Nancy BURROWS

BURROWS, Nancy passed away peacefully June 17, 2017. She was 89. Nancy was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, the only child of Inez and Lewis Kreiter. Her parents were both college educated and they ensured that their daughter was just as well educated. Filling children with knowledge and wisdom would be her life's work. She majored in English at Goucher College, then a liberal arts college for women, in north Baltimore, MD. It was there she met the love of her life, Benjamin Burrows, who was attending medical school at Johns Hopkins, the college next door. She was a sweet, petite, midwestern German Protestant who could trace her family lineage to the American Revolution and beyond. He was a nice Jewish boy from New York who could trace his family lineage to the pogroms of The Pale. They had nothing in common. It was kismet. After marriage and Ben becoming Dr. Benjamin Burrows, it was off to Austin, Texas, and Seattle for Ben's draft service in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War. Nancy and Ben then raised four Children in Chicago after Dr. Burrows became an esteemed pulmonologist and research fellow at the University of Chicago. While raising her own children, Nancy helped hundreds of poor mothers in Chicago raise theirs by teaching at one of the first Head Start preschools in the country. Dr. Burrows was recruited in 1968 to become one of the first major researchers at Arizona's new medical school, the University of Arizona College of Medicine. Using the immense patience of a practiced and experienced preschool teacher, Nancy helped her four suburban Chicago teenagers adjust to their new life in the "Dry Heat" of the Old Pueblo. Both Ben and Nancy fell in love with the desert and the West, and Nancy even bought a horse and joined a group of friends on trail rides around the mountains and ranches of Southeastern Arizona. Nancy taught nursery school for 13 years at the famous Tucson Community School and many of today's leaders in Tucson well remember their time in Mrs. Burrows' fun-filled class. In 1987, the Tucson Association for the Education of Young Children awarded her its Nina Brannen Teaching Award. She finally retired in the 1980s to help care for her grandchildren. Nancy believed all children were empty vessels that needed to be filled with love, joy, kindness, and knowledge. She treated all of her students, her family and everyone she met with extreme kindness and respect. She was a loving wife, a wise and wonderful mother and grandmother, and for those of us who had the great joy to have met her, to have known her, and to have loved her, she was the most decent, caring person we have ever known. Nancy is survived by her four children, Jan, Susan, Steve and Lynn, her four grandchildren, Mark, Jamie, Jeffrey, and Rachel, her two great-grandchildren, Jonathan and Saphira, and close family friends, Donna Burrows and Lynn Moke. The family is holding a private memorial, however if those who knew her would like to honor and remember Nancy, she would be greatly pleased if you made a donation to the Tucson Community School, tucsoncommunityschool.org, or through your acts and votes, supported early childhood education.