The Foreign Service Journal, February 2009

66 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 9 Herbert Rathner, and they married on July 4, 1956. The couple then began a life of travel with Foreign Service assign- ments to Orleans, France and Wies- baden, Germany. Over the decades, Mrs. Rathner raised her family while stationed in Sierra Leone, Korea, Bo- livia, Switzerland, Mississippi, Jamaica and Washington, D.C. She and her husband traveled extensively through- out the United States, making many good friends. Mrs. Rathner loved to read, garden, study the Bible, play Scrabble, create scrapbooks of family travels and write letters. She possessed the gift of mak- ing a house into a home. She espe- cially enjoyed making colorful quilts, giving many as gifts and donating oth- ers to various charities, including the Northern Virginia Training Center. She also supported the Fairfax Kiwa- nis Club, The Lamb Center and Fair- fax County Library. She is survived by her loving hus- band of 52 years, Herbert; children, Kathryn (Big Sky, Mont.), James and William (Henderson, Nev.); and bro- ther, Walter Pavelchek (West Chester, Pa.). She was predeceased by her par- ents, Frank and Louise Pavelchek and her daughter, Ann. Mary Jo Simons , 97, widow of the late FSO Thomas W. Simons, died peacefully on Nov. 11 at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, Pa., of com- plications following hip replacement surgery. Born in Sullivan, Ind., on Sept. 9, 1911, Mrs. Simons graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors fromDepauwUni- versity in 1933 and received her M.A. from the University of Colorado in 1936. She married her husband, a freshly minted Ph.D., that same year, and they taught and worked in Indiana and Minnesota, his home state, until moving toWashington in 1944. Thom- as Simons joined the State Depart- ment in 1945. For the next 18 years Mary Jo Si- mons was half of a State Department Foreign Service team serving abroad in four posts — Calcutta (1945-1946), Karachi (1947-1949), Monrovia (1955- 1957) and Madras (now Chennai) (1957-1963) —and in the department. After her husband’s 1963 retire- ment, they lived in East Lansing, Mich., where he established a South Asian studies program at Michigan State University. The couple then re- located to Poona (now Pune), India, where he was director of the American Institute of Indian Studies from 1965 to 1969. They then retired to Washington, where Mrs. Simons taught in D.C. and Maryland public schools, served as ex- ecutive chairman of the Phi Beta Kappa Association of Washington, D.C., and was a regent of the Daugh- ters of the American Revolution’s Ruth Brewster Chapter and a docent at the DAR Museum. She was also a mem- ber of Mortar Board, the Asian-Amer- ican Forum, Alpha Omicron Pi soror- ity, the American Association of For- eign Service Women (now the Associ- ates of the American Foreign Service, Worldwide), and the Chevy Chase Presbyterian Church (for more than half a century). Bright, lively and adventurous, Mary Jo Simons lived a big life in what many see as America’s century. And, like her husband, who died in 1990, she chose “God Bless America” for the response to the benediction in her me- morial service at Chevy Chase Presby- terian Church on Dec. 29; she was then buried next to him in Rock Creek Cemetery’s Foreign Service section. Mrs. Simon leaves a son, retired FSO Thomas W. Simons Jr. of Cam- bridge, Mass.; a daughter, Sara Simons of Philadelphia, Pa.; four grandchil- dren; two great-grandchildren; and a sister, Mrs. Henry A. Shorey III of Bridgton, Maine. Virginia Hill Stephens , 86, wife of the late FSO Richard H. Stephens, died at the Virginia Medical Center in Arlington, Va., on Nov. 20 of vascular disease. Virginia Hill was born onMarch 10, 1922, in Trinity, N.C., and left a North Carolina tobacco farm during the Great Depression to go to secretarial school at High Point College. From 1942 to 1943 she was a government secretary on the staff of U.S. Army General George Patton, where she worked on the North African cam- paign. Her twin brother, U.S. Army Private First Class Virgil Hill, was killed in action during World War II at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. During her service with Gen. Pat- ton, she met U.S. Army Captain Rich- ard H. Stephens, who was also on Gen. Patton’s staff. They were married in Panama in 1943. Mrs. Stephens began her life as a Foreign Service wife in 1945 in Paris, where she lived in architect Le Cor- busier’s house at 16th Arrondissement near the Bois de Boulogne on Rue Nuggesser-et-Coli and came to know dress designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Rich- ard and Virginia Stephens served over- seas for 16 years in Puerto Alegre, Syd- ney, HongKong, Tokyo and theDomin- ican Republic. In 1958, they moved to I N M E M O R Y