Nancy Turner Pennypacker

Nancy Jane Turner Pennypacker died peacefully at her home in Lakeland, Florida on November 17, 2025. She was born on October 26, 1926 in Fairview, Pennsylvania to Fred Walter and Edna Nina Miller Turner. The third of four children, her father was a cost accountant for the Griswold Manufacturing Company, and her mother was a Registered Nurse.

During the Second World War, she trained at Philadelphia General Hospital and served her country in the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps. She worked as a Registered Nurse for the next five decades, most of them at hospitals in Florida, where she moved in the early 1950s. A highly respected pediatric nurse, for years she wore the cap that identified the school where she had trained. She was thrilled when a physician at Tampa General Hospital, seeing her cap, called out, "a Blockley nurse!" Besides Tampa General, she worked in the Pediatric Ward of Shands Teaching Hospital in Gainesville, and at Orange Memorial Hospital in Orlando.

She enjoyed forty years with the love of her life, William Franklin Pennypacker. A U.S. Army infantryman during the war, he fought in France and Germany and met the beautiful nurse after V-E Day. They wed in Philadelphia on September 20, 1947. On September 14, 1948 they were blessed with a son, William Franklin Pennypacker, Jr.

Nancy was preceded in death by her parents, her sisters Ruth Elizabeth Turner Weaver and Florence Eva Turner White, her husband, and her son. She loved and was loved by numerous cats, especially Pyewacket.

She is survived by her loving "baby brother," John Miller Turner of Sarasota, and by eight nieces and nephews, in addition to numerous grand and great-grand nieces and nephews. We have wonderful memories of her, over ninety years of them, going all the way back to playing with her young brother in the backyard sandbox in Fairview. Boating trips on the Suwannee River, playing tennis, genealogy sleuthing, camping adventures in her RV: she loved to have fun. She was a cheerful presence in her family's life, a fiercely devoted nurse, and a genuinely loving woman. We will miss her.

She will be buried beside her husband and son in the Fairview Cemetery, Fairview, Pennsylvania, close to her parents and grandparents.

Rest in peace, Aunt Nancy.