Nancy Quarles Lorimer

1920 - 2012

Nancy Helen Quarles Lorimer passed away on Thursday, Nov. 29, 2012. Funeral: Mass of Christian Burial, 11 a.m. Monday at Holy Family Catholic Church. Interment: Greenwood Memorial Park. Visitation: 3 to 5 p.m. Sunday at Thompson's Harveson & Cole Funeral Home. Memorials: Community Hospice of Texas, 6100 Western Place, Suite 105, Fort Worth, Texas 76107; Cancer Care Services, 623 South Henderson, Fort Worth, Texas 76104; Union Gospel Mission, 1321 East Lancaster, Fort Worth, Texas 76102. Nancy Helen Quarles was born Nov. 10, 1920, on Mistletoe Drive in Fort Worth to Mae Wilson and John Emerson Quarles. She attended Marsh Private School for the elementary grades and graduated from Paschal High School (when it was still located in the hospital district) with the class of 1937. The students used to gather before school on the front steps of that building. That is where she met her future husband, Hosmer Bartels Stuck, in the fall of her senior year. She attended Stuart Hall in Staunton, Va., for one year and graduated from Bradford Junior College in Massachusetts in 1940. She spent a year at the University of Texas in Austin where she became a member of Pi Beta Phi. The following year she remained at home and made her debut at the Assembly in November 1941. In March of 1943, after he completed OCS, she married her high school sweetheart at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church. He served as a combat engineer in Europe until 1945. He was on his way to the Pacific when, blessedly, President Truman ordered the atomic bombs to be dropped and Japan surrendered. His ship was diverted from going through the Panama Canal and turned into Norfolk, Va. During the ensuing years they had three daughters, Susan, Marguerite and Nancy. By the early 1970s, when TCU opened an art history department, she went back to college to complete an unfinished part of her life. She received her B.A. in 1976. She and her husband enjoyed many subsequent trips to Europe where they visited the cathedrals and museums to see all the things she had studied and written about in those classes. After her husband died in 1979, she designed and built a house for herself where she enjoyed entertaining friends as she loved to cook. She became an avid gardener, pieced and quilted a dozen quilts, six of them for her grandchildren, played bridge with friends, took early morning walks in the neighborhood, and read constantly - especially the Bible, books about archeology and all of Jane Austen every January. In the mid-1980s, she began to travel with Smithsonian groups to places she longed to see, even going as far as Egypt and Petra in Jordan. On one of these trips, she met another enthusiastic walker from Vermont, and they began to take walking trips in Great Britain, where supposedly there are 100,000 miles of footpaths. Their last trip together was to walk in the Lake District of Italy where the above picture was taken in May, 1993. In July of 2003, she married Wishard Speer Lorimer Jr., MD. They had been friends since high school and neighbors for 20 years. At that time, she joined the Catholic Church, and they worshipped together every Sunday at Holy Family Catholic Church. At the time of her death, she was chairman of the board of Quarles Lumber Company founded by her father in 1901. She was also a member of the Assembly, the Junior League of Fort Worth, River Crest Country Club and the Fort Worth Club. In the 1980s, she was a member of Bible Study Fellowship for seven years, five years as a discussion leader. The family expresses with deep appreciation the superb care and comfort afforded Nancy of Community Hospice of Texas. Survivors: She is survived by her husband; two of her daughters; and six grandchildren, the delight of her life, Francina Stewart of Brooklyn, N.Y., Brent Lampl and his wife, Ivette, and their children, Harber and Yvonne of Dallas, Demian Hommel and his wife, Annie, and their son, Oscar, of Springfield, Ore., Nathanael Stewart and his wife, Jessica, and their children, George and Elizabeth, of Chicago, Ill., Havala Hommel Kyllonen and her husband, Leif, of Portland, Ore., and Bethany Stewart Fry and her husband, Ryan, of Lee, N.H.; and nine much-loved stepchildren and their families.