Margit Davenport, age 67, passed away January 28, 2010 at Kansas City Hospice and Palliative Care in Kansas City, Mo., after a long battle with breast cancer. Memorial services will be held at 4 p.m. Friday, February 5, 2010, at the Porter Funeral Home, 8535 Monrovia, Lenexa, Kan., 66215. Visitation will be held before the service from 2 – 4 p.m. Flower arrangements would be appreciated and can be sent to Porter Funeral Home, or memorial contributions may be made to the American Cancer Society. 

Margarete Margot Kupfer was born May 25, 1942, in Frankfurt, Germany. The daughter of Alfred Hermann Kupfer and Charlotte Alice Lehmann, Margit and her family left Frankfurt during World War II and took residence in a converted grain mill in the countryside. Despite the difficult times, her childhood was joyful. Margit explored the surrounding countryside with her sister, Elvira, and often hunted the forests for wild mushrooms with her father. Her passions as a child were for riding horses and snow-skiing in the mountains outside her hometown. As was the case with many youths of her era, Margit fell in love with American pop culture, and had a particular infatuation with Elvis Presley (which she was listening to when she passed). Quite the social butterfly, Margit spent her young adulthood in many local dancehalls, and one day a close friend introduced her to a handsome, slender GI from the United States. After a courtship that reached across the ocean, Margit and Lawrence Robert Davenport were married on August 3, 1967, in Frankfurt, Germany. For six years after her marriage, Margit lived in Frankfurt, working for advertising agency Young and Rubicam, and then as a hostess for LTU airlines before giving birth to her first child, Alexander (Sascha), in 1973. In that same year, the young family moved from Frankfurt to Leawood, Kan., where in 1977, she gave birth to her second son, Steffen. Her homeland was always calling, however, and Margit frequently traveled back home with her children during the summertime to visit family and friends. Margit introduced her love of snow-skiing to her family, and they endeavored to take a trip each spring. As a proud compatriot of her homeland, Margit enjoyed many good times and strong friendships as a member of Kansas City’s German community—most notably through the Germania Club of Kansas City, in which she was an active member of the Ladies Circle. Her favorite pastimes were gardening and partaking in little “wanderungs (walks/hikes)” through the suburbs of Leawood. On these walks, she would observe nature and look at the beautiful homes, hoping to glean ideas on how to improve her own ongoing home remodeling projects. For many years after her first cancer diagnosis in 1987, Margit volunteered for the American Cancer Society, walking door-to-door in her neighborhood collecting donations until she relapsed in 2000.