Before Peggy became Peggy Charren, the children’s television activist, she was just Peggy at Squibnocket Beach with the pigtail down her back and the indescribable accent from somewhere between the Upper West Side and Newton. She was funny and fun to be with. For the heavy-duty child-rearing years in the sixties, we only saw each other in our bathing suits and cover-ups. If we passed in Menemsha or someplace else, we could seem unfriendly because we didn’t recognize us dressed. We always had books with us and bedspreads borrowed from our rented houses. It took the two months of summer to finish a single book, longer if we had to take it back home, sand included. Peggy always had another book to recommend.

Things began to change as our kids got big enough to go to school. We bought land, built a bit later. We were influenced by the women’s movement and consciousness-raising groups that told us we could do anything (it would take a long while for institutions to catch up, if at all). I had finished a doctorate at Harvard and then had to fight my way into a less than ideal job at the University of Michigan. Peggy became . . . a nudge. She started talking about how children’s television commercials made her mad. I agreed with her and severely limited my kids’ television watching time, with the additional rule that they could not have any toys advertised on TV.

Peggy had a more political approach. She brought up the idea of enriching programming for children. A total surprise — where did that come from? Unafraid, with not a little chutzpah, Peggy decided to take on the television giants. She knew she had a lot to learn and we Squibby moms knew she was serious when she started beach seminars on child development with the child psychologists Albert and Chris Dreyer; on political strategy with several of the dads, including Bill Gamson; and on how to set up what would become Action for Children’s Television.

We knew she was serious when she cut off her pigtail and started going to hairdressers. Her wardrobe seemed to be getting spiffier. She was spotted in the scruffy old airport waiting room on her way to or from Washington.

I lost track of Peggy for many years but would occasionally run into her at events and parties (“I don’t know what I am doing here,” she said at a show-off party with the emerging rich and famous in the early 1990s). She and Stanley gave wonderful parties on the deck of the house they built on Quitsa Pond for a cross-section of up-Island nice people. This group used to joke that Stanley built windmills (he did, and a good deal before when they got to be called turbines) and Peggy tilted at them.

Peggy did more than tilt at those windmills. She turned them around. Children’s television got better, commercials were reined in a bit and Peggy Charren made a big difference in the world. People loved her and she loved them back. They gave her awards and honorary degrees. She became a Harvard professor, a member of boards and commissions, a supporter of the arts, especially the American Repertory Theatre, not far from their apartment in Cambridge, and public television, especially WGBH.

We will miss her up here in Squibby. If we can find a piece of beach to sit on with our children, their spouses and grandchildren this summer, we’ll say a special goodbye to my old beach chum.

Zelda (Zee) Gamson lives year-round in Chilmark.