Marian Robinson a woman who spoke her mind and cherished her privacy.

 “One of my biggest blessings is getting to see my granddaughters grow up before my eyes. My job here is the easiest one of all: I just get to be Grandma,”

“If somebody’s going to be with these kids other than their parents,” she once said, “it better be me.”

“She taught us that you can be open and honest about your own shortcomings and it doesn’t necessarily mean your kids are going to adopt them,” Michelle Obama once said.

Mrs. Robinson described her approach to grandmothering as: “I do everything that grandmothers do that they’re not supposed to.”

“I have candy, they stay up late … they watch TV as long as they want to, we’ll play games until the wee hours,” she said.

Along with her deep involvement with her family, Mrs. Robinson maintained varied interests. She was in her 50s when she took up running and won gold in the 50-meter and 100-meter races at the 1997 Illinois Senior Olympics. She stopped running after an injury.

“If I can’t do it fast, I’m not doing it,” she told Oprah Winfrey’s magazine in 2007. “You don’t run just to be running — you run to win.”

 Mrs. Robinson built a busy social calendar that included trips to casinos in Las Vegas and concerts in Washington. At the same time, her low profile gave her a level of anonymity that allowed her to travel without a security detail. If someone recognized her as the mother-in-law of the president, she would often say, “I get that a lot.”

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