Barbara C. Clemence

Barbara C. Clemence died peacefully on Friday, May 10, 2019 at Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, Maryland.  Predeceased by her husband Vail, sister Muriel Jordan, and parents Walter and Mildred Wight, she was survived by six children, eleven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.  She was a longtime member of St. Matthews United Methodist Church in Bowie.

On September 17, 1931, she was born  Barbara Caroline Wight in the house her father  had built in Johnston, Rhode Island;  and just short  of nineteen years later, on July 1, 1950, she married  G. Vail Clemence  only a mile down the road  at Belknap Chapel, across  the street from the farm first acquired by his ancestor Thomas Clemence  some  300 years earlier.

Barbara had first spotted her future husband Vail when she was five, seeing him from an upstairs window during a summer camp held each year at the farm which was the home of his grandmother, the noted Rhode Island educator Lora Eliza Oatley Clemence.   It was the earliest moment of a childhood friendship that grew into a lifetime together; when he passed away in 2017, they were in their 67th  year of marriage.  The word "soulmates" has never been more truly exemplified.

A doer and an organizer from an early age, as a youngster Barbara formed her own 4-H chapter to teach other girls the arts of cooking and sewing.  She played piano starting in childhood; by her teen years she was serving as accompanist for the children’s Sunday School songs at Belknap, the church where   she and Vail would eventually be married.

She would go on, as an adult, to play and sing for the local Choral Society in Manassas Park, Virginia. When they moved  to Newport News, in the southeast corner  of the state,  she directed and accompanied both  the youth  choir and an "Up With People"  young  people's performance group at Denbigh  Presbyterian Church, where she also served  in the adult  choir as singer and pianist.

Music was central in the Clemence household.  Family singalongs took place in the living room, where two pianos shared space with a trumpet, trombone, clarinet, flute, melodica, accordion, several harmonicas and guitars, a banjo, a drum kit, and a small pump organ.   Her children especially treasure memories of her sitting down with their father  to play piano  duets,  and of his picking up his trombone or guitar  to accompany her as she played  and sang  one of the songs  they loved that  were popular from the turn of the century  to the fifties and sixties.

No account of Barbara's busy life would be complete without mentioning the diligence with which she memorialized her children's, grandchildren's and great-grandchildren's activities in the form of thousands of photographs and hundreds of hours of video footage.  Most people who knew her would understand how a grandchild might  grow up thinking  the big gray VHS camcorder on her shoulder was not an accessory  but an attachment, seldom and briefly disconnected.

Her childhood expertise with a sewing machine also proved invaluable through the years, as she designed and stitched together countless school costumes, Halloween costumes, and theater costumes for her singing and acting brood. And later, during the years she and Vail danced with the Bowie Square Cats, she created coordinating costumes they'd wear to the group's full-dress square dance and round dance evenings.

But of all her gifts, none was more special than her talent for relationships.  She had an uncanny knack for connecting with strangers and making lifelong friends wherever she went.  It was a talent she exercised for a number of years as a volunteer with the Gallup organization, conducting in-field polling in any kind of weather, in every kind of neighborhood, while meanwhile,  never slackening her pace  as a busy mother of six who over the years virtually never missed  a pick-up  or drop-off of her children  for whatever intricately-scheduled activities filled each hectic day.

Perhaps the most  significant  example  of the way she invested herself in the lives of others comes  from her retirement years, when for 13 years she and Vail led the volunteer organization FISH of Greater Bowie, devoted to providing routine and emergency transportation for seniors  in need.   FISH stands for Friendly And Sympathetic Help, and the Capital Gazette records that  in one recent  year the group provided 729 rides and logged over 13,000 miles of volunteer work.

That statistic appears in a Gazette article along with this wonderfully telling description:

“She says [Vail is] the head coordinator and she's the "mouth."  Barbara recruits FISH volunteers everywhere she goes — grocery store, McDonald's, church.”

And although this short  paragraph is almost  a mini-eulogy itself, capturing so much of what her life with Vail meant to so many, it remains  to mention that  the tireless Barbara Clemence  also rode motorcycles, wrote a weekly column  for the Manassas Journal Messenger,  loved camping and travel, played  volleyball well into her seventies, and won a state  seniors  table  tennis  championship, as well as maintaining a correspondence with friends and family all over the U.S. and the globe.

It's not every day, nor every week, that this world marks the passing of such a woman, who at eighty- seven leaves a legacy of passion and eagerness to serve that – along with her love for her family, her community, and those who simply needed her – was so powerful and so enduring.  She will be greatly missed, much mourned, and joyfully remembered.

The funeral service will be conducted at 2:00 on Saturday, June 8, 2019 at St. Matthews United Methodist Church in Bowie, with reception following at the church.