Nancy Gordon McLaughlin Fork, aka “Nance” and "Sandy"
1920 - 1992
Mother of invention as well as of 6 children, wife, volunteer, actress, family historian, logophile, all terms that only begin to describe a truly amazing woman.
Born in Toronto, Canada, she was the daughter of Alexander Gordon McLaughlin (Mac) and Alice Agnes Ethyl Cline (Allie), both of Hamilton, Ontario. Living in Canada until 1926, Mac, then working for the Otis Elevator Co., was given a promotion in the sales department and transferred to Chicago, IL. It was a heady time, and Chicago was a bustling metropolis. It was here that Mac, his wife and young daughter met the Sims family. Otis Elevator was the largest client at the law firm of Sims and Stransky; as a business move, he was invited to the 1926 Sims Ranch hunt. From this social beginning, Mac and Dr. Peter Krupp became fast friends. Peter and Betsy Krupp took young Nance up to their cottage at Sims Ranch, where she slept in tents as did the young Krupp boys, and cavorted around Sims Ranch with all of the other Sims descendants in her age group.
By 1932, Nancy’s mother Allie had developed colon cancer and was treated with surgery as the only option then available. The country was in the throes of the Great Depression when Mac McLaughlin was told that, in order to keep his job as Vice President of sales for Otis, he would have to move to Cleveland and take on the jobs of two others who were being let go. Given that choice, Mac moved his ailing wife and daughter to Ohio. His wife was hospitalized for an entire year (probably more of a long care nursing situation) but never saw her daughter again because children were not allowed in hospitals at that time. Allie died in January of 1933 and, as a busy businessman, Mac put Nancy in boarding school at Hathaway Brown in Shaker Heights.
In the fall of 1938, Nancy had entered Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA (the same week that the hurricane of ‘38 hit Massachusetts while she was out biking– she remembered getting back to the dorm on her hands and knees) and Mac was transferred back to Chicago. Immediately upon his return to the Windy City, Mac renewed his close relationship with Peter and Betsy Krupp. He had been a widower for 5 years, his only child was off at college, and Betsy Krupp had an “available” sister, Helen Sims Gammie. The two singles seemed destined for each other. Mac was a gruff businessman and Helen was the ultimate hostess. How perfect that Mac could find a woman to share his life who got along famously with his best friends. Someone described a usual evening at Mac and Helen’s apartment at 1500 Lake Shore Drive with the Krupps as follows: “After dinner, the men would remove themselves to the study, smoking cigars, drinking Scotch and saying not a word to each other. The women would sit in the living room talking incessantly about what they had done that day. As the evening ended, and Betsy put on her coat, Dr. Peter would shake hands with Mac and say, ‘A lovely evening as always’, despite having not said a word one to the other”. Mac and Helen married in 1939.
Legally adopted by Helen Sims in 1940, Nancy “Sandy” McLaughlin became the eldest Sims granddaughter.
Meanwhile, at Wellesley, Nancy was studying foreign languages, and being active in theater productions She had a beau who, much to her dismay, subsequently fell for a friend of hers. As an act of contrition, the friend set Nancy up on a blind date with an MIT student, also from Chicago. She gamely accepted the date with this tall handsome fellow, Donald Wm. Fork. Despite their differences (he was, after all, a “South Sider” and she was a “North Sider”) and a disastrous canoe capsizing in the Charles River, they fell in love and decided to marry. Since Nancy, or “Sandy” as he called her, had never had to keep house, she felt that if she were going to marry a man who would live a middle-class life, she would need to learn how to make a comfortable home for him and for their children-to-be. She left Wellesley in 1941 and entered Garland College, then a “Cooking and Homemaking” school in downtown Boston. She was closer to Don at MIT and was being taught lessons in “How to clean a house” (dust first, then vacuum) and how to cook tasty, well-planned meals.
By 1942, World War II was raging on two fronts, and MIT was pushed to graduate all their seniors in April instead of June. As the graduates received their diplomas, they also received their enlistment papers. The wedding planned for June was no longer feasible and, in a panic, Nancy called her stepmother, Helen, and said, “I have to marry Don within the week, before he leaves for training camp, can you get Dad to set something up?" Nancy had asked the right person. Within a week, Helen had arranged housing, food, dresses, flowers, church and transportation…even the attendants; and a week later, on April 9, Nancy and Don were married in Chicago.
While they were engaged, Nancy and Don had planned to have 6 children and had chosen names for them, 3 for boys and 3 for girls. Their first daughter, Alice, always known as Rolly, was born in late April of 1943. Don was posted to the Panama Canal Zone a week later and Nancy and Rolly moved into 1500 Lake Shore Drive with Helen and Mac, Helen’s daughter Barbara, and Mac’s efficient, beloved and opinionated Swiss housekeeper, Flora Riva. In 1945, Nancy and Rolly joined Don in Panama, living on the base.
