Nancy Bass Wolfram, who died Aug. 23, 2016, was born to Catherine Forbush Bass and George Henry Bass, 2nd, in Brockton, Massachusetts because the town doctor at home in Wilton, Maine had left for military service. Nancy returned to Wilton days later when able to travel. Her father, himself born in Maine, liked to comment that, although not a Maine native, she had many relatives and friends in the state.

She graduated from the town’s elementary school, Wilton Academy, and from the Northfield School for Girls in Massachusetts, now known as the Northfield-Mt. Hermon School, a coeducational boarding and day school for boys and girls which Nancy enthusiastically supported all her adult life.

She spent early summers at the Bass family cottage in Bayville, Maine, where Nancy developed her lifelong passion for sailing, as a teenager becoming the Maine state sailing champion. She attended Wellesley College, majoring in history, and later earned a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota in teaching English as a second language (ESL).

A year after graduating from Wellesley, Nancy married Charles W. Wolfram in Farmington, Maine. They celebrated their 50th year of marriage several months before Nancy’s death. They flew from their honeymoon to Minnesota, where Nancy started her ESL career with informal efforts to teach English to an ever-widening circle of friends from other countries. Over subsequent years, she acquired her ESL training while raising her children and then taught ESL classes in public and private settings. Her students came with dozens of different native languages, all of which served as only mildly resistant barriers to Nancy’s ability to communicate through verbal and non-verbal means and occasionally with a smattering of French—always with a warm smile and contagious good will. Most of her students returned to their homes and now live around the world, and many continued to correspond with her.

In North Oaks, Minnesota where they settled, Nancy and her family became devoted to the outdoors -- canoeing, camping and bicycling in decent weather, and pursuing cross-country and downhill skiing and other winter sports the rest of the year. Those experiences led to two extended bicycle-camping trips by the entire family through several countries in Europe.

They spent most summers in Bayville, at the foot of Linekin Bay, where the family has maintained a summer cottage for over 45 years and where Nancy taught the entire family to love sailing almost as much as she did. The family moved to Ithaca, New York, in 1981, where Nancy started her second book club and continued her work as an ESL teacher, including several years at Elmira College. The first book club, in Minnesota, and the Ithaca book club continue to thrive decades later.

Nancy first developed symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in the mid-1990s. After retiring, she and her husband moved to California to be near to their two children and their three grandchildren -- all ending up living within three blocks of each other in Berkeley. Nancy volunteered for several Alzheimer’s studies conducted by the University of California at San Francisco Medical School, one of which became a standard method of diagnosing the disease. Eventually, she entered the Lakeside Park assisted-living home in Oakland, California near Lake Merritt where she and her husband or son Peter walked almost daily for five years until the last weeks of her life, when she died peacefully from complications from a fall.

Nancy is survived by her husband; her daughter, Catherine D. Wolfram of Berkeley, California; Catherine’s husband Matthew A. Barmack; their children, Sylvia Catherine Barmack and Maxwell George Barmack; her son, Peter R. Wolfram, also of Berkeley; his daughter, Sky Beverly Katherine Wolfram; her sister, Joanne Bass O’Connor and husband Richard Dana O’Connor of Maine; and an extended family of many other much-loved Bass and Wolfram relatives and friends in California, Maine, Minnesota, New York and elsewhere.

Nancy’s family has planned memorial services during October in Berkeley and during the summer of 2017 in Bayville.

The family asks that, in lieu of flowers, those wishing to do so make a contribution in memory of Nancy to the Northfield-Mt. Hermon School, 1 Lamplighter Way, Gill, MA 01354, or to a charity of their choice.