Teacher learns life lessons

On a recent morning Nancy Weiss was found pulling invasive plant species from along the Batavia Riverwalk. Weiss was the leader in the development of the area, that includes separate areas of plants native to woodland, flood plain, rock shelf, prairie, and savannah areas. (H. Rick Bamman photo)

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Nancy Weiss’ father was a typewriter repairman for Burroughs, and the family frequently was relocated. They moved to the North Side of Chicago when she was in fourth grade.

“We went to Lincoln Park a lot,” she said, “especially for day camp. It cost 50 cents for the summer.”

A favorite place for teenagers was the Diversey rocks, the big boulders at the shore by Diversey Harbor.

“We weren’t supposed to swim there, but we did,” she said.

Weiss served on the student council at Waller High School. She enjoyed working with students and teachers on fundraisers, such as the National Honor Society’s Fun Fair.

Weiss took her family’s 8 mm Keystone camera to school, and she and a friend filmed students and scenes throughout the building.

“We told them, if they wanted to see the movies, they had to come to the Fun Fair,” she said.

She still has the movies and has given them to alumni.

“Waller was a neat school with a good mix of races and nationalities,” she said. “I belong to the alumni association. It’s now a wonderful magnet school.”

Nancy had a scholarship for $75 a semester at Northern Illinois State Teachers College where she had a double major in English and French.

She was editor of The Towers, a magazine of students’ literary work.

She lived in a house with 12 other girls. Nancy recalls, “Our landlady was a cook at the local high school, and she would bring home big pans of macaroni and cheese. That was good, because none of us were well off, and we always seemed to be hungry.” .

She was married in her senior year. Nancy obtained a BS degree in secondary education and stayed an extra year to take graduate courses in French and English.

Her husband was drafted and sent to the little town of Fulda, Germany where no one spoke English, so Nancy learned German. “I got books and tapes from the post library and practiced on neighbors and merchants,” she says.

Because another teacher was leaving, she was offered a job on the post, teaching seventh and eighth grade. “I soon found why the other teacher had left,” she says. “The kids were so disturbed. They were being moved around all the time, and most were out of control. “

Two days after school started, her room was broken into, desks were overturned, and windows broken. “Then I knuckled down to work,” says Nancy. “In June, one of the boys who was the most disruptive said, ‘You taught us something! The other teacher never did that!’”

Nancy and her husband took advantage of every vacation period to travel, but the most fun was enjoying small town life in Germany. Holidays were exciting with Father Christmas who was ferocious and carried sticks to spank the naughty children. The Germans decorated their trees with sparklers as well as candles, and New Year’s Eve was the time for gift-giving.

Although discouraged by her first teaching experience, when they returned to the U.S., Nancy took a job teaching English and French at Bensenville High School. “The staff there was wonderful and supportive, and the job was fun!” she found.

However she had to drive 35 miles each way from Aurora. When she ended in a snow bank in a ditch, she decided to get a job closer to home. Nancy was teaching French in Naperville when her husband declared he wanted to teach in California. She didn’t. He went west, and she moved to Chicago.

Single, Nancy taught at Marshall High School while she completed her masters degree at Northern.

At Marshall, she taught children who tested as “borderline retarded.”

“But they just didn’t have a basic learning environment,” she says. “I went to the basement to find books for these kids. The only books they had were fourth grade readers about animals.”

She bought used books about teenagers and sold them to the kids for a nickel. She offered to buy them back, but the children never wanted to give them up. A fellow teacher commented he couldn’t believe it when he saw these kids enjoying reading.

In a folk dance group she met Ed Weiss, a packaging engineer with Western Electric. They were married six months later and moved to Aurora.

Daughter Betsy was born in 1964 and son Teddy in 1966. The Weisses adopted an eight-month-old Hopi Indian boy from Phoeni, to complete their family.

Nancy was elected a Muskie delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1972  She recalls, “It was an awful experience. The McGovern people swamped us. We called them kamikaze liberals.”

She was elected to the Kane County Board in 1976 and again in 1980. While there, she took an interest in restoring the Fabyan Forest Preserve She helped to create the Friends of Fabyan. “Many people didn’t believe that Frank Lloyd Wright was involved in the restoration of the Fabyan home,” she says. She helped prove he had. Nancy still leads walking tours and helps in many ways.

Then she ran for the school board in Aurora.  “These were difficult times for the district, and it was emotionally draining,” says Nancy.

After four years on the board, she took the position of Director of Human Services for the City of Aurora. She took special pride in helping to form the Friends of Phillips Park and working to restoric that historic park.

In 1995, the Weisses bought a smaller home near the Fox River and the bike trail in Batavia. Immediately they became involved in the community, joining the Batavia Plain Dirt Gardeners.

They soon adopted a plot in the Batavia Wildflower Sanctuary on the Batavia Riverwalk. She says, “This area was a degraded thicket of buckthorn and scrub trees. In 1991, when the Riverwalk was born, volunteers of all ages and abilities began changing the landscape and building a dream. We have battled buckthorn, honeysuckle, garlic mustard and other invasive species, creating a beautiful and educational garden space with native Kane County plants.”

After a year, they found themselves in charge of the project.

 Through fundraisers, the garden club has provided financial support to purchase hundreds of plants and trees. Many volunteers have worked long hours tending the 35 wildflower plots around the shoreline of the river.

She says, “I love working with these great volunteers and giving tours to the schoolchildren.

“I’ve learned so much botany. Why didn’t I study botany instead of all that French!”

She would be delighted to hear from anyone interested in helping with the work of recreating this special area of native plants and trees. Call Nancy at 879-9419.