Fear didn’t hinder sense of adventure
Cotton. Beans. Labor. Frances Wolf and her six siblings were wellversed in the stark realities of life on the Georgia family farm. The family stayed close, valued church and wasted nothing.
Wolf, emboldened by a church member who suggested she could do it, decided to go to college — the first in her family to do so. They supported her as she uprooted and departed from charted territory.
“I think it was absolutely who she was, and she was going to do something different,” said Julie Wolf of her mother, who maintained tight bonds with the family even after moving. “She had an idea that there was more to life, and she wanted to try to get it.”
Frances Wolf died Oct. 11 after complications during heart surgery. She was 80.
Not long into her studies at Southeastern University, Wolf met a man named Bill in a lunch line and fell into the kind of love that lasts for more than six decades. Bill graduated college, proposed on Christmas break, and they married in 1954, cutting her education short.
She moved with her husband to Pennsylvania and took a job in a factory, sewing things such as cashmere coats. When he was stationed in Germany, she moved with him, uprooting herself once again.
“We traveled every weekend,” Bill Wolf said of their time there. Groups of young couples took the bus that zigzagged through Europe. “We had a great social life.”
Eventually, the family settled in Hollywood in 1961.
Bill took a job in the public-school system, and Wolf was a classroom volunteer, her belief that “there was more to life” influencing her return to college.
“She never sat down,” her daughter said of that period. Her mother graduated from Florida Atlantic University and began to teach elementary school.
At home, Wolf could conceive meals based on memories of food she had eaten at a restaurant. She could restore engines or washing machines.
“If you could read it, you could do it,” Julie said. “And if you paid attention when you took something apart, you could put it together.”
Eventually, the Wolfs took off to Japan to teach military personnel children on base — a job that also took them to Germany and Korea. To satiate their extensive palate for travel, they continued to do so on their own. Wolf saw every continent but Antarctica during her life, her family said.
Though she loved her work, Wolf ’s greatest passion was her family, and the birth of her grandchildren summoned her home. She and her husband bought a condominium in New Smyrna Beach in 1992 and a home in Sanford not long afterwrd. Wolf taught the grandchildren to fish, cast nets, ride bikes and build sand castles. They swam and played cards.
She read a devotional each morning, her Bible each night. She joined aqua Zumba classes, bridge games and a local women’s club.
Wolf abided by the idea that fear shouldn’t stop you, that family should be kept close along the way.
In addition to her husband, William Wolf, of Sanford and daughter Julie Wolf of Orlando, Frances Wolf is survived by daughter Gonja Wolf of San Diego; three sisters, Beulah Bryant, Mary Shipes and Tina Thompson, all of Macon, Ga.; two brothers, Alton Fowler and Bill Fowler, both of Macon; and two grandchildren.
DeGusipe Funeral Home & Crematory, Maitland, handled arrangements.