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NANCY DEVORE Obituary
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Memories and Condolences
for NANCY DEVORE
Ann Ralston
December 29, 2024
Nancy and I met at age 14 or so, when we were in Highland Park Junior High in 1948. I was a quiet, rather shy girl when Nancy befriended me. All at once I was caught up in her enthusiastic interest in almost any topic there was to discuss. At one costume party with our friends we all dressed up as literary characters. Nancy and Pat came as Stella and her sister from A Streetcar Named Desire. Pat wore a slip and carried an iron, and Nancy, dressed in one of her big sisters´ evening gowns was - who else? - Blanche Dubois, who stole the show. Through the years Nancy and I kept in touch through letters and visits. The very last time I had contact with Nancy was a night or two before her death. As young teens, Nancy and I had talked and wondered about outer space, the planets, and "other worlds than ours." And in that last phone call, Nancy said she was looking at a full moon and thinking of me. That call evoked such fond memories of the past, and of the person Nancy was, and what she meant to me through many decades. As I approach my 91st birthday, I find myself looking back with wonderful memories of Nancy, an extraordinary person and a close friend.
(The Davis Family)
July 17, 2015
Our deepest condolences for your family. May your loving memories hold close in your heart and God's love give you peace and comfort. (Psalm 83:18)
Nancy Skiles -- left on top of log wall -- at Swannanoa
Nancy Leinbach
January 24, 2015
January 24, 2015
Dear Ones who loved and treasured "Nancy Skiles of Dallas, Texas." This is how I remembered her for years. I knew her briefly in 1954 when we spent a few weeks in the same work camp in Swannonoa, North Carolina. I was 18 and preparing for my first year in college. She was already at UT, Austin. For those days, over sixty years ago, she was my tutor in how to open up to the world .... and especially . . . how to accept all those around me (we were living in an integrated group) with a loving heart. I have ever been grateful to her. For decades I have typed her name into my computer searching for a memory. Early in the fall of 2014 I finally got a hit ... because of her husband's (Devore of Harvard) obituary. The route led to her wonderful daughter, Claire, who embraced my search and confirmed that I had finally found the person I had sought for so long. Irony of ironies I lived (in the late 60's to the early 80's) in West Cambridge .... a mile or so from Nancy near Mass Ave between Harvard and Porter Square. How could this be? Alas, she was so close ... yet so far. And I now live in North Carolina. This summer (2015) I expect to visit that mountain top where we were in 1954. I intend to honor her there as I was never able to do in life. Thank you all for the touching memories and messages. It helps.
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Mel Konner
January 18, 2015
Reading Claire's beautiful reminiscence reminded me that I too have things to say about Nancy's calligraphy. Just the day before yesterday I showed a large class of students, for the thousandth time, her simple, colorful, and elegant map of Africa showing the location of the !Kung San (Bushmen) with whom at various times many of us lived. I will soon show that same class Nancy's gracefully drawn chart of the primates of the world. But what I remember most about this was her devotion to beautiful texts. One of her pieces was a perfectly rendered version of John Donne's “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee." I think she had her mind in part on this inevitable day as she was lovingly making her careful letters. Even more, I think of her exquisite calligraphy of the last lines of Wallace Stevens' poem “Sunday Morning,” because, knowing how much I loved it, she made it especially for me. I have looked at it almost every day for four decades, and I have read the lines through on many of those days. I'm not allowed to reproduce it here, but it's the part that begins, “We live in an old chaos of the sun…” and ends with, “…as they sink/Downward to darkness, on extended wings.” Nancy bordered the text with a beautiful fruiting vine, very appropriate to the line, “Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness.” You can find the poem here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/2464. Unlike in the original, Nancy's calligraphy, framed on my wall, has “Downward to darkness” and “on extended wings” set as progressively indented independent lines, like the gracefully written formal address on an old-fashioned envelope. This I think is true to the poem, since although the poet doesn't set it on the page this way, you can hear it in his voice when he reads it: http://www.wallacestevensbiography.com/wallace-stevens-reading-his-poetry.htm. I think too, that like the Donne quote, this poem, and especially these closing lines, represent what Nancy thought about life and death, including her own, as a part of the endless web of living things, without supernatural beliefs, and without fear. Darkness or not, I'll always think of Nancy on extended wings.
