Lila Mae Schneider Azad May 5, 1933 - April 17, 2024

Modesto, California Lila Mae “Peggy” Azad passed at 4:00am on April 17th, 2024. A Memorial Celebration of her life to be held on May 18th, 2024 at Del Rio Country Club in Modesto, California.

Lila Mae “Peggy” Azad was born in St.Paul, Minnesota. She was the daughter of Jesse Schneider and Laura Ronning Schneider. Her mother died when she was 5 years old and her father died when she was 9 years old. Peggy went to primary school in St.Paul. She was granddaughter of German immigrants. She fell in love with reading at the very young age. She had read all the books in the library. She knew all the history and qualities of the books. The love for books continued through out of her life. Sometimes in high school she had training in fast reading. She read and collected a variety of books including history, science and especially art books. She began to fall in love with art and decided to continue in that path. She met Manouch when she was 21 years old while working at the surgical research lab evaluating possibility of diseases for open heart surgeries initiated at the University of Minnesota. Later on she continued her education, first at Mcalester College where she received Master’s degree in education, and then Master’s degrees in Art and Psychology from the University of Minnesota, followed her love for further studies at Fieldings Institute in Santa Barbara, California where she received her PHD in Psychology with great celebration with all her family and Manouch’s family.

Manouch started to look for a home in Santa Barbara after Peggy’s second year, he found a 5 acres land in the mountain area, he built a home with a beautiful 2 story home overlooking the ocean. During the coming years for about 15 to 20 years we traveled extensively. We traveled to London, UK, Netherlands collecting a lot of art treasures. We continued our travels all over the world but her favorites were France, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy and our last European trip was as far as Turkey which was very interesting to Peggy because of its similarity to Iran which we had visited four times and during our last trip from Iran we stopped in Italy and island of Murano where she bought several glass art works particularly a fabulous blue bowl which was sent to us a month later. During our lives together Peggy & I have traveled to many countries, museums and art center where they were special places of interest to Peggy.