because she knew how to keep families together during good and tough times and how to survive rough patches.

“We need more of that in our world today because people seem to be so apart,” Foster said, later adding that “she really lived what she believed.”

Knight also loved to travel with her husband and was an avid reader, her daughter said, with several novels on her nightstand in the days before her death.

Parker called Knight “a wonderful person,” while Atchley said Knight was “really, the ultimate, wonderful woman that I knew for many years.”

“She was a wonderful human being, giving and loving, and spread that to all of us as well,” Parker said. Atchley had similar remarks.

“She was a wonderful person, I can’t say any more than that — and I miss her,” Atchley said.

Knight is survived by daughter Jocelyn Knight Cacciatore and husband James Cacciatore of Corte Madera; son Geoffrey G. Knight and his fiancée, Anna Stevens, of Tiburon; brother Marc Sanchez-Corea and his wife, Cathy Sanchez-Corea, of Bolinas; grandson Dominic Cacciatore and wife Anni Cacciatore; granddaughter and Belvedere Nursery School teacher Maria Elena Cacciatore Gutierrez and husband Daniel Gutierrez; three great-grandchildren and several nieces and nephews.

She was preceded in death by husband Fred Geoffrey “Jeff” Knight, her parents, sister Rosalyn Schummers, who died in 2007, and brother Antonio Sanchez-Corea II, who died in 2018.

A public memorial service will be held 10 a.m. June 13 at St. Hilary Catholic Church at 765 Hilary Drive, with a vigil at 7 p.m. June 12, also at St. Hilary’s.

Donations can be made to the St. Vincent de Paul Society of Marin County at vinnies.org, the Western Dominican Province’s retirement fund by earmarking donations for “elderly and infirm friar care” at give.opwest.org or any breast-cancer research organization.

Reach Francisco Martinez at 415-944-4634.