Librarian, League of Women Voters member, lover of facts
For years, Nancy Mahood Weiss played Scrabble, Upwords or cribbage against her husband, Gerard, almost every night. They kept yearly tallies and usually ended up within a few games of each other in their 200plus contests.
In 2017, though, “she beat me by double digits,” Mr. Weiss said.
Mrs. Weiss, a librarian, kept her mind sharp until the end.
She died Jan. 18 in a hospice in Washington, Pa., after having cancer for seven years. She was 72 and lived with her husband in East Washington before going to hospice.
Mrs. Weiss was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in Coraopolis, graduating from what was then Coraopolis High School in 1963. She attended Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., where she met Mr. Weiss, a student a year above her at nearby Amherst College.
They married Sept. 9, 1957, and renewed their vows each “monthaversary,” he said — more than 600 times. “The ninth of every month, you do something special.”
They moved after college to the San Francisco Bay Area; she pursued a degree in library science from the University of California, Berkeley, while he attended seminary to become a Presbyterian minister. Mrs. Weiss was a lifelong reader, a lover of Jane Austen and Dorothy Sayers, in particular, said her family.
In California in the 1960s she became involved in politics, attending candidate meetings. “Those were the best shows on earth, in San Francisco at the time,” Mr. Weiss said.
But while she was in library school, she was working at the Marin County Library when hostages were taken in the Civic Center that housed the library. The 1970 incident, staged in an effort to free a prison inmate, resulted in four deaths, including Superior Court Judge Harold Haley.
It was a pivotal moment, said Mr. Weiss, turning her off to partisanship. “I think she kind of decided she was going to understand things and be more open and neutral. Librarians say, ‘I’ll get you the information, and you’re free to understand whatever you want.’”
Mrs. Weiss joined the League of Women Voters, organizing candidate forums and putting together voter guides. The league “has very strict rules about debates, being fair, and getting information to voters,” he said.
“I remember being little, she would set up the card table with flyers, whatever we were mailing out to people,” said her daughter Polly Weiss. “She would have me folding and labeling things for mailing, and would take me to the borough council meetings and candidate meetings.”
Mr. Weiss said his wife even enforced that civicmindedness at home. “When I started going off about Trump, or something, not that she would disagree with my positions, but she would disagree with saying things in a really hot or inflammatory way,” he said.
Washington County Common Pleas President Judge Katherine Emery, who knew Mrs. Weiss as the county’s law librarian from 2001 to 2010, said the same civil attitude exemplified her work. “She had such a nice manner with people who came in, who were maybe upset, frustrated,” Judge Emery said. “I’d remember how warm andfriendly she was.”
Mrs. Weiss came to the law library after almost 30 years at Washington County’s Citizens Library and picked up the knowledge necessary for law quickly, Judge Emery said.
“As a librarian, she had to deal with pro se litigants a lot, people seeking help and doing their case themselves,” she said. “She learned all the court procedures as well, so she didn’t give them bad information.”
Of course, Mrs. Weiss did have some specific political commitments, particularly regarding the environment, said her husband and her daughter.
She always carried with her the plastic bags used for newspapers. “If she saw a can or something, she could flip the bag inside out, pick it up, and throw it out,” said Mr. Weiss, and she was part of a successful campaign to bring curbside recycling to East Washington in 1992.
“She was environmentally conscious way before it was fashionable in the Whole Foods type of way,” Ms. Weiss said. “She convinced our dad the dryer didn’t actually work so he would hang laundry on the line instead of usingthe dryer.”
Although, added Ms. Weiss, “I think she also liked the old-fashioned simplicity of hanging the laundry.”
In retirement, as her vision deteriorated, she became a fan of podcasts, particularly enjoying the politics podcast from the data journalism website 538.com. “Getting into the podcasts was a way to still have information, follow politics, and keep up on things,” her husband said.
In addition to her husband and daughter, Mrs. Weiss is survived by a brother, James Mahood, of Pittsburgh.
Visitation is from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday at Faith United Presbyterian Church in Washington, Pa. Her family suggests contributions to Citizens Library in Washington, the Sierra Club, or UNICEF.