Nancy Lee Wright Smith died peacefully in her sleep in her home of nearly fifty years surrounded by the love of her family. She leaves a big hole in our lives, but one filled with all the love she created around her.
Nancy was born in Milwaukee, WI to Lee Rutherford Wright and Mary Wilhelmina Kingelin. When her parents asked her a few years later whether she’d like a baby sister, she said, “No!” She wanted to be the only girl, and she got her wish. She was a devoted big sister to her two brothers, Roger and Jim, remaining close to them until their deaths.
The family lived first in Wauwatosa, WI, then moved to Houston, TX where Nancy graduated Valedictorian from Galena Park High School in 1950. She went on to get her Bachelor’s degree in English Literature at Rice University where she was also a tennis champion. She regularly beat everyone in the family at both tennis and Scrabble.
After graduating from Rice in 1954, Nancy won a scholarship to study in Norway for a summer. She took a steamer across the Atlantic, which instilled in her an early love of travel. She passed that on, in turn, to her children and grandchildren. Nights when she couldn’t sleep, she would sometimes count all the countries members of the family had visited. That usually did the trick, she said.
She met Stewart Wilson Smith the year after she returned from her post-college Norwegian trip. Nancy and her mother were proud of their Finnish heritage and had gone to hear a concert celebrating the music of Sibelius. They were sitting in the nearly empty concert hall when Stewart and some of his friends walked in. The young men sat down in the row next to them. After a brief discussion, Stewart switched places so he could sit next to Nancy. The whole row chuckled at the end of the concert when Stewart asked Nancy for her phone number. “That was the only time I ever gave my phone number to a stranger,” she liked to say. Nancy delighted in telling the family’s origin story and in her frequent recounting, one detail never changed. She knew right from the start that she had met the man who would become her husband. They would have celebrated their 65th anniversary in June.
Nancy’s first career was as a teacher. Some people teach for a living. Nancy lived to teach. She liked to say she loved it so much, she would have done it for free. She taught fifth grade (“the best grade”) in Pasadena, CA, East Hampton, NY, and later in Tokyo, Japan where Stewart was on sabbatical at the University of Tokyo.
Though she mostly “retired” when her oldest child, Carol, was born, she remained the family’s resident educator, librarian, culture bearer, archivist, accountant and correspondent for the duration. She always wanted to be a writer, and in fact she was. Her art form was the letter. She put down her life and ours in long letters typed on onionskin on her old manual Royal typewriter. The rattle of its keys and the bing of its bell were part of the music of her life as she banged out multiple smudgy carbon copies to send to relatives and friends around the country. She treasured her boxes and boxes of saved letters from her friends and relatives, testament to long friendships. Many of the envelopes were stuffed with newspaper and magazine clippings, the old analog means of sending “links” to people she loved.
Nancy was ahead of her time in other ways as well. She was a devoted thrift-store shopper long before thrifting was cool. (Her frugality famously extended to managing to wait while in labor until after midnight before going to the hospital to give birth to Carol, which saved a day’s worth of hospital bills.) And she threw “coffees of the world’ dessert parties for Stewart’s fellow Caltech faculty members. The parties featured various things you could add to your coffee well before Starbucks got into the business. She loved having a house full of people and found endless creative ways of entertaining, from hosting local readings of A Christmas Carol during the holidays, to holding Teddy Bear teas with her granddaughter, Haley.
Family was the most important thing in her life, the thing that centered and anchored her. Even in her eighties, she still got a little flutter and would say how handsome Stewart was whenever he’d put on his tuxedo to sing with the Kirkland Choral Society.
She passed her love of books, art, and music to her three children – Carol, David and Peter – who became one of each – a writer, an artist and a musician.
The arrival of her grandchildren, Christopher, Spencer, Haley, Emma and Ivy was a source of immense joy for her. One of her proudest roles was as a grandmother and she glowed whenever she spoke of any one of them.
She was a devoted friend, who considered her closest friends part of her family. She loved to ask people about their lives, even as Alzheimer’s crept into her own. In her last weeks, she was still making new friendships.
She loved animals, too. Early on, she raised several litters of Golden Retriever puppies. They were followed by a long line of beloved pets, some adopted from other family members, all of which lucked out in the love department. And they returned the love. Her cat, Lucy, was a constant bedside companion in her final days.
Through it all, Nancy remained a teacher, showing her family how to live with grace and purpose and quiet courage in the face of things we cannot change. She taught us how to laugh, even when circumstances are hard and she showed us that the bond of family cannot break, even in death.
She once wrote that one of the highest compliments she ever received came from her mother-in-law, Laura Frost Smith, who told Carol: “When your mom joined our family, she showed us what love is.”
It is true.
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