News

By Jane Smith

    HIGHLAND BEACH — For the annual Delray Beach St. Patrick’s Day Parade, Margaret Ann “Muffie” Liebler hired a semi-trailer and decorated it.
    “She always had a float,” said her daughter Heather Phelps. Her floats won many first place prizes, including one she designed that saluted Irish potatoes.
    She also was a fixture at the American German Club’s Oktoberfest in suburban Lantana, the now-closed Royal Palm Beach Polo Club in Boca Raton and the New Orleans Jazz Festival.
    Mrs. Liebler, of Highland Beach, was 71 when she died from breast cancer on Oct. 5.
    The daughter of the late Dr. Charles and Margaret Schmitt, she was born in Fort Lewis, Wash.
    “My grandfather called her ‘Little Miss Muffett,’ which gradually was shortened to Muffie,” Phelps said.
    Mrs. Liebler graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a master’s degree in education in 1963. She taught briefly in Pennsylvania schools.
    She met her husband in 1955 when he was a lifeguard at the Mt. Lebanon Municipal Pool, near Pittsburgh. He taught her brothers how to swim and thought “she was pretty,” Phelps said.
    He proposed at her house, just before he was inducted into the Army at Fort Sam Houston. They married on Jan. 6, 1968, at Heinz Chapel on the Pitt campus.
    They moved to Highland Beach in 1978. For many years, Mrs. Liebler owned Olympic Gymnastics in Boca Raton.
    In addition to her husband, Dr. Frederick Byron Liebler, she is survived by two daughters, Heather and husband Brian Phelps and Heidi and Bobby Zafarnia; two sons, Frederick Charles “Fritz” and wife Heather Liebler and John Matthew “Jodi” Liebler; three grandchildren, Vivien and Beatrix Phelps and Sienna Zafarnia; and many extended family members.
    Babione-Kraeer Funeral Home in Boca Raton handled the arrangements with her funeral Mass at the Ascension Catholic Church in Boca Raton and burial at Our Lady Queen of Heaven Cemetery in McMurry, Pa.
    Instead of flowers, her family requests donations in her memory to the Alzheimer’s Association (alz.org).