About WFNH: Our Founders
Oral History Project: WFNH Founders' Stories
These are the people who believed enough in the idea of the Women’s Fund of New Hampshire to be the building blocks of our first endowment dollars and operating funds starting in 1998. Shirley Elder, a former reporter for The Washington Star and the Boston Globe’s New Hampshire Weekly, is contributing her time and expertise to collect these stories. We'll be adding more so stay tuned.
CHARLOTTE FARDELMANN (click here view an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the Charlotte Fardelmann story for printing)
Charlotte Lyman Fardelmann remembers her father’s advice clearly, and she remembers just as clearly how she came to ignore it. The connecting link is in the strength of silence.
“Don’t spend or give away principal,” her father, Ted Lyman, a grain merchant in Minneapolis, said years ago to his young and potentially-wealthy daughter. “Use the income and keep the principal to pass down in the family.”
That’s what he had done -- passed his money, some of it inherited and some from smart investments -- down to his family. That’s not what Charlotte Fardelmann is doing; she’s giving it away.
“Have you given away a lot of money?”
“I have.”
To understand the Charlotte Fardelmann who became a devout Quaker, a founder of the Women’s Fund of New Hampshire, a freelance journalist, a teacher and creator of her own charitable foundation, The Lyman Fund, it is necessary to take a look back.
She grew up in an affluent corner of Minnesota but skipped what she called the “high society world … the showy parties, the formal gowns and social drinking.“ After graduating from Wellesley College, she shared an apartment with college friends in New York City and then married a young med student. But all along the way she said she was uncomfortable with the money that enabled her to live in ease. Even when she got a job, she knew she didn’t have to work to get by.
“It wasn’t a lot of money,” she said of her wealth. She was sitting in her pleasantly cluttered home by the Piscataqua River in Portsmouth. “It just was more money than my friends had. It made me uncomfortable. I didn’t want to talk about it.”
Time passed. Her doctor husband, Dale Fardelmann, became a urologist. Charlotte became a mother of four children in five years. In the early 1960s, the family moved to Portsmouth to this house once known as the “hennery” or hen house for the Wentworth Coolidge mansion next door.
Charlotte described the place lovingly in her book, Nudged by the Spirit: “My home stands at the confluence of two rivers near enough to their ocean mouth to be filled by the strong currents of the salt sea tides twice a day.” She loves the river, and regularly hauls her kayak out for spin.
In 1970, the Fardelmanns divorced. When her own Episcopal Church turned its back on divorcees, Charlotte searched elsewhere. She meditated. She tried transcendental meditation. Then in 1977, she turned to the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers, in Dover. She described herself as a “high-pressure, fast-paced, achievement driven” journalist and writer. The problem, in the early 1980s, was that she developed a writer’s block just as she was supposed to produce a book about the islands of Maine.
“I panicked,“ she said. She went to the Quaker meeting with a cry for help: “How do you get your priorities straight?” In the silence that followed, she said she found her answer. She heard a song in her head: “Slogging along …” She finished the book. And she made plans to attend a Quaker center for study and contemplation at Pendle Hill. It was, as she said with the calm assurance of the faithful, “an incredible spiritual transformation that changed my life.”
From there, Charlotte Fardelmann went on to tackle the demon of her own wealth. She studied money, and “sensed” she should start giving it away. She defied her father’s advice by dipping into principal. The largest single contribution, $500,000, went to The Lyman Fund, which she created to help people, mostly Quakers and mostly women, “take the next step on their spiritual journey.” Other projects -- like the Women’s Fund -- have benefited as well. She likes to be in at the beginning of things.
Her life has become a mix of quiet time (she leads “stillness” retreats), prayer, music (she’s in two singing groups -- the Shanty Singers, who are marine docents of the Great Bay Stewards, and the Voices from the Heart), travel, daily entries in her journal, and philanthropy.
“It‘s been very rewarding for me to give money,” she said in an interview. “Giving and receiving are two aspects of one whole, like yin and yang. If you give with the right spirit, you are receiving as you give. If you receive with the right spirit, you are giving to those you receive from … It’s just wonderful.”
