Nancy (Bass) Wolfram

Wolfram, Nancy Bass October 3, 1942 - August 23, 2016 Nancy Bass Wolfram, for years a resident of North Oaks, Minnesota, was born to Catherine Forbush Bass and George Henry Bass, 2nd, in Brocton, Massachusetts and spent all but the first days of her youth in Wilton, Maine, then the home of the Bass shoe business. She graduated from Wilton Academy and from what is now the Northfield-Mt. Hermon School, 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, as a teenager winning the state sailing championship. She attended Wellesley College, majoring in history, and later earned a master's degree from the University of Minnesota in teaching English as a second language (ESL). A year after graduating from Wellesley, Nancy married Charles W. Wolfram, then teaching at the University of Minnesota Law School. Last year they celebrated their 50th year of marriage. In Minnesota, Nancy started her ESL career with informal efforts to teach English to 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 many different native languages, all of which served as only mildly resistant barriers to Nancy's ability to communicate through verbal and non-verbal meansalways with a warm smile and contagious friendship. Her students now live around the world, and many continued to correspond with her. In North Oaks, Nancy and her family became devoted to the outdoors - canoeing, camping and bicycling in decent weather, and 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 family in Europe, and a third bicycling tour in Germany and Austria with Minnesota friends. The family spent most summers in Bayville, Maine, staying at their summer cottage for over forty-five years. Nancy there taught the entire family to love sailing almost as much as she did. The family moved from Minnesota to Ithaca, New York, in 1981, where Nancy continued her work as an ESL teacher, including several years at Elmira College, and started her second book club. That and the first book club, in Minnesota, continue to thrive decades later. Nancy first developed symptoms of Alzheimer's disease in the mid-1990s. After retiring, she and her husband moved to California to be near to their children and grandchildren. There, Nancy volunteered for several Alzheimer's studies, one of which became a standard method of diagnosing the disease. She eventually entered an 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 peacefully from complications from a fall. Nancy is survived by her husband, her daughter Catherine D. Wolfram of Berkeley and husband Matthew A. Barmack, their children Sylvia C. Barmack and Maxwell G. Barmack, her son Peter R. Wolfram of Berkeley and daughter Sky B. K. Wolfram of Eugene, Oregon, Nancy's sister Joanne B. O'Connor and husband Richard D. O'Connor of Maine, and an extended family of many other much-loved Bass and Wolfram relatives and friends. Nancy's family has planned memorial services during October in Berkeley and during the summer of 2017 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.

Published on September 4, 2016