Nancy Pompian

Nancy Worden Pompian, 79, died sleeping peacefully at her home on October 12, 2016. She was born December 3, 1936, in Lafayette, Indiana, daughter of Mary Grace (Williams) and Roger Stanley Worden.

Nancy majored in journalism at Purdue University and moved to New York City, where she was a copy reader in the college department at Harper & Brothers publishers, and later, in Boston, an editor at Houghton Mifflin. In 1959, she was married to Stuart Pompian of Chicago, and they lived in Cambridge, Boston, and Waban, Massachusetts. During that time Nancy was a free-lance editor for Medicaid, editing a book created by the Department of Health Education and Welfare. Later she was a volunteer reader for blind students at Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School and taught nature classes for children at the Massachusetts Audubon Society's Drumlin Farm in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

In 1976, following the birth of and early education of their two sons, the Pompian family moved to the village of Haverhill Corner, New Hampshire and had a small farm. Nancy worked with students with learning disabilities at Dartmouth College, later expanding the program to all disabilities and become Director of Student Disabilities. For many years, she was a consultant to Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey, and consulted for the Association of American Medical Colleges. She served as president of the Haverhill Historical Society when the Society renovated and preserved the Ladd Street School outside the village.

Following retirement from Dartmouth in 2005, Nancy and Stuart traveled with her brother Donald and his wife Sue to visit the site of the Worden homestead in Wibaux, Montana, where their father spent his early life. The photographs taken by her grandmother from 1908 to 1921 with a Brownie camera on the homestead were among her most treasured possessions. She took architecture classes at Dartmouth College, and architecture tours became a focus of travels in her later life. She wrote articles for magazines about a variety of topics, including the history, architecture and restoration of the eighteenth and nineteenth century houses her family lived in. Her goal was to write and revise her writing every day. She enjoyed friendships with women and men, conversation, swimming, and an annual reunion with a group of ten friends who had attended Jefferson High School in Lafayette, Indiana, her hometown, and remained friends for 60 years after high school graduation. Later, after moving with her husband to Hanover, she
relished the friends she made there.

She is survived by her husband, Stuart, and sons Michael, his wife Angela and grandchildren Nicholas, Alexander and Spencer of St. Louis and David, his wife Hali and grandchildren Tyler and Sascha of Denver, and; her brother Donald and wife Susan Worden of Alexandria, Virginia, and nephew Scott Worden and wife Elizabeth of Washington, D. C. and her grand-nieces Annie and Nell.

A memorial service is planned for a later date.