Artist and Sculptor
Nancy Winslow Parker died peacefully November 27, 2015 in Lakewood, New Jersey, close to her summer home on the Jersey shore where she reveled in playing croquet at the Mantoloking Yacht Club right through the last summer of her life.
A prolific author and illustrator of children’s books, she recalled that it took 88 rejections before The Man with the Take-Apart Head was published by Dodd, Mead & Company in 1974. She considered it her “parting shot to the workaday world of time clocks, lunch hours, boring work, and paycheck bondage.” It had taken her 20 years to break free of the corporate world and plunge, like Alice, down the rabbit hole of her imagination. Her books were often autobiographical. Poofy Loves Company is a tale about a dog who steals a cookie out of the hand of a little girl. Poofy was the son of Mimi-Gladys, a pedigreed bichon-frise and one of the first two dogs of that breed in the United States. Her cat came into her life some years later. The book Puddums: the Cathcarts’ Orange Cat, inspired by the antics of her niece Becky’s cat, was so popular that it was translated into French.
A two-year-old’s infatuation with pill bugs and crickets became Bugs (1987), a project that combined silly rhymes like “What made Nick’s dog sick? A tick.” with each bug’s Latin name and a precise scientific description. The editor at Greenwillow Books insisted that she consult an entomologist at the N.Y. Museum of Natural History. He made her redraw every bug down to the number of hairs on its legs. “What a mixture! Who would want our book? It turned out that everyone, especially children, did,” she recalled in an essay written in Something about the Author Autobiography Series.
Many of Nancy Parker’s carefully researched illustrations and stories reflected her passion for American history and technology. Another passion was model railroading. She started with an N scale layout in her New York apartment and eventually installed, with her great nephew Blaine's help, a G scale layout at the beach house. Summer Sundays, after services at St. Simons, Nancy would run the trains for anyone who wanted to drop by for donuts and child's play.
Recalling how children loved rhymed couplets (as in Mother Goose), she brought history, art, and poetry together in Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Greenwillow, 1985) and Barbara Frietchie by John Greenleaf Whittier (Greenwillow, 1981). She wrote and illustrated a total of 20 children’s books and another 30 books by other authors, notably John Langstaff and Janet Yolen. A series she illustrated by Shirley Neitzel celebrated events in a child’s life like visiting grandmother while they taught children to read.
Nancy Parker was born in Maplewood, New Jersey, October 18, 1930. She graduated from Maplewood’s Columbia High School and Mills College (Class of 1952) where she majored in art. She live most of her life in New York City on East 74th Street, only steps away from the Frick, the Whitney, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and not far from the New York Public Library and the New York Historical Society. Living in New York, she said, was “like being a chocoholic in a candy store.”
Her sculptures consisted of large, wooden constructions, mostly of houses meticulously assembled and furnished inside and out. In her paintings, the houses float in surreal space. A painting of the Morro Castle recalled the 1934 shipwreck whose burned hull could still be seen from the boardwalk at Asbury Park when she was a girl.
Nancy Parker leaves behind many devoted friends from New York and Mantoloking and six nieces and nephews, Virginia Parker Dawson, and Charles Franklin Parker and Stephen Winslow Parker, the children of Nancy’s brother Alfred Gaunt Parker; and James Barrett Sandkuhle (Barry), Becky Sandkuhle Ashley, and Judy Bea Sandkuhle, the children of Nancy’s sister, Muriel Parker Sandkuhle. There are six great nieces and nephews and three great nieces and nephews, and five great great nieces and nephews. Their children and their children’s children have had the good fortune to have been brought up on Great Aunt Nancy’s whimsical illustrations and quirky humor.
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