♀Nancy Jane Blanchard

Nancy Jane Blanchard (13 October 1929 – 1 September 2006) was a New Jersey-born schoolteacher and high-school guidance counselor who took her degree in psychology, with departmental honors, at Northwestern University and spent some forty years of her married life in Barrington, Illinois. She was the grandmother of the compiler of this family history.

Early life

Nancy Jane Blanchard was born at Orange Memorial Hospital^W in East Orange, Essex County, New Jersey, the second of three children of Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975), a pediatrician practicing in East Orange, and Mary Esther Schneck (1900–1968). Her father served as chairman of the Section on Pediatrics of the Medical Society of New Jersey in 1938. Her elder sister, Barbara Blanchard (1928–2008), was born the year before her, and a younger brother, Robert Watson Blanchard (1934–2006), followed her. She grew up in South Orange, where the census found the family in 1930 and again in 1950. Her mother had also been a Northwestern student, taking a science degree in zoology there in 1921.

Columbia High School

Nancy attended Columbia High School^W, which served South Orange and Maplewood and published a yearbook called The Mirror. Its 1946 issue reviewed the Junior Night show In the Bag, in which she played Jessica, “Major Gridley’s beautiful daughter, who, alas, is husbandless.”

Her senior year was a busy one. The 1947 yearbook lists her in the Junior Night cast, on the staff of the Mirror, as a Bible reader and a member of the school council and the Girls’ Athletic Association, on the finance committee, and as chairman and treasurer of her homeroom. Her classmates called her “Doc”, a nod to Felix “Doc” Blanchard^W, Army’s star fullback and the 1945 winner of the Heisman Trophy, and they remembered her for “weekends at Lafayette - a beautiful gal who is just as terrific as the Army player of the same name.”

In the class will, she left her “Vogue” cover girl looks to another Nancy in her class. The class prophecy pictured her years later, still starring in a Broadway revival of In the Bag, the Junior Night musical.

Northwestern

She went on to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In November 1949 a South Orange newspaper named her, as a junior, among the town’s representatives at the university. She joined the Alpha Delta Pi^W sorority; the 1951 Northwestern yearbook, the Syllabus, calls her an “ADPi beauty” chosen Navy Ball attendant in 1948, and records the chapter “working during the Centennial year” with “Nancy Blanchard as president.” She received a bachelor’s degree in 1951, with departmental honors in psychology.

Marriage and family

Nancy became engaged in the winter after her graduation. The engagement of Frederic Roger Curtis to Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) of South Orange, New Jersey, was announced in the South Orange-Maplewood News-Record on 20 December 1951, naming the groom as Pvt. F. Roger Curtis of the United States Army, and in the Chicago Tribune on 23 December 1951. The Tribune reported that he was “serving in the armed forces far eastern command” and that he had studied at Northwestern, where his fiancée had graduated.

Nancy Jane Blanchard and Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) were married on 14 February 1953 at the Munn Avenue Presbyterian Church in East Orange, New Jersey, with a reception at the Orange Lawn Tennis Club in South Orange; her sister Barbara was her maid of honor. The Tribune printed the notice two days later, on 16 February. The South Orange newspaper’s account of the wedding, headed “Nancy Blanchard a Bride,” describes the bride’s gown as “of ivory satin and imported Alencon lace, trimmed with seed pearls.”

Nancy and Roger Curtis raised four children together and lived to welcome nine grandchildren. They settled in the Chicago area. According to a family account from their daughter, the family lived in Park Forest, Illinois, where their first two children were born; in Prairie Village, Kansas, from 1956; in Dallas, Texas, from January 1962; and in Tower Lakes, part of Barrington, Illinois, from 1966 until 1993. After his mother’s death in 1993 they moved into his parents’ house in Barrington, and in the summer of 2005 to Port Charlotte, Florida. This squares with the obituary heading “formerly of Barrington for 40 years” (1966 to 2005) and with “for one year” in Port Charlotte. Directory listings place her in Barrington between 1997 and 2002.

Career

When her engagement was announced in December 1951, she was working in the child study department of the South Orange-Maplewood school system. Nancy took a master of science degree in education at Northern Illinois University^W in DeKalb; the year is not known. According to her obituary she taught in the Barrington schools and was a guidance counselor at Lake Zurich and Libertyville High Schools.

The record for Libertyville High School^W is the clearer of the two. The 1973 yearbook has a staff photograph on its page headed Guidance, captioned “Mrs. Nancy Curtis,” and a yearbook index lists a Nancy Curtis at the school in 1976 and in each year from 1981 to 1986. She was on the guidance staff there by 1973 and was still there in the mid-1980s, more than a decade at the school.

Death

Nancy Jane Blanchard died on Friday, 1 September 2006, in Punta Gorda, Charlotte County, Florida, aged 76. Her obituary in the Daily Herald of 10 September 2006 described her as of Port Charlotte, Florida, “for one year,” and said that her services and burial would be private. According to a family account, her ashes were spread at Clam Lake, Wisconsin, as her husband’s were the following year. Her mother-in-law, Bernice, had bought plots at Evergreen Cemetery in Barrington for the whole family, but as far as the family knows only her husband’s parents are buried there. The obituary asked that memorial contributions be made to the American Cancer Society or the Trust for Public Land.

Notes

Her obituary places her as a guidance counselor at Lake Zurich High School as well as Libertyville. No Lake Zurich yearbook shows a Nancy Curtis, so those years rest on the obituary alone.

A 1942 Sons of the American Revolution application transcribing her father’s children once gave her birth year as 1919; the day and month agree exactly with the family’s own record, and only the decade was misread, so 1929 stands.