Joyce Anne Olin

1944 - 2023

Joyce Anne Olin died comfortably at home on February 25th in Annapolis. She was 78. She was a loving and beloved wife of her husband of 40 years, Christopher B. Nelson, and a loving and greatly loved mother, sister, grandmother, aunt, and great-grandmother. She loved the out-of-doors, walking in the woodlands, feeding the birds, squirrels, stray cats and foxes, laying out a banquet for them every morning. She was occasionally seen wandering her gardens, followed by ducks or foxes hoping for a new handout from her. She loved her gardens and spent much of her spare time planting and maintaining an extraordinary variety of flowering plants and trees. And she loved her cats as though they were her children. To family and friends, Joyce was generosity itself, giving of herself and her means whenever called upon, making quilts for newborns, providing special opportunities for educational adventures for youngsters, volunteering to work in public gardens and to support local non-profit organizations, opening her home and gardens to all who wished to experience the beauty of the world around her, offering a home to visiting performers with the Annapolis Opera, serving as hostess to countless events at St. John's College. Each year at Halloween she'd set outside the president's office buckets of candy for St. John's students; at Thanksgiving, she and her husband opened their home for a home-cooked meal to 40-50 students who were unable to go home for the holiday; in the spring, she would bake chocolate chip cookies for staff. She had a keen eye for works of art that she collected with her husband. She was a lifelong reader of books about all manner of things, from cooking to gardening to nature studies to great and small works of fiction and biography, reading right through her uncomplaining slide toward death. And she loved traveling abroad with friends to experience new vistas and new cultures. Joyce was born in Chicago, Illinois, the oldest of six children of Beauford and Betty Berggren. She was the first in her family to attend college, starting at the University of Illinois, where she met her first husband, John Olin, father of her daughter Meg. When they moved to California, she finished her undergraduate studies, earning her Bachelor's degree from the University of California-Davis. She received a Masters degree in Library Sciences at the University of Southern California. Her marriage ended in divorce, and she moved back to her native Chicago, where she worked as a librarian at the DePaul University Law School while also studying law there. It was during this period that she met and married Chris, who himself had four children by a prior marriage. She received a Doctor of Jurisprudence from DePaul and went to work as a law clerk for a judge in the Illinois Appellate Court. From there, she went on to work as an attorney at the Chicago regional office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In 1991, when Chris accepted an offer to return to Annapolis as president of St. John's College, they moved to Annapolis, where they have lived ever since. From 1991 until 2014, Joyce worked as a senior attorney at the EPA Headquarters in Washington DC, retiring at age 70 to spend more time with her books, gardens and animal friends, and enjoying time at their second home on Washington Island in Wisconsin. She never ceased her formal education, earning a Master's Degree in Liberal Arts from St. John's College in 2020. Joyce is survived by her husband Chris, daughter Meg (Lisa), sons Tollof (Audrey), Gunnar (Christina), Lars (Anitra), Erik (Sanaa), more than 20 grandchildren and great grandchildren, and her devoted sisters and brothers, Linda, Cheri, Julie, Kenneth and John, and their children and grandchildren. A gathering in her memory will be held later. The family would welcome memorial gifts made to St. John's College or the Annapolis Horticultural Society.