Mel Konner
January 17, 2015
Nancy, in addition to all the generous things she did in the world in her own right, was the lifelong partner of a famous Harvard anthropologist with a strong personality, who made their home the intellectual center of a vibrant community that turned out to be making a scientific revolution in the 1970s and beyond. Without Nancy's generosity in opening what was her home too, that movement, and those creative people, would have made a much slower and probably smaller impact. An adventurer of Texan proportions, she also accompanied her bold husband on anthropological sojourns, sometimes with their children, and turned herself into a practical anthropologist through those experiences. Her insights into what she saw and learned were always a part of important Cambridge conversations. It's impossible for me to imagine my career in anthropology, or that of my late wife Marjorie Shostak, author of the classic "Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman," without Nancy's advice and kindness, however laced with acerbic wit. That wit, which revealed a penetrating intelligence and an always-irreverent sense of humor, belied a deep willingness to befriend young strangers and help guide them into careers and into life. If the wit occasionally stung, that helped make the advice memorable. In our case, that meant guidance not just in fieldwork, teaching, and academic politics, but in marriage and parenthood as well. She is missed, but she is here in us, and by extension in our children, in our students, and in our readers.
January 16, 2015
I knew Nancy at Highland Park High School, and remember her as bright, friendly, and open to the new and the unusual.
Paula McFarland
Anita Lachner
January 14, 2015
Nancy was in the group of friends I was privileged to join when I entered Highland Park in my junior year. And what a group it was! These girls were fascinating, intelligent, sensitive to others, always wanting to learn more of everything. They awakened my brain, my senses, and made me a better person. Nancy was bursting with energy, willing to try anything to help more, to understand. Who could have been surprised when Nancy and Irven headed to the wilderness with babies and kept them healthy and safe. I admired her for her perspective and all the good she accomplished. The world is a little less bright without her.
January 14, 2015
Nancy was a vivid, deeply engaged person, who never sat back and watched, but entered into the world around her. She actively tried to help make this a better world, and is sadly missed. She was a lifelong friend to me. Ann Ralston
Ian, Nancy, Anna and Alex
Claire DeVore
January 4, 2015
So many things I could not add to this obituary when writing it, it was $550.00 as it was and she would have killed me! Her love of going down a dirt road saying "I wonder where this will take us?" and then finding a huge tree had fallen over and blocked our path After we had gone over a rickety bridge where wood supports fell into the water below us. She backed up the 1970s station wagon while I stood on the other side..
Taking 2 small children laden with scientific equipment around the world to meet her husband and travel three days from any civilization into the depths of the Kalahari Desert.
She always told me to "fall asleep with a smile on your face so you will have good dreams", try it, it works! She met everyday with a cheerful attitude no matter what tragedies lay in the background. She liked nothing better than to sit on a bench in Harvard Square, or anywhere in the world, and strike up a conversation with a complete stranger. She did not judge anyone until they had proven themselves one way or the other. She adored her special girlfriends from Highland Park High School in Dallas and all the theater, writing, art, astronomy and experiments they did together. She loved her friends and was loyal to the end. She spoke her mind which offended many Yankees but delighted the others because you really could ask how your hair looked and she would tell you..so you learned not to ask and hoped she wouldn't tell you anyway. She was an amazing classical pianist and I would sit at her feet writing out the pieces I wanted at my funeral, learning to adore minor keys. She was an accomplished calligrapher and made some wonderful pieces, one of which is the famous Quote: "Professor Haldane, what has a lifelong study of evolution taught you about Our Creator? "An inordinate fondness for beetles"
She saved 1000 baby spiders when my father was yelling that they had hatched in his bathrobe, and took them to a ficus to grow up into her pets. She carried a baby baboon in her blouse despite the fact that the baboon Dolly would sneak her hand out and take food off the airline tray. She was great with teenagers and had a job in the worst part of Chicago with inner-city teens trying to get them to play board games. She lit the trash can there on fire with an unextinguished cigarette too. In Chicago in postwar housing one room was so cold they turned it into a fridge.
She threw great parties where everyone danced. She could do cartwheels far longer than was advisable. She volunteered at the voting station until she wasn't sure of people's names anymore. She put up with living without a dishwasher for her entire life. She rarely bought clothes or was given jewelry, preferring to travel. She loved murder mysteries like Elizabeth Peters. She wants you to read A Splendid Exchange: how trade changed the world. Right Now. Buy it. Or she will buy you a copy. OK?
michelle plakas-kaiser
January 4, 2015
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