All three of my sister Nancy’s husbands survived her. The final husband, the Scot, said she was a juicy woman. Her first husband told mother that Nancy never nagged; she just bubbled him to death. Nancy’s two ex-husbands remained friends with her. She lived with each for seven years. The third husband, John Cameron, stuck. Nancy’s 76 years of life were too few, but were fully packed.
Our parents thought ”Nancy Surr” sufficient; they couldn’t agree on a middle name. Nancy wanted the middle name ‘Elizabeth’ so she took it. Her other names came by marriage.
She wore thick glasses that eventually, along with exercises, corrected her wandering eye. Mother fixed her long brown hair in tight braids. Her energy, intelligence, warmth, and force of personality comprised her charm as a girl.
Nancy, the firstborn, organized everything. She organized circuses (admission a penny), directed plays and family pageants, supervised fort digging, planned active games like red rover, charades, and races, and quieter games like hell, Monopoly, and Lexicon (a Scrabble-like card game). Nancy made life a lot of fun for her family.
Toward adolescence Nancy adopted the short curly hair popular in the fifties. She grew a fine pair of breasts, also popular in the fifties. In the seventh grade, Nancy got a diary with a lock. My brother Jack and I were intrigued. Jack tried his hand. The lock yielded at the first pass of a paperclip. We read the wildly funny phrase, “Oh heavenly day, Harvey kissed me today!!” When Nancy came home Jack and I pranced around the house chanting “Oh Heavenly day, Harvey kissed me today!!” After dinner Daddy pointed out the churlishness of reading other people’s private papers. We heard him.
In 1950 we moved into the house our parents built eight miles away. Nancy was the beautiful new girl in Redlands High School. During winter frosts, high school boys trudged to school with pale, blackened faces and eye circles; they’d lit smudge pots all night to save orange groves from freezing. They earned the cash, thus, to buy junkyard cars, fix them, and feed them. Nancy became expert on smudging, the internal combustion engine, and the cosmetic fixes one could make to a car – chopping, bobbing, and channeling.
Nancy attended Smith her first college year. At the end of that year, the man Nancy would marry graduated from Yale. The army drafted him; he drove to Fort Ord, California for training. Nancy followed him to California for her second, last, year of college at Berkeley. They married; she had just turned 20. The two moved to Indianapolis where John, a Private, taught officers at the army’s finance school. Their first child, Annie, was born in the army hospital there.
When Nancy was great with Annie, and late for an OB appointment at the hospital, she parked in a slot marked “Reserved for General Officers”. In her cubicle, in her angel gown, she heard a male voice calling out “Private Hoffs-dik, Private Hoffs-dik”. Unsure who was wanted, she remained quiet. The next Monday, John's irate Colonel dressed him down for parking in the General Officer’s slot. The General’s wife, late for her appointment, parked in a space marked “No Parking – Fire Lane”. A small, easily contained fire broke out, the fire engine blocked the parking lot, and John's license number was noted. John passed his Colonel’s ire on to Nancy that night.
When he left the army, John took Nancy and Annie to Boston to earn his MBA. Nancy sold furniture to support them. Susie, a Down syndrome baby, was born in Boston. Nancy attributed the Down syndrome to free, student-administered X-rays of her teeth with old machines around the time she conceived. Nancy took classes to learn about genetics.
Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, California, hired John as an executive. He joined the Young Republicans and the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Nancy bore their son Johnny, in California. Nancy threw herself into the good wife role for as long as she could, then found work at an employment agency. She specialized in finding jobs for bright young geeks, aerospace engineers and physicists. She hired me to babysit and housekeep. She made friends with executives in Palo Alto. Weekends she hung out, and wrote, at a coffee house, where she got to know Ira Sandpearl and other wildly pacific men. Friday nights she’d go out to L’Omelette where the bright young executives celebrated happy hour. She made good friends and asked good questions.
Nancy divorced John, and moved to Southern California. She found work as a secretary at an aerospace engineering firm.
Nancy met and later married Dick Loy, a funny, original, engineer. The family moved to a houseboat. Time magazine featured them in an article about the Loys' time-sharing computer terminal on the houseboat. The article pictured Nancy in the round bed Dick had made. Annie and Johnny did their homework on the terminal, which spewed arrows of paper onto the rug. Nancy set up and edited Time Sharing News. She wrote a book, Computer Management. Dick fell for another woman and Nancy divorced him.
