Nancy Hobson

Nancy Hobson, the big-hearted nurse who met the love of her life in a hospital ward, and Roy Hobson, the wily World War Il veteran she cared for, re-united when she passed this summer at age 94 following a long illness.

The reunion could have come in the seats and bleachers where they proudly watched their grandchildren play and perform.

Or it could have been around their living room coffee table, where they routinely hosted a steady stream of family and an always growing and eclectic group of friends.

Or maybe during one of those hasty dinners either one could have skillfully conjured between hectic work shifts.

But, more than likely, they met up again on a Pemaquid Point rock in Nancy's native Maine when Roy breezed up in a 12-foot sailboat. He probably greeted her wearing chinos and soaked sneakers with a playful admonition that went along the lines of, "Geezus Nancy, where the hell have you been?"

She then stepped into the vessel Roy let their only child name "Grand Slam," and now they're together again because that's how Nancy lived. She always went big before she went home and now she's doing both forever.

When Nancy Miller grew up a pre-World War II tomboy in the mid-coast Maine village of Waldoboro, she harbored big dreams. Beginning seven decades of work by making up beds on the hill at Moody's Cabins, she was determined to leave town and make a career in nursing.

With gentle prodding from her stepfather, William H. Brooks Jr., Nancy barely took time to graduate from Waldoboro High School's class of 1948 before heading to Massachusetts and Springfield Hospital's School of Nursing. After completing her degree, she did her post-graduate work at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore before landing a job at Boston's Veterans Administration Hospital in Jamaica Plain.

That's where she met Roy, a patient who had suffered injuries in a car accident, and the two intense personalities sparked right away. The wisecracking and yet somehow still warm ex-Coast Guarder who spent the 1940s hunting U-2 boats in the North Atlantic and then served for the U.S. Army in post-war Germany came home in the mid-1950s to meet his match. The firecracker brunette who always called it like she saw it sizzled in his company.

They began a 58-year love affair of witty barbs and immense respect that didn't end until Roy passed in 2013, when his parrying partner shook her head and said softly, "It wasn't long enough."

Her mother, Waldoboro Postmaster Louise Miller Brooks, threw a sprawling Sept. 1, 1957 wedding as big as the town on her rolling lawn. On that day between the high school and the town baseball diamond, her sister and lifelong partner in mischief, Mary Miller Savchick, stood as her maid of honor in a ceremony attended by a U.S. Senator (Fred Payne) and a major league baseball icon (Clyde Sukeforth), as well as enough of Lincoln County for the town team mascot Jimmy Spence to park cars.

In the '60s and '70s, Nancy and Roy raised a son with Nancy juggling babysitters while working shifts at Framingham Union Hospital, where she became a notorious matchmaker with at least three marriages of co-workers to her credit. She then became a school nurse at St. Mark's School in Southboro, Mass., for nearly a decade before the next big move.

With their son out of college and Nancy never pleased with how the restaurant business treated Roy, they characteristically put it all on the table in the early '80s and started all over as domestics on the Massachusetts' North Shore.

Nancy eventually went back to nursing (Salem Hospital) and joined a registry that assigned her Red Sox great Tony Conigliaro a few times following his heart attack and stroke. Tony C. couldn't speak, but in typical Nancy fashion, she transferred her bottomless energy. She recalled when she told him he had such beautiful eyes, he would blink.

As the '90s began to churn into the turn of the century, Nancy went big again. With three grandchildren growing up in Cincinnati and Nancy, 72, and Roy, 77, the lifelong New Englanders began anew again when they pulled up roots and put them down across the river in Covington, Ky.

The 1,000-mile move not only put them on the doorstep of the Ohio River and their beloved view of any kind of water, it also gave them a front-row seat for the exploits of Kevin, Kerry, and Annie. Along with being doting grandparents and parents of the orange cat Harry they adopted from their front door, Nancy kept Roy going while he became a Cincinnati legend while working security at the door of the umpires room during the first years of Great American Ball Park.

Nancy kept two constants from New England. When she wasn't preparing lunch for her son on his over-the-bridge breaks from Paycor Stadium, she would make friends with a mélange of neighbors and Roy's co-workers and invite them up on the porch for a drink. Such as the after-party when his ballpark buddies threw him an 80th birthday bash on a deck in Paycor overlooking the Bengals field of Carson Palmer and Chad Johnson.

She also loved her walks along the water, admiring the view of both stadiums and the chugging riverboats. Nancy's favorite spot became the bench next to the bronze statue of the former slave and educator James Bradley.

She seemed to sense they were kindred spirits. Different lives in different times to be sure. But both James and Nancy left their homes with big dreams on well-lived journeys that brought them to the same spot along the water.

Nancy is predeceased by her husband, Roy Thomas Hobson; her mother, Louise Miller Brooks; her father, Burnette G. "Bud," Miller, stepfather, William H. Brooks Jr., her sister, Mary Miller Savchick, and a great-grandson, Jack R. Hobson.

She leaves a son, Geoff Hobson and wife Antia of Oxford, Ohio; grandchildren Kevin Hobson and his wife Danielle Sanchick of Norwalk, Conn., Kerry Hobson Miller and her husband Danny of Indianapolis, and Annie Hobson of Cincinnati, Kenneth Clemens of Loveland, Ohio, and Lakyria Evans of Cincinnati; and seven great-grandchildren.

There'll be a service of remembrance next summer at the Old German Church Cemetery in her hometown of Waldoboro, Maine, where the ashes of Nancy and Roy are to be placed before a gathering of family and friends at a date and time to be announced.

The family asks donations be made in her memory to the American Nurses Association:  https://ebiz.nursingworld.org/anfdonation?_gl=1*1ii8c6h*_gcl_au*NDgyNTI2MDI3LjE3MjEwNTU3Mzk.&_ga=2.246389316.179418645.1721055739-1764423285.1721055739