FRAN MAHONEY (click here view an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the Fran Mahoney story for printing)
When it comes to money, Fran Mahoney follows her heart. She’s not independently wealthy, but she has invested wisely. She’s “adopted” girls in three countries, Guatemala, Honduras, and French Guinea, taken in an old cat from the local animal shelter, and become a founder of the Women’s Fund of New Hampshire.
“I love animals and I love people, particularly women and girls,“ she said as she sat in her Bedford living room surrounded by packing boxes, and watched closely by her large, well-loved mixed-breed cat, “Sevie“.
Mahoney’s estate plan reflects those loves. And being efficient, a professional thinker, really, she put it in writing. “I said, ok, I’m going to cover these things that benefit people and animals” -- Childreach, which identifies underprivileged children in other countries and tries to improve their lives and communities; the World Wildlife Fund, which seeks to protect endangered animals; and the Women’s Fund, which seeks to aid needy women and girls throughout New Hampshire.
In fact, that’s how she came to be a “founder” of the Women’s Fund. “I didn’t know that’s what I was doing,” she said of her estate plan. “I just said I think I’ll do something to contribute.”
It’s worked out well. “It’s been very interesting to watch the Women’s Fund develop, and to see its vision unfold,” she said. For her part, Mahoney has taken the lead in one of the WFNH’s major tasks, grant making. “It’s so much fun,” she said, “to see the ideas people come up with to improve the lot of women and girls.”
But now Mahoney is off on another adventure, Mexico.
She sold her house in Bedford, donated some paintings to the Women’s Fund auction, stored some stuff, and now, with her companion, Homer Cates, a retired computer engineer with Digital Equipment, they are moving to San Miguel de Allende, a picturesque 16th Century resort town of 80,000 in central Mexico. They‘re taking two suitcases each, his-and-her laptop computers, Homer‘s guitar and, of course, Sevie.
Fran Mahoney doesn’t look like an impetuous person. She wears her hair short, prefers comfortable shoes, smiles easily, and describes herself as “almost a native” of New Hampshire (born across the border in Gloucester, MA, and raised in Nashua). But her life has taken unpredictable turns.
Like many good Catholic girls, Mahoney entered a convent, the Sisters of Mercy, as a teenager, gaining an English degree from St. Mary’s College and a master‘s from Catholic University. She taught for a while, and then she was offered a chance for more education. So she went off to Boston College, won a doctorate in counseling psychology, and therein lies a tale: she left the Sisters of Mercy.
It happened in Boston. As a graduate student, Mahoney said she found a freedom she had never known in 16 years as a nun. “Everything changed,” she said. “I could tell I wasn’t the same person. I said this really isn’t my life anymore.” It was 1973, a time of turmoil in the country, the Catholic Church and Fran Mahoney.
Newly independent and back in New Hampshire, Mahoney stayed with higher education, specializing in adult learning and professional development, and working in almost every corner of the University System of New Hampshire. The longest stint, 1979-1998, was with the School for Lifelong Learning, now Granite State College. In 2005, she won the college’s distinguished service award.
But the learning never stops. In San Miguel, she plans to study and become fluent in Spanish, to find new friends, carve out a new career. “My life is always about what lies ahead,” she said. “Today’s interesting. Tomorrow might be more interesting. Who knows what will happen?”
SUE RATNOFF (click here view an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the Sue Ratnoff story for printing)
One of Sue Ratnoff’s favorite places is her garage. Especially when the cars are somewhere else. There, in a well-organized jumble of tools and lathes and scraps of wood, she can follow her dreams of creating fine furniture.
“When I was in high school (in the 1960s), boys got to take shop,” she recalled recently, “and I had to go to home ec. I could care less about how to run a sewing machine. I was dying to learn how to work a band saw.”
In some ways, that attitude led directly to the Women’s Fund and her role as a Founder. Ratnoff said she was attracted to the Women’s Fund by a golfing buddy, who explained some of the organization’s goals as well as the special needs of women in a largely rural state like New Hampshire. Ratnoff thought it over – and joined up.
"I like the fact the Women’s Fund allocates its money to women,” she said. “Because I think a lot of resources don’t go to women. I just don’t think women have as many opportunities as men.”
As a teacher, she said she believes in educating young women to realize their full potential – learning such skills as auto repair or even how to use a band saw. “I want to level the playing field,” she said. “I trust the Women’s Fund to try to do that.”
Ratnoff’s $25,000 pledge is contained in her personal trust to be handed over to the Women’s Fund after her death. Conditions of the trust put the Women’s Fund first in line, she said.
As a WFNH Founder, Ratnoff is not so much wealthy as frugal. “We have pretty simple tastes,” she said. “We hold on to things for a long time.” Her car, for example, is 10 years old. “It runs,” she said. “That’s all I ask.”
Sue Ratnoff is a transplant to New Hampshire, born in New York where her father was a photo editor for the Associated Press, raised in Westchester County and educated in Washington, DC, and New Rochelle. After all that, she said she concluded she was definitely not a city girl. “I vowed to live in the country the rest of my life,” she said, and she has. She worked many years as an administrator in various high schools – Concord, Exeter, Goffstown – before making another big switch.
“I said to myself you are so far removed from what you started out doing. You don’t see kids but every once in a while. Teachers don’t know you. Kids don’t know you. I need to get back to my roots.”
When an elementary school job opened in Greenland, she took it, and for the last 11 years, Ratnoff and her partner, Lynda Beck, former vice president at Phillips Academy in Exeter, have lived in a quiet neighborhood in Exeter. Furniture-making may seem a far cry from that day job as special education coordinator for the Greenland Central School, but Ratnoff has found a way to make room for both work and wood – as of July 1, 2007, she went onto half time at the school, sharing her job, 50-50, with another teacher and leaving time to set up her shop in the garage.
A lot of thought has gone into this. Ratnoff, who has honed her skills as a member of the Woodworkers Club of America chapter in Brentwood, said she will insulate the place for year-round use. Equipment will be on wheels so it can be moved out of the way when cars take over the garage.
What will she do if she ends up with dozens of lovely homemade rocking chairs? “I won’t,” she said. “I’ll give them away.”
JO ELLEN THOMAS (click here view an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the Joe Ellen Thomas story for printing)
Jody Thomas wasn’t yet 16 when she learned to drive heavy equipment around the family farm in her native Dublin, Ohio. Her father was a farmer, her mother a teacher. Her two brothers are farmers. She’s a doctor. She knew from the time she was a little girl in a one-doctor town that’s what she wanted to be, a doctor.
But it was the farm that shaped her life and led – eventually – to her role as a founder of the Women’s Fund in her adopted state of New Hampshire.
Here’s how it happened:
When the outer beltway of Columbus, Ohio, cut through the Thomas farmland, the tiny town of Dublin (pop 500 in Thomas’s youth) slowly became a suburb. The old farmstead soon was more valuable for commercial use than for corn and soybeans. So Jody Thomas and her brothers sold a portion of the farmland in the late 1990s and, with her newfound profits, Thomas vowed to help others.
Along came the Women’s Fund of New Hampshire.
“It just happened at the right time,” she said as we sat in the comfortable home she shares with Cassandra Donovan on the edge of Great Bay in Greenland. Outside the wind whistled furiously in a late winter display of power. Inside, she chatted easily about her dedication to helping women and children.
“I’ve always been for equality for women and for empowering them to make their own decisions,” she said. “I saw the Women’s Fund as a chance to give something back to help women and kids.”
The Women’s Fund was a modest operation, “sort of grass roots,” she said. “I admire that … It’s going to grow, which is good.” She said she especially likes to see WFNH grants go to women seeking entrepreneurial skills and girls learning fundamental household and money management skills.
Jody Thomas is more formally known as Dr. Jo Ellen Thomas, a senior member of the Exeter Hospital staff and a member of Core Physician Services in Exeter, a large multi-specialty group practice that absorbed a smaller group she was with for many years.
At 66 and with nearly 40 years in Exeter, she’s now treating the children and grandchildren of her first patients, and as those patients grow older, she’s becoming an expert in geriatrics. She really enjoys medicine. “It’s fun to be part of people growing up and growing older,” she said. “It’s fun to help people I’ve seen through hard times, good times, grief – all that.”
Dr. Thomas knows what it’s like to be a woman pioneer although she said she doesn’t feel a bit heroic about it. But when she went to med school at Ohio State University in the 1960s, she was one of only eight women in a class of 150. In Exeter, she was the only women doctor in town for a while.
She is now more New Hampshire than Ohio. From the days of her internship in Portland, Maine, she said she has been “hooked on New England”. She likes to ski, hike, bike, take photos. One framed panorama in her living room is of the White Mountains where she has hiked for years – not “peak-bagging” she emphasized, but looking for nice views. A canoe below her deck is ready for warm-weather excursions on Great Bay.
Her home – converted from an old summer cottage – has become a sanctuary. To come here after a stressful day’s work, she said, is like being on vacation.
SUSAN WERNER THORESEN (click here view an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the Sue Werner Thoresen story for printing)
There are some people in this world who, quite simply, get things done. WFNH Founder Sue Werner Thoresen is one of them. She’s the kind of person who sees a problem, and, without hesitation, tackles it.
She has hosted a local public affairs TV show, written a book on financial planning, prepared management strategies and land use plans for all kinds of boards and town governments, studied workforce housing, raised two kids, Kristin and Erik, sat on a number of non-profit boards and commissions including Strawbery Banke, the League of Women Voters, the Society for the Protection of NH Forests, and the Wentworth-Coolidge Commission. She hired on as a financial advisor and later associate vice president for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in Portsmouth, led seminars (as in “Smart Women Finish First”). And, oh yes, Thoresen also was elected to two terms on the Portsmouth School Board and as a delegate to the 1974 state constitutional convention, and chairs the citizens association on the Lake Winnipesaukee island where the family vacations.
“I have worked full time my entire life,” she said. But she also gardens (“gardening is therapeutic”), makes jewelry (while doing the laundry), reads, plays a little golf, contemplates writing another book, and truly enjoys vacations on her island and playing in the sandbox with her grandchildren. She accumulated $25,000 for a 5-year pledge to WFNH the old fashioned way: she earned it.
Sue Werner grew up in Davenport, Iowa, and met Bob Thoresen in graduate school at Syracuse University where she studied public administration, and he, city planning. After a stint in the Army, he took a job as planning director for Portsmouth, and they moved there in 1972. In 1977, he left city government to become a consultant – and to paint. He’s now a development consultant, and president of the New Hampshire Art Association.
At the same time, Sue also was in the planning business writing up management plans and land use regulations for towns in New Hampshire and Maine. At some point, as she was driving down a dark country road after a late planning session, she said she began to wonder, “When I’m in my 50s and 60s, do I want to be doing this?”
It was 1990. The answer came in a surprise offer to join Dean Witter. She accepted, and quickly became a specialist in goal setting, risk, and asset management.
As Sue looks back, she sees two other events that helped point her to the Women’s Fund. One was a 1970 brush with sex discrimination in Georgia where she worked in regional planning while her husband was in the Army. She was, she said, doing the work of three but paid less than a man. The one woman on the board said: “She makes enough money for a woman.” Thoresen quit in protest.
A second came a decade later, where she tackled the needs of women and girls as head of the Seacoast YWCA. “A lot of organizations in Portsmouth now involved in social change came from that group,” she said. In the end the Y’s most successful projects were taken over by others.
When WFNH founding founders Barbara Zeckhausen and Molly Scheu talked of creating an organization devoted to those same needs, Sue joined up. “I believe a lot of issues in the state involving women and children still are not addressed, and do not have enough funding.”
That’s what she’s about – funding. And one of her goals is to increase the size of the Women’s Fund endowment. It’s a big job. The theme from Sue’s term as head of planned giving for her Smith class of 1966 could be a theme for today’s Women’s Fund goals: “We’ve only just begun.”