The Foreign Service Journal, September 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2021 73 Ms. Corrigan was the consummate hostess, and an elegant, intelligent and beloved partner to her husband as he served in his many posts, which included being deputy chief of protocol in Washington (and attending many state dinners at the White House with President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Mamie Eisenhower) and culminated with his appointment as U.S. ambassa- dor to Rwanda (1971-1973). Ms. Corrigan raised five children in what were sometimes difficult circum- stances that included attempted coups d’état. She once had to talk her way through a curfew checkpoint late at night to get to the hospital to give birth. She was multilingual and attended parent-teacher conferences in Spanish, Portuguese and French. In 1967, having flown single-engine planes in both Guatemala and Panama, she participated in the U.S. Southern Command’s tropic survival training program alongside Special Forces teams preparing for Vietnam deployments. She wrote an article about her experience, which was published in the December 1967 Foreign Service Journal . She also managed the Red Cross volunteer program at Gorgas Hospital in the Canal Zone. In most of the countries where she lived, she traveled to remote areas to visit and encourage religious missionaries. She sent food and supplies to, among others, the Maryknoll sisters and priests who served the poor in remote areas of Guatemala. Her strong Catholic faith was an inspiration to her family and friends. After her husband’s retirement from the State Department in 1973, the fam- ily returned to Chevy Chase, Md. While continuing to raise her children, Ms. Corrigan studied to become a regis- tered nurse. For more than two decades she worked at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md., both as a critical care nurse and later as director of quality assurance, and at the Washington Hospice. Ms. Corrigan was an alumna of Mount Holyoke College in South Had- ley, Mass.; the University of Geneva in Switzerland; and American University in Washington, D.C., where she earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing. A Dame of Malta and a member of the Daughters of the American Revo- lution, she was active in many other religious, civic, nursing and volunteer organizations. Ms. Corrigan was preceded in death by her husband in 2005, her only sister, Joan Carswell Clarke (Mrs. Vincent Clarke) of Glens Falls, N.Y., and by three babies who died in infancy. She is survived by five children: Kevin Corrigan of Hedgesville, W. Va., and his wife, Nancy Novotny Corrigan; Mary Annette Corrigan Ogden of Houston, Texas; Martha Jane Allison of Santa Cruz, Calif., and her husband, Michael Allison; Robert Foster Corrigan Jr. of Houston and his wife, Gwendolyn Kil- lam Corrigan; Susan Corrigan of Coral Gables, Fla.; nine grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren. n Nancy S. Gordon , 98, wife of the late FSO and former Ambassador Robert C.F. Gordon, died on April 2 in Charlottesville, Va. Ms. Gordon was born in Knoxville, Tenn., on July 20, 1922, and lived there until she graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1944. On graduating, she was selected for a Rockefeller intern- ship with the National Institute of Public Affairs in Washington, D.C., and later worked for the Alabama Legislative Ref- erence Service in Montgomery, Ala. She attended the University of Cali- fornia–Berkeley, where she received a master’s degree in political science in 1948. There she met Mr. Gordon, and the couple married in 1949. During their Foreign Service career, the Gordons were posted to Baghdad, Khartoum, Dar es Salaam, Rome, Port Louis—where Mr. Gordon was U.S. ambassador from 1980 to 1983—and Florence, where Mr. Gordon was consul general. One of many career highlights was meeting Lady Bird Johnson in Florence, where she rented a villa for a summer. It was the beginning of a lifelong friend- ship. In 1996 the Gordons moved toMon- tana to live near family. After Mr. Gordon’s death in 2001, Ms. Gordon returned to Florence to be with family and friends, and thenmoved to Charlottesville, Va. Ms. Gordon is survived by two daugh- ters, Laura Giannozzi and Moffie Funk; four grandchildren, Sara, Stefano, Robert and Laura; and two great-grandchildren, Amelie and Rowan. n Curtis F. Jones , 99, a retired For- eign Service officer who lived in the Carol Woods Retirement Community in Chapel Hill, N.C., passed away on June 5. Mr. Jones was born in Bangor, Maine, on Oct. 25, 1921. He graduated from Ban- gor High in 1939, and attended Bowdoin College, graduating early in 1942 to join the U.S. Army. During World War II, he was posted to several different locations, includ- ing the University of Pennsylvania for Arabic-language study, but served his last and longest assignment as an air traffic controller on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific. He was honorably discharged as a sergeant in 1945. After the war, he joined the State