Our father gave Nancy a fine briefcase for Christmas and advised, “An expert is a person from out of town with a briefcase.” Nancy moved her children to London; she had always wanted to live there. She worked editing Dataweek, a journal about computers. Johnny and Annie attended minor public schools. After she left Dataweek, she founded Druid Management, a consultancy. She wrote The IBM World (The Sun Never Sets on IBM in England), the Yin and Yang of Organizations, and ghostwrote People at Work.
Nancy never earned a college degree. She didn’t need one. She was perceptive, curious, and knew what made people tick, singly and in organizations. Oxford University’s Center for Management Studies gave her a research fellowship for three years and she taught there.
She met John Cameron, then Director General of the Chartered Institute of Transport. He was a quick, wiry man, and kind. They married and lived in London. John held a lifetime pass to ride Great Britain’s trains anywhere, anytime.
Her own genealogy fascinated Nancy; Nancy’s enthusiasm infected John. He knew of a great-grandfather, John Cameron of Pitlochry, Scotland. Nancy suggested a trip there to investigate. They took the overnight train from London to Pitlochry, a tourist site in the Highlands. They found the tombstone with Cameron’s name and the right dates - “John Cameron of Clunemore Farm” - in the Scottish Episcopal churchyard in nearby Blair Atholl town. People at a local pub told them Clunemore Farm had stood vacant for ten years. The house had no doors; sheep from the farm below wandered through it. When Nancy and John saw the small stone house at the top of a hill they loved it.
Clunemore had a majestic view of Killiecrankie pass where Scots soldiers had leapt, naked and shrieking, down a cliff to rout the English. Nancy and John arranged the lifetime rental of Clunemore with the Duke of Atholl’s farm manager.
The Camerons rode the sleeper from London to Pitlochry most weekends. John put Clunemore to rights. He installed doors, built a ha-ha (retaining wall to keep sheep out), installed a Rayburn (wood-burning cooker), a kitchen sink and drain-board, gutters and a garden. He restored the stone barn in the back (later the home of his bookbinding and rare-book business, and his model train.)
Nancy kept her successful management consultancy going while becoming the perfect Scots housewife. She made friends and curtains, and learned to dye and spin wool. Costumed as a Scots crofter she spun wool to entertain tourists. She wrote a pamphlet about dying with woad. She arranged flowers at the Episcopal Church and met with friends to sew needlepoint kneelers for pews. Theirs were gros point; hers depicted Blair Castle, the Duke’s seat, in petit point. Nancy gleefully recounted that the Duke, seeing the boy next to him with Nancy’s kneeler, switched kneelers saying “Mine, I think.”
One spring Nancy fostered an abandoned lamb. It followed her around the house, bleating when she was out of sight. Nancy never ate lamb again.
Nancy entertained family and friends royally. She cooked well, and whipped up delicious dinners when friends dropped in. She served Stilton soup and Famous Grouse to varied and interesting people every Christmas. Everyone loved visiting Nancy and John.
Soon Nancy needed an interest beyond consulting. She rented an abandoned gas station next the train station, filled it with used books, and sold them to locals and tourists. Often she’d sweep in, greet her clerk, sweep out the till, and sweep out the door without accounting for the cash. The Atholl Browse was successful anyway.
For her final enthusiasm, Nancy pieced fabric into works of art. These were bright, colorful, beautiful, and treasured.
John developed angina. They rented a small house near town for the winter; Clunemore’s hill was impassable in snow and John needed easier access to medical care. Nancy, diabetic, swam daily at the Hydro. Despite exercise, she eventually suffered heart failure and was hospitalized for a few weeks. The Duke gave the Camerons lifetime use of Blair Castle’s gate house in exchange for their interest in Clunemore. Nancy and John had collected too much stuff; the move daunted. After they finished pruning Nancy’s fabric collection, they drove to Edinburgh to sell John’s British Rail memorabilia. Nancy had a massive heart attack on the drive and died in the car.
Typically, Nancy had organized her own memorial service. She “stipulated a healthy supply of guacamole (and whisky) be provided for mourners after the ceremony.”*
* The Herald Scotland - 28 July,
2010
