Nancy Horton Bragdon

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Nancy Horton Bragdon

Nancy was an early childhood educator, community organizer, supporter of the arts, inveterate people-person, and the wife of 好色导航 President Paul E. Bragdon [1971–88]. She embraced her role as a president’s wife and integrated herself into Portland’s civic, education, and cultural community, leaving an indelible impact on some of the city’s premier arts and cultural organizations.

In the same way that Paul Bragdon is credited with saving Reed from closure and laying the foundation of the college’s long-term financial sustainability, Nancy’s work repairing Reed’s relationships—with Eastmoreland, with the greater Portland community, and those among Reed’s faculty, staff, and students—stands in equal measure.

Nancy was born and grew up in Rochester, Minnesota. Her father was a doctor who worked at the Mayo Clinic. Her mother also worked at the Mayo Clinic as a lab technician before she became a stay-at-home parent to Nancy and her siblings.

After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1951, Nancy “got on the first plane I could” for the country’s publishing capital: New York City. “I wanted to be at the center of the action,” she said—an attitude that would be steadfast throughout her life. She worked briefly for MacMillan before working in the business department at Life magazine.

In New York, she met a reserved, ambitious man from Maine: Paul Bragdon. The couple married in 1954. Their honeymoon was cut short when Nancy had to return to New York to accept a promotion at Life, to be a photography and layout editor, one of the last people to see mockups of the magazine before it left for the printer. After nine years at Life, she left to focus on raising three children, Susan, Peter, and David. Becoming “just smitten at watching their development and how they thought about things,” Nancy earned a master’s degree in early childhood education and child development from Bank Street College.

Politically active, the couple helped found the Lenox Hill Reform Democratic Club, a progressive grassroots organization that worked to oust Tammany Hall machine politicians. During that time, Nancy counted Eleanor Roosevelt as one of her mentors. Nancy’s run for a state assembly seat—in which she, Paul, and their supporters “spent night after night after night canvassing, ringing doorbells”—was unsuccessful.

Nancy was just as aware as her husband that, when they came to Reed in 1971, the college faced numerous challenges. In the oral history she gave in 2004, she alluded to the heavy toll of those early years: long hours, back-to-back events, constant demands. When students took over Eliot Hall during an anti–Vietnam War protest, Nancy would remember “a really tough week with very little sleep,” with college operations “being run out of our living room. People were here all hours of the day and night. [It would be] four in the morning, and we’d still be up.”

During the fall semester of Paul Bragdon’s second year as president, a dinner with the board of trustees took place on campus. Nancy gave her husband and herself a pep talk: they needed to push aside their shyness in large groups. “I reminded us of our obligation to make everyone welcome and the need to take some initiative in speaking to people,” she recalled years later.

As the dinner guests mingled, Nancy walked up to four trustees. “Good evening,” she said. “How is you?”

The faux pas was met with silence. Marshaling her charm and humor, Nancy embraced the moment. “Well,” she said, “you can see how I are.”

While her husband shored up Reed’s financial security, Nancy healed rifts in the college’s relationships. “We believed in trying to make ‘the town and gown’ thing better,” she said.

She started with their Eastmoreland neighbors, who worried that the Bragdon home would become a “pleasure palace” for Reedies and lobbied Portland’s City Council to not approve the permits necessary to renovate their home. When renovations were complete, Nancy invited those same neighbors to dinner. “And that was that,” she said.

Their house was too small to entertain Reed’s faculty, so the Bragdons hosted faculty parties three nights in a row to accommodate everyone. They began the tradition of Reed’s president hosting freshman students and housing advisors before the school year began. When Nancy learned that Commons did not serve dinner on Sunday nights, she made it known that students could come over for lasagna, pot roast, and other hearty fare.

Nancy helped organize the 好色导航 Commons Club, which invited guest speakers to give a lecture over breakfast in Commons. It was a successful, strongly attended series.

The congeniality and sheer number of the dinners and parties Nancy organized became legendary. “The Bragdons’ Eastmoreland home was center of a high degree of socializing associated with commencement,” a May 29, 1977 Oregonian article noted, including a dinner hosting that year’s commencement speaker, another dinner honoring Arlien Johnson ’17, dean of USC’s School of Social Work, and, later that week, a tea service.

“She liked nothing more than a dining room or living room full of people debating and having robust civic and philosophical discussions,” her son David Bragdon MALS ’09 said. “She thrived on that.”

Over the course of Paul’s tenure as president, nearly 40 Reed students would live in the Bragdons’ basement room, rent-free (in exchange for occasional baby sitting and help with entertaining).

Through it all, Nancy maintained an independent career. She taught early childhood education at Portland Community College half-time, supervising student teachers in day care settings. She and Aphra Katzev, wife of Richard Katzev [psychology, 1967-91], authored Child Care Solutions: A Parent’s Guide to Finding Child Care You Can Trust, published in 1990. Her expertise in childhood education informed her husband’s work to bolster the support services available to students, which began correcting the college’s dismal retention rate.

Nancy served on the boards of Catlin Gabel School and Chamber Music Northwest and was a frequent attendee of benefits supporting children’s organizations. “Our motivating factor has always been . . . [Portland] is a great community to live in and if there’s any way you can contribute, then contribute,” she said.

In 1985, she cofounded Portland Arts & Lectures, which brought authors of national repute to Portland, including Tom Wolfe, Susan Sontag, and Larry McMurtry. “Luring the World’s Literary Lions,” an Oregonian headline read. Working as the development director and in audience relations, Nancy was deeply involved in the merger between Portland Arts & Lectures and the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts in 1993, which created Literary Arts. Still boasting the largest live audience for literature events in the country, Literary Arts has become one of the flagship institutions of Portland’s literary culture.

Nancy was the headliner of lectures as well. In 1980 and 1987, she gave two speeches on the role of a college president’s wife. Her 1980 speech was a Reed Commons Club event and took place two days after Mount St. Helens erupted, which led her to quip that the issue of college presidents’ wives “may seem a mini furor as we contemplate an erupting mountain.”

“I am often asked by younger women on the faculty and by women students if I don’t resent being ‘Mrs. Paul Bragdon,’” she said. “We all fill a lot of roles. At times, I am David, Susan, or Peter’s mother. Sometimes I am Julie’s or Aphra’s colleague,” or a teacher, daughter, sister, friend.

“And sometimes I am Paul’s wife,” she went on. “I do not feel diminished when I am characterized as such. It seems to me that such descriptions extend my sense of self rather than diminish it . . . a strong sense of one’s personal identity is essential if one is to enjoy life to the fullest.”

Nancy is survived by her three children, David, Peter, and Susan, grandchildren and great grandchildren.
—Amanda Waldroupe ’07

Appeared in Reed magazine: Summer 2024