Stories broadcast on her radio and television programs Just Mary and Maggie Muggins were published in a series of popular books.
[1] Mary Grannan was born into an Irish Canadian Roman Catholic family in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada on 11 February 1900.
She spent the rest of her 20-year teaching career at the school, where she was noted for her talents as a storyteller and as an author and producer of plays performed by her students.
In the summer of 1927 she studied at the Vesper George School of Art in Boston, and later contributed editorial cartoons to the Daily Gleaner, a Fredericton newspaper.
In April 1936, while still teaching full-time, Mary Grannan began broadcasting on CFNB, a private radio station in Fredericton.
[3] On the strength of Just Mary she was offered a full-time position as a junior producer at CBC Radio headquarters in Toronto.
It offered a variety of content, including plays, interviews, and documentary broadcasts recorded outside the studio in places such as a zoo or a newspaper's linotype printing operation.
She stayed in Toronto and continued to work on her two programs, Just Mary on radio and Maggie Muggins on television, as a freelancer.
[4] Prompted by fan mail requesting that the Just Mary stories be made available in book form, the CBC collaborated with the Canadian textbook publisher W.J.
Also in 1944 the Canadian publisher Thomas Allen & Son Limited brought out Maggie Muggins, a collection of stories that had not appeared on the radio program.
The outcome was that Mary Grannan retained copyright in her work and received royalties from her subsequent books, which were all published by Thomas Allen in Canada.