Mary Martha "Stacey" Wahl, a mathematics professor and author who held patents on two math teaching tools and lived in Ridgefield more than 50 years, died on Friday, Nov. 9, 2007, at Bethel Health Care. She was 91 and the widow of John Wahl.
"I have stories to tell and lots of young relatives to tell them to," she wrote in the introduction to The Flavor of Our Lives, a family memoir. "...I want you to sense what it was like to be the wife a young nuclear physicist in the days when atom smashers were so new, few people realized they existed."
Before getting to her husband 's work on the Manhattan Project, her memoir included vignettes of growing up in Ottumwa, Iowa, early in the 20th Century - picking strawberries for three cents a quart, admiring female aviator Amelia Earhart, and being confronted with the Ku Klux Klan's anti- Catholic prejudice.
"Something made me look out of the third floor window. I was the first person to see it!" she wrote. "My heart skipped many beats. There, about 30 feet in front of the house, propped against our prized elm tree, was a four-foot high cross, engulfed in flames.
"...I now react with an instinctive feeling of empathy for all the threatened minorities in my country and the world."
Born in Ottumwa in 1916, a daughter of Anna Coday and Theodore A. Stoessel, she was the youngest of their 10 children.
She attended the University of Iowa and taught mathematics at high schools in Iowa and at Lincoln School of Teachers College Columbia University, while doing work toward her master's degree from Columbia.
"Even as recently as three or four years ago she still received letters from some of those students she'd taught in the late 1930s and early 40s," said her daughter, Elizabeth O'Connor of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "She felt very good that they'd thought enough of her to keep in contact over all those years."
On Dec. 27, 1943, she married Dr. John Schempp Wahl, a nuclear physicist who worked at the University of Iowa on one of the early atom smashers.
She "wasn't permitted to know a thing" about his work and didn't find out about some aspects of what he did until the 1980s.
Decades after the first atomic bomb helped end the war, the couple visited Hiroshima and that "had an even greater traumatic impact on us than that bewildering bold black headline of Aug. 6, 1945," she wrote.
After living in Iowa City and Los Alamos, N.M., the Wahls moved to Ridgefield where her husband started work at Schlumberger in 1954.
While raising three children Ms. Wahl began teaching mathematics at Western Connecticut State University and eventually became a full professor. She retired in 1986.
"She just got so much out of and put so much into her teaching," her daughter said. "She would constantly try to come up with new visual aids that would make mathematical concepts meaningful to her students, with the goal that those of them who would become teachers would use them with their own students.
"That's what led to the patents she received."
The patents recognized her ingenious dissection of geometric solids such as cubes into component solids - including 12-sided rhombic dodecahedrons - which she developed as a teaching tool.
"She did that first on paper and then she had people build both wooden and plastic models," said her daughter.
She also wrote a children's picture book, I Can Count the Petals of A Flower, with her husband, using his flower photographs.
"It started out as a simple counting book - one petal, two petals," her daughter said, but eventually grew to show numbers ' components: "You could have one flower with six petals, or two flowers with three petals, or three flowers with two petals ... They're all different ways of getting to six."
The book is still in print after 30 years.
Ms. Wahl was a great traveler and camper. She and her husband took their three children camping across the United States and around Europe. In retirement the Wahls traveled to China, India, Japan, Australia, South America, the Easter Islands. After her husband died she traveled in Africa.
Besides her daughter, Ms. Wahl is survived by two sons, Dr. Richard Wahl of Fountain, Colo., and Patrick Wahl of Greeley, Colo. Her six grandchildren include Megan, Katie and David O'Connor, John and Robin Wahl, and her step-grandchild Lisa Piebalgs.
A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated on Friday, Dec. 7, at 1 p.m. in St. Mary's Church, Ridgefield.
Private burial services will be in St. Mary's Cemetery.
The family will receive friends on Thursday, Dec. 6, from 5 to 7 p.m. in the Kane Funeral Home, 25 Catoonah Street.