Once back in the States, they found an apartment of their own on the north side of Chicago, close to the El and within comfortable driving distance of both sets of in-laws. The family lived in Chicago until 1951 when Don was transferred to Indianapolis.
This was the height of the polio epidemic, before there was a vaccine. Nancy and Don wanted to keep the children, five of them by 1952, safe and out of the city so Nancy and the kids and the car spent the time from mid-June to Labor Day in Au Gres, in Helen’s cottage along the shore of Saginaw Bay on Sims Ranch; “The Ranch” for short. Don would join them for the two weeks of his vacation. After he’d worked for Western Electric for enough years to have three weeks of vacation, the summer trips began for the family of 8. Don drove the VW minibus and Nancy was not only the navigator (no GPS in those days) and logician who planned and prepared meals, invented and led travel games, doled out inexpensive toys, made sure the 6 kids in the back seat behaved and otherwise made the long hours on the road work smoothly. Each of the 6 kids has special memories of the many destinations, among them Banff and Lake Louise, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Colorado, Mt. Rushmore, Florida, and Boston.
In the meantime, ever interested in learning and creating while fulfilling her role as wife and mother, Sandy pursued other interests. She took a cake decorating class and made beautiful and delicious birthday cakes, the bestselling cakes at school bake sales and she even made her daughters’ multi-tier wedding cakes. She attended the Indianapolis symphony, often knitting sweaters on round needles in the dark during afternoon performances. She loved all sorts of puzzles, especially crosswords and cryptograms. She worked with fellow Wellesley alumnae to create and sponsor Keen Cutters at the Indianapolis Coliseum for children to learn and enjoy ice skating. She was a Cub Scout Den Mother. She sewed, crocheted. and taught her children how to embroider (the boys by drawing tanks and airplanes on the hems of pillow cases). This way she was sure her sons could thread needles and sew on buttons.
Her summers at the Ranch as a youngster held her in good stead when she held down the fort with all six kids while Don stayed back in Indianapolis riding his bike to work because she needed the one car they owned more. She handed down to her kids many of the summer customs that had flourished at Ed and Charlotte's Ranch House and Helen’s cottage, among them, the costume party tradition. Attendees were not allowed to buy anything to complete their costumes and they only were informed of the date of the party that very morning. There are several picture frames full of snapshots of generations of Sims descendants in their costumes on the front porch of JimBarJack to this day. One Ranch House tradition was the use of a large hand-rung brass school bell to signal anyone outside that it was time to come in for a meal. We learned flag etiquette because we put the flag up every morning to let family up and down the beach know that we were present and we took it down every evening and furled it fairly properly into the regulation triangle shape. She saw to it that many of the six children learned to love horseback riding during the summer. She led blueberry (huckleberry) picking expeditions into the woods, taught all of us how to avoid poison ivy and what to do if we realized we hadn't avoided it. When we were too young to do it ourselves, she taught us how to clean and then cooked the perch we caught with droplines off the end of someone's dock. She made sure we learned the tradition of "Ranch specials" (cheese melted under the broiler on, often slightly stale, saltines) to be served at grownups cocktail parties. (We use it still, but usually on Triscuits these days.) And, in those days, before Saginaw Bay flooded the cellar. she did the laundry down there with the aged agitator machine with its wringer perched on top. She taught us how to use the wringer safely and how to whack the release on the end of it if the clothes got jammed. For both her sanity and our health in the polio days, she instituted a tradition that continues today: the post-lunch hour-long rest. No radio. There was no TV in the house in those days. No talking. Reading encouraged, lying on your bed or on a couch. There were Weekly Readers, kids' newspapers that came to us by subscription in the mail, and lots of comic books, Mad Magazines, Readers Digest magazines and Aunt Helen’s old 1940’s Vogue magazines.
Rolly remembers how proud and happy she was after the six of us had left the nest and she got involved with Connor Prairie a pioneer village set in 1836. She managed their gift shop and loved choosing what to stock it with. She tried insofar as possible to feature items that the 19th century pioneers would've recognized and used, among them pewterware for the table, hand-thrown kitchenware (bowls, pitchers and churns for example), and wooden toys for children all of which became standard Christmas presents for her children.
She remained friends with many of the local families who had once worked on Sims Ranch, the Masers, Pendreds, Lohrs and many of the Mennonite families. She helped to establish the Arenac County Historical Society and the small church building in AuGres now houses much of the Sims Ranch memorabilia.
She died at JimBarJack, August 1992. Her remains now reside in the Sims Family cemetery, beside her beloved Don (always ”Dear” or “Honey”) where she spent almost every summer of her life. She loved being at Sims Ranch probably because it was the one constant she had in her life. You need look no farther to find the biggest cheerleader for the family’s continued presence in the area.
