10A THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
NEWS
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 6. 2005
PROFILE
Want to spruce up your living space? Linda did-by selling mark.More than a top beauty brand,mark has 350+
makeup products and accessories. It's an opportunity to earn money or even fundraise
for your favorite organization.
Selling mark is fun and fashionable, and more rewarding than working in restaurants or retail stores. Be your own boss work flexible hours, and make money for school, shopping or whatever!
mark Representatives:
- Earn up to 40% on everything you sell.
· Earn prizes, trips and cash.
Go to meetmark.com/collegesweeps to become a mark Representative and enter to win $100.* No purchase necessary. Must be a legal U.S. resident and 17 years of age or older to enter. For complete details, including how to enter, see official rules at www.meetmark.com/collegesweeps. Sweepstakes starts on 9/19/05 at 12 noon and ends on 10/31/05 at 12 noon. Void where prohibited.
*See www.meetmark.com/collegeswee.ps for details
Remembering Nancy
Nancy Sanders, 1967 KU graduate, is pictured in 1990. Sanders and her husband, Spencer librarian Bill Crowe, set up a $250,000 endowment for student librarians in June. Sanders died Sent. 14
Contributed photo
Alumna's legacy lives on at the University
BY FRANK TANKARD
flankard@kansan.com
KANSAN STAFF WRITER
Crowe said Nugent was the
Nancy Sanders isn't gone. She's in too many places to count.
Bill Crowe, head of the Spencer Research Library, recalls stories about his wife, Nancy Sanders.
Sara Garlick/KANSAN
She's in a frame on the wall with her younger sister, Kathryn. She's in the weary eyes of her husband, Bill Crowe, head of the Spencer Research Library, seated by the fireplace. She's in the genes of their miracle baby, Kate, a few feet away.
You've probably never heard of Nancy Sanders. But Bill Crowe recalls her as the dirt soul of Douglas County, a woman from a farming family who knew what it meant to be a Jayhawk and savored every minute of it.
Nugent, sitting surrounded by framed pictures of the students he grew close to as a KU librarian from 1950 to 1993, will never forget seeing the obituary of Sanders, who worked for him at the Watson Library circulation desk until she graduated in 1967 with a Spanish degree. Students aren't supposed to die before their mentors.
Before Sanders, 60, died of cancer on Sept.14, she and Crowe left a $250,000 endowment to the University so some day a few "Sanders Scholars" will get an opportunity to attend the university she loved.
Sanders grew up in Lawrence in a modest house on 2120 New Hampshire St., raised by two Kansans who grew up during the heart of the Great Depression. Her mother, Dorothy, had been forced to drop out of the University after two years to take a job as a bank teller. She made sure her two children, Nancy and Kathryn, got the education she couldn't afford.
Nancy's father, Raymond "Tag" Sanders, who owned a car dealership in town, grew up in southwest Douglas County on a 160-acre farm his parents bought in 1908. The farm was a special place to Nancy. She spent many hours there as a child. In 1998 she moved there with Bill and Kate into a new house she designed, where Bill now lives alone.
Nancy Sanders isn't gone. She's in the living room of John Nugent, her mentor, on an obituary resting in his hands. Nugent, 82, kept a copy of a press release for Sanders' endowment, which she and Crowe set up three months before she died.
Like losing a child
In a few years, the endowment — the Raymond W. and Dorothy Jewell Sanders Fund — will provide scholarships for student library employees and set them up with mentors like Nugent.
reason Sanders became a librarian, which in turn was the reason she and Crowe met in 1974, as co-workers at an Indiana University library. "She was one of the best student assistants I ever had," said Nugent, a radio at his side and a World War II dog tag around his neck. "It's hard she had to die so young."
Sanders actually lived longer than expected, considering she had Type 1 diabetes, also known as juvenile diabetes — the worst type — at a young age. Having the disease meant her body didn't produce insulin to take sugar from her blood to her body cells. She made it to 60. "She wasn't supposed to live that long," Crowe said.
Someone to live for
In 1981, at the age of 35, Sanders did something doctors warned her would be a death sentence because of her fragile vascular system, an effect of the diabetes: She gave birth. Suddenly, Sanders knew she would have to live at least long enough to see her miracle, Kate, graduate from Lawrence High School.
Sanders made it, and then, in spring 2004, she saw Kate graduate from the University with a history degree. Kate is now studying library science at Emporia State.
"She always said that anything after 55 is gravel," Kate said, her long, dark hair a little disheveled from cleaning out the barn with Kathryn, who lives down the road.
In her last few years, Sanders didn't put anything off, knowing that with each year she lived, she pushed the odds a little more. She worked tirelessly in her flower and vegetable gardens, took a trip to Europe with Crowe in 2002 — the first time they'd been there together — and spent time making the house just the way she liked it.
Every detail of the house meant something to her, from the wooden mantle carved from a tree found on the property to the kitchen floorboards salvaged from the original farmhouse.
On the wall above her grandparents' big supper table hangs an expensive, giant framed picture of a wide river and thick trees, which Sanders and Crow bought in June to commemorate their 27th and final wedding anniversary.
When they had company, the objects made great conversation pieces on the history and old-time characters of Douglas County, a subject Sanders knew well. "You should hear her talk," said one of the couple's frequent guests, Provost David Shulenburger.
On Labor Day, Shulenburger and his wife, Carol, had a final outing with Sanders and Crowe at the Eldridge Hotel. He and Sanders returned to their usual conversation points over drinks and a little food. He related his farming stories from North Carolina with hers and asked her local history questions.
"That was a grand evening," he said, sipping coffee in his office and smiling at thoughts of his friend. "She physically wasn't as strong as when I'd last seen her, but her spirit was strong. She could hold her own in conversation."
Houseful of reminders
In the end, it wasn't diabetes that killed Sanders. It was lung cancer, which was unusual because she didn't smoke. Her left lung had already collapsed entirely when doctors diagnosed her in February. It was probably too late for doctors to save her, so she chose to live her last few months without the pain of chemotherapy or radiation treatment.
Sanders died in the same room of Lawrence Memorial Hospital that legendary women's rights activist Emily Taylor died in a year and-a-half ago.
Crowe said Sanders would have been happy about that. Taylor was exactly the kind of courageous, independent woman Sanders strived to be, in control to the end. On Sunday morning, a neighbor came to the farm and took Glory, the last of the five horses Sanders kept after she got sick. Her 14 cats and three dogs remain. "They still look for her," Crowe said.
People ask him if he's going to sell the house, move closer to campus, move on. After all, he doesn't have the ties to the land that she had.
He grew up in Boston. To Sanders, the place signified the two generations that came before her. But Crowe has ties to the property that are just as strong as hers. To him, the place has taken on another meaning: Nancy.
"My job is taking care of this," he said, and he carried a plant out of the bedroom and watered it, as Nancy would have done.
- Edited by Anne Burgard
1