Memorial contributions may be made to the John and Stacey Wahl Scholarship Fund, University of Iowa Foundation, P.O. Box 4550, Iowa City, IA 52244-4550. —Jack Sanders, The Ridgefield Press, Nov. 15, 2007
"I have stories to tell and lots of young relatives to tell them to," she wrote in the introduction to The Flavor of Our Lives, a family memoir. "...I want you to sense what it was like to be the wife a young nuclear physicist in the days when atom smashers were so new, few people realized they existed."
Before getting to her husband 's work on the Manhattan Project, her memoir included vignettes of growing up in Ottumwa, Iowa, early in the 20th Century - picking strawberries for three cents a quart, admiring female aviator Amelia Earhart, and being confronted with the Ku Klux Klan's anti- Catholic prejudice.
"Something made me look out of the third floor window. I was the first person to see it!" she wrote. "My heart skipped many beats. There, about 30 feet in front of the house, propped against our prized elm tree, was a four-foot high cross, engulfed in flames.
"...I now react with an instinctive feeling of empathy for all the threatened minorities in my country and the world."
Born in Ottumwa in 1916, a daughter of Anna Coday and Theodore A. Stoessel, she was the youngest of their 10 children.
She attended the University of Iowa and taught mathematics at high schools in Iowa and at Lincoln School of Teachers College Columbia University, while doing work toward her master's degree from Columbia.
"Even as recently as three or four years ago she still received letters from some of those students she'd taught in the late 1930s and early 40s," said her daughter, Elizabeth O'Connor of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "She felt very good that they'd thought enough of her to keep in contact over all those years."
On Dec. 27, 1943, she married Dr. John Schempp Wahl, a nuclear physicist who worked at the University of Iowa on one of the early atom smashers.
She "wasn't permitted to know a thing" about his work and didn't find out about some aspects of what he did until the 1980s.
Decades after the first atomic bomb helped end the war, the couple visited Hiroshima and that "had an even greater traumatic impact on us than that bewildering bold black headline of Aug. 6, 1945," she wrote.
After living in Iowa City and Los Alamos, N.M., the Wahls moved to Ridgefield where her husband started work at Schlumberger in 1954.
While raising three children Ms. Wahl began teaching mathematics at Western Connecticut State University and eventually became a full professor. She retired in 1986.
"She just got so much out of and put so much into her teaching," her daughter said. "She would constantly try to come up with new visual aids that would make mathematical concepts meaningful to her students, with the goal that those of them who would become teachers would use them with their own students.
"That's what led to the patents she received."
The patents recognized her ingenious dissection of geometric solids such as cubes into component solids - including 12-sided rhombic dodecahedrons - which she developed as a teaching tool.
"She did that first on paper and then she had people build both wooden and plastic models," said her daughter.
She also wrote a children's picture book, I Can Count the Petals of A Flower, with her husband, using his flower photographs.
"It started out as a simple counting book - one petal, two petals," her daughter said, but eventually grew to show numbers ' components: "You could have one flower with six petals, or two flowers with three petals, or three flowers with two petals ... They're all different ways of getting to six."
The book is still in print after 30 years.
Ms. Wahl was a great traveler and camper. She and her husband took their three children camping across the United States and around Europe. In retirement the Wahls traveled to China, India, Japan, Australia, South America, the Easter Islands. After her husband died she traveled in Africa.
Besides her daughter, Ms. Wahl is survived by two sons, Dr. Richard Wahl of Fountain, Colo., and Patrick Wahl of Greeley, Colo. Her six grandchildren include Megan, Katie and David O'Connor, John and Robin Wahl, and her step-grandchild Lisa Piebalgs.
A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated on Friday, Dec. 7, at 1 p.m. in St. Mary's Church, Ridgefield.
Private burial services will be in St. Mary's Cemetery.
The family will receive friends on Thursday, Dec. 6, from 5 to 7 p.m. in the Kane Funeral Home, 25 Catoonah Street.
Memorial contributions may be made to the John and Stacey Wahl Scholarship Fund, University of Iowa Foundation, P.O. Box 4550, Iowa City, IA 52244-4550. —Jack Sanders, The Ridgefield Press, Nov. 15, 2007
Mary Martha "Stacey" Wahl, a mathematics professor and author who held patents on two math teaching tools and lived in Ridgefield more than 50 years, died on Friday, Nov. 9, 2007, at Bethel Health Care. She was 91 and the widow of John Wahl.
"I have stories to tell and lots of young relatives to tell them to," she wrote in the introduction to The Flavor of Our Lives, a family memoir. "...I want you to sense what it was like to be the wife a young nuclear physicist in the days when atom smashers were so new, few people realized they existed."
Before getting to her husband 's work on the Manhattan Project, her memoir included vignettes of growing up in Ottumwa, Iowa, early in the 20th Century - picking strawberries for three cents a quart, admiring female aviator Amelia Earhart, and being confronted with the Ku Klux Klan's anti- Catholic prejudice.
"Something made me look out of the third floor window. I was the first person to see it!" she wrote. "My heart skipped many beats. There, about 30 feet in front of the house, propped against our prized elm tree, was a four-foot high cross, engulfed in flames.
"...I now react with an instinctive feeling of empathy for all the threatened minorities in my country and the world."
Born in Ottumwa in 1916, a daughter of Anna Coday and Theodore A. Stoessel, she was the youngest of their 10 children.
She attended the University of Iowa and taught mathematics at high schools in Iowa and at Lincoln School of Teachers College Columbia University, while doing work toward her master's degree from Columbia.
"Even as recently as three or four years ago she still received letters from some of those students she'd taught in the late 1930s and early 40s," said her daughter, Elizabeth O'Connor of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "She felt very good that they'd thought enough of her to keep in contact over all those years."
On Dec. 27, 1943, she married Dr. John Schempp Wahl, a nuclear physicist who worked at the University of Iowa on one of the early atom smashers.
She "wasn't permitted to know a thing" about his work and didn't find out about some aspects of what he did until the 1980s.
Decades after the first atomic bomb helped end the war, the couple visited Hiroshima and that "had an even greater traumatic impact on us than that bewildering bold black headline of Aug. 6, 1945," she wrote.
After living in Iowa City and Los Alamos, N.M., the Wahls moved to Ridgefield where her husband started work at Schlumberger in 1954.
While raising three children Ms. Wahl began teaching mathematics at Western Connecticut State University and eventually became a full professor. She retired in 1986.
"She just got so much out of and put so much into her teaching," her daughter said. "She would constantly try to come up with new visual aids that would make mathematical concepts meaningful to her students, with the goal that those of them who would become teachers would use them with their own students.
"That's what led to the patents she received."
The patents recognized her ingenious dissection of geometric solids such as cubes into component solids - including 12-sided rhombic dodecahedrons - which she developed as a teaching tool.
"She did that first on paper and then she had people build both wooden and plastic models," said her daughter.
She also wrote a children's picture book, I Can Count the Petals of A Flower, with her husband, using his flower photographs.
"It started out as a simple counting book - one petal, two petals," her daughter said, but eventually grew to show numbers ' components: "You could have one flower with six petals, or two flowers with three petals, or three flowers with two petals ... They're all different ways of getting to six."
The book is still in print after 30 years.
Ms. Wahl was a great traveler and camper. She and her husband took their three children camping across the United States and around Europe. In retirement the Wahls traveled to China, India, Japan, Australia, South America, the Easter Islands. After her husband died she traveled in Africa.
Besides her daughter, Ms. Wahl is survived by two sons, Dr. Richard Wahl of Fountain, Colo., and Patrick Wahl of Greeley, Colo. Her six grandchildren include Megan, Katie and David O'Connor, John and Robin Wahl, and her step-grandchild Lisa Piebalgs.
A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated on Friday, Dec. 7, at 1 p.m. in St. Mary's Church, Ridgefield.
Private burial services will be in St. Mary's Cemetery.
The family will receive friends on Thursday, Dec. 6, from 5 to 7 p.m. in the Kane Funeral Home, 25 Catoonah Street.
Memorial contributions may be made to the John and Stacey Wahl Scholarship Fund, University of Iowa Foundation, P.O. Box 4550, Iowa City, IA 52244-4550. —Jack Sanders, The Ridgefield Press, Nov. 15, 2007
"I have stories to tell and lots of young relatives to tell them to," she wrote in the introduction to The Flavor of Our Lives, a family memoir. "...I want you to sense what it was like to be the wife a young nuclear physicist in the days when atom smashers were so new, few people realized they existed."
Before getting to her husband 's work on the Manhattan Project, her memoir included vignettes of growing up in Ottumwa, Iowa, early in the 20th Century - picking strawberries for three cents a quart, admiring female aviator Amelia Earhart, and being confronted with the Ku Klux Klan's anti- Catholic prejudice.
"Something made me look out of the third floor window. I was the first person to see it!" she wrote. "My heart skipped many beats. There, about 30 feet in front of the house, propped against our prized elm tree, was a four-foot high cross, engulfed in flames.
"...I now react with an instinctive feeling of empathy for all the threatened minorities in my country and the world."
Born in Ottumwa in 1916, a daughter of Anna Coday and Theodore A. Stoessel, she was the youngest of their 10 children.
She attended the University of Iowa and taught mathematics at high schools in Iowa and at Lincoln School of Teachers College Columbia University, while doing work toward her master's degree from Columbia.
"Even as recently as three or four years ago she still received letters from some of those students she'd taught in the late 1930s and early 40s," said her daughter, Elizabeth O'Connor of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "She felt very good that they'd thought enough of her to keep in contact over all those years."
On Dec. 27, 1943, she married Dr. John Schempp Wahl, a nuclear physicist who worked at the University of Iowa on one of the early atom smashers.
She "wasn't permitted to know a thing" about his work and didn't find out about some aspects of what he did until the 1980s.
Decades after the first atomic bomb helped end the war, the couple visited Hiroshima and that "had an even greater traumatic impact on us than that bewildering bold black headline of Aug. 6, 1945," she wrote.
After living in Iowa City and Los Alamos, N.M., the Wahls moved to Ridgefield where her husband started work at Schlumberger in 1954.
While raising three children Ms. Wahl began teaching mathematics at Western Connecticut State University and eventually became a full professor. She retired in 1986.
"She just got so much out of and put so much into her teaching," her daughter said. "She would constantly try to come up with new visual aids that would make mathematical concepts meaningful to her students, with the goal that those of them who would become teachers would use them with their own students.
"That's what led to the patents she received."
The patents recognized her ingenious dissection of geometric solids such as cubes into component solids - including 12-sided rhombic dodecahedrons - which she developed as a teaching tool.
"She did that first on paper and then she had people build both wooden and plastic models," said her daughter.
She also wrote a children's picture book, I Can Count the Petals of A Flower, with her husband, using his flower photographs.
"It started out as a simple counting book - one petal, two petals," her daughter said, but eventually grew to show numbers ' components: "You could have one flower with six petals, or two flowers with three petals, or three flowers with two petals ... They're all different ways of getting to six."
The book is still in print after 30 years.
Ms. Wahl was a great traveler and camper. She and her husband took their three children camping across the United States and around Europe. In retirement the Wahls traveled to China, India, Japan, Australia, South America, the Easter Islands. After her husband died she traveled in Africa.
Besides her daughter, Ms. Wahl is survived by two sons, Dr. Richard Wahl of Fountain, Colo., and Patrick Wahl of Greeley, Colo. Her six grandchildren include Megan, Katie and David O'Connor, John and Robin Wahl, and her step-grandchild Lisa Piebalgs.
A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated on Friday, Dec. 7, at 1 p.m. in St. Mary's Church, Ridgefield.
Private burial services will be in St. Mary's Cemetery.
The family will receive friends on Thursday, Dec. 6, from 5 to 7 p.m. in the Kane Funeral Home, 25 Catoonah Street.
Memorial contributions may be made to the John and Stacey Wahl Scholarship Fund, University of Iowa Foundation, P.O. Box 4550, Iowa City, IA 52244-4550. —Jack Sanders, The Ridgefield Press, Nov. 15, 2007
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