Nancy Dougherty Best, 85

Nancy Louise Dougherty was born in Groffdale, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, on May 18, 1931, as the first child of Frank and Kathyrn Ebersol Dougherty. Frank had an automotive repair shop in Lancaster. He later switched to industrial engineering design and obtained a few patents. He had grown up in Seattle and Alaska. Kathyrn was a seamstress who sewed some of the historical costumes for the Lancaster mansion of James Buchanan, the last president before Lincoln. Kathyrn had old roots in Lancaster County, with Nancy’s great-grandmother having heard the cannons of Gettysburg from many miles away. Nancy had a younger brother, Terry, who was an Air Force pilot and served in Vietnam.

Nancy graduated from McCasky High School in Lancaster with a 4.0 in 1949. She then attended Oberlin College in Ohio, where she was in the Top Ten of the Freshman Class. The strong liberal arts environment at Oberlin deeply impressed her. The following summer she worked at a resort lodge in Maine, where she met Thomas Best, a student at the Episcopal Seminary in Philadelphia. They married and she transferred to Drexel, graduating summa cum laude with Bachelor of Arts in Home Economics and English degrees, and was a member of Phi Kappa Phi. Later in life, she earned a Master of Arts in Spanish degree from Millersville State College, Lancaster County, and a Ph.D. in Language Instruction degree from Pennsylvania State University.

Thomas was made the priest of the Episcopal Church in Gordon, Nebraska, and in 1958 became the priest of the newly built Episcopal Church in Kalispell. Her children Randolph and Kathyrn were born in Nebraska, and John and James in Kalispell. In the 1970s, Thomas left the Episcopal Church and they became divorced.

In Kalispell, Nancy taught English at the new junior high, took, over Mr. Hamilton’s Spanish class at Flathead High School after he died, and taught Spanish at Flathead Valley Community College. Outside of Kalispell, she was professor of education at Central Connecticut State College and at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma; professor of English at Hannam University in South Korea; and taught second grade at a Christian school in Seattle.

She went on many evangelical trips to such places as Israel, Turkey, East Germany, Russia, China, India, Panama, Chile and South Africa. Regarding nature as a manifestation of God’s greatness and goodness, she tried to picnic and hike every weekend in Glacier Park from late March to early November.

The last decade of her life, she worked at the Salvation Army Thrift Store in Kalispell. She looked forward to going to work and considered several of her co-workers as family.

Nancy belonged to Canvas Church and frequented Fresh Life Church. She was also an enthusiastic devotee of Bible Study Fellowship.

In November 2016 she discovered she had cancer. On Dec. 17 she flew to Dothan, Alabama, to stay at the home of her granddaughter Andrea Bergman. She died there Dec. 23, 2016.

She is survived by her brother, and all her children and grandchildren.

Suggested memorials would be to Wycliffe Bible Translators or Youth With A Mission.