Nancy (Bass) Wolfram
October 3, 1942 - August 23, 2016
Nancy Bass Wolfram was born to Catherine Forbush Bass and George Henry Bass, 2nd, in Brocton, Massachusetts because the town doctor in Wilton had left for military service. Nancy returned to Wilton days later when able to travel. Her father, himself born in Maine, liked to comment that, although not a Maine native, she had many relatives and friends in the state. She graduated from the town’s elementary school, Wilton Academy, and from the Northfield School for Girls in Massachusetts, now known as the Northfield-Mt. Hermon School, a coeducational boarding and day school for boys and girls which Nancy enthusiastically supported all her adult life. She spent early summers at the Bass family cottage in Bayville, Maine, where Nancy developed her lifelong passion for sailing, at one point becoming the Maine state sailing champion. She attended Wellesley College and later earned a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota in teaching English as a second language (ESL).
Nancy’s ESL teaching began in Minnesota, where she and her husband first settled after marrying. She started with informal efforts to tutor an ever-widening circle of friends from other countries. Over subsequent years, she acquired her ESL training while raising her children and then taught ESL classes in public and private settings. Her students came with dozens of different native languages, all of which served as only mildly resistant barriers to Nancy’s ability to communicate through verbal and non-verbal means and occasionally with a smattering of French—always with a warm smile and contagious good will. Her former students now live around the world, and many continued to correspond with her.
A year after graduating from Wellesley, Nancy married Charles W. Wolfram in Farmington, Maine. They celebrated their 50th year of marriage several months before Nancy’s death. She is survived by her husband, her daughter Catherine D. Wolfram of Berkeley, California, Catherine’s husband Matthew A. Barmack, their children Sylvia Catherine Barmack and Maxwell George Barmack, her son Peter R. Wolfram, also of Berkeley, his daughter Sky Beverly Katherine Wolfram, and an extended family of many Bass and Wolfram relatives and friends in California, Maine, Minnesota, New York and elsewhere.
Nancy and her family spent their first years in Minnesota, near St. Paul, where they became devoted to the outdoors— canoeing, camping and bicycling in decent weather, and pursuing cross-country and downhill skiing and other winter sports the rest of the year. Those experiences led to two extended bicycle-camping trips by the entire family through several countries in Europe. They spent most summers in Bayville, Maine, at the foot of Linekin Bay, where the family has maintained a summer cottage for over forty-five years and where Nancy taught the entire family to love sailing almost as much as she did. The family moved to Ithaca, New York, in 1981, where Nancy started her second book club and continued her work as an ESL teacher, including several years at Elmira College. The first book club, in Minnesota, and the Ithaca book club continue to thrive decades later.
Nancy first developed symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in the mid-1990s. After their retirement, she and her husband moved to California to be near to both their children and their three grandchildren—all ending up living within three blocks of each other in Berkeley. Nancy volunteered for several Alzheimer’s studies conducted by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco Medical School, one of which became a standard method of diagnosing the disease. Eventually, she entered the Lakeside Park assisted-living home in Oakland, California, near Lake Merritt where she and her husband or son Peter walked almost daily for the five years until the last weeks of her life, when she died from complications from a fall.
Nancy’s family has planned memorial services during October in Berkeley and next summer in Bayville. The family asks that, in lieu of flowers, those wishing to do so make a contribution in memory of Nancy to the Northfield-Mt. Hermon School, 1 Lamplighter Way, Gill, MA 01354, or to a charity of their choice.