NORTHFIELD, MN - Frances Sorrel Bodman, a former resident of Ithaca, passed away on December 9th, 2004 at Hospice Homes and Suites in Elko, MN. She was 90. She was the wife of the late Nicholas C. Bodman, professor of linguistics at Cornell University.She was born May 30th, 1914, in Washington, DC, the daughter of Alice Sorrel Blech and U.S. naval officer Richard Wainwright. She grew up in Washington, DC, Annapolis, MD, and Leesburg, Virginia. She graduated from The Madeira School in Washington, DC and was a 1936 graduate of Wells College in Aurora, NY. After college, she won a scholarship to study for a year in Germany. On her return, she worked first at St. John's College in Annapolis and then at the Annapolis YWCA.Shortly before the outbreak of WWII, she went to Honolulu to attend her brother's wedding and found a job with Army Military Intelligence as a typist and translator of German. On December 7th, she was called into her office, and she said she "went to war with a toothbrush and a pack of Chesterfields."In Honolulu, she married naval lieutenant Nicholas Cleaveland Bodman, on July 13th, 1943. At the end of the war, the couple moved to Washington, DC, and then to Yale University, where her husband attended graduate school. In her husband's subsequent career with the U.S. State Department, they lived in the Washington, DC area and also served overseas in Cameron Highlands, Malaya and in Taichung, Taiwan. Her husband left the U.S. State Department in 1961 to become professor of Chinese linguistics at Cornell University. After thirty-two years in Ithaca, NY, they came to Northfield, MN to settle at Parkview West in 1994.Her grandfather, Rear Admiral Richard Wainwright was the executive officer of the U.S.S. Maine, and subsequently earned distinction as the captain of the U.S.S. Gloucester at the battle of Santiago de Cuba in the Spanish-American War. Her father, also named Richard Wainwright, received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service at Vera Cruz in 1914. She was commissioning sponsor for the U.S.S. Wainwright DLG-28, named in honor of the two men. Her mother, Alice Sorrel Blech, had worked in the White House as Mrs. Taft's personal secretary.

Frances is a 6th generation of Benjamin Franklin, Signer of the Declaration of Independence.

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