Nancy Nugent Larson

August 28, 1926-March 13, 2020

Nancy Nugent Larson (née Moran), descendent of abolitionists, civic activist, Episcopalian, and entrepreneur, died March 13, 2020 at the age of 93. Felled by the frailties of extreme old age, Nancy was surrounded by family when she quietly took her final breath. A huge proponent of family, she lived long enough to know and love seven generations of relatives, perhaps her proudest accomplishment. Certainly, she was a fan of the family saga, brightening all familial occasions with stories of the ancestors that only got better and better in the retelling.

Nancy was born in Evanston, IL on August 28, 1926, at the height of the Roaring Twenties. Her parents had scandalized relatives by making what, for those times, was a mixed-marriage—Kathryn Isobel Horton came from pre-Revolutionary War English stock, James Edward (Ned) Moran was first generation Irish. Married at the extravagant, pink Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago, Nancy’s parents were the more sedate Midwestern version of monied Bright Young Things, with one set of Wedgewood bone china just for breakfast. There is a photo of eldest baby Nancy and her father standing in a loose row with six other young men in cream color suits, high collars, ties, braces, all exuding optimism, all showing off their well-dressed toddlers. In 1929, the stock market crash would sweep away the wealth from both sides of the family, leaving Nancy’s stock broker father devastated. For years, he dressed each morning and headed to the Loop for the job he no longer held, leaving Nancy’s mother bewildered when he inexplicably failed to pay bills and raged at her about household expenses. Ultimately, the marriage ended in divorce—still uncommon in these times—with Nancy’s mother retreating with her four young children to Escanaba, Michigan in the Upper Peninsula.

In many ways, their lives were typical of the Great Depression. Unpaid bills led to the installation of an electric meter that swallowed hard-to-come by quarters. Nancy and her sister Sue collected glass bottles for the five or ten cents required for Saturday morning shows at the movie house. In other ways, Nancy’s household was less typical. Her mother had majored in French and encouraged the children to read extensively and listen to news on the radio. Noon time dinners were served with fine china and silverware and crystal on Irish linen tablecloths. For five years, there was Julia, the “Irish girl,” who cooked and cleaned in exchange for room and board. There was no money to pay her and she had nowhere to go. Late in Nancy’s childhood, her mother made yet another mixed-marriage, with John J. Mitchell, a timberman and great sailor of French descent, who introduced financial stability to the household.

Nancy was the fourth generation of women in her family to get a college degree; she majored in English and Economics. All her siblings went to college, none on the GI Bill, though her brother did win the Pepsi Cola Scholarship, a fact Nancy brought up frequently with much pride. Nancy, herself, was editor of the Lawrence University newspaper, ferocious mitten-knitter for the boys on the front, sorority sister (we think Kappa Alpha Theta), and lifelong member of Mortar Board, a university women’s scholastic honor society. She had chums from Lawrence who remained friends until the end of her life.

Nancy was a good Episcopalian, being a co-founder of two churches—St Philip & St James in Denver, Colorado and St. Anne’s in Reston, Virginia—but Democracy ran a close second as her fundamental belief system. She registered with the League of Women Voters immediately after she registered to vote and was an active member throughout her lifetime. A Reston League friend told us that, in her first election, Nancy couldn’t bring herself to vote for either Dewey or Truman, so she wrote in comedian Bob Hope. We daughters remember days spent in the League offices in downtown Denver, sorting “One Man/One Vote” leaflets. And the big orange dress-up clothes barrel in our basement also had clipboards, because we usually played Going to League Meeting. Nancy always worked the polls on election days and she felt enormously honored to be campaign manager when Martha Pennino, an influential and much-loved Fairfax County, Virginia politician, ran for the US House of Representatives. (Martha lost, as did most women in those days.)

Despite growing up in a loving Republican household, Nancy became an avid, liberal Democrat. Her first job out of college was with the Appleton Post Crescent, a staunch supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who came from Appleton, WI and engineered the post-WWII American red scare. When the publisher refused to cover McCarthy’s Communist witch-hunts, Post Crescent reporters tore swaths of paper off the UPI and Reuter’s wire service machines and took them door to door in the community to let people read the news fresh from the source. 

It was at the newspaper that Nancy met her future husband, Calvin Frederick Larson. As the experienced reporter on the city desk, Nancy was assigned to show Cal the ropes when he was first hired. Decades later, Cal was telling his daughter about the low starting wages at the paper. This led to a small uproar on the part of Nancy—from the first day, Cal had been paid more than she.

Nancy was always a feminist, but one who wanted to win more than she wanted to force others to face their own prejudices. She told the story of her editorship of her college newspaper, the year the men came back from war. Jaded and impatient, many of these new students were loath to acknowledge Nancy’s editorial authority. So, she deliberately disarmed them, by forgetting her pencil and needing to borrow one or by introducing a story idea one week and then giving the guys time to assimilate it, take ownership, and propose that same idea a couple weeks later. When her elder daughter asked if this hadn’t been a bit manipulative, Nancy replied that they had a paper to get out, she didn’t have time to waste arguing, and, anyway, if the guys hadn’t been so dismissive, they wouldn’t have fallen for her machinations.

Those stratagems for change stood Nancy in good stead over the years. Though this list may be incomplete, Nancy helped found or successfully lobbied for the creation of:

1955 St Philip and St James Episcopal Church, Denver

1959 Terrace Club community pool, Denver

1964 Chalmers Hadley Library, Denver

1967 Reston Community Association, Reston

1969 St Anne’s Episcopal Church, Reston

1974 Fairfax County Human Rights Commission, VA 

1978 South Lakes High School, Reston

1984 Reston Board of Commerce

1998 Reston Museum (one of the sponsors who purchased the space)

Married in 1951, Nancy was part of the post-WWII generation that started their adult lives acutely aware of the debt they owed friends who had died in the war. Nancy often said she felt a deep obligation to make the world a better place for all and to fight the kind of bigotry that had not only led nation to fight nation, but paved the way for the Holocaust. She and Cal were supporters of the American Civil Rights Movement and advocated for the integration of their Harvey Park section of Denver. In the late 1950s, she started a Girl Scout troop that included Protestants, Jews, Catholics, and Chicanas—highly unusual for the day. When the family moved to Reston in 1967, Nancy became president of the Herndon High School PTA and led the push to integrate the faculty. And she told tales of going to the annual council of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, where the attendees broke into two groups, shouting angrily at each other from their parish tables over the pace of integration within the church. Nancy’s social circle was always diverse, though perhaps not to the degree she wished. Theirs was the era in which diverse groups would gather to engineer social change and then return home to dine with those of their own race. In her own mind, Nancy was most proud of the work she did on the committee that created the Human Rights Commission in Fairfax County—and gave it teeth. Throughout the country, many similar citizens’ groups were being founded as advisory boards to tackle discrimination in employment and housing. But only those with enforcement power actually saw real change. Fairfax County’s one was such.

Like many women of her generation, Nancy layered all this civic activism on top of paid employment. And because her profession was writing, she usually could find work in her field. Nancy and Cal left the Post Crescent for Denver, where Cal had a job lined up at the Rocky Mountain American Automobile Association. Not yet adept at the newlywed thing, Nancy set her mind to homemaking. One of her notable early meals was boiled garlic cloves (they were on sale!). Such is the downside of growing up with household help. After a week or two of such domesticity, Cal came home and announced that he had not married a housekeeper and that she was to find a job—any job. Jobs being tight, she finally found employment going door to door selling sterling silver flatware. Evidently, the business plan was to send well educated, cultured young ladies out to introduce couples newly promoted into the middle class by the GI Bill to the practices of fine dining. Nancy’s first sale was a huge success, until the receipt was written up. Suddenly she realized that her customers were mortgaging their immediate future for forks, knives, and spoons. So, she tore up the receipt, and quit the job.

Her second job was no less temporary and no less emblematic of the times. She was interviewed and hired at the Denver daily Rocky Mountain News in the morning, saw the doctor and discovered she was pregnant in the early afternoon, and was fired by the News before supper. From thence came a conglomeration of deeply satisfying part-time jobs. She was the Denver beat reporter for Fairchild Publications, most often writing for the prestigious Women’s Wear Daily (now W). Cal was a crack photographer and had access to a glass plate camera from the Triple A.  For most of their young marriage, their romantic getaways were funded by Fairchild, as they went to the ski slopes to cover together the annual Ski show, selling clothing to retailers for the upcoming winter. They also covered Western Wear at the Denver rodeo and the Shoe Show, where manufacturers’ reps lined up in hotel rooms, their wares dumped out of suitcases onto every available bedroom surface. Nancy always had magnificent shoes because she had tiny feet and was given freebees from salesmen (yes, they were all men), tiny being the preferred demonstration size.

Once Cal started law school nights, Nancy also ran the market research operations for Crossely S-D Surveys, Inc, a national firm out of New York City. Denver was the hub for market research in the West. Her daughters remember waiting for Nancy to get off the phone or come back to the car, the time dragging into what a friend suggested were Mother Minutes, while Nancy collected data and served as mother-hen for a huge coterie of Survey Ladies. Brown paper shopping bags were tested in Denver grocery stores, with shoppers returning all the bags that tore. Our house was filled with giant piles of ripped paper bags, lining all the walls, because the desert climate had proven fatal to this version of grocery bag. Then there was Kraft’s new Catalina salad dressing. The plan had been to distribute bottles of dressing and survey the recipients. However, Catalina proved so successful, Kraft cut off marketing research and we had cases of the stuff in the basement for years. Nancy learned that one can marinate almost anything in Kraft Catalina dressing.

In later years, Nancy gave up the Survey Ladies for writing promotional pieces for the Denver Public Library and teaching writing to Denver Public School students, but the best job she had in Denver was as editor of the Southwest Herald Dispatch. There she had full scope for her crusading spirit. The Herald Dispatch was located in a movie-perfect, old fashioned newsroom, with a Linotype typesetter and printing presses in the back. Roz Russell never stepped through the door, but Nancy was almost as elegant. She would simultaneously be grabbing the phone, taking tips, typing, and smoking down those Lucky Strike cigarettes made so popular during the War. Meanwhile, her two daughters, Sally and Barbara, were free to sit, mesmerized, and watch the typesetter or wander next door to the penny candy store. They both remember the wax coke bottle candy, candy cigarettes, giant wax lips, candy necklaces, and the oh-so-messy Pixi Stix—none of which tasted particularly good. And how cool to have a mom who not only worked in a building full of men, but was the boss!

If Denver was interesting, the family’s 1967 move to Reston offered Nancy true scope for her abilities. She wrote for the American Association of Appraisers; pitch-hit at the Reston Post Office, which was run out of a closet at the original Reston Community Center in Lake Anne Plaza; did a lot of pro-bono writing explaining and promoting the civic organizations being created to give life to Robert E. Simon’s New Town urban experiment, launched in 1964; worked for Gulf Reston, Inc. to improve interaction between residents and the developer; and ultimately, in 1976, bought New Town Publications, creator of  A Place Called Reston, more commonly referred to as the Reston Directory, that launched in 1967 and was still being typed and mimeographed.

The Directory began as a tool to introduce neighbor to neighbor in Simon’s nascent, experimental “urban” community, where the main drag was only halfway paved and the developer, Reston Inc., was floundering. Simon’s vision of a planned New Town where people could live, work, and play without climbing into their cars, a place where a variety of housing options would lead naturally to economic diversity, where couples could age from starter apartment to family home to retirement apartment without having to leave the community, where people of all races, religions, ethnicities, and nationalities were welcome, caught the fancy of progressive reformers from around the country, amongst them Nancy and Cal Larson. Nancy shaped the Reston Directory to support this vision, turning the first half into a handbook on Reston history, descriptions of community organizations, names and numbers of contact people, explanations of local and state government and why Reston wasn’t a real town or city and how residents could work around that to get things done. Basically, Nancy included everything we can look up on the computer today, but was unavailable then in print form anywhere.

Along the way, Nancy self-educated about the potential of dedicated word processors and then the computer, invested heavily in digital design and layout at the dawn of the industry, and never really did learn to use any of the equipment she bought. (She was particularly non-mechanical, once calling her grandson in a panic because she had broken her computer. Turned out she had unplugged her keyboard in a fit of pique.) The Reston Directory accumulated prizes for content and design and, perhaps the greatest tribute of all, hundreds of people sent in listing updates throughout the year, even new arrivals. The Reston Directory was given as a housewarming gift by almost all realtors.

Over the years, Nancy added the Herndon Directory, Fairfax West, and Potomac Communities to New Town Publications’ oeuvre, though none had the community-building impact of the Reston Directory, primarily because new construction in those other areas was scattered among numerous developers and lacked the driving social vision that Reston’s developers subsequent to Simon—Gulf Reston and then Mobil’s Reston Land—maintained. For several years, she published a directory for the Reston Board of Commerce, which she helped found, until the business community grew sizable enough to support a Chamber of Commerce. And she created the Northern Virginia Legal Directory, a hugely successful book.

Ironically, it was the computer that so intrigued Nancy at its inception that finally brought down New Town Publications. Folks learned to Google for information, local organizations and sports teams set up web pages, businesses turned from print advertising to the web. Print directories, which were technically out of date even before distribution, waned nationally. Moreover, the Reston Directory, which still had a loyal following, became harder and harder to produce as the community grew to 58,404 people by 2010. Updating the residential listings was a nightmare, with New Town staff going to the very websites that would prove to be the Directory’s downfall. The Great Recession of 2009 finally kicked the slats out from under New Town Publications. To Nancy’s eternal regret, the doors closed that year, though daughter Barbara took over the Legal Directory and kept publishing through 2019. 

Much of Nancy’s life was public. There was a time in the 1980’s that almost every issue of the Reston Times and Reston Connection quoted either Cal or Nancy, always with the descriptor “civic activist.” (Cal found the notoriety quite embarrassing.) New Town Publications was often in the news. Even the Larsons’ family time spilled into public space as the grandparents, with great joy, took their grandkids to concerts, dances, farmers’ markets, festivals, and nature walks. What has been a surprise after Nancy’s death, however, is the number of women who, in phone calls and sympathy cards, told us stories of how she mentored them in business, politics, and civic activism. This one recounting how Nancy and a friend called her up and informed her she was running for the Reston Community Association. That one remembering how Nancy encouraged her to go back to work after decades at home. Another saying she never would have run for office if not inspired by Nancy’s enthusiasm for participatory Democracy. We, her family, have always considered Nancy rather inspiring (sometimes rather too much so), but we never realized the extent of the behind the scenes work she did to help other women follow their dreams.

Nancy was preceded in death by her husband Calvin, brother James B. Moran, and sister Sue Moran Schram. She is survived by her sister Martha Thompson; daughters Sarah Larson and Barbara Zaczek; her son-in-law Tom Zaczek; nephews Michael, Greg, and Warren Thompson; grandchildren Benjamin Mook (wife Avigail Ziv), Nate Mook, Natalie Zaczek McIntosh (husband Nick McIntosh), Galen Mook (partner Jessica Robertson), and Koaw Zaczek; bonus grandchildren, Michael Lujan and Marina Chavez Otoya; and adored great-grandchildren, Taylor, Sarah, Moses, Ayelet, Levi, David, and Zachary.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic and the fact that the Episcopal Church closed for months, we were unable to hold a memorial service for Nancy. That is why we created this memorial website. We invite those who knew and loved her to submit their own stories for posting. Nancy’s ashes were comingled with those of Cal and interred in the St. Anne’s Memorial Garden on June 11, 2020 at a special outdoor service where only 10 people could attend, including the two priests. Nonetheless, the family found it moving and appropriate. Our family thanks everyone who sent condolences and best wishes, especially those who have shared stories. Any of you who wish to make contributions in her name may do so to World Central Kitchen, 1342 Florida Ave NW, Washington, DC 20009 (202-844-6330) or https://donate.wck.org/.

PS: Wondering about those abolitionists? Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, the second co-educational college in the United States, was founded in 1847 as part of an abolitionist program to lure non-slave-holding families west. New states were being admitted into the nation free or slave depending on the majority vote of settlers. Amos A. Lawrence, a wealthy Boston merchant, pledged $10,000 to be matched by $1,000 each from local families. The Nugent family of Kaukauna, Wisconsin, was one of the donor families. Nancy was proud to have Nugent as her middle name, so she skipped the common practice of using her maiden name, Moran, as her middle name after marriage. She was Nancy Nugent Larson